Physical organizational structure is an integral part of business; however, there are often times where drawing these lines impede progress. In addition to clearly defined departmental structure, our work takes assorted workers from across the corporation and groups them into "regional teams" and "global teams". These teams would meet to work on overarching projects and creating templates for technical consistency. Likewise, our managers also tried to instill a sense of collaboration among workers and open sharing of information and resources.
It all sounded great in theory... in practice, it was (for lack of better words) crap. While the ideals were in place to share resources and work together, the accounting systems were archaic and every department needed to show xx amount of work hours per project. Managers refused to let employees work on cross-department projects unless it was done in overtime(salaried, so no extra pay). In essence, the metrics in place that gauge a manager's effectiveness and accountability directly negated the spirit of cooperation they tried to preach.
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6 years ago
2 comments:
My brother has experienced something similar at the Ford plant in River Rouge. It's the newest Ford plant. Before it opened, managers and line workers went through training so the plant could take a team approach to tasks. Rather than managing 40 workers directly, my brother now manages 3 team leaders, who manage the line workers. Although that part has stuck, the team approach to tasks has gone away. Upper management argued there was no accountability (similar to your experience) and some tasks didn't work well when rotated regularly. Essentially, the structure has gone back to how it's been for decades at Ford, with specific people assigned to specific tasks on each shift. For my brother, tho, his job is now a little easier. Old ways are difficult to change.
I agree with you. I think its very difficult for organizations to really achieve cross-department projects or sharing of work.
In my company almost every year the management says that it will make sure that knowledge sharing will happen this year and they will make sure that every one will work on something that not in their normal duties. I never saw this happening except when some team is behind in a project and they need help. Then some people from other teams get pulled in.
I was asked once to work with another team as they were short on resources. But i could clearly see that the team was reluctant to really assign me any work that is supposed to be important. I was asked to do things that are very general and those that do not really involve anything that the team working on specializes in. Instead of developing skills it built some frustration in me as I felt that i was being over worked for some other teams inefficiency and ended up doing things that did not add any value to my skills or knowledge. ( I know any work that helps the company is important, but we live in an individualistic culture of US not in Japan)
I do not think this is possible unless there is a great interest from top management in a company and the company has a secure culture of one big team instead of number of small teams that make up the organization.
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