Engstrom Mirror Plant

Assignment 1: 8600 - 310 – Understanding How to Motivate People in the work place

In May 2007, the Engstrom Auto Mirrors plant was facing the crisis. The business was doing badly and the sales had started to decline in 2005. Thus, there was a steep reduction in plant productivity and employee morale was all time low. The company used Scanlon Plan as an incentive for staff. The core element or foundation of the plan was concept of participative management, where management and staff together will decide the bonuses based on revenues for that year.

The employees would spill the food and be careless and also give out extra toppings to their friends. This would bring the percentage up and at the end of the month when manager would not receive the bonus they would realize the reason of not getting it. The manager set the benefit from 6 to 12 hours for the pizza, and salad. The employees got frustrated some still worked and some quitted. The manager hired new workers. For a time being, the manager started getting bonuses but, after a while the same issue raised because, the new workers were not happy of the policy as far as they got use to of the environment. Later, manager realize that the manager should spend more time in the franchise instead of leaving it on the workers and also the reward system has to be change because, employees were not satisfied with only the managers receive the bonus and the rest would not get

Else could have reduced the salary for all the employees for few months and this could have motivated the employees to work more to increase productivity and to save their jobs. So proper procedures to downsize with fairness all around or other plans could have been ideal instead of discriminating and ending up in a legal suit spending more money than saving any.

forces employees to focus even more on their self-interest. Now when presented with work, they

During May 2007, the Engstrom Auto Mirror Plant faces a low employee morale issue. The newly appointed manager, Ron Bent, sees a decline in work place productivity and culture throughout his recent years of working at the plant. When Bent joined the company, it was facing a similar issue of low morale. He then decided to introduce the Scalon Plan, an incentive program for the employees, to raise morale. The program was successful when it was first introduced but ran into problems time after. Bent was faced with many challenges with the Scalon Plan that caused him to ask many

The second summer there were no motivations and rewards given to employees, which also affected their performance and behaviours. The experienced hard workers were supposed to be rehired at a higher base wage, but they weren’t. Bonuses were based on referrals but only for old crewmembers, which wasn’t fair to the new crewmembers.

One of the valued but demanding customer, who had considered Engstrom as a certified supplier, was requesting a large order but Engstrom was unable to deliver on time due to the low productivity problem. The plant manager along with his assistant were already dealing with the troubling numbers when this happened. While the task was a tough bone and not easy to tackle, and there were a lot of factors needed to be taken in to consideration. The leadership started to analyze and break down the main causations other than the overall economic trend that dragged the company into the turmoil, as it turned out, it was the low, frustrated employee morale and diminished work satisfaction.

Referring to the section under “The Transition”, Stayer asked his employees what the ends are for the employee’s work, with the most common responses being job security, compensation and rewarding job, Stayer comes to notice that all these ends revolve around performance (Roberts, 1993, p. 6). If the workers maintain a high performance, resulting in higher customer satisfaction, then there will be a less likely chance of contract cancellation. Therefore lowering the issue of the thirty day contract cancellation, forcing Johnsonville Sausage Company to let go its workers. Compensation will also increase due to performance of workers. Johnsonville has the Capital Expansion Plan with a twenty-five percent increase. This acceptance of the Palmer Sausage Offer will create more hours for the employees and increase job responsibilities for most, which was a problem for workers who did not receive an increase due to lack of responsibilities (p. 11). This reflects Johnsonville Sausage Company's strong culture, where they highly value employees obtaining more responsibilities in their work environment (Robbins et all, p,

172). Employees that did not confirm lost the $5 Day pay. The creation of this policy and department dehumanized his workforce for the betterment of his reputation. Expecting excellence in all aspects of a person’s life goes against the purpose of mission accomplishment as well as failing to embrace the critical thinking trait of open-mindedness.

The manager’s retaliatory approach to lower the loss percentage was not a motivational factor for the employees at all when he changed the number of hours employees had to work to receive free food from 6 hours a day to 12 hours. Evidently the employees did not respect his authority as the change did not seem to have an effect on them nor did it give them any motivation to do better. These jobs where minimum pay jobs

Hierarchical issues are assorted and they can show themselves inside the association in a way that might be hard to identify. These issues if not identified before, can keep the association from accomplishing its set objectives and goal. More or less authoritative issues are hierarchical issues that can obstruct the smooth operation of the association. They go from worker business related issues to hierarchical auxiliary related issues (Lorenzi and Riley, 2003). As a rule the hidden reason for these issues inside the association is absence of open stream of data or notwithstanding utilizing incorrectly hierarchical structure. From the contextual investigation of Engstrom Auto Mirror Plant, there are a few authoritative issues that are clear and have come about into hierarchical clash. These issues present themselves nearly in all associations. It is accordingly imperative for the administration of any association to guarantee they have viable procedures to manage any issue that may emerge inside the association since inability to address such issues may result to significantly more issues inside the association. The absolute most regular authoritative issues that present themselves practically in all associations include:

Engstrom Auto Mirror Plant is facing an internal crisis which primarily is a motivational problem. Ron Bent, the manager, and Joe Haley the assistant has seen workplace culture and productivity decline over the years. Ron joined the company when it was going through a similar issue in the past. He came and implemented an employee incentive program which is general across the United States. The incentive program called Scanlon Plan was originally very effective in employee motivation and increasing productivity at Engstrom, but it is now failing.

Management expects all employees to achieve that goal in order to receive a monthly bonus in their paycheck. The problem with this motivational technique was that each employee was to push the sale of clothing and other retail in order to make the bonuses each month. This would cause some employees to get hostile because they were not selling the most that they had set for themselves. Another problem that arose from this motivational technique was that employees began to dislike the employees that had met their quota for the month because they had received bonuses, while the other believed that had worked just as hard but not received the extra money for their effort. This technique was based solely on the amount of inventory

Low morale among employees in any company eventually leads to decreased profits with other factors of the business decreasing along the way. “And US Airways employees, who have seen their pay cut by more than 20 percent and their health insurance and pension plans shrink, are certainly an unhappy lot” (Claudia H. Deutsch). In order to increase profits, the airline has decreased pay and took away some of the earned vacation. “Company executives say they are taking steps that will improve working conditions and profitability” (Claudia H. Deutsch). Many employees were calling in sick which the company believed would eventually lead to poor customer service.