Organizational Behavior in My Organnization

Each morning, we have production meetings where the supervisors/managers of the major manufacturing functions within our company meet to discuss the important aspects of the day. What are the important products that need to be manufactured and/or shipped? What are some of the lead-times for these products and do they need to be adjusted? What are the important health and safety issues? Are there any quality issues? These are some of the questions that are discussed in detail on a daily basis. It is very important to communicate with each other in order to stay on top of the issues to ensure things are not forgotten, maintained and running smoothly.

The meeting is managed by our Operations Manager. Also in attendance are some of the manufacturing functional department heads: Precious Metals, Semi-conductor copper and LPSM (solder mask). The Quality Control department is represented by the QC manager. Others in attendance include: the HSE Compliance Engineer, Customer Service, maintenance and shipping.

The meeting begins promptly at 8:30. Walking into the meeting room, every one is stunned to see someone from Finance (myself) in attendance. I’m getting very strange looks. Without uttering a word, people are already thinking the worst. You can see it all over their faces. I don’t know why, I’m Finance not HR. I’m not there to fire anybody. After exchanging a few laughs and calming everyone down by telling them I was observing the meeting for the purposes of a communications project for grad school, the daily production meeting gets underway.

Having not really attended one of these meetings in a long time, I have to say, they are one of the more well run and to-the-point meetings I’ve been a part of.

IDENTIFICATION

The way the meeting is structured, the department supervisor represents his/her team. The operations manager treats each function supervisor as a separate entity. He reads from a spreadsheet, all of the orders that are on the...