Personal Experience with Non-Profit University, Thesis of Management Accounting

Download Personal Experience with Non-Profit University and more Thesis Management Accounting in PDF only on Docsity! C200 Task 2 Page 1 of 12 C200 Task 2 Elizabeth Case Personal Experience with an Existing Organization A.   Describe an existing organization with which you have had personal experience and its objective(s). The organization that I have personal experience with is Non-Profit University (I have changed the name for privacy purposes). Non-Profit University is an all online college that is highly accredited. The University offers bachelor’s and master’s degrees in Business, Information Technology, Health Professions and Teaching. The University offers a different learning structure for student who work full time and have other responsibilities. As the name suggests, Non-Profit University is a non-profit organization. The structure of the program helps to keep the cost of tuition and fees low. The learning structure is quite flexible. Non-Profit University was originally established in 1997 when the internet was just taking off. The University was founded by a group of governors who recognized that Higher Education need to change to help educate underserved populations. The main goal for Non-Profit University is to “improve quality and expand access to post-secondary educational opportunities by providing a means for individuals to learn independent of time or place and to earn competency-based degrees and other credentials that are credible to both academic institutions and employers” (Education without boundaries.™, n.d.). The main objectives include keeping the cost very low so graduates will have little to no debt to pay off. The high accreditation increases the return on investment for the students. The programs provide a higher rate of employment due to hands on, real life experience. Non-profit University offers help with career preparations and help increase the likelihood of employment after graduation. Non-Profit University offers easy transition from C200 Task 2 Page 2 of 12 Bachelor’s to Master’s Degrees as well. Helping the student’s continue education to advanced degrees. 1. Describe   three   leadership practices of the current leader, other than yourself, in the existing organization. The leadership practices of the current leader in the enrollment call center include monitoring work progress of employees, handling escalated student phone calls, and continuous training. Jenny Montgomery effectively monitor her employees work progress against the department goals through the tools available to her. The daily goals for each call center representative are to maintain forty phone calls a day, four hours of talk time a day, and stay on the incoming call line for more than six and a half hours a day. These expectations are posted on the internal knowledge base and are coached on weekly. Jenny will pull the daily phone call reports through the internal phone system. Jenny will share the report with the team every morning through email to demonstrate how the team is achieving these goals. The report also demonstrates those who might need additional support to meet these goals. Jenny will address any issues with the employees individually in a weekly coaching meeting. She has developed options to help inspire her team to reach these goals and offers training on how to improve these statistics. Jenny Montgomery further assists her team, and other call center teams, by handling escalated student issues. As a Call Center Supervisor, Jenny has been specifically training to handle students who are upset and offer additional options. Call center employees can feel flustered when they are dealing with an angry student who demands to speak with a manager. Jenny has trained her employees on how to transfer these students to the manager phone line to help de-escalate the student. She has the authority to change the assigned representative, C200 Task 2 Page 5 of 12 align with the government regulations and expectations. These changes and updates can happen very rapidly, and the management team works together to cascade these updates to everyone in the call center as quickly as possible. These changes and updates are relayed through daily, weekly, and month team meetings, one-on-one trainings with managers and training, emails, and instant messages. All these communications methods are tracked and saved in an internal system that is accessible for all call center employees. The continuous training allows the call center representatives to stay on top of the changes and relay those to the potential students as the changes happen. Keeping the students up to date on the changes will help build trust and a better rapport for the students as they move into their program. They will be confident they have chosen the correct program with the correct University. 2. Evaluate two of the organization’s current weaknesses. The two current weaknesses for Non-Profit University call center include higher attrition rates compared to other departments within the University and lack of communication with additional support teams to help expedite student application processing. The higher attrition rates for the call center are typically related to the lack of advancement opportunities within the position and a lower hourly earning potential. Some of the feedback received by employees the phone calls with potential students can be quite tough to handle and some representatives do not feel they are compensated well enough to handle them. This negatively impacts Non-Profit University because time and money invested in the training of that individual will be lost, and the university will need to spend more time and money to onboard a replacement representative. The current training process for the call center representatives is 3-5 weeks depending on how comfortable they are jumping onto the phone line. The support teams who work with the call center for Non-Profit University include our admissions team, transcripts and records team, and financial team. The current communication C200 Task 2 Page 6 of 12 pathways for each of these support groups is back end emails that take three to five business days to receive a response. Non-Profit University offers enrollment every single month, and these waiting timeframes can cause a potential student to lose time waiting for these responses, and potentially miss their desired start date. This can affect our student’s trust and overall feeling support negatively and lead the student to choose another university to enroll with. 3. Evaluate two of the organization’s current unmet opportunities. The two unmet opportunities for Non-Profit University would be to increase digital self-serve options for the students and offer the student’s a choice on what type of assessment they take for each course. Non-Profit University is a great option for distance learning. However, many of the interactions throughout a program require manual efforts from the staff. Adapting the programs to increase digital self-serve options would allow the student more freedom to go through their program at their own pace. The students could finish assessments quickly and efficiently, access next steps to courses, adjust financial aid options and create a more personalized experience for each person. This increased accessibility and personalization will help increase marketability and differentiation between competitor colleges or universities. Non-Profit University currently has two types of assessments to pass the courses within each program. They are writing-based and test-based assessments. These assessments are pre-assigned to each course and the student does not have a choice to change it. The opportunity for this would be to change up the pre-determined assessment for each course and open the opportunity for the student to choose what type of assessment they would like to take to pass the course. Some students may prefer doing all test-based courses to get through the program at a faster pace, other might prefer writing-based assessments. Offering more flexibility with the C200 Task 2 Page 7 of 12 assessment choices will allow more customization for the programs to each student. Bringing forth more satisfaction with the programs and happier students overall. 4. Evaluate two of the organization’s current unresolved threats. The two unresolved threats for Non-Profit University are increased competition from other non-profit universities who are trying to develop a competency-based learning style and the risk of tuition and fees increasing for the students. Online distance education is becoming much more in demand as more and more potential students are unable to attend a traditional college. Many universities across the country are finding ways to change the traditional model to allow for more online courses and completely change the learning style to be more flexible for students. As other colleges continue to adapt to the new learning structure potential students have more choices and could potentially draw students away from Non-Profit University. Non-Profit University works hard to keep tuition and fees as low as possible for potential students. However, with increased popularity and increased costs for technology, human resources, and other resources, it is hard to prevent tuition and fees to increase on a yearly or bi- yearly basis. Increasing tuition and fees can sway potential students from enrolling in college all together because the overall cost is too much. The potential student will never be able to change their lives by obtaining a better job, obtaining a promotion and so on.   C.   Conduct a leadership evaluation of the current leader discussed in part A1, using   one   of the scholarly leadership theories below that is different from task 1, by doing the following: 1.  Evaluate three strengths of the current leader, using the chosen scholarly leadership theory, including how each strength relates to the theory. Support the evaluation of the leader’s strengths with at least one scholarly source. C200 Task 2 Page 10 of 12 employees tend to feel ignored when this happens and are more likely to leave the University for better management connection elsewhere. This bias will take away from the Transformational Leadership theory about being employee focused and turns it a bit into a playing favorites scenario (Lievens Pascal van Geit Pol Coetsier, 1997) The third weakness we will discuss is Jenny’s fear of confrontation. The Transformational Leadership theory states that leaders will help their employees grow and develop. Developing individuals will not always be easy and will include employees pushing back and being upset. Jenny is not very good when she must deal with upset or angry employees. She will avoid the conflicting employees to avoid uncomfortable situations. This can cause the employees to be dissatisfied with everything and lead to higher turnover (Bass & Riggio, 2006) 3.  Recommend three actionable items to improve the effectiveness of the current leader, including how each actionable item relates to the chosen scholarly leadership theory. Support the recommendations of actionable items with at least one scholarly source.    The three actional items Jenny Montgomery can use to improve her effectiveness of her leadership skills include addressing her weaknesses that were mentioned above. The first actionable item we will discuss is for Jenny to reduce the number of employees that report to her directly. It can be difficult to be an effective Transformational Leader when there are too many employees, and not enough time in the day to help everyone. The best action plan would be for Jenny to work with the hiring manager and other upper level managers to request fewer people have assigned her. This may require Non-Profit University to hire more managers and increase the number of teams for the call center. She can present data showing how her lack of time and dedication for her employees is affecting their morale and ultimately leading to higher attrition rates. She can present that the she is unable to fulfill all the requirements for her job and her team effectively and is ultimately costing the company revenue. Reduced employees C200 Task 2 Page 11 of 12 could lead to a higher focus on each and every employee that reports directly to Jenny (Bass & Riggio, 2006). The second action item we will discuss is Jenny’s biases towards her employees. Jenny’s biases pop out with out her realizing she is doing it. The best course of action would be for her to attend a live webinar put together by Non-Profit University to learn more about Transformational Leadership skills, how to avoid bias in the workplace, and to learn more about emotional intelligence. A weekly coaching session with her manager to practice and help her recognize these biases will help keep her accountable for her changes. The more she works on her technique the more she can focus on her employees and help develop a stronger rapport with each employees, not just a select few (Lievens Pascal van Geit Pol Coetsier, 1997) The third actionable item to discuss would be to address Jenny’s fear of confrontation. All humans have some sort of fear to deal with and address uncomfortable situations, in the workplace. The best way for Jenny to address this fear is to gain some more knowledge and experience through additional trainings and practice with her direct manager. The above- mentioned work-related training will address some skills for confrontation as well. Ultimately, she will need to come her coaching sessions with the confrontational employee with a plan of action, and address everything in a matter of fact way. Addressing issues as they come up will instill a stronger sense of trust with the confrontational employees and potentially reduce the confrontation (Bass & Riggio, 2006). C200 Task 2 Page 12 of 12 References Bass, B., & Riggio, R. (2006). The Measurement of Transformational Leadership. Retrieved from Transformational Leadership: https://eds.a.ebscohost.com/eds/ebookviewer/ebook/bmxlYmtfXzE2NzM3NV9fQU41? sid=87f3a5cb-a2fa-42e0-ba53-727736540bf8@sdc-v- sessmgr02&vid=3&format=EB&rid=2 Education without boundaries.™. (n.d.). Retrieved from Western Governors University: https://www.wgu.edu/about/our-story.html Lievens Pascal van Geit Pol Coetsier, F. (1997). Identification of Transformational Leadership Qualities: An Examination of Potential Biases. Work and Organizational Psychology, 415-430. Tepper, B. J., Dimotakis, N., Lambert, L. S., & Koopman, J. (2006). Examining Follower Responses to Transformational Leadership from a Dynamic, Person–Environment Fit Perspective. 1343-1368. Wong, K. (2020). Organizational Culture: Definition, Importance, and Development. Retrieved from Achievers: https://www.achievers.com/blog/organizational-culture-definition/#:~:text=Organizationa l%20culture%20is%20the%20collection,your%20company%20what%20it%20is.