School of Management (SoM)

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Browsing School of Management (SoM) by Type "Technical Report"

Now showing 1 - 5 of 5
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    Flush with success: How social enterprises are scaling up to meet global sanitation challenges
    (WSUP, Cranfiel Univeristy and CBSA, 2023-08-14) Adams, Richard J.; Markandya, Polly; McLaren, Melody
    Introduction: How can Small and Medium-Sized Social Enterprises (SMSE) help meet our enormous global sanitation challenges? What's holding them back, and how can governments, businesses, donors, and academia support them to achieve the scale required? To answer these questions, the “Flush With Success” roundtable on 14 June 2023, co-hosted by Cranfield School of Management, Water & Sanitation for the Urban Poor (WSUP) and the Container Based Sanitation Alliance (CBSA), brought together sanitation experts, social entrepreneurs and researchers to share the hurdles and opportunities of supporting growth through the provision of facilities and services in the sector. WSUP Chief Executive Ed Mitchell noted, global sanitation “is a challenge that is so big that no one organisation can solve it or even begin to solve it.” This report summarises the diverse contributions of the roundtable’s panel as well as input from more than 50 international participants, all facilitated by CBSA Executive Director Rémi Kaupp. Discussions surfaced several systemic issues faced by actors in the sanitation sector when trying to achieve scale. In this report, these are organised according to the five Strategic Areas of the WSUP Urban WASH sector Functionality Evaluative Framework
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    Influences on employers’ provision of part-time working: an evidence review
    (Cranfield School of Management, 2021-07-14) Gascoigne, Charlotte; Kelliher, Clare
    Part-time working accounts for one in five jobs across Europe, and one in four in the UK. However, part-time working from the employer perspective has been under-researched. The employer perspective is important because currently, part-time jobs are often poor quality jobs, and because some full-time workers would prefer to work part-time but feel that the option is not open to them. Better quality part-time jobs across a broader range of types of work could improve labour market participation, social inclusion and progression for certain disadvantaged demographics, which in turn will maximise skills and productivity. Part-time working is defined in relation to a full-time norm, but part-time jobs are not uniform: part-time working may be designed to meet employer needs or workers’ work-life needs; it may be high-quality or low-quality; and it may vary from one day a week to almost full-time. Influences on employers’ provision of part-time working may operate at the national, sectoral, occupational or organisational level. Within organisations, provision may vary depending on the nature of the work and the attitudes of line managers and co-workers. National legislation and cultural expectations provide the context within which employers make their decisions about the provision of part-time working: the prevalence of part-time working across Europe varies from 48% in the Netherlands to less than 10% in many eastern European nations. This context may affect employers in several ways. First, it may affect employer policy – not just the legal rights of part-time workers, but the cultural expectations about ‘the right thing to do’ for demographic groups such as parents and carers. Secondly, it may influence line managers’ views on how to implement employer policy; and thirdly it may affect workers’ preferred working hours, which in turn affect employers’ provision of part-time working. Sectoral and occupational context also influence employer decisions about the provision of part-time working: there is wide variation across sectors and occupations, with much higher prevalence in service sectors and in low-paid, female-dominated occupations in the UK. However, there is insufficient evidence to assess how the nature of the work, the people doing the work, the skills and gender balance in the sector, and the economic position of each sector or occupation contribute to the variable provision of part-time working. At the organisational level, employers, and line managers, must balance the costs of part-time working against the need to attract and retain workers. There are quasi-fixed costs such as recruitment and training, which rise with the number of employees, rather than hours worked, and costs associated with the adaptation of working practices for part-time employees, such as team communication and the coordination of work. There are two principal advantages for employers: using part-time working to match supply and demand for labour during extended operating hours and peak periods, and, where organisational success depends upon the knowledge and talents of the workforce (human capital), using part-time working to attract and retain workers. The perceived productivity of part-time working is also part of the calculation. The Covid-19 pandemic has had a major impact on employer attitudes to flexible working, particularly homeworking. At the same time, the flexible furlough scheme has provided a natural experiment in part-time working. Although the use of short-time working schemes during economic downturns is well established in other developed economies, their impact on longer-term part-time working has received little research attention, possibly because part-time working is often considered from the perspective of workers’ reasons for working part-time, while short-time working schemes are largely involuntary for workers. The redesign of work to facilitate ‘part-furlough, part-working’ may have provided opportunities for managerial and organisational learning: the next stage of this project is to research any changes in employers’ perspectives on the feasibility of part-time working in different types of work.
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    Managing and measuring for value: the case of call centre performance
    (Cranfield School of Management and Fujitsu, 2004) Marr, Bernard; Neely, Andrew
    As an integral part of most organisations today call centres play a key role in the service delivery chain. Value creation is in the eye of the beholder, if organisations fail to deliver value to their customers, there will inevitably be a loss for stakeholders over the longer term. Presently in many industries, call centres are the primary source of contact for customers. This important role implies that the performance management of call centres is of critical importance to organisations, especially the delivery of customer satisfaction. In this research the ways organisations measure and manage customer satisfaction in call centres is explored. Clear evidence that current measures of performance in call centres are often counter-productive to achieving customer satisfaction is revealed. Many call centres seem to have fallen into the trap of believing that operational measures such as call duration are indicators of customer satisfaction. Evidence indicates that they are not; they are only measures of efficiency, which in turn is seen as determinant of financial performance. Most call centres seem to miss the important link between employee satisfaction, service quality, customer satisfaction, and profitability. In 12 case studies of world-leading call centres, the research identifies various managerial implications to avoid the "efficiency trap" in measuring and managing call centre performance. The managerial implications of this research are as follows: l Call centre performance is increasingly important for delivering customer service. Call centre performance should not be measured in isolation from the performance of the whole organisation. In most cases they are not detached operations with a solitary goal of driving down costs. Call centres are an integral part of an organisations value chain delivering its services and products. Therefore, the performance measures of call centres need to reflect the strategic direction of the entire organisation. l A more balanced approach to measuring performance based on strategic objectives is valuable, especially if visual representations of service delivery and value creation are used. This enables easy communication of overall performance and puts efficiency targets in perspective. Best practice seems to be to track the following areas of performance as well as their interactions: employee satisfaction, service quality, customer satisfaction, and satisfaction of other stakeholders (e.g. financial performance) with particular emphasis on the intangible performance drivers. l Customer dialogue is important and call centres are in fact listening to and speaking with customers all the time. Measuring customer satisfaction should start with understanding customers. Communication is often very task orientated, whereas call centres need to recognise the importance of listening to the customers in order to: - understand their needs and requirements from their perspective - detect failures, bottle necks, or improvement potential - deliver service that satisfies the customer. l It is critical to understand and classify the nature of demand. Often calls are unwanted or even unwittingly generated by other parts of the organisation. By analysing and classifying demand, it becomes more manageable and more predictable. Unwanted calls could then be reduced or even eliminated. Overall, a strategy-driven and integrated approach towards performance measurement in call centres will, therefore, improve operational efficiency and contribute to continuous innovation of the organisation as a whole.
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    Measuring corporate management and leadership capability
    (Cranfield School of Management, 2002) Neely, Andrew; Gray, Dina; Kennerley, Mike; Marr, Bernard
    The Council for Excellence in Management and Leadership commissioned the Centre for Business Performance at Cranfield School of Management to produce for them a report investigating the case for corporate reporting and disclosure in the field of organisational management and leadership. Clearly there are pros and cons for such reporting, especially if it is made compulsory through the forthcoming Company Law review, but on balance the authors are of the opinion that: 1. Greater corporate reporting and disclosure in the field of organisational management and leadership is not only desirable, but also inevitable. 2. Legislation may result in organisations reporting more in the field of organisational management and leadership sooner than they would otherwise, but in the longer term market forces will force them to report this information. 3. The steps that organisations are taking to adopt measurement frameworks that balance financial and non-financial issues mean that they are already building the infrastructure necessary to enable this reporting. 4. It is impractical to expect that a generic set of reporting standards applicable to all organisations can be developed for this area. It is widely believed that performance measures are context and strategy specific. Hence requiring organisations to report against a standard set of measures will simply result in additional bureaucratic burdens being placed on them. 5. An alternative, and much more pragmatic approach, however, is to accept that the role of measurement is to provide insight. What investors, and other external stakeholders, want is insight into the management and leadership talent pool that exists within organisations. As a result it should be possible to encourage and/or require organisations to release information in their annual reports which provides fact based insights into their management and leadership talent pool. 6. To provide a structure for such disclosure the authors recommend that a portfolio of critical questions about the management and leadership talent pool be developed and that organisations be encouraged and/or required to provide answers to these questions through fact based evidence of their own choosing. 7. Many organisations would benefit from the rigour provided by this approach. Far too often the performance measures that organisations have in place in the arena of organisational management and leadership are poorly developed and deployed.
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    Project leadership: skills, behaviours, knowledge and values
    (Association for Project Management, 2018-10-18) Coleman, Sarah; Bourne, Mike
    This research has sought to draw out project leadership competences from the perspective of practising project leaders, aspiring project leaders, heads of profession, project sponsors and clients. The aim of this research report is to help focus, develop and refine our understanding of project leadership so we can support continued capability building for project professionals and their organisations. To compile this report, the authors Sarah Coleman and Professor Mike Bourne conducted in-depth interviews with 38 individuals across five multinational organisations (BAE Systems, IQVIA, Jacobs, Shell and Siemens). These organisations were chosen because of their reliance on complex projects for the delivery of strategy and performance, and the individuals for their substantial knowledge and experience of project delivery, and their range of perspectives. The interviewees held and had experience of a wide variety of roles, from the aspiring leaders delivering smaller projects to the most experienced project leaders (responsible for £1bn+ budget major, complex projects), heads of profession, project sponsors and clients. Together, these individuals have over 500 years of project experience.