Jeans Therapy - Levi's Factory Workers Are Assigned to Teams, and Morale Takes a Hit.

1. What went wrong with Levi’s move to teams in their plants?

Levi’s was too late in attending global competition. To catch the market, they had to drastically redesign their strategy. But the major problem of Levi’s was doing nothing to understand the human side of management change. Levi’s did not align the company’s culture, values, people, and behaviors to encourage the desired outcome. Levi’s did not capture value; responsible for designing, executing, and living with the changed environment. Levi’s did not use creative means to maintain employees satisfied.

2. What could Levi’s have done differently to avert the problems?

I believe that if Levi’s had recognized the market demands the time it start to change and designed a structure to adjust with the market, slowly, the impact on the workers would not have being so drastic; since they couldn’t use a long term goal to establish the new strategy and convince workers to participate on it. Levi’s could develop teams that understood how to work together and how they would be able to lead their people and please their workers with incentive plans. They also didn’t worry about keeping their industry’s unique values and sense of individuality, and about creating a culture of loyalty and performance. Levi’s leadership teams fail to plan for the human side of change. Levi’s should ”cultivate their human resources through careful selection and training of the best and brightest employees, implementing innovative team-based employee involvement programs, developing genuinely participate management approaches, and continually retraining their employees.”

3. Devise a team incentive plan that you think might work.

“Successful process improvement activities depend upon the active involvement of the workforce. Group incentive systems are a method of engaging the workforce by providing financial rewards for performance, and help reinforce a winning spirit. Group incentive plans also give credibility to management efforts to improve processes by sharing some of the benefits in return for workforce contributions.” So the principal aspects I would take care are the following:

• I would start with a leadership team and then engage key stakeholders and leaders to integrate into program design and decision making, both informing and enabling strategic direction using an accurate measurement of the organization’s history, willingness, and ability to innovate.

• After research the best talents on each layer of the organization, I would align them to the company’s vision, make clear Levi’s mission, and motivated them to make change happen. Throughout Levi’s talents, I would define a strategy and set goals to design and implement them. Communication and feedback would be the key for success.

• I would establish a budget.

To those who accepted responsibility for making change happen in all of the areas, I would measure and share performance results, motivating them by using incentives and rewards which would have to fit to the budget.

Some approaches I would use are the following:

Profit sharing: A plan that gives employees a share in the profits of the company.

Defined Benefit plan: promises the participants a specific monthly benefit at retirement and may state this as an exact dollar amount.

Team recognition events: Is “a great way to establish a performance culture. Recognizing the extra efforts of teams that achieve high goals is personally