Chapter 14 Case Problems Customer Service

1. Suppose you knew who this writer is and that you were the manager of her boss. What would you say to the manager to help resolve this problem?

The easiest way to solve this problem, I think, would be to empower the employee. (213) That is the problem in this story, that the employee is not empowered so they can not properly do their job. If they would assign the responsibility directly to that employee and give them the authority to do the job, (208) then they would be better organized and prepared to finish the job and achieve the goal without being over worked. This would help motivate her and sustain an effective work culture (209).

2. What fundamental violations of good management principles are apparently being revealed by this employee?

The most apparent violation is that they are not really listening or trying to understand the situation that the employee is in, even though the employee has tried to explain it to them. The other one that I see being the most apparent is that they are not doing anything to motivate the employees or get them organized (208-209) so that they can effectively do their jobs. In this end this just makes them frustrated and makes their goals unreachable (213) which is something that they should help them set so that they can achieve them.

1. What advice would you give Georgette for better use of meetings?

I would say that she needs to help them expand the ideas if they really have tried them before into something that would work, rather than just shutting them down. Much like the other case, the employees are not empowered (213) to do anything since their ideas are always ignored. She needs to have better control on the process, (212) and one way that she might be able to do that is to accept written suggestions, so that she can go through them before or after the meeting and pick which ones to bring up so that she’s not constantly denying the employees. Then there also needs to be a rewards system (214) I...