New clients can rest assured that they receive a satisfactory return on their investment in organizational development services.  Results are what matter to all clients. We collaborate with you closely in order to deliver your desired outcomes.  Here are some examples of our work in various sectors:

 

Agricultural Enterprise
Call Center
Construction Equipment Company
County Government
Employment Services and Job Development
Frozen Food Processor
Human Services Agency
Production Facility
Mid-Sized Family Business
Outpatient Clinic
Police Department
Production Line Foreman Development
Supervisory Sexual Harassment Allegation
Supervisory Team Development
 

An Employment Services and Job Development Agency

 

We helped to bring together the leadership and staff to communicate about their perceptions of the operations of the organization.   The board needed to know what staff was thinking in terms of process improvement and program development.  The staff needed to understand what the board’s decisions meant in terms of their daily work.  Staff members needed to be clear that they were aligned with the board’s goals.  Resources within the agency were being severely strained due to an exploding immigrant population from a wide variety of countries who spoke a daunting range of native tongues.  At the same time, board resources were being strained by turn-over in board membership and the need to recruit new leadership, solidify the gains made, and stand together toward a clear mission, a mission that could be realized with current human resources, if not facilities.  Trula successfully helped both contingencies understand the other’s needs, helped to solidify areas in which they found agreement, and helped problem-solve areas of divergent needs.  In the end, the organization came away with a sense of unity and assurance that the organization’s challenges could be met. 

Outcomes:

1. Board, administration, and staff came to agreement about cross-functional processes.
2. Alignment between leadership and staff was gained through clearly establishing mutual goals.

 

A Human Services Organization

We facilitated the business planning process in this start-up organization that had become bogged down in one of the critical initial phases of the business planning.  During the business planning phase, all systems within the organization had to be designed and budgets attached.  Unfortunately, when it came to the more technical aspects of the facilities planning, the team was unable to move beyond one or two steps before meeting with resistance, both internal and external.  The strategic planning team worked hard in several brain-storming and planning sessions to come up with ideas to solve the identified problems.  Trula guided the problem-solving process and helped the team move forward while keeping a written document of all decisions made by the group.  As a result, the strategic planning team of this organization was transformed from a loosely affiliated, moderately productive group to a dynamic “machine” that gained momentum and rendered a concrete plan that could bring about the events needed to change the organization from a start-up to a solid human services agency that the community could rely upon.  Trula then transformed the report from the strategic planning sessions into a formal, written business plan.

 

Outcomes:

1. The leaders assigned process ownership in ways that were client-driven and matched the talents and resources of individual leaders on the strategic planning team.

2. Assumptions were challenged in regard to the processes that were thought to be needed.  The organization become "unstuck" and was able to move forward in their
   planning process.
3. A comprehensive, written business plan and recommendations for long-term development was completed.

 

Agricultural Enterprise

 

We have worked with this international company from 1996 through 2002.  The  long-term contract was to develop all levels of management, from the director to the general managers, to the supervisors, to the field block captains and mechanics.  Trula facilitated and assisted with implementation of performance improvement processes; strategic planning for employee empowerment; improvement of organizational communication, supervisory and management skill building, performance appraisal processes, workplace safety goals, training development, and employee alignment with company goals.  The outcome of the project under Trula’s direction, in collaboration with the CEO, has been satisfying to the company.  Performance and quality measures have indicated steady improvement in all targeted areas requiring change.

 Outcomes:

1.      Business process improvements:

• Decisions being made at lower levels in the organization

• Values shifted from protective to productive

• Managers became coaches, not supervisors

• Supervisors became instructors and educators

• Supervisors and leads went from feeling controlled to empowered

2.      Organizational culture shift

• All levels of staff have a sense of ownership over their jobs

• Responsibility has moved from the top to all levels

• Active participation in decision-making is the norm
  
   

 Frozen Food Processor

 

We facilitated employee satisfaction focus groups, reported to the leadership team, and consulted regarding employee conflicts, and team development needs in the human resources department.  The fundamental change needed within this company was to assess the disconnect between leadership/management and production workers and improve cooperation.

 Outcomes: 

1. Leadership became more active in assuring that business standards were carried through to all levels in the organization.
2. Leadership supported an initiative to educate and develop supervisors and leads so that they had a greater capacity to achieve the company goals.
3. Employees became more aware of company decisions and philosophy, and, thus,
   more supportive to a company leadership style that they had previously misunderstood.
4. Leadership reorganized the human resources department so that it went from being a step-child to administration to part of the process of management team decisions.  Leadership hired the best talent to carry out this function in Human Resources, encourage HR team development, and better leveraged HR as a bridge between administration and production workers.

 

Construction Equipment Company

A reorganization of company structure was necessary to accommodate rapid growth.  Trula was instrumental in the organizational redesign.  Job descriptions were rewritten and reporting lines were reconfigured.  The design of the physical environment was changed to meet team and organizational communication goals.  A major move to a new location was facilitated with careful planning.   New technology included the purchase of new equipment and the training of the sales and service staff on the new equipment.  Several meetings were held between the owner and general manager to define the customer responsive processes that would be used and the appropriate personnel to assign to the process.  Consultation was offered in all phases of this organizational redesign process.

 Outcomes: 

1. The owner was able to evaluate the general manager more realistically in terms of customer service needs.
2. The owner hired the brightest and best sales manager he could find and the general manager delegated his previously held sales responsibilities to the new sales manager.
3. The new sales manager developed a sales team and utilized processes that were based on customer information provided to him from his sales team.
4. More contemporary software technology was used by the general manager to track the sales team’s results.
5. The company moved to new quarters with very little "down time" because of the
   efficiency derived from the pre-move planning meeting decisions regarding move procedures and personnel assignments.

 

Customer Service:  Call Center

 

At the outset of this assignment, the client engaged us to help the call center front line personnel make more efficient use of their time.   The team leader believed that the work overload for supervisors was caused by front line employees not being time thrifty and, therefore, they could not handle the volume of calls.  In working with the call center team, Trula discovered that the difficulty in handling the number of calls occurred not so much because front line personnel apportioned their time poorly, but in the decisions they  made about the calls that came in.  Front line personnel did not have sufficient ownership of the process and, therefore, were unnecessarily passing calls to supervisors. Supervisors were handling issues that did not need to be touched by them and the increased dialogue between supervisors and front line personnel was taking up valuable time.  Supervisors, too, did not have sufficient power to solve problems by engaging the necessary resources.  Needless delays in customer service were occurring. Managers were frustrated that customers were quite angry by the time the case reached the managers’ desks.  Trula met with the call center’s three managers and re-examined the triage process that was used when calls came into the center.  Trula and the managers discovered that the employees on the front lines were not empowered to make the necessary decisions that would either immediately satisfy the customers or would move the case along by getting questions answered more quickly.  The managers had set up a system that required supervisory intervention whenever technical questions had to be asked of the physicians in the network.  It was these technical questions, as opposed to billing or other questions, that were creating bottlenecks in the business process.   The managers had set up the system in this fashion in order to provide documentation and to reduce the calls to outside partners, taking a protective stance toward the partners whom they viewed as too busy to be bothered with minor issues.   In re-examining the process, it was discovered that the call center personnel could be trained to better triage customer calls if there were better touch points between the call center personnel and the partners' network.  Working with the managers, Trula coached them on how to elicit the help of key individuals in the network.  Managers explained to these key network members the benefits of using their office personnel to directly interact with call center personnel on more minor issues that did not require in-depth analysis and supervisory or partner intervention.   In the process, the technical issue of knowing how to use the phone system for “patching” calls to outside lines needed to be reviewed. 

 Outcomes: 

• Improved case management in customer service center.

• Better process ownership by front line personnel

• Less redundancies and inefficient use of time

• Alleviated stress on supervisors and managers

• Better communication between customer service call center and partner network

 

  Production Facility with Three Departments

Team building was needed to bring together three departments of 60 employees.  Each department had been functioning as an independent unit rather than operating in a way that recognized the interdependence of the departments to reach the overall goals of the company.  All departments were comprised of physical force employees for whom teamwork did not exist as a concept but only as a practicality of having to interact with co-workers.  Over a period of four months, Trula brought together the three teams in smaller groups, comprised of a mixture of employees from all three departments.  Dialogues were facilitated to discover common problems and frustrations, common values and goals, and common solution-oriented alternatives.  At the end of the series of meetings, the majority of employees acknowledged a better working relationship within and among departments.  The plan is to engage the same employees in another series of discussions the following year in order to build on the gains made and to pull in the “outsiders” who still had not bought-in the goal of teamwork. 

 Outcomes: 

• Silos were removed.
• Departments began to see their interdependence and their work as a process
  not as a department.
• Communication and mutual support between units increased.

  

Mid-sized Family Business 

Effective leadership in this company began with creating and empowering an executive team.  Heretofore, vice-presidents of each department were not operating in tandem.  Communication was faulty among them.  No sense of esprit de corps existed.  The primary consulting challenge for Trula was to help the executive team understand its role as leaders versus as managers and to learn to rely on each other’s strengths.  Trula’s secondary consulting challenge was to help the son of the founder realize that it was time to step into the president role and to lead with vision and confidence.

 Outcomes: 

• The son of the founder took over as president of the company and began to assume a stronger, more inspirational role.
• Executives on the team were empowered to advocate more clearly for their needs based on the overall company’s desired outcomes.
• The company became more market-driven and searched for a new marketing director who would have greater dedication and passion regarding keeping the leadership team focus on customer-satisfaction and sales goals.

 

Outpatient Clinic

This clinic had been using a software package that limited its ability to track a number of factors crucial to the financial success of the clinic.  The previous software was adequate for paper billing and accounting systems but did not provide access to electronic billing, financial management of capitated contracts, tracking of service hours per health care provider, or utilization of services analyzed by the type of service offered.  Clerical support services were not set up to function in a manner that was consistent with the rapid changes in managed health care.   Clerical staff were using a number of different methods to track information and the information could not be integrated in a comprehensible, useful manner.

New software was purchased and the software vendor came to the company to train personnel in its use.  Support services staff members were highly resistant to the new system because it was far more complex and difficult to learn than the system they had previously operated.  Furthermore, with all departments—scheduling, billing, accounting, and customer service—now working on the same software that was networked throughout the clinic, each employee became more personally accountable for work produced, since each one’s input to the system could be viewed by all others and since each person’s contribution much more clearly impacted the work of others using the system. 

This meant that the support services staff members could rely less on the directives of their supervisor and had to rely more on each other to work as an efficient and accurate team to accomplish the data based goals.  Trula’s interventions included team meetings to discuss difficulties in learning the new system, set up appropriate mentors or peer trainers, and work out interpersonal challenges that occurred when communication broke down or a team member believed that another team member(s) were not holding up his/her responsibility, and, thus, negatively impacting the quality and accuracy of a co-worker’s production.  The vendor of the software was asked to provide names of other clients who had gone through a similar transition so that the clinic could better predict the outcome of the transition process.  In this way, another clinic (not a competitor) helped provide the needed reassurance that the new system would work out fine in the end after the processes had been smoothed out.

 Outcomes:

• Overcame staff resistance to new software system

• Eased transition for staff members

• Achieved mastery of new system
   

County Government

In this county government program, various job development programs were pulled together under one umbrella.  Consulting services for this program were provided early in the life of the One Stop Center, not long after these centers were set-up on a statewide basis.   As citizens began to use the service, the One Stop Center soon became aware of the fact that they were serving a highly culturally diverse clientele but 95% of the One Stop staff where white, non-Hispanic Caucasians.  Our services were three-fold: 1) Reach out to the largest cultural minority in the county by providing job adaptation information in the Spanish-language; 2) Recognize the need for cultural sensitivity throughout the organization and provide training for cultural sensitivity; 3) Bring in clients from various cultural communities and prepare them to share their job-training, job-hunting personal stories with staff as a means of training staff and building bridges with the cultural communities; complete that interface.  The end result of these interventions was an organizational cultural shift from insular thinking to world cultures thinking and increased openness to learning about cultures in order to serve clients better.  Since staff  was primarily human services workers with a natural bent toward social sciences, one might assume that a complete cultural shift would be relatively easy to accomplish but it was not. Disgruntlement and conflicts regarding “lack of support from upper management for the difficult cross-cultural case management we do” remained underground and only gave voice during one of the training sessions. 

Outcomes:

• On the surface, it appeared that a sufficient organizational culture change had occurred, at least, the organization was moving in the right direction.  
• We reported the findings regarding remaining issues to the highest-level director in the county who was charged with budget allocations and decision-making.
• We encouraged the director to continue forth with the cultural change process in light of the findings and to engage upper management in the facilitated process. 

 

Production Line Foreman Problem

 

This female foreman was in charge of a bottling line of approximately 30 employees who were both male and female, both Hispanic and non-Hispanic.  The employees on the bottling line did not function as a team, primarily because the female supervisor created divisiveness in her approach to management.  She was accused of being discriminatory, harsh, and unfair.  She was interviewed so that Trula could determine her perspective on the complaints leveled against her, her desired outcomes in the situation, needs that she had that were unfilled, and what she was willing to do to improve and what she thought she needed to learn.  She was individually coached regarding cultural and gender differences, managerial style, objectivity in performance appraisal, motivating employees, and creating a team environment.  In the course of the coaching, Trula discovered that the female foreman had been minimizing the fact that she had come up through the ranks and promoted to supervisor without any supervisory training.  The foreman thought she should be able to know what to do out of “common sense.”   Once she realized that it was okay to admit she didn’t know something, she was more open to learning.  Employee complaints diminished dramatically.  The team worked together more effectively.   However, the foreman came to understand that her personality style and her interpersonal needs did not lend themselves well to a supervisory position.  Trula told management that the coaching had gone as far as it could go.  Even though the company was satisfied with the progress that had been made, the supervisor requested a transfer to a non-fiduciary position in another company department.  She was granted the transfer.

 Outcome: 

• The female foreman was able to understand what leadership meant and was able to implement some of the leadership and management skills she had learned.
• The female foreman did a self-inventory and was able to see the inadequacies in her personality that made her a poor fit for the role of a foreman.
• A transfer of the foreman to another department with a more suitable assignment was discovered to be the best result for all involved.

 

A Supervisory Team

 

A bilingual team of five Hispanic male supervisors, who manage physical force crews of equipment operators and manual laborers,  received monthly coaching for  two years in regard to supervisory skills, empowering employees, and developing productive teams.  The supervisors worked in different geographic locations and had daily contact via radio and phone.

 Outcomes: 

• Hispanic supervisors have been empowered and given a weighty voice in the company.
• Line leads under their supervision have been empowered to make more decisions
  and take on more responsibility.
• Work is being performed where it makes the most sense.

• The Hispanic supervisors were able to pull together their own crews and improve
   morale and cooperation at all levels. 

Alleged Supervisory Sexual Harassment

 

A company with 1,000 employees was faced with the dilemma of dress codes and sexual harassment as the company introduced more women into its workforce.

A valued, older male supervisor felt protective toward the young women on the crew, and, for this reason, attempted to “advise” the young women about properly modest dress so as not to arouse the male co-workers or invite sexually suggestive comments from them.  His paternalistic intentions were interpreted as inappropriate and hostile by the young women, especially in light of the fact that the company had no published dress code and did not offer uniforms.  He was coached by Trula as to how he needed to relate to the young women on his crew and in what ways he could be appropriately protective.  He was also individually trained in regard to the laws surrounding sexual harassment.

At first he was offended that his actions had been misinterpreted and he did not believe he needed any individual coaching.  Later, however, he gladly offered his positive evaluation of the coaching experience with Trula as having taught him about his own biases, assumptions, and perceptions that were not suited to his workers or suited to current social and legal trends.

 Outcomes: 

• The supervisor was able to understand why his behavior did not fit the corporate
  culture or the letter of the law

• The supervisor committed to behaving in an appropriate way.
   

 Police Department Staff Conflicts

A police chief and police sergeant were coached by us on how to deal with interpersonal conflicts among officers who were vying for recognition and status within the department, situations where a lack of respect existed between officers, and issues between departments (investigation/detectives) and patrol.  The police chief was coached on how to work with his staff during times of interpersonal conflict. The police chief had initiated the consultation and, therefore, was a ready learner.  The police sergeant was more skeptical, being somewhat insecure about why he was being asked to be coached by Trula, but as soon as rapport and trust were established, he utilized the coaching time well and gained skills and insights that were useful to him. 

• The police chief and police sergeant were  successful in learning how to mediate conflict and coach employees during times of conflict.
• A resolution was found among disputing parties.