Managing Customer Services: Human Resource Practices, Turnover, and Sales Growth

This study examines the relationship between human resource practices, employee quit rates, and organizational performance by drawing on a unique nationally representative sample of 354 customer service and sales establishments in the telecommunications industry. Multivariate analyses show that quit rates are lower and sales growth is higher in establishments that emphasize high skills, employee participation in decision-making and in teams, and HR incentives such as high relative pay and employment security. Quit rates partially mediate the relationship between human resource practices and sales growth. These relationships also are moderated by the customer segment that frontline employees serve

From Bureaucracy to Enterprise? The Changing Jobs and Careers of Managers in Telecommunications Service

This paper analyzes how organizational restructuring is affecting managerial labor markets. Drawing on field research from several Bell operating companies plus a detailed survey of managers in one company, this paper considers how organizational restructuring affects the employment levels, the nature of work, and the career trajectories of lower and middle level line managers. Does restructuring lead to a loss or managerial power and a convergence in the working conditions of managerial and nonmanagerial workers? Or, conversely, do managers stand to gain from the flattening of hierarchies and devolution of decision-making to lower organizational levels? The paper\u27s central argument is that a new vision of organization has taken hold – one that replaces bureaucracy with enterprise. This vision, however, entails sharp contradictions because it relies on two competing approaches to organizational reform: one that relies on decentralizing management to lower levels to enhance customer responsiveness; the other that relies on reengineering and downsizing to realize scale economies. While the first approach views lower and middle managers as central to competitiveness, the second views them as indirect costs to be minimized. The central question is whether or how the two approaches can be reconciled. The evidence from this case study shows that restructuring has had the unintended consequence of creating new organizational cleavages: between lower and middle level managers on the one hand, and top managers on the other

City Designed for Subtropical Living - Carrying forward the momentum from Subtropical Cities 2006

At a time when cities around the world are increasingly looking and feeling the same, and similarly adding to mounting environmental crises, the Subtropical Cities conference hosted by the Centre for Subtropical Design in Brisbane a few months ago generated keen enthusiasm for ways subtropical environments can produce new models for urbanism and address the problems of the contemporary city. Subtropical Cities was characterised by a genuine sense of excitement about how, in the subtropics, we can plan and design urbanism that is enriched by commitment to local distinctiveness through attention to climate, cultural values and landscape. The conference confirmed that if we are to face the challenges of today and the future, we need a framework that accommodates complexity and diversity. Invaluable micro-tactics and subtle incremental changes which dwell on amenity and liveability are necessary; not the tallest, not the biggest, not the most spectacular! Such excesses are easily achieved

Backstage At English\u27s

It has been my good fortune to spend many a performance backstage at English\u27s , as well as to watch many performances from out front

The persistent vegetative state: legal and ethical issues

Recent advances in technology and medical expertise have enabled doctors to prolong the lives of many severely injured patients who only a few years ago would have died from their injuries. The prolongation of life by such measures has raised many legal, ethical and social issues. When in 1992 the House of Lords determined in Airdale NHS Trust V Bland that life-supporting measures, including artificial nutrition and hydration (ANH) might lawfully be withdrawn from Anthony Bland, a patient in a persistent vegetative state (PVS), attention was focused on these issues particularly as they apply to the patient in PVS. Since the PVS patient is neither competent to refuse treatment, nor is he dying or suffering, the reasons normally advanced for withdrawing life-supporting measures do not apply. In Bland, their Lordships relied on the best interests test laid down in Re F (mental patient: sterilisation) [1989] 2 All ER 545, and, with the exception of Lord Mustill, on the Bolam test (Bolam v Friern Barnet Hospital Management Committee) [1957] 1 WLR 582. This thesis examines the decision mBland and addresses some of the issues raised. The appropriateness of the best interests test as applied to the patient in PVS is explored and compared with the approach of substituted judgement employed in some other common law jurisdictions. The relevance of the Bolam test to decisions regarding the withdrawal of life-supporting measures is considered. The legal requirements for the withdrawal of ANH are discussed, together with the ethical debate and the moral dilemmas posed by its withdrawal. Finally, the question as to whether the decision in Bland is good law is addressed, and it will be argued that whilst it may be morally acceptable to withdraw ANH from some patients, as regards a patient in PVS, the moral imperative is that we should not

New York\u27s Plain English Law

New York was the first state to pass a law requiring that contracts governing consumer transactions be written in plain English, as opposed to legalese. This Note examines the effect of New York\u27s Plain English Law on consumer transactions as well as the Law\u27s reception by lawyers and consumers

Outcomes of Self-Directed Work Groups in Telecommunications Services

[Excerpt] The purpose of my presentation is to consider whether the use of self-directed teams enhances competitiveness in services. In the context of heightened competition brought about by deregulation and the internationalization of service markets, do team-based work systems produce higher quality service and customer satisfaction? Do workers benefit as well? Should unions as well as management support this innovation? If so, under what conditions and why? This presentation complements that of the other panelists in this session in important ways. First, while Verma provides an overview of the array of workplace innovations being introduced in telecommunications firms (from joint labor-management consultation to total quality and self-management), I focus on a more detailed quantitative assessment of use of one of those innovations—self-directed work groups. Second, I consider the ways in which the introduction of self-managed teams differentially affects the job characteristics of two of the groups identified in Herzenbergs typology of work systems in services: the semiautonomous groups (represented by customer service representatives in telecommunications) and the autonomous groups (exemplified by network field technicians)

[Review of the books \u3ci\u3eManaging the Human Factor: The Early Years of Human Resource Management in American Industry and \u3ci\u3eHired Hands or Human Resources? Case Studies of HRM Programs and Practices in Early American Industry\u3c/i\u3e]

[Excerpt] Bruce Kaufman has produced two volumes on the early development of human resource (HR) management that should become mainstays in undergraduate and graduate courses in the fields of HR studies and industrial relations. Not since Sandy Jacoby\u27s pathbreaking book on the development of personnel management has such careful attention been paid to the inner workings of American corporations\u27 personnel policies a century ago (Employing Bureaucracy: Managers, Unions and the Transforming of Work in American Industry, 1900-1945, 1985). Unlike Jacoby, who specifically analyzed how and why companies developed these policies in response to union movements and external pressures, Kaufman\u27s purpose is to show that the roots of modern HR management can be traced to the late nineteenth and that “strategic” HR is not new