Jeans Therapy – Levi’s Factory Workers Are Assigned to Teams, and Morale Takes a Hit.
1. What went wrong with Levi’s move to teams in their plants? Levi’s was too late in attending global competition. To catch the market, they had to drastically redesign their strategy. But the major problem of Levi’s was doing nothing to understand the human side of management change. Levi’s did not align the company’s culture, values, people, and behaviors to encourage the desired outcome. Levi’s did not capture value; responsible for designing, executing, and living with the changed environment. Levi’s did not use creative means to maintain employees satisfied.
2. What could Levi’s have done differently to avert the problems?
I believe that if Levi’s had recognized the market demands the time it start to change and designed a structure to adjust with the market, slowly, the impact on the workers would not have being so drastic; since they couldn’t use a long term goal to establish the new strategy and convince workers to participate on it. Levi’s could develop teams that understood how to work together and how they would be able to lead their people and please their workers with incentive plans. They also didn’t worry about keeping their industry’s unique values and sense of individuality, and about creating a culture of loyalty and performance. Levi’s leadership teams fail to plan for the human side of change. Levi’s should ”cultivate their human resources through careful selection and training of the best and brightest employees, implementing innovative team-based employee involvement programs, developing genuinely participate management approaches, and continually retraining their employees.”
3. Devise a team incentive plan that you think might work.
“Successful process improvement activities depend upon the active involvement of the workforce. Group incentive systems are a method of engaging the workforce by providing financial rewards for performance, and help reinforce a winning spirit. Group incentive plans also give credibility to
2. What could Levi’s have done differently to avert the problems?
I believe that if Levi’s had recognized the market demands the time it start to change and designed a structure to adjust with the market, slowly, the impact on the workers would not have being so drastic; since they couldn’t use a long term goal to establish the new strategy and convince workers to participate on it. Levi’s could develop teams that understood how to work together and how they would be able to lead their people and please their workers with incentive plans. They also didn’t worry about keeping their industry’s unique values and sense of individuality, and about creating a culture of loyalty and performance. Levi’s leadership teams fail to plan for the human side of change. Levi’s should ”cultivate their human resources through careful selection and training of the best and brightest employees, implementing innovative team-based employee involvement programs, developing genuinely participate management approaches, and continually retraining their employees.”
3. Devise a team incentive plan that you think might work.
“Successful process improvement activities depend upon the active involvement of the workforce. Group incentive systems are a method of engaging the workforce by providing financial rewards for performance, and help reinforce a winning spirit. Group incentive plans also give credibility to
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