Strategic Planning And Implementation Of Organization Development Program

Identifying key difficulties and impacts

TASK 1 FORMATIVE ASSESSMENT

Q1: Read the below case study and answer following questions

As part of the company’s strategic plan, the Y Fit Fitness group aims to grow its personal fitness client base by 100 percent over the next 12 months. The company currently has ten fitness centres. It is owned by a team of investors has one CEO and a manager at each centre. Over all it has 50 fulltime staff and 60 part time staff. The number of fulltime and part time fitness trainers at each centre varies, depending on how each centre is set up and level of demand for personal fitness trainers. The culture also varies from center to center and is largely dependent on each center managers’ areas of expertise, interests, values and skills. The fitness centers that provide the highest level of personal training have a greater number of full-time staffs. They also place strong importance on their client relationships and promote and market the advantages and benefits of personal training whenever possible. However, there has not been great emphasis on marketing or promoting personal training across the company. At the higher performing centers, there is also less absenteeism.

A, analyze the above strategic plan of Y Fit fitness group and write one strategic goal that directly affects organizations development needs.

One strategic goal of Y Fit Fitness group is improving the overall customer experience by enhancing the level of customer satisfaction in all their centers. The organization aims at placing a strong focus on increasing the relationship with customers through strong promotional training and marketing of their services to the public. To increase the overall organization performance, Y Fit Fitness group has ensured that there are enough employees in all centers to ensure that clients always have enough trainers at their service.

B, identify key difficulties the company is facing. Write a short introduction and itemize the problems and the impact of each problem taking into consideration if any realignment is required.

The company is facing difficulties in marketing its products and promoting personal training. Absenteeism is still a great challenge in low performing centers. Lack of marketing means that the degree of public awareness of the products offered by the company is low. This possesses the risk of the company to have low sales as in the comparison of the competitors. Lack of promoting personal training hinders career development and possess the company in danger of losing skilled employees. Furthermore, high absenteeism is experienced in low performing centers because of poor leadership and management of staff.

C, identify key roles who should be involved in developing development strategies and objectives. Prepare a responsibility matrix using this template. Keeping the ARCI initialism in mind, use the letter A (approving) R (reviewing) C (creating) and I(input) to identify how you think responsibilities should be allocated:

role	engagement	Team performance	communication	Senior manager development
Organizational Development manager	I, R	C, R	I	A
Chief Executive Officer	A, R	R	I	A
Personal Fitness Trainers	I, C	I	C	I
Branch Managers	I, C, R	C, R	R, I	A

D, determine who should be involved in consultation and identify the key roles including those who should be involved in creating development strategies and objectives.

Before any major strategies are implemented in the organization, the chief executive officer should always be consulted. All managers in all branches should ensure that they report development strategies to the organization development manager who then presents the strategies to the chief executive officer for consultation through his input, review and approval. Minor issues which do not affect the whole organization could always be approved by the branch managers, while critical strategies for development involving the whole organization need the chief officer’s consultation for approval. To create critical development strategies for the organization, meetings for the top managers should be arranged to strategize on key issues affecting the development of the organization.

Involving key roles in developing development strategies and objectives

Q2. You are the organisation development manager in an organisation that has recently conducted an employee survey for the first time as a part of the organization development plan

Answers

You and your team have collated and analyzed the result

List two strategies you could use to provide feedback regarding survey results to staff.

One-on-one and anonymous strategy

Group or Collaborative strategy

Describe how to maximize participation and support from managers and explain why it is important?

I will maximize the participation by providing redeemable points or airtime to employees who participate in the survey. By Using 3 x 3 matrix strategy I will get enough support from managers as they will be participants during the evaluation process.

What are the pros and cons of each strategy? Complete this table with your answers.

strategy	pros	cons
One-on-one feedback and Anonymous feedback (hiding identity)	– Giving feedback without displaying the participant identity motivates employees to provide honesty results of what they know next time the survey is conducted. – Feedback is focused on performance but not personality – One on one makes the feedback not influential in case of negative feedback	– The strategy might be biased toward employees who need to be recognized
Group  feedback	– Giving feedback to a group helps in learning how different employees are behaving regarding feedback.	– Employees can collaboratively resist the outcomes

Q3. Provide three examples of how staff can be involved in team development and training activities? To test solution to team problems, what tools or techniques would you use and why would you use them?

Involving employees in training and development strategies is critical for the success of any organization. Organizations can, therefore, use several methods for the involvement of employees. For example, managers can seek staff input in regards to their view on the prevailing issues. Staff input is important as they are directly affected and can therefore offer meaningful and important views for the situation. Another example is whereby employees can be engaged in team building activities which can be effective and fun in improving teamwork and identifying the employees’ weaknesses and strengths. Managers can therefore select the best team building activities which meet their training objectives.  Furthermore, managers can delegate duties to the staff which is important as it exposes staff to new roles and responsibilities which improves their skills in various fields. Techniques which can be used in testing the solutions to team problems include getting feedback from the employees and through participation and articulating vision as they provide clear perspectives directly from the team.

Q4. Scenario

Read the below  scenario and complete the task that follows:

Write later

Q5. Outline at least 2 methods to ensure effective communication and consultation in your development program.

Open meetings

Emails and other advanced technologies

Q6. Identify a conflict situation in your organisation or an organisation familiar to you.

A, identify what technique or strategy you could employ to manage conflict within your development team. Explain your choice

Collaborating or win-win techniques – The strategy will manage conflict with development team by encouraging both conflicting members by collaborating with both members in order to find a win-win solution for the problem. Furthermore, the technique will identify underlying opponents concerns and find alternatives that satisfy each party’s concerns (Stolfo et al., 2010).

B, what would you do to assist both parties to acknowledge and respect each other’s differences?

I will create a conducive atmosphere and working environment that suits every party. Furthermore, I will encourage teamwork spirit, closely supervise the parties and encourage both parties to focus on performance but not personalities.

Providing feedback regarding survey results and maximizing participation

C, how could you help them reach an agreement?

I will help them reach an agreement by coming up with alternatives ways of solving their problem and further sharing with both parties the feedbacks of their concerns and encourage mutual respect in the workplace.

Q7. To manage conflict between individuals and groups to achieve agreement, when would you apply compromising resolution?

When resolving disagreements in mediation and negotiation processes, applying compromise is common. Although an agreement may not be met, underlying organizational and interpersonal conflict may not always be solved by compromising resolution. Compromising may generate a material or functional solution although it may be challenging to solve issues of behaviour and emotion typically brought about by disagreements. As a result, groups and individuals may continuously harbor other dissatisfaction or ill feelings that may resurface if the involved parties continue contacting each other.

Q8. You are the organisation development manager in an organisation that has been implementing a range of activities for the first phase of the development program. These have been implemented according the OD plan and is in alignment with the organisational strategic plan. Before you begin implementing the phase 2 organisation development activities, you would like department mangers to assist you with assessing the level of engagement with the OD activities across the organisation. Each department manager has number of supervisors reporting to them. You want the feedback to provide both qualitative and quantitive date on what’s working well and to explore any areas that have been missed or need corrective action.

A, what actions would you take to enlist support of department managers?

I will forward my objectives and goals to accomplish when I implement phase 2. Furthermore, I will also consider sharing all milestones I have covered during phase one and achievements for the managers to see the essence of supporting the activity.

B, what methods could you use to survey staff? Conduct a survey to identify any loss of support for organization development programs and activities.

Survey methods include telephone surveys, face-to-face surveys and mail or web surveys.

Survey

Please complete the survey and return it to me by 2/11/2018
How often do you interact with me	Rarely	Sometimes	Very often	Other (please indicate)
Did organization display any consideration to employees	rarely	sometimes	Very often	Other (please indicate)
Are employees involved in organizational development activities	rarely	sometimes	Very often	Other (please indicate)

Q9. The team responsible for implementing the organization development plan is not meeting their target and each week they are further behind. You have called a special meeting of the team to discuss the risks and to try and reach agreement on how targets can be achieved.

What are the benefits of having regular meetings and individual feedback during the OD process? Prepare meeting agenda, highlighting the purpose and expected out comes.

Getting individual feedback and having regular meetings ensures that the process of organization development is actually monitored. Therefore, it gives the organizational manager an opportunity to review the effectiveness of implemented strategies to see if they are actually working. When organizational managers review development processes, changes can be made if need be. It is also easy to identify discrepancies and act accordingly.

Meeting Agenda

Meeting Agenda Agenda for the meeting of the Skylux Organization Development Committee which will be held on 14th December, 2018 in the company’s meeting hall at 2pm. Attendees: Mr. Paul Scott – chairman, organizational development manager Mr. Bond Daniel – member, company deputy branch manager Mr. Isaac Gary – member, finance manager Mrs. Rose Daniels – member, procurement manager Mrs. Lucy Atkins – secretary, company secretaryAbsent: Mr. Jason Michael – member, reception manager Agenda Preliminaries Review of the minutes of the previous meeting Formulation of Strategic Goals Risk of low customer service – highest degree of etiquette by employees when dealing with customers Risk of lengthy registration process – service should be very quick and minimized Troubleshooting common problems – empowering supervisors to solve simple issues Closure: The meeting will end at 4.pm

Q10. Read the below case study and answer the questions that follows.

The Y FIT Fitness centre has conducted a three-day leadership program for its 10 fitness center managers. The focus on the training was:

• To create alignment with new strategic objectives: to grow personal fitness training by 100% in the next 12 months.
• To build skills in leading change and coaching for change

Involving staff in team development and training activities

Prepare an evaluation process to identify what direct and indirect effects this leadership program has had on the new strategic objectives.

The evaluation programme that is suitable for the Y FIT Fitness center is outcome evaluation that determines whether the programme produces the changes it intends. The Evaluation process has four stages starting with an assessment of the impacts of each programme, analyzing data from population group, choices of evaluation designs and a selection of group comparison.

Evaluation process

Evaluation stages	Outcomes/impacts
An assessment of the impacts of each program component	Determinants of a satisfactory level of leadership programme to the members
Data from a population	Describing the behavior and interest of members from the available data of participant of the leadership program
evaluation designs	The phase includes assessing change among individuals before and after the leadership programme.
Evaluation of comparison group	The stage includes determining whether the programme will be improved over time even if it had not experienced the intervention. The more similar the two groups are, the more confident the program will contribute to any detected changes.

Q11. Senior managers are a driving force for change and have a critical role in ensuring the success of a development program. List 4 ways that managers can help drive a successful development program. Describe why this kind of support is beneficial and list 3 appropriate resources.

1. Dealing with the short time of development needs and learning
2. Igniting the passion of other managers to coach their team
3. Teaching their team on how to own the organizational development.
4. Building trust in the leadership of the organization.

For business leaders, making the right investments in development and learning programs is critical although challenging for them. Therefore, support from the senior managers is critical since they can pass on their insights, skills and knowledge through coaching and mentoring (Cummings & Worley, 2014). In addition, the kind of support ensures that senior managers assist organizations in rethinking how organizational development happens from just a simple activity happening once-in-a-while to a consistent campaign (Brown & Harvey, 2011).

Q12. (a)what technique or strategy would you apply to evaluate the effectiveness of your development processes? Why should you consider opportunity cost in your evaluation of the program?

I will use the techniques of assessing the internal and external forces, measuring performances and correcting performances to evaluate the effectiveness of the development process. The opportunity costs create awareness of any lost opportunity as it causes the organization to consider the reality, benefits and drawbacks when selecting among several options. Opportunity costs also provide a room for comparing relative prices and advantages of an alternative. The comparison makes sure the company gets quality services or products at the right time.

 (b) How would you make appropriate adjustments if required?

I will make appropriate adjustments by consulting with other stakeholders after the evaluation and determination of the best opportunity costs. If the majority of stakeholder supports adjustments then I will adjust.

Q13. Identify three legislation areas that your organisation’s development plan may need to address. Explain why it is important to address legislation and regulatory context in your development plan? Explain the impact of legislation on organization development and change.

All organizations have legislation requirements which have been put in place and which must be followed in the organizational development process, especially when the human life or the environment is at risk. Therefore, laws have been put in place to ensure that individuals and organizations have a minimum care standard which ensure that activities of development in the organization do not result in loss or harm to other people. Legislation areas which should be met include management procedures, emergency procedures, operating procedures, safety standards.

Q14. Outline theories of organizational behavior and dynamics relevant to planning and implementing organization development.

Theory of Cognitive Dissonance-

Self-Perception Theory

Q15. What are some of the change management techniques including an organisational culture that must be considered in the development plan and how do they affect organization development?

Organization techniques of managing change include organizational culture, honesty, repetition, motivation, instilling belief and planning. The techniques affect the organizational development as they assist in prioritization of the key areas for change and ensure proper planning to understand the risks and estimate the required resources for change. In addition, implementing change requires motivation of employees and instilling belief to trust the importance of the change.

Q16. Imagine your organization is undergoing changes. Create a communication plan to get feedback and ideas on the draft development plan strategies

Communication plan

Person	Role title	Frequency	channel	Notes
Ericson son	Communication leader	Weekly	Weekly check-in of emails and reports	Weekly approval of milestone and giving strategic direction as needed.
Smith Keen	Communication coordinator	daily	Checking daily emails of the progress updates	Pulling others as need and going to contacts for questions, deliverables, and needs
Bolt Titus	VIP of communication	A major milestone of development plan strategies (monthly, weekly and daily)	Checks  daily progress updates via outlook emails, weekly meeting and monthly reports	Checks all approved files of daily and monthly milestones

Q17. According to Kotter, how can leader encourage employees to respond to change therefore effectively participate in activities and interventions?

According to Kotter, a leader can encourage employees to respond to change through incorporating change within the organization culture, by producing more change and consolidating gains, generating short-term wins, empowering broad-based action, communicating the vision for buy-in, developing a change vision, creating the guiding coalition and establishing a sense of urgency.

Q18.   Project on contributing to organisation development at BizOp Enterprises.

First, in order to contribute to BizOp Enterprises, there must be clear goals and objectives and possible measures of success. I will contribute to organization by effectively communicating with stakeholders to strategies on how they can increase their sales by fifteen percent by next year. Furthermore, I will propose suitable strategies that fit the organization. The strategies like making a proper sales database in all retail outlets for a demonstration of achievement in key performance indicators (KPI’s). Entering the BizOp Enterprise with the desired pricing product will be of benefit to the organization for surviving rapid competition as it is clear that the online prices are the mismatching amount of retail.

References

Brown, D. R., & Harvey, D. F. (2011). An experiential approach to organization development.

Cummings, T. G., & Worley, C. G. (2014). Organization development and change. Cengage learning.

Stolfo, S. J., Keromytis, A. D., Misra, V., Locasto, M. E., & Parekh, J. (2010). U.S. Patent No. 7,784,097. Washington, DC: U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.