BUSI 760 Week 6 DB Forum 3 Reply Example

Discussion Board Forum 3 Replies: Keller, Service and the System

BUSI 760 Quality Management and Productivity, Discussion Board Forum 3 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 Monica

Monica, your thread argued that Keller's account of the dignity of work means housekeepers should help write the hotel's cleaning standards rather than receive them from a corporate manual. I agree, and this week's reading gives your argument a second foundation. In the fourth chapter, Keller and Alsdorf (2012) present work as service: the primary way most people love their neighbors is by doing their daily work well for others. A housekeeper who cleans a room thoroughly is serving a guest she will probably never meet.

That last point suggests one addition to your plan. Grant (2008) reported field experiments in which employees whose jobs benefited others, including fundraising callers for a university, performed better after they were shown how their work helped the people it served. In the fundraising study, callers who heard about the difference the money made to students raised more than callers who did not, and a second experiment found that lifeguards who read about rescues became more dedicated to their duties. Grant traced the effect to employees' sense that their work had a real impact on others. Service is easier to sustain when the server can see the person served. Your housekeepers currently see only the inspection checklist. Could the hotel share guest comments about cleanliness with the housekeeping team each week, including the names of the housekeepers whose rooms were praised? That would connect the standards your team writes to the guests they serve, which fits both Keller's view of service and the emphasis Starbird and Cavanagh (2011) place on teams that understand who their processes are for.

Reply to Ethan

Ethan, your thread was honest about a frustrating problem: drawing errors at your engineering firm keep recurring, and you attributed them to careless engineers who need more accountability. I understand the frustration, and Keller's fifth chapter speaks to it directly. Keller and Alsdorf (2012) describe how work in a fallen world becomes fruitless at times, producing thorns and thistles despite our efforts, and they caution against both despair and the expectation that work can be made perfect.

I wonder, though, whether the errors are as individual as they appear. Deming (1986) argued from long experience that most problems and most opportunities for improvement belong to the system, which management designs, and only a small fraction to special causes such as individual carelessness. He warned that blaming individuals for system problems makes things worse, because people start concealing mistakes instead of raising them, and the information management needs to fix the system disappears. If several engineers make the same kinds of errors, that pattern points to the system: unclear standards, rushed schedules or a checking process that catches errors too late. Before adding accountability, could your firm sort the last year's errors by type and stage, and see whether a few categories account for most of them? If so, a change to the checking process might reduce errors more than discipline would, and it would treat your engineers with the charity Keller's chapter asks of us in a world where work is hard for everyone.

References

Deming, W. E. (1986). Out of the crisis. MIT Center for Advanced Engineering Study.

Grant, A. M. (2008). The significance of task significance: Job performance effects, relational mechanisms, and boundary conditions. Journal of Applied Psychology, 93(1), 108-124. https://doi.org/10.1037/0021-9010.93.1.108

Keller, T., & Alsdorf, K. L. (2012). Every good endeavor: Connecting your work to God's work. Dutton.

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