Case: Jeans Therapy Levi's Factory Workers Are Assigned to Teams
By: Stenly • Essay • 1,027 Words • March 23, 2010 • 3,379 Views
Case: Jeans Therapy Levi's Factory Workers Are Assigned to Teams
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.” (moresteam.com)
So the 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