Please help me to identify three alternatives courses of action that could solve the problem identified. Indicate at least three pros and cons of each alternative
Organizational Effectiveness at Turbo Logistics Ltd. Alex Stephens was happy when Turbo Logistics Lid. offered him the job of operations manager at its Hamilton Ontario branch. Stephens was already happy at his previous company but the headhunter's invitation to apply for the operations manager job at one of Ontario's leading supply logistics companies was an offer he couldn't refuse. Turbo Logistics had eight branch plants with the Hamilton plant being the third largest. The operations manager position was a valuable first step in a promising career. One of Stephens' first observations at the Hamilton branch of Turbo Logistics was that relations between employees and management were strained. Taking a page from a recent executive seminar he attended on building trust in the workplace, Stephens ordered the removal of all time clocks from the plant. Instead, the plan would assume that employees had put in a full shift. The symbolic gesture, he believed, would establish a new level of credibility and strengthen relations between management and employees at Turbo Logistics. At first, the 400 production employees at the Hamilton, ON site appreciated their new freedom. They felt responded and saw this gesture as a sign of positive change from the new operations manager. However, one month later, problems started. A few people began showing up late, leaving early, or taking extended lunch breaks. Although this represented only about 5 percent of the employees, others found the situation unfair. As well, the increased absenteeism levels were starting to effect plant productivity. Something needed to be done. Stephens asked supervisors to observe and record when the employees came or went and to discuss attendance problems with those abusing the new system. But the supervisors didn't have any experience with keeping attendance and lacked the necessary people skills to discuss the issue with their subordinates. Employees resented the reprimands, so relations with supervisors deteriorated. The additional responsibility of keeping track of attendance also made it difficult for supervisors to complete their other responsibilities. After just a few months, Turbo Logistics found it necessary to add another supervisor position and reduce the number of employees assigned to each supervisor. And the problems kept coming. Without time clocks, the payroll department couldn't deduct pay for the amount of time that employees were late. Instead, a letter of reprimand was placed in the employee's personnel file. However, this required more time and additional skills from the supervisors. Employees did not want these letters to become a permanent record, so they filed grievances with their labour union. The number of grievances doubled over six months, which required even more time for both union officials and supervisors to handle these issues. Seven months after removing time clocks, Alex Stephens met with union officials, who agreed that it would be better to put the time clocks back in. Employee-management relations had deteriorated below the level when Stephens had started. Supervisors were burnt out from overwork. Productivity had dropped due to poorer attendance records and increased administrative workloads. A few months after the time clocks were put back in place, Stephens attended an operations meeting with the other seven branch plant managers during an operational summit for Turbo Logistics in Calgary, Alberta. During the meeting, Stephens described the time clock incident to Deepak Singh, Turbo's operations manager in Surrey, BC. Singh looked surprised, then chuckled. Singh explained that the previous Surrey operations manager had done something like that with similar consequences six of seven years earlier. The previous manager had left some time ago, but Singh heard about the Surrey time clock from a supervisor during the manager's retirement party 4 months ago. "I guess it's not quite like lightning striking the same place twice," said Stephens to Singh. "But it really does feel like it."
