(Solved)Using the following information about Alaska Air land, Pl
Using the following information about Alaska Air land, Please answer the following question. Thanks.
Organizational needs
Organizational needs identify what is necessary to meet the future need of the organization. The needs help to determine the organization’s priorities, make improvements, and ensure the appropriate resources are allocated. The first organization need is to fix the operational challenges at Alaska Airlines. The company cruised through the 1900’s with mediocre performance; however, due to various events over the past two decades, Alaska Airlines has been facing the risk of bankruptcy. Alaska Airlines’ primary hub is located in Seattle and houses various operational units including maintenance, ticket counter, infight, flight operations (Avolio, at el., 2015). The various operational units work independently, however with current operations failing to meet the status quo, Alaska Airlines needs to overhaul the current operations process to ensure all units are aligned and are collaborating for the success of the company. By improving the operational challenges, the company can work on reducing costs and improving the company’s reputation.
The second organizational need is to increase the employee morale. The crash of flight 261 in 2000 began the steady decline of the morale within the workplace. Flight 261 and the 9/11 attack took an economic toll on the company, which it tried to repair in 2003 with The 2010 Plan. The 2010 Plan began impacting employees financially by outsourcing groups, offering voluntary severances to management, and closing several Alaska Airlines stations and offices throughout the west coast. Around the same time union contracts were up for renegotiations, which resulted in mediations, binding arbitrations lowering pay, and terminations of employees (Avolio, at el., 2015). The union negotiations further negatively impacted the employee morale, as employees were fearful that they would be next impacted and were overworked. By having low employee morale, one of Alaska Airlines’ three strategic priorities – customer satisfaction – will continue to be negatively impacted due to the lack of employees’ desire to please the customer since they aren’t happy themselves. As the employees represent the brand of Alaska Airlines, it is important to focus on their morale to help to ensure they are upholding the value of the Alaska Airlines brand.
The third organizational need is effective performance measurements to help measure success. Alaska airline employees work in individual silos along and currently do not have any performance analysis that help measure organizational goals. The lack of understanding current performance targets and current status of performance does not encourage employees to strive to achieve any performance standard. As the company must improve its operational status, it is important for employees to understand where the company is currently operating at and what each employee’s role is to help improve the performance (Blazey, 2009, p.16). The performance analyses can also be used to respond rapidly to changing organizational needs in the future. These analyses can also help to identify weak spots within a certain operational team and help to identify units that need additional resource. In addition, the performance of the airline is something that shareholders hold much value in. Shareholder want to know that the performance of the company is standard with competitors and are helping increase the value of the company.
Impacting
How did this problem arise? Determine how this problem is currently “impacting” the organization.
The problem with Alaska airline first arise when one of their planes crashed on January 31, 2000 due to mechanical problems. MD-80 jet was carrying roughly 88 passengers, and working crew from Puerto Rico Mexico when the plane crashed into rough seas 64 km, approximately 40 miles from Los Angeles. Everyone was shocked at the tragedy that had just happened. Not too long after came the trauma of 9/11. Airlines operations were greatly interrupted worldwide, with the demand for traveling going down. 9/11 was seen and viewed by many to have been a great shock to the nation. However, because the Alaska Airline crash had something to do with mechanical problems, made the crash very personal to all that were directly impacted by the event or not. To them, it was rather neglect on the airlines side that caused such a crash to happen in the first place (Avolio, Patterson, & Baker, 2015).
Due to the 9/11 tragedy that had shocked the nation, and caused airlines to see a huge reduction in travelers, many airlines decided to lay off their employees to avoid going bankrupt. Atlanta Airlines and its management felt that it would be best to take the other route and not lay off that workers. In the sense that doing so would maybe restore some, if not, all the trust that their employees once had about the airline after the tragedy crash that had occurred.
The mechanical problem that caused the crash has been affecting the company since it first occurred. “Alaska’s annual passenger traffic dropped 5.6 percent in 2001 compared with the industry wide decline in domestic passenger travel of 19 percent (Avolio, Patterson, & Baker, 2015)”. In 2004, the airline decided to contract out their heavy aircraft maintenance. The company has been taking measures of different kind to avoid the maintenance problem crash that caused many people to doubt the airlines ability to protect them, and whether safety was of any importance to them at all.
Gaps
Alaska Airlines was going through some major changes (rather they had to go through some major changes). ‘Alaska Airlines had recovered from an all-time operational low, where only 60 percent of flights were on time and seven bags per 1,000 passengers were reported as having been mishandled’ (Avolio, B., J., Patterson, C., & Baker, B. 2015). The airline company was able to stay afloat because they had an extremely loyal following of passengers. This loyalty was rapidly decreasing as more and more passengers were experiencing delayed flights and lost bags.
The airline had gone through two major events that negatively impacted the customer loyalty. In one incident, ‘an Alaska Airlines MD-80 jet carrying 88 passengers and crew from Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, to San Francisco crashed into rough seas 64km (40 miles) northwest of Los Angeles’ (Avolio, et., al. 2015). Shortly after this incident, 9/11 occurred which severely hindered all airlines. With these two events happening so close together Alaska Airlines was struggling to keep sales. With these two events on top of their poor flight times and bag handling, Alaska Airlines had a long way to go to get their sales back to a ‘below normal’ level. With their current situation being so bad, they needed a full organizational shift to get back where they wanted to be.
Alaska Airlines wanted to get their numbers back to where they used to be and then eventually surpass that and gain their customer loyalty bag. The airline needed to determine what changes to make to the core values and processes of their organization to make their goal a reality. Their process included an entire shift in management in their Seattle hub. This also came with downsizing and changing up lower level managers as well. This was tough decision as employees (along with the customers) can also lose faith and their sense of loyalty to the organization.
Perhaps the biggest change that Alaska Airlines made to get to where they wanted to be as an Airline was outsourcing their ramp vendor. ‘A bold decision was made to replace more than 470 Seattle baggage handlers with contractors’ (Avolio, et., al. 2015). This decision really defined the gap between where they were versus where they wanted to be. Although they had hiccups with the vendor, which initially was not working towards their advantage. ‘Stabilizing the ramp quickly was essential to the long-term success of the “Fix Seattle” imperative” (Avolio, et., al. 2015). Once they got this aspect of the organization corrected their flight delays, bag handling, as well as other employees working operations (especially pilots).
Alaska Airlines gap between their current situation and their goal had been increasing at an alarming rate due to external factors as well as internal factors. The organizational change that they made in their Seattle hub was extremely crucial to minimizing and eventually closing this gap.
1. Describe the strategy you will use to get support from your employees. How will this strategy be effective?
2. Determine steps you can take to ensure commitment from those involved. Describe those steps.
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