Topic 1: Global Organisations (2)
In this week’s article section, we continue our exploration of past and present solutions to improve the performance of global organisations. In last week’s selection, we were introduced to three important aspects of managing global organisations, namely people, processes, and structures. The first two articles of this week focus on the people aspect while the third article focuses on the structure aspect. dhahdbcbcdjbdadasaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa
1. This article from Allianz focuses on the need to consolidate the level of employee benefits to an international level in order to reap the highest rewards from their employees. Companies have become aware that harnessing talent is one of the main steps to success. "Employee Satisfaction is the key to consumer satisfaction." The article shows that if the multinational company learns to consolidate their benefit schemes, which keep their employees satisfied, they will be able to lower costs and increase transparency. Allianz urges companies to connect their global employee benefits to risk management in order to make sure that they can retain their talent at a global level and thus experience economies of scale. However, this only works when conducted at a global scale, calling for the need of Global organisations rather than individually functioning branches of a multinational. companies. http://www.europeanceo.com/finance/allianz-‐talent-‐investment/
2. In this article, Dion Hinchcliffe brings up the issue of workforce collaboration in global organizations. The collaborative environment in a typical enterprise is complex: different time zones, vast distances between offices, regional cultural differences, corporate politics, and bureaucracy all make it one of the signature challenges of large organisations today. In this article, Dion suggests a collaboration value chain, a powerful way of mapping the array of inputs we have to bring to bear on collaboration, along with tools, activities, and desired outputs. Hopefully, such method will shed some light on this problem and help drive effective collaboration.
http://adjuvi.com/how-‐to-‐improve-‐global-‐workforce-‐collaboration/
3. In this Mckinsey Quarterly archive article published in 1979, Tom Peters examines the flaws of the matrix-‐organization design and explores several more effective approaches to implement no more than one or two essential corporate thrusts at a time. According to Tom Peters, the matrix oversimplifies how people in organizations actually behave. Its central concept—that simultaneous decisions can routinely be made along multiple dimensions with fragmented accountability—overestimates the information-‐processing capacity of managers. This eventually leads to overloading the circuits. Moreover, under a matrix organisation, it is difficult to pin responsibility for results on anyone and hence the sense of urgency attached to a job is undermined. By giving empirical evidence, Tom Peters illustrates that the most successful companies have been those restless enough to be unsure what their management styles should be. Therefore, companies shouldn’t rely on one-‐variable solutions, such as merely changing the structure to a matrix organisation and management can keep ahead of the process only by constant, deliberate experimentation with new organizational missions and themes. http://www.mckinsey.com/insights/organization/beyond_the_matrix_organization
As we can see, in order to enhance the performance of global organisations, we need to think about how to improve productivity and reduce costs in optimising people, processes and structures. By investing in employers’ benefits, companies are able to reserve talents, hence increasing productivity. Meanwhile, global companies should tap on its global scale in reducing the cost of providing employers’ benefits. Another way to improve productivity is to promote collaboration among workforce by critical
planning against the value-‐chain framework (i.e. inputs, tools, activities, outputs, and impacts). Last but not least, in order to stay ahead, global organisations need to constantly revise their focuses and experiment with new organisational missions rather than relying on one-‐time structural changes.