Gabb Wireless

Company Background

The Gabb Phone is a smart phone designed for kids. Launched by Stephen Dalby in May 2019, the Gabb Phone has quickly grown across the country. Currently, there are approximately 200 employees in the customer support division at their Provo, Utah location. Gabb Phones allow kids to be independent and safe with technology, while giving parents peace of mind. Gabb Phone is rapidly growing with 100,000 units sold to date and other products such as watches, ear buds, and speakers.

The Problem

Because of the quick growth of the company, employees feel like they're taking on more responsibility and aren't receiving the appreciation or recognition they deserve for the work increase. For example, one employee was performing very well for quite some time and only received a $10 fast food gift card for their time, as well as their exceptional work that was well above coworkers. Many other coworkers feel they deserve a raise, but a raise is being withheld from them as employers tell them they are almost there time and time again.

Data Collection

To better understand the problem, we had Nathan observe a group of ten Gabb employees for a few weeks and discover the following trends.

Nathan was able to find some interesting trends. Trends that continue to drive a wedge deeper and deeper between the employees and the upper management. At the beginning of this project, we had ten individuals we were working with, but now we are down to eight because two of them decided that the great pay was not worth the lack of appreciation or the inability to progress in the company.

Employees will occasionally have their calls reviewed and scored by management. While this seems like it would assist in quality assurance, a perfect score has never been obtained. Many employees feel that a call has gone well, only to be told otherwise. Some feel that some notes are just being copied and pasted into their review, essentially keeping employees at the same place forever.

In this example, everything was done correctly, however they discussed how his microphone had an issue. This specific worker was actually using his video game headset which is set to have high quality audio assurance. Finding it hard to believe there could be an issue, we actually tested the audio quality by making calls from different phones and could not detect any issue. Although this is just one example, there are many other issues that have been recorded and have been one of the leading causes of employee dissatisfaction.

Surveying at Gabb

To best understand how the employees at Gabb were truly feeling, we set up an anonymous survey through Google forms. As a team, we then came up with around 10 questions for the survey. Nathan took this survey to the employees and encouraged them to take it. With some time and persistence, 17 employees completed the survey. The Results were staggering. Here is a look at the answers to 3 of these questions. The graphs below ranges from 1-4, and is labelled as: 1 = strongly disagree, 2 = disagree, 3 = agree, 4 = strongly agree.

Results

Here you can see employees are very unsatisfied with work conditions. This is just a glimpse of the questions, but this lack of satisfaction continues into all other aspects of their work experience.

Solutions

Management by Objectives (MBO)

Companies set objectives in order to keep the work moving. Motivation comes with movement and progress; it doesn't spring up out of no where. The management by objectives theory is a participative principal companies can use to improve employee motivation (Andrade, 2019). With organizational, division, department, and individual goal setting, participation and dialogue is shared throughout the company. Followed up by performance evaluations, it enables employees to truly be connected to both their own goals as well as the companies.

With the application of the management by objectives principle at Gabb Wireless, we would see an increase of motivation for the surveyed employees. As they would be involved in the greater organizational goals; as well as personal, specific goals that are evaluated. With this theory applied, they would see an considerable increase of motivation in their work.

Goal Setting (Locke's theory)

Our team recommends that Gabb Wireless pursue a new method for employee reviews. Currently, employee reviews consist of the organization setting a goal for each employee to meet. However, employees are unable to reach this goal because they have not been given any constructive feedback how to do so. In order to remedy this, Gabb Wireless should take an approach similar to Locke’s Goal Setting Theory.

Goal setting is a guideline that outlines what an individual, or company, believes is important and what they want to achieve. Locke’s Goal Setting Theory is about the effectiveness of goals on an individual, or companies, performance (Andrade, 2019). It has been found that individuals who are setting specific and difficult to achieve goals perform better than those whose goals are less specific and easier to achieve.

In this approach, the managers will sit down with each individual employee and help them to set goals based on 5 simple steps.

Clarity In this step, the manager will help the employee to come up with a clear, specific, and measurable goal. This goal should be establishing who, what, when, where, why, and how. This step should also include a timeline with milestones that each employee plans to achieve and deadlines for achievement. An example of a clear, specific, and measure able goal could be as simple as: Angela will cut the time between being asked a question by the customer and answering the question (pause time) down from 15 seconds to 10 seconds in the next 3 months.

Challenge All employees should be expected to set goals that will be challenging for them to achieve, but not impossible. Making the goal challenging, as well as achievable, will help to motivate the employee to do their absolute best. An example of a challenging goal could be something like cutting down on the use of pauses and filler words such as "um", "err", "well", and "ah".

Commitment Employees should be committed to put in the effort that will be required to achieve their goals. This is one of the reasons it is important for the employee to have a say in what their goals will be.

Feedback Feedback is important to help all employees to meet their goals. Specific and constructive feedback regarding the progress of an employee is going to help keep them accountable as well as give management the knowledge of how well they are progressing. From here, adjustments may need to be made in the timeline. Giving feedback will also let your employees know that they’re valued and noticed. They will likely be even more motivated and work even harder.

To give feedback, perhaps allow the employee to listen, along with the manager, to the recorded calls that are being used for their review. Walkthrough the call with them, ask them how they feel it went, and give feed back.

Task Complexity Managers need to keep in mind that sometimes it is necessary for an employee to acquire a new skill in order to meet a more complex goal. When planning out the timeline be sure to include the mastering of this skill as one of the milestones before moving on toward the end goal.

Recommendation

Due to the rapid growth of Gabb Wireless, employees feel as though they’re taking on more responsibility than they are getting compensation and recognition for. We can see in the data that employees are being unfairly reviewed which is causing frustration within the company. Our team recommends that Gabb Wireless takes a different approach in making sure there employees are satisfied and happy. As of right now, managers set all the goals for the company and don’t allow for employee input. We would suggest Gabb Wireless to use the 5 simple steps outlined in Locke’s Goal Setting Theory. This allows for employees and be heard and express their input as well as getting feedback from managers so they know what is expected of them. Communication is vital for a company to be successful in working together and reaching its goals. This will increase motivation in work ethic which in turn benefits the company as a whole.

References

https://gabbwireless.com/product/gabb-phone-plus/

Andrade, M. S. (2019). Organizational behavior in practice. Dubuque, IA: Great River Learning.

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