Reflective Essay: Organisation and People

Individual Assignment: Reflective Essay

The individual written assignment will take the form of individual reflection upon your experience of the group assignment (see Group assignment guidelines below).

Throughout the group-based assignment, your group will have been involved in a number of activities, including planning, investigating, analysing, team working, presenting and evaluating. There will also have been certain underlying activities such as thinking, persuading, negotiating, testing and encouraging. You are now required to write a reflective essay that

(a) makes use of the relevant theory to provide a detailed analysis of one aspect of your experience during the group assignment and

(b) considers the implications of your analysis for the effective management of people within organisations.

For example, your reflective essay may address one of the following topics:

1. Conflict within groups
2. Cross-generational working
3. Issues surrounding group leadership/management (or a lack thereof!)
4. Decision making
5. Group performance
6. Group formation
7. The use of power (hard and/or soft) within your group
8. Knowledge sharing
9. Group roles
10. The impact of culture on group work
11. Interpersonal relationships and team effectiveness

You need not be constrained by this list and should focus on a topic that you are interested in studying (and writing about) in detail.

A high quality reflective essay will involve:

• Meeting the terms of reference (objectives a and b)
• Excellent presentation and layout (style and structure)
• The ability to undertake constructive/honest self-reflection (openness, clarity and realism of reflective critique)
• The ability to analyse and provide explanations, linking to relevant literature
• An overall grasp and understanding of the processes involved (e.g. learning and group-working) and their implications for the effective management of people within organisations.

Assignment guidelines:

• This essay should be word-processed
• Its length should be around 3000 words (10% allowance, and excluding references and appendices)
• It should be presented in essay format – please see guidelines
• It must include correct and appropriate referencing – including Tables and Figures
• It must be submitted both electronically (through Blackboard) and a paper copy handed into the College Admin Centre by 4.00pm on Monday 15th December 2014
• Requests for extensions will ONLY be granted due to SERIOUS personal mitigating circumstances, supported by appropriate evidence (eg medical certificate)

and that is our group brief

Why should managers/employees check e-mail 24/7?
INTRODUCTION
The internet is the fabric of our lives. E-mail is one of the most commonly used services on the internet, allowing people to send massages to one or more recipients.But there is a new labour agreement in France in 2014, it aims to give employees a better work life balance so they want ban on checking work e-mail after 6pm.

KEY ISSUES
POSITIVE
1. Effective communication can be positive to the whole organization. Return in time is essential to both manager and subordinate staff.
2. People can send almost any kind of information by e-mail. It is easy to check and manage details of message.
3. Influence employees’ working style. When boss send e-mail in any possible time, it might shows manager’s hard working. That is the inspiration or motivation of employees.
NEGATIVE
1. It will have too much pressure on employees. It means over control on working time, and may cause the problem of quantitative workload. Reducing the satisfaction of employees.
2. Hiding emotion. Non-verbal language includes some invisible information, like bodily contact or tone. E-mail only can keep verbal language.
3. Information security. Information disclosure usually happens inside and outside of organization. Company may get loss because of this problem.

BENEFITS & DISADVANTAGES
BENEFITS
 Fast & effective: E-mail as a combination of written and spoken digital elements, it will arrive at their destination in this world within seconds or minutes. And it is easier to communicate to multiple recipients, be it 20 or 200 people, especially during off hours. So in can improve the efficiency, every problems can be solved in time.
 Inform emergency events/ important information: there are a lot of methods can inform those notifications, such as letters or call. But letters need formal language and layout and phone call can not inform everyone at once, it may be spend a lot of time. Particularly, during off hours. For example if there is an emergency event tomorrow but the manager forgot inform everyone, the manager will send an e-mail to employees during off hours.
 Build the relationship between the manager and employees: This is one of the part of motivation. According to the Maslow’s hierarchy of needs mode, the relationship belongs to the love needs. it is beneficial to organizations motivate employees group working and their friendship.
DISADVANTAGES
 Pressure:24/7 Check mail occupied employees off duty time，In fact, this is a disguised form of overtime work. Checking work emails can be a distraction from family life. In French, legally-binding agreement asking workers to “disconnect” from work emails ,“No after-work e-mails please. French ordered to ignore the boss after 6pm” ran the title of one report. The deal signed between employers’ federations and unions representing workers in the digital and consultancy fields stipulates that employees should avoid the temptation to consult work emails in non-work time and employers must not pressure them to be electronically available after this time.
 Counterproductive: in order to chasing the efficiency optimization, the manager will always send the e-mail to employees. But it may leave out the employees attitude, make employees antipathy and dispose of a matter carelessly, inefficient work achievement.
 Too much: When in charge of a large team, will receives at least 50 emails every day. Reading and responding to all of this mail takes a long time. When we use it appropriately, email is an incredibly useful communication tool. But many of us feel overwhelmed by the amount of mail that we receive and need to respond to.

Critically evaluate its usefulness to management and leadership
 Initially, checking emails in24 hours can closely keep contact between managers and employees. Meanwhile, it can improve work efficiency or even doubled especially for some companies who do international business for their time differences.
 Then, in the event of an emergency business, this behave can ensure that there are always several relevant employees in the waiting list. As an example, there are a lot of companies in the community who have provided 24-hour service, not only the staffs, in some special circumstances, in order to ensure management and employees to keep in touch so that they can make timely guidance, and the employees can make the correct reflection.
 24 hours to check the mail can improve the efficiency of the staff; on the contrary, it decreased the quality of life in private both to managers and employees. And to some extent, to add additional staff workload and which is also unpaid.