Acme minerals Extraction Company has been suffering internal conflict between the different groups of employees at multiple sites, these conflicts have led to decreased moral of staff and decrease in productivity overall increasing total costs. Management’s first step in the problem solving process is to identify the problems leading to low productivity before working on a solution. To do this the company hired Suzanne Howard to work with veteran employee Donald Peterson a staff member with 39 years of experience across all three staff groups, operations, above ground and below ground. Wanting to work closely with employees Howard and Peterson established a monthly ‘Problem Chat’ for all employees in hope of receiving staff feedback. A few months later lively problem-solving discussions between different groups began to occur. The chat saw that the main problems were limited communication, no relationships or trust in co-workers and unwillingness to work as a team. With the problem chat proving to be a success management’s next step in the problem solving process would be to identify short term and long-term objectives.
Short term objectives: commitment from groups through employee motivation and participation, decrease group problems, increase trust throughout the company, clearly inform staff of these objectives.
Long Term Objectives: increase productivity and moral, lower total costs, create a positive work environment with teamwork, and eliminate all group-based problems.
Now that short and long term goals have been informed to staff, Howard and Peterson aim was to turn these groups into working functional teams by creating solutions to their problems through SPITS (select a problem and implement a tailored solution) by collaborating with different groups. Over time permanent cross functional teams were established and were making improvements without even