Inter-City Manufacturing, Inc.

Q1) The technique which increased Rich Langston’s communication effectiveness is open-door policy. Rich Langston believed an open-door policy can facilitate upward communication. An open-door policy is a new trend within large corporations. This policy is one that allows communication to take place from the bottom of organization to its top. It means that employees are allowed to go to their supervisors, their supervisor’s boss, or even the President and Board of Directors, with a problem or issue that the subordinate feels needs to be discussed with upper level management. This new open-door policy ensures higher employee morale. This policy also ensures employee communications with managers, and establishes trust and openness between upper level management and their subordinates. In the case, employee Leroy complained bitterly that his manager had over-committed the department and put everyone under too much pressure, he also argued that long hours and low morale were major problems to the president, Rich Langston.

By open-door policy, it ensures that employee Leroy knows what is expected of him and in what time frame he is expected to deliver. An open-door policy provides regular updates to supervisors and workers on the status of various projects and encourages regular staff meetings to review progress toward goals. An open-door policy is one that recognizes and rewards good work with promotions, bonuses, raises and public praise. It builds a sense of trust within the organization that allows it to deal with office politics in an open, honest and respectful way.

Q2) I don’t think that an open-door policy was the right way to improve upward communications. The open-door policy is often used as the first step in the workplace dispute resolution procedure and is a popular management method of grievance resolution involving a manager making him or her available at any time for an employee who wishes to raise an issue. The open-door policy is essentially an informal, unstructured and ad-hoc form of dispute resolution. As such it has been described as inappropriate for a number of workplace disputes.

If an employee has been unable to resolve a grievance with his or her manager, the peer review technique may be requested. Generally, application to peer review is through the issuing of a written grievance. Consisting of a panel of fellow employees or peers and management representatives, the panel listens to the arguments and evidence presented by the employee and by the other disputant, often a management representative. Panel members may ask questions and clarify any matters necessary before a binding decision is issued through the process of secret ballot on a course of action to resolve the problem. Panel members are required to maintain the confidentiality of the process and must receive specific training in their role. Generally, such panels are constructed giving employee representatives a majority over management representatives, commonly with a ratio of three to two, in an effort to balance the power inequality in the employment relationship and to ensure a fairer hearing for the employee.

Q3) An open-door policy may make the employee raising the complaint highly visible to his or her co-workers which could act as a disincentive to raise sensitive matters such as sex discrimination claims. Often the desired outcome of a dispute is a neutral opinion and most employee disputants would probably not want the third party to be a supervisor or manager with whom they are familiar. Problems also arise when the manager is implicated in the employee’s grievance.

The open-door policy has been criticized as potentially leading to employees feeling reluctant to confront their supervisor or manager on their own. In particular, employees have reported reluctance to raise claims due to a fear of reprisal, especially if using the open-door policy to bypass their own supervisor or manager. Therefore, many employees are reluctant to use the open-door policy.