Question

Please read the attached article from the New York Times and write a short paper answering the below questions. There is no length minimum for the essay. I would anticipate approximately 1-2 pages double-spaced, 12pt Times New Roman font to address all required elements. Papers over 2 pages will receive an automatic reduction of 50%.

Your task is to accomplish two goals in your paper:

1. Analyze a business problem(s) presented in the article and describe its effect on the business and the stakeholders of the business (remember, stakeholders can involve employees, clients, customers, management, shareholders, and community bystanders). Be sure to list the stakeholders.
   • Use at least 2 theories/concepts of Organizational Behavior to identify the problem and assess its effects.
2. The second part of your paper should propose a solution to the business problem(s) identified in part 1.
   • Use at least 2 theories/concepts of Organizational Behavior to justify the solution you propose (they must be different theories/concepts from what you used in part 1). Also, be sure to describe the effect your solution will have on the business and stakeholders.

In writing your paper, be sure to use a sufficient level of detail in applying the theories. This means using their component parts to thoroughly build your case. Do not summarize the article or use solely anecdotal information as an explanation. Please note that there is not one single business problem presented in the article and that, depending on your perspective, it is possible to identify a wide variety of problems for business and/or stakeholders that are presented in the article.

Data-Crunching Is Coming to Help Your Boss Manage Your Time

By DAVID STREITFELD AUG. 17, 2015

You might be at work, but that hardly means you are working.

Mitesh Bohra thought that projects at his software company, InfoBeans, were taking too long. “Something was supposed to be done in a thousand hours and it would end up taking 1,500,” he said. “We were racking our brains to figure out where the time went.”

Increasingly, bosses have an answer. A new generation of workplace technology is allowing whitecollar jobs to be tracked, tweaked and managed in ways that were difficult even a few years ago. Employers of all types — old line manufacturers, nonprofits, universities, digital startups and retailers — are using an increasingly wide range of tools to monitor workers’ efforts, help them focus, cheer them on and just make sure they show up on time.

The programs foster connections and sometimes increase productivity among employees who are geographically dispersed and often working from home. But as work force management becomes a factor in offices everywhere, questions are piling up. How much can bosses increase intensity? How does data, which bestows new powers of vision and understanding, redefine who is valuable? And with half of salaried workers saying they work 50 or more hours a week, when does working very hard become working way too much?

“The massive forces of globalization and technological progress are removing the need for a lot of the previous kind of whitecollar workers,” said Andrew McAfee, associate director of the Center for Digital Business at the M.I.T. Sloan School of Management. “There’s a lot of competition, global labor pools of pretty good quality, automation to make you more productive and make your job more 24/7. These are not calming forces.”

One way employees are pushed to work harder is by tethering them to the office outside of normal business hours. Nearly a third of workers in a Gallup poll last year said they were expected to “check email and stay in touch” when they were not working.

New technology tools are also threatening one of the enduring rituals of corporate life — the annual performance review. General Electric, long a standard-setter in management practices, began a pilot project last year in which a smartphone application was used to give workers instant feedback from bosses and colleagues.

After a meeting or presentation, a manager can tap on the app and write short notes of encouragement, advice or criticism under categories like “insight,” “consider” and “continue.” Faster feedback is healthy, according to Susan P. Peters, senior vice president of human resources, who often tells colleagues that almost nothing in business conforms to yearly cycles anymore.

The pilot program and the smartphone app were tested last year. The results were sufficiently encouraging that by the end of this year, G.E. intends to extend it to 80,000 of its whitecollar workers, and to nearly all 175,000 of them by the end of 2016.

The technology is part of G.E.’s broader “performance development” program. It is intended to be more personalized, supportive and timely than past practices. The emphasis, G.E. says, is on coaching rather than labeling or ranking.

“People in sales are continually measured and always know where they stand. Now this is happening in the rest of the whitecollar work force,” said Paul Hamerman, a workplace technology analyst with Forrester Research.

“Done properly, it will increase engagement. Done in the wrong way, employees will feel pressured or micromanaged.”

Myrna Arias, a Southern California saleswoman for Intermex, a money transfer company based in Miami, was required to download an app on her cellphone that tracked her whereabouts 24 hours a day, she claims in a lawsuit now pending in federal court. Ms. Arias’s suit quotes her manager as saying, perhaps jokingly, that he knew how fast she was driving at all times.

“Ms. Arias believed it was akin to wearing a felon’s ankle bracelet,” said her lawyer, Gail A. Glick. She deleted the app and was fired. Her suit, which accuses Intermex of invasion of privacy and wrongful termination, seeks $500,000 in lost wages. Neither Intermex nor its lawyers responded to requests for comment.

Companies making work force technology that relies more on engagement than enforcement say it increases transparency and fairness. “In the office of the future,” said Kris Duggan, chief executive of BetterWorks, a Silicon Valley startup founded in 2013, “you will always know what you are doing and how fast you are doing it. I couldn’t imagine living in a world where I’m supposed to guess what’s important, a world filled with meetings, messages, conference rooms, and at the end of the day I don’t know if I delivered anything meaningful.”

BetterWorks is focused less on measuring how employees spend their time at the office than in making them more connected to it. One way to do that: Make it feel more like Facebook.

One of its clients, Capco, a financial services consultant, is seeking to make the millennials happy. “They are looking for gigs, not careers,” said Patrick Gormley, the chief operating officer. “The things that would keep them tied to a job in years gone past — a mortgage, a car loan — have evaporated. That really challenges us to create an outstanding employee experience, so we can retain the best.”

Capco’s 3,000 employees, who are spread out geographically, post their most ambitious goals for the year electronically for all colleagues to see and they, as well as executives, can issue “nudges” and “cheers” to each other. “Transparency is a tough culture change, particularly for management,” Mr. Gormley said. “We’re not used to admitting that we’re not perfect.” He noted that 12 people had nudged him electronically, versus 52 cheers.

Other work force developers are enhancing the traditional process of evaluating employees, which used to be annual and backward looking.

Now it is more spontaneous.

Amazon, the ecommerce giant, uses an internal tool called Anytime Feedback, which allows employees to submit praise or criticism to management. The company says most of the remarks are positive, though some Amazon employees complain that the process can be hidden and harsh.

Workday, which is based in the Bay Area, has developed a tool called Collaborative Anytime Feedback. Colleagues use it to salute each other — everyone in the company can see who is saying what.

“People wouldn’t put something negative in a public forum, because it would reflect poorly on them,” said Amy Wilson, Workday vice president of human capital management products.

The software also enables employees to comment privately, however, to a colleague’s manager. Workday says these remarks range from positive to at least constructive.

Workday also sells an employee timetracking program, which it advertises as being able to increase worker productivity, along with reducing labor costs — presumably in human relations departments — and minimizing compliance risks.

Brown University is one of Workday’s customers, offering an endorsement on the company’s site. A university spokesman declined to comment on how the program was used at the Rhode Island campus.

Some say time tracking simply replaces a manual time sheet and encourages honesty. “We tell people not to focus on the Big Brother aspect. This is all about efficiency,” said Joel Slatis, founder of Timesheets.com, which makes clockin software used by 1,400 small companies. “If you fill out a paper timecard and write down 8 a.m. when you come in at 8:02, no one is going to bat an eye. But if you do that when you leave too, that means you’re getting 5 minutes more a day.”

Jamie Clausen, who clocks in and out of her job in customer service at a State Farm insurance office in Silicon Valley from her home using Timesheets, says she accepts it as a modern reality.

“It shouldn’t be an option to just show up at 9:15,” she said. Ms. Clausen, 29, previously worked in a call center, where she was closely monitored. She added that she had been watching “Mad Men,” and its portrayal of freewheeling 1960s office life “seemed crazy.” “It was a totally different world, back then.”

At InfoBeans, an Indian company whose United States headquarters is in the Bay Area, managers feared that workers’ inefficiency would lead to financial losses and client defections. So it began to use a software system called Buddy, which is made by Sapience, an Indian firm that is expanding into the American market.

Khiv Singh, a Sapience vice president, noted that data surrounded workers: “We have pedometers to measure how far we walk, apps to monitor our blood pressure, stress level, the calories we’re taking in, the calories we’re burning. But the office is where we spend the majority of time, and we don’t measure our work.”

When InfoBeans began using Buddy, Mr. Bohra was surprised by what he found.

“Engineers would write on their time sheets that they were doing development for eight hours, but we started to see a very different set of activities that people are performing,” Mr. Bohra said. “Meetings. Personal time. Uncategorized time. Performing research on something that maybe already should be a part of our knowledge repository.”

Mr. Bohra declined to let any of his employees be interviewed. But he said the work was more focused now, which meant smaller teams taking on bigger workloads. Eliminating distractions, including some meetings, lets people go home earlier, he added.

Steve Lohr contributed reporting.

A version of this article appears in print on August 19, 2015, on page B1 of the New York edition with the headline: The 24Hour

Timecard.

Answer 1

A) Problem 1

The business problem as first identified in the article is that the white collar workers are not able to complete their tasks within the deadline of the project , and it has almost always been witnessed that the time frame is not followed , as such they exceed the time given to accomplish a project.
The problem has resulted in various complexities for the software company and Mitesh Bohra is concerned about it.
The reason attributed to it is observed to be either geographical dispersion or no mechanism at placr for timely tracking their work progress , or employees working from home where there can be thoisands of interruptions etc. Thus the manager at the software company concludeds that when being on work , does not necessarily mean that people are working.

Problem 2)
In order to manage time the solution so presented ; i.e the advancement in connectivity (data crunching) has been acting a pain in back to the various stakeholders. Although it is believed that the solution will make the employees accomplish tasks on time, but it is also leading to the increased interferences in personal life and free hours of employees. Due to such advancement in connectivity , employees are being expected to stay online and respond during their off work hours that is resulting in various complexities for employees

Affect in stake holders:

Negatives
The customers are not able to get projects on time due to inefficiency in time management.
Due to data crunching now they are forced to stay connected all the time.
Employees are pressurized to work somehow more beyond their work if they don't come up to goals set hampering their privacy
Management is concerned about the budget associated to a project might exceed or customer unsatisfaction
Dividend is not distributed on time due to delay in revenue.

Positives
The new technology has fostered easy communication and yracking of project progress
The new technology has made managers point out the deficiencies of white collar employees so that they address to these areas by responding to them through three feedback notes : Insight, consider and continue
It will result in a lot of self improvement and zeal to achieve more
Connectivity will make employees who don't have any such direct contact with the company feel powerful and important .

The two concepts that can be applied from Organisational Behavior are:

1) Individual Differences
As per the concept of OB it is believed that each individual has a separate identity , work culture ,, perception , habits and attitudes. Therefore each employee might be having a different approach towards working, a different pace , and different priorities , thus it cannot be expect that individual work the way you want or the way you do.

outcome
These result in some employees performing tasks on time while some delaying the process due to which all over time frame of project and schedule set geys hampered

2) Desire for Involvement :
The another concept of OB that helps identifying the problem , is the belief that each individual has a varying desire for involvement , some get motivated easily and some take time for incorporating diligence and reselience.

Outcome:
The employees lose motivation to work , or feel less interested in their job of not convinced to work better through supervision and appraisals .

B) Solution:
The solution to the problem as proposed by the article is the technology that increases the connectivity among the employees in the world today through various devices and strategies that enable to connect to them throughout so as to ensure they keep up with the deadline improve their pace and show up on the time

OB concept defining solution:

1)Organisations are Social systems:.
OB believes that organizations should work like a social system where integration of activities , coordination and cooperation should be breeded to let it progress and prosper.

Outcome:
Integration of activities will foster coordination and accomplishment of tasks wothin the stipulated period

2)Mutuality Of Interest:

The discipline of OB believes that people have mutual interests that should be driven to drive their actions towards a common goal.
The mutual interest of earning money makes them join the organization as employees , therefore this mutual motive should be used properly to motivate them towards goal attainment. E.g a bonus on achieving target will make them push themselves.

Outcome:
Mutual interests will result in accomplishment of common goal more easily with less problems of self interests hampering the ultimate goal.

Dear student i might have made spelling mistakes due to typing fast , apologies for that ,

I hope it is within the length you instructed , you can shorten it if necessary.

Hope i explained well

Thank you

Good luck n God bless :)