Patagonia Inc

The whole idea of making company’s operations and decision making transparent to the employees tells about healthy organizational spirit. It grew out at the point when employees felt ignorant of the company plans, other departments’ activities and in general, not in control on their destiny. Involving employees into the decision making process definitely eliminates above mentioned attitudes and improves company’s planning, as workers have the real knowledge and experience on what can be actually improved and done. But from the other hand, in this particular situation, the role of employees participation was overemphasized.

Workbook process is very costly in a long run and requires a lot of time and effort from the workers. At the same time, employees have their own work to do besides to the Workbook and in time they can grow an attitude that they are performing managers’ job. The quality of the Workbook results is also under question. For example, some of the defined goals and objectives are very hard to measure and define either they are achieved or not. Besides, the amount of objectives varied from team to team. As well, it is very important that all of the top managers believe in the process.

If they are not convinced in the project from the beginning, they transform the negative attitude to the employees and spirit within the organization starts to lack. In a long run, employees gave less and less time to the Workbook; attitudes “it does not worth the time” started to appear. It is very important to integrate Workbook process to the corporate culture, develop a habit for workers to use it. At this stage, it is essential to make it clear for workers which benefits they get from using the system. One of the issues in the company is informal rewarding system.

During the better periods for the company, all of the employees were given equal rewards. However, when the profitability decreased and top managers suggested that only the worthy employees get the reward, employees decided that nobody should be given a bonus. From one point of view, this kind of behavior aligns with the corporate culture, grown by the company leader. But from the other hand, people start lacking motivation for the development and showing better results. When thinking about the formal reward system, a lot of background work should be done, regarding to the planning, defining performance measurements etc.

Thus, at this stage, rewards can be linked with the Workbook process. It would motivate people to share their opinions and give a feedback to the Workbook and get bonuses from that. Still, my opinion is that in the current Workbook process, employees are involved into the planning process too much. It can disturb them from performing their main job, thus, develop negative attitude towards the system. It could be organized in a way that managers perform planning and budgeting. At the same time, all the information is shared with other employees and they have a change to comment on it and by that get rewards.