Application Assignment W 01- personal experience

From 2009 to 2011 I was employed with the Upper Rio Grande Workforce Development Board. I began as government relations assistant and moved on to government relations coordinator. My job responsibilities did not change, all that changed was the amount I was paid and my title.

URGWDB was one of 28 workforce development boards in Texas. The Board of Directors itself consisted of between 25-30 people at a time, each representing either the public or private sector. Beneath the board of directors was the administration of the entire organization. We’ll call the administration the board. The board had a CEO and plenty of directors. These directors were responsible for overseeing various departments which were: government relations, workforce resources, accounting, finance, information technology, regional relations and customer service. In addition to the board of directors and the administration staff was the contractor staff. The contractor staff oversaw the day to day operations of the organizations and worked closely with customers.  The contractor staff also had upper management; the main two were the director and assistant director. 

Frederick Taylor was concerned with restructuring organizations by paying attention to the actual workers; by doing so management could actually “manage” the employees as well as the output. During my time with URGWDB, the directors were constantly searching for ways to achieve this. However, they did the opposite of Taylor.

Taylor looked to the employees of the organizations he was a part of in order to better the entire organization.  For instance, Taylor found that employees could do more work but were not doing so out of fear that they may not be needed. Taylor took this information and used it to his advantage. By recognizing the worker’s abilities, Taylor in a sense rewarded them by changing the incentives for which they worked.

I believe that by concentrating more on the managers, URG alienated their employees.  I worked closely with upper management and even I felt alienated. There was a massive turnover within the organization, where new people were constantly being hired.  Should they have taken a different approach much like Taylor did with incentives for instance, perhaps things would have been better.  Although there were employees that received incentives they were most often the same employees every time.

The approach URG used was similar Fayol’s ideas and focused on creating better management.  There were constantly classes, webinars, seminars and leadership conferences being held in order to teach management how to be better at managing.  The only problem with this was that the directors did not pay attention to the employees and what they needed.  However, had they followed Fayol’s fourteen principles this goal could have been accomplished. Management shut themselves off from the rest of the organization to where employees where afraid to interact with them. There was constant fear of reorganization because the actual ideas were not relayed to the employees properly. To the employees, reorganization meant layoffs.

Before trying to reorganize the organization, URG ran on a bureaucratic system, very much like Max Weber’s theories. Weber felt that organizations need structure. With his theories organizations needed managerial hierarchy, division of labor, formal selection, career orientation, formal rules and impersonality.   The bureaucratic approach worked well for URG. Everyone knew their place and what they needed to do in order to keep the organization running efficiently. As employees, we knew the numbers we needed to reach each month, we knew who to talk to for each issue we encountered and we knew what we were doing mattered. While it may not have been ideal for every organization, bureaucracy worked well for URG. The size of the organization and the structure helped make bureaucracy a possibility.  

Overall, while Weber, Taylor and Fayol each had different approaches to organizing companies to reach their full potential, I feel that a successful organization would benefit from all three approaches. By incorporating ideas of all three men, everyone in the company would be addressed and the effect would be increased productivity. Of course, it might not work either but I will consider these my guides when operating my own non-profit organization in the future.