Aberdeen's System At The Green River Facility example essay topic

FMC Corporation's Green River facility is a large organization with many different product lines that cater to many different customers. The industry it serves is the chemical industry. With over 1,000 employees, they service over 100 customers with several different product lines. The Aberdeen facility on the other hand, has only 100 employees who service to only one customer with a single product.

The Aberdeen facility, although small in numbers, has proven to be successful in growth and organizational effectiveness to the point that the Green River facility is interested in its organizational behaviors to incorporate them into their own facility. The Aberdeen facility was founded on the beliefs of participative management and empowerment (George & Jones, 2005) to its employees. The basic principle behind the success of this idea is trust. According to Bob Lancaster, the founder to Aberdeen's management system, trust eliminates fear and allows employees to really focus on what is needed to be done as well as getting it done.

By organizing self managed teams (George & Jones, 2005) along with a team leader, employees are encouraged to manage many different aspects of their own organizational behavior. Employee selection is a rigorous process designed to attract people with not only technical skills, which is minor determining factor based on the philosophy that technical skills were easily trained, but a range of: personal skills, group skills, communication skills, problem solving skills, results orientation, and leadership skills (Clawson, 2005). These employees would have to be able to thrive in the environment were they are not needed to be told what to do, but to just do it. Teams are designed to manage virtually every aspect of the plant. They schedule work hours, purchased materials and tools, planned work schedules, coordinated with other teams, evaluated team members performances, recommended salary increases, generate reports, and deal with virtually every problem that arises (Clawson, 2005).

This is where trust is displayed. These teams are comparable to a family. Each person depends on each other to get jobs done within the team. They openly communicate and have meetings when necessary to discuss and resolve issues as they arise. There is no communication gap between management and teams. In other words, there is no long chain of people you have to go through before you can reach management.

Employees at the Aberdeen facility seem to be more satisfied with their jobs due to the fact that they appreciate the self-motivation and responsibility that makes them a valuable part of their team. Although there are occasions where people are not comfortable with not being told what to do in a work environment and do not like having responsibility, most of the employees thrive in this setting. They enjoy the reward structure which ranges from days off to pay increases. The structure of the Aberdeen facility allows for much room for employees to rise in the company.

They have a structure that bases pay increases according to not only evaluations, but by getting certified for more duties and earning points for duties performed. The facility actually expects you to rise up the ranks after a certain amount of time. This facility is truly about making sure that not only are their employees satisfied because they know that overall production is higher when employees have job satisfaction, but they make sure that they are showing employees they are appreciated and valuable. The more you do, the more you will be rewarded. Some of the issues Kenneth Dailey, manager of the Green River facility, may face while trying to incorporate Aberdeen's system at the Green River facility will no doubt be challenging. One of the big issues I see off hand will be organizing teams.

Remember, Aberdeen produces one good, while Green River has several. An ideal solution would probable be to organize each team by a single good that is produced. This way will avoid confusion and allow full attention of a team to only one product. If teams are to handle all goods produced there can be issues of lack of attention to on good, but more to another. This would not be ideal for production. Also, being that Green River has over 1,000 employees, they will most likely produce more by specializing teams.

This organization of teams will make the system more effective for the Green River facility to adapt to Aberdeen's system. After the restructure they can then implement the rewards and benefits that have proven to be effective for Aberdeen's employee's job satisfaction. In other words, a happy worker is a productive worker. Once Green River employees grasp the idea of trust and happily accept the responsibility of the new system I think it will prove to be just as effective as the Aberdeen facility. This will also filter out the employees that are not comfortable with responsibility and would rather just take orders from someone else.

This attitude will not work with this system. Implementing this system may take some time to accomplish due to the size of the Green River facility, but the system is possible to achieve at this facility. The reason the Aberdeen facility has prospered is simply that the employees feel that their part is truly essential to the functioning of the facility, and that makes them feel good about their job and they are constantly seeking ways to improve their team's production. Once all of the teams are in place and employees are put with the product specialized for them, the ball will get rolling. Slowly but surely things that need to be corrected will be done, employees that can not conform to the new responsibilities will be eliminated, and employees will start to feel the job satisfaction that is really the driving force behind this system.

Bibliography

Jennifer M. George & Gareth R. Jones (2005).
Understanding and Managing Organizational Behavior. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall James G. Clawson (2005) Custom Business Resources.