PSYCH 668 Week 6 OD Interventions and Evaluation Example

Predictable Schedules, Fairer Attendance Rules and Supervisors Measured on Retention: An OD Intervention Plan With Its Evaluation

[Student Name]

University of Phoenix

PSYCH/668: Organizational Development, Leadership, and Management

Week 6 Assignment

[Instructor Name]

[Date]

The distributor, its employees, the intervention and all figures are composites written for a model paper; research findings come from the sources listed.

Last week's diagnosis traced day-shift turnover mainly to rigid schedules and attendance rules that clash with the lives of working parents, a clash made worse by supervisors judged only on rates, with pay a lesser factor. Feedback sessions on both shifts confirmed the findings; one picker said, "Finally somebody wrote it down." This paper proposes interventions and a plan to evaluate them.

Thinking About Change

Armenakis and Bedeian (1999) surveyed change research from the 1990s and sorted it into four groups of questions: content, meaning what is being changed; context, meaning the external and internal conditions surrounding the change; process, meaning the steps by which people put the change into practice; and criteria, meaning the outcomes used to judge success. They highlighted the importance of employee readiness and of explaining why change is needed, and noted that many change efforts fail because of process rather than content.

I use their framework to structure the plan: the content addresses diagnosed causes, the context includes a tight labor market and a president focused on efficiency, the process relies on the employee steering group and the criteria include turnover, attitudes and performance.

What Research Says About Combining Interventions

Neuman et al. (1989) pooled studies of organization development interventions to see how much they shifted job satisfaction and related attitudes. Interventions combining several techniques generally produced stronger effects than single-technique interventions, and interventions focused on human processes, such as team building, tended to affect attitudes more than technostructural changes alone, with team building showing the strongest effects among single interventions.

Our diagnosis found causes at several levels: policies, supervision and crew climate. The research supports a combined approach rather than a single fix.

Intervention One: Predictable Schedules

Schedules will be posted two weeks ahead rather than four days ahead. Mandatory overtime will require twenty-four hours' notice except in genuine emergencies, which supervisors must log. A shift-swap system will let pickers trade shifts with approval from a lead rather than a manager. This addresses the largest gap found in the survey, schedule predictability.

Intervention Two: A Fairer Attendance Policy

The points system will remain, but each employee will receive three family emergency absences a year that carry no points, and points will expire after six months rather than twelve. The steering group helped design these changes, which address the cluster of departures following attendance warnings.

Intervention Three: Supervisor Development

Day supervisors will attend four two-hour sessions over two months on coaching conversations, handling family emergencies and running short crew meetings, with practice and follow-up observation. Ninety-day retention will be added to supervisors' goals alongside rates, and supervisors will receive authority to approve schedule swaps and family emergency absences. Without the change in goals and authority, training would teach supervisors to do things the formal system still discourages.

Training supervisors to be flexible is wasted if their goals still reward them only for rates.

Intervention Four: Crew Role Clarification and Buddies

Klein et al. (2009) meta-analyzed studies of team building and found moderate positive effects on team outcomes, with stronger effects for affective and process outcomes than for others. Among the four components examined, role clarification and goal setting produced the strongest effects.

Each day-shift crew will hold a facilitated session clarifying roles, such as who handles replenishment and who helps new pickers, and setting crew goals for accuracy and support. Every new hire will be paired with an experienced buddy for the first thirty days, aimed at the forty percent of departures that occur within ninety days.

Implementation

Greg will announce the changes in person on both shifts, explaining that retention has become a company priority. I will coordinate implementation with the steering group. Weeks one through four cover policy changes and scheduling; weeks three through ten cover supervisor sessions; weeks five through eight cover crew sessions. A monthly review meeting with the steering group will identify problems and adjust.

Anticipating Resistance

Supervisors may resist new goals and fear that flexibility will hurt rates. Involving two supervisors in designing the training and showing them the cost of turnover will help. Night-shift employees may see day-shift changes as favoritism, so the policy changes will apply to both shifts. Greg may lose patience if rates dip; agreeing in advance on a three-month window before judging results reduces that risk.

Evaluation Design

The day shift works in two zones, produce and dry goods, with similar staff and turnover. The plan will start in the produce zone, with the dry goods zone beginning three months later. This staggered rollout gives a comparison: if ninety-day retention improves in produce but not yet in dry goods, and then improves in dry goods after its start, the intervention is a likely cause rather than seasonal hiring or a change in the labor market.

Criteria

Outcomes span several levels. Reactions: supervisor and crew session ratings. Attitudes: the same twenty-five-item survey repeated at three and six months. Behavior: schedule changes posted late, absences and swaps. Results: ninety-day retention, annual turnover, picking accuracy and overtime hours. Each turnover avoided saves about four thousand dollars in recruiting and training, so reducing day-shift turnover from 68 to 45 percent would save roughly eighty thousand dollars a year, against implementation costs of about twenty-five thousand.

What Would Count as Failure

An honest evaluation sets out, before results arrive, the evidence that would count against the plan. If ninety-day retention in the produce zone has not improved by at least ten percentage points after three months, or if improvement in produce is matched by the same improvement in dry goods before its rollout, the steering group will conclude that the interventions are not the cause of any change. If picking accuracy falls by more than a small margin, the company will review whether flexibility is being managed well. Stating these thresholds now protects the evaluation from being reinterpreted later by people who hoped for a particular answer.

What Greg Agreed To

Greg approved the plan with two conditions: a monthly one-page summary of results and the right to pause the attendance changes if absences rise sharply. Both conditions are reasonable. The summary will report retention, accuracy, overtime and absences by zone, and any pause will be discussed with the steering group before it takes effect.

Closing the Cycle

In keeping with action research, results will return to employees at three and six months, and the steering group will decide what to keep, change or stop. The plan is a first cycle, not a final answer, and a second round of diagnosis will follow if retention stalls or new problems appear on either shift.

Conclusion

Combined interventions targeting scheduling, attendance, supervision and crew roles, implemented with employee participation and evaluated through a staggered rollout, give the company a credible test of whether it can keep its day shift. Research on intervention effects and team building supports the choices, and the evaluation will show whether they work here.

References

Armenakis, A. A., & Bedeian, A. G. (1999). Organizational change: A review of theory and research in the 1990s. Journal of Management, 25(3), 293-315. https://doi.org/10.1177/014920639902500303

Klein, C., DiazGranados, D., Salas, E., Le, H., Burke, C. S., Lyons, R., & Goodwin, G. F. (2009). Does team building work? Small Group Research, 40(2), 181-222. https://doi.org/10.1177/1046496408328821

Neuman, G. A., Edwards, J. E., & Raju, N. S. (1989). Organizational development interventions: A meta-analysis of their effects on satisfaction and other attitudes. Personnel Psychology, 42(3), 461-489. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1744-6570.1989.tb00665.x