Discussion 1: You are an owner and executive level manager of a business with eight locations. Your strategic goal is to expand this business over the next 5 years. While you are pleased with the past performance of the business overall, you have spent a great deal of time over the previous months visiting the eight locations and addressing issues and concerns of the various employees and location managers. It has become obvious to you that you are unable to devote the time and energy necessary to focus on necessary executive level activities to take the business to the next level. All of your time seems to be spent addressing small problems within the existing locations. You have heard that other businesses have successfully used a team approach to management with good results. You have decided to examine this option for your business, managers, and employees.

After reading the scenario above and the section on self-managed teams in your assigned textbook readings, compose a paper in which you explain the difference between traditional and team working environments. Then explain how effective self-managed teams could be built and successfully implemented within your business. Finally, describe how these teams could contribute to the overall effectiveness of your business.

Minimum Submission Requirements:

Your Assessment paper should be at least 2 full double-spaced pages in length, using size 12-point font in Microsoft® Word®.

Be sure your paper is well written in paragraph form, with correct spelling, grammar, and punctuation.

Be sure to name your file according to the following file-naming convention: username_homework_unit#.doc.

You may use external sources in addition to the required module readings. Cite any external sources used.

Your paper must be written in Standard English and demonstrate exceptional content, organization, style, grammar, and mechanics.

Your paper should provide a clearly established and sustained viewpoint and purpose.

Your writing should be well ordered, logical, and unified, as well as original and insightful.

Discussion 2: RESPONDS TO STUDENTS

NICOLE POST

There are numerous important factors in building a virtual team that provides benefits to the organizations and to the individual team members.

Building a virtual team can attract better people to your company due to the flexible work environment. Having remote workers in a company keeps real estate costs down and saves on relocation costs. It is important for the company to train management on how to build a virtual team. A virtual work environment requires more specialized training. A virtual environment can put a lot of pressure on senior leadership to make sure everything runs productively within the company. The company needs to put limits on virtualization and managers need to have control of their own virtual teams. The company needs to try to balance out teams working virtually but not at the expense of losing the human factor.

Virtual teams provide employees with a good work/life balance. Companies can rotate employees to allow for more opportunities and encourage employees to map out their careers. Some companies do not set an amount of paid time off for their employees. They think the amount of time off does not matter if the work gets done. Virtual teams have proven that employees do not only have to work from a conference room to be effective. Technology has made it easy for everyone to be available all the time.

AMY POST

I found the article, "The evolution of work; One company's story" to be interesting. I have been hearing a lot about the unlimited PTO and the new style of working remotely, so it was nice to read an article on it.

The major difference in the two work environments would be the face to face, personal contact with your co-workers and management. The new way is mostly all work is done without being in an office setting, working remotely and instead working from home. Where the traditional way is working in the office setting with the face to face communication with other employees, management and customers.

I feel that the importance of building a virtual team in the new way environment is even more crucial than the traditional environment because you lack the face to face ability to sit down and discuss updates, problems, concerns, team building activities, etc. This all would be done virtually now in the new environment. The large benefit to employees is the unlimited amount of PTO time to the employee and the ability to make their own schedule. However, this could be a disadvantage to those who do not have the drive when they are working at home, like you would when you are sitting behind a desk with limited interruptions in a workplace environment.

Overall, I am not sure how I feel about the new way vs. the traditional work environment. I think the new way has its large benefits but there are also a lot of negative issues that could come out of it. Especially when you are a manager, I feel that it would be more difficult to track employees task completion in a virtual environment vs. traditional.

What do you think of this new environment?