BUSI 760 Week 2 DB Forum 1 Reply Example

Discussion Board Forum 1 Replies: Process and People Together

BUSI 760 Quality Management and Productivity, Discussion Board Forum 1 Reply

Thread by [Student Name]

The classmates and their threads are composites standing in for the course's own; the books and the published research are real; the week, points and readings follow Liberty's public course guide for BUSI 760, which keeps the reply instructions inside the course.

Reply to Rebecca

Rebecca, your hospital pharmacy's results are impressive. Daily ten-minute huddles in which technicians and pharmacists review the previous day's near misses cut dispensing errors by about a third in six months, and you tracked the change with the hospital's own reporting system rather than impressions. That is exactly the kind of evidence our first forum asked for.

This week's reading suggests one more question. Starbird and Cavanagh (2011) argue that processes and people have to be aligned together, because a well-designed process run by disengaged people will drift, and engaged people stuck in a poor process will become frustrated. Your huddles changed both at once: they added a process step and gave technicians a voice they did not have before. Which one produced the gain? Combining unit-level studies from a wide range of companies, Harter et al. (2002) showed that where staff were more engaged, the units also scored better with customers and on output, profit, safety and keeping people. Their data were correlational, so they cannot show that engagement caused the results, but they make engagement a plausible explanation for some of your improvement.

The distinction matters for what you do next. If the huddle format is what reduced errors, you could spread it to the outpatient pharmacy as a standard procedure. If engagement did most of the work, the outpatient team would need the same experience of being heard, and copying the meeting without that experience might not help. A practice that works because people feel heard cannot be transferred by copying its agenda. Did your technicians' scores on the hospital's engagement survey change over the same six months? If they rose on the questions about having a voice, that would suggest the huddles mattered as much for who was speaking as for what was reviewed.

Reply to Joshua

Joshua, your thread made a strong case that Six Sigma projects work, at least financially. Your call center's green belt projects reduced average handle time by 40 seconds and saved more than $300,000 a year, and you showed the savings with before-and-after data. You also mentioned, almost in passing, that agent turnover rose from 35 to 48 percent in the same year. I think that second number deserves as much attention as the first.

Starbird and Cavanagh (2011) would read your results as a case of improving processes without bringing the people along. Shorter handle times may have come from scripts and limits that agents experienced as pressure rather than as improvement. Research on lean manufacturing points the same way. Bortolotti et al. (2015) compared manufacturing plants that had succeeded with lean with those that had not, and found that the difference lay less in hard practices such as pull production than in soft practices such as employee involvement, training and small-group problem solving, along with an organizational culture that supported them. Your projects were run by belts and managers; the agents' role was to follow the new procedures.

If turnover costs your center even a few thousand dollars per replaced agent in recruiting and training, the higher turnover may have absorbed much of the savings. Would your center consider adding agents to the next round of project teams, and tracking turnover and engagement alongside handle time as project outcomes? That would show whether a more people-centered version keeps the savings without the exits.

References

Bortolotti, T., Boscari, S., & Danese, P. (2015). Successful lean implementation: Organizational culture and soft lean practices. International Journal of Production Economics, 160, 182-201. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijpe.2014.10.013

Harter, J. K., Schmidt, F. L., & Hayes, T. L. (2002). Business-unit-level relationship between employee satisfaction, employee engagement, and business outcomes: A meta-analysis. Journal of Applied Psychology, 87(2), 268-279. https://doi.org/10.1037/0021-9010.87.2.268

Starbird, D., & Cavanagh, R. (2011). Building engaged team performance: Align your processes and people to achieve game-changing business results. McGraw-Hill.