Overland Resource Group

Buck

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The Overland Resource Group (ORG) is consultant group that helps companies build stronger relationships between managers and employees. Its goal is to help companies like American Airlines improve its performance while still meeting the needs of its employees.

The Overland Group has been in business for over 20 years, and has worked with a number of large corporations and their associated unions.

Overland's approach is very straightforward. Some companies become so large and complicated that their different parts become isolated from each other:

*Layers of management keep senior managers and front line workers from understanding each other's jobs.

*Different departments that should work together don't communicate well.

*Labor unions develop their own structures and their own goals.

These structures create a "silo" mentality that provides an atmosphere to accommodate poor performance and poor communication.

The solution is to place a new structure on top of the existing one that will bridge the barriers among the different parts. Using this new structure, employees and managers can work together to find answers to business problems in a way that meets everyone's needs.

A key part of this approach is treating employees as business partners.

Employees supply AA with one of its most important resources -- skilled labor and practical experience. But just like any business partners, AA and its employees are dependent on one another -- and a troubled relationship between employees and managers hurts the quality of the company's product and places the jobs of the employees at risk.

However, when these groups work together to address the needs of both, then each one has a better chance at success.

The Model
In a large company, information tends to flow up and down but not across different departments and employee groups. Typically, business decisions are made in the following manner:

Information flows up the structure to a manager.
The manager comes up with a solution.
The "solution" is then communicated down to frontline employees.
Unfortunately, this structure has a number of problems that can lead to either bad decisions being made or to good decisions being implemented poorly. Important details can be left out when information is gathered. The abilities and constraints of different work groups can be misunderstood. Frontline employees do not know what facts went into a decision.

Often, the result may lead to an employee concluding, "What idiot thought of this idea?" as they try to implement a "solution" that does not fix the problem. As a result, the original problem remains.

This outcome is not the result of bad decision makers; it is the result of a bad decision process.

To address the problem, American is adapting a model designed to improve how managers and employees can more effectively communicate and work together. This new model provides a way for all employee groups affected by a business issue to have early input into decisions that impact the company.

At the "top" of this new model is the Joint Leadership Team (JLT), made up of senior managers from AA and the national officers from the labor unions. The JLT discusses and identifies business issues that should be addressed in a cooperative manner.

Once an area has been chosen, the JLT sets up a joint team of employees to work on the task; the makeup of the joint team is dependent on the task at hand. For example, one of the first joint teams created was the Joint Business Education and Communications Committee (JBECC).

JBECC's mission is to educate employees on business matters and improve communication within the company. As a result, JBECC is made up of communication and education personnel from different company departments and from the labor unions.

Currently, there are other joint teams working on improving customer service, producing a more competitive product and decreasing the cost of maintenance work at the MCI maintenance base. More joint employee teams will be formed to address local issues.

Successful, long-lasting change must be driven by structure -- not personalities. People will come and go from American; however, if a healthy structure is left in place, then the change will have a better chance of taking root.

Robert Hughes, president of ORG, likes to say that the model works best when it doesn't work. Failures and setbacks are an expected part of any attempt at change. However, the new structure creates a way in which those failures can be quickly identified and corrected. The trouble is not that failures happen -- the trouble is when failures are not fixed.

Does AA Need Overland?
If the solution is this simple, why does AA need Overland, anyway? Well, the task of changing business practices is similar to dieting. In theory, weight loss is as simple as eating less and exercising more. In practice, though, the result is much more difficult to achieve.

Just as dieting is made difficult by years of habit -- patterns that are difficult to break --many of the internal difficulties faced by American are the result of many years of established organizational habits. Overland's job is to help identify those bad habits and to replace them with new ways of working together.

Another vital role played by Overland is that of "counselor" -- a neutral third party. When unhealthy relationships exist for a long time, tension and skepticism tend to develop as well.

In addition to the normal tendency to resist change, mistrust can prevent people and organizations from taking the risks necessary for change. The Overland Group acts as a go-between to help overcome feelings of anxiety and mistrust, to focus on finding areas of common interest and agreement.

What Won't Change
Both the company and the employees can succeed by finding new ways to work together. However, despite these new changes, some things will not change. For instance, managers are still responsible for managing, and they are still responsible for their work areas.

What this process does, however, is provide managers with better information, support, and buy-in from employees when key decisions need to be made. It also allows employees to make important contributions to decisions that affect their jobs.

Disagreements and setbacks will still happen. However, this new approach will attempt to reduce the number of disagreements and lessen the impact of any failures.

Significantly, the new JLT framework will not replace traditional collective bargaining under the Railway Labor Act, nor does this process involve the changing of existing labor agreements. Labor unions will still serve their membership as always.

Instead, this process will attempt to identify ways to address very real competitive issues while respecting the labor agreements that are in place. There will also be times that AA management and one of its unions will not be able to cooperatively resolve a dispute regarding an existing agreement. In these cases, all the tools of the collective bargaining process remain available.
 
OOhhhh, I'm getting excited about the propects of an outside agency managing the company and the union.

Overland for AMR

Abernathy for TWU

What do we pay our leaders for?
 
Nightwatch said:
And just what does MAG do again?
MAG was hired to do administrative work for the National.

Abernathy was hired to bypass the Locals.


The members can vote out those who hired MAG.

The members can not vote out those who hired Abernathy.

If Abernathy suggest a radical restructure of the TWU, which includes eliminating some Locals the TWU International will claim that it was the members, through Abernathy that drove this. In the meantime, the only people that are accountable to the members, the Local officers, are left out of the loop.
 
Nightwatch said:
And just what does MAG do again?
The answer is obviously over your head. This has been answered at least ten times on this bulletin board.

connell_mind.jpg
 
Overland appears to acknowledge the mechanic and related.


Employees supply AA with one of its most important resources -- skilled labor and practical experience.

Now if only the TWU, NMB and specifically the Dept. of Labor will?
 
Perhaps someone can get through the layers of management to get to the Overland group to relay the message back to management that the mechanic and related group are unhappy with their current representation and believe the company should have stayed neutral in the dispute.
 
Rusty said:
Perhaps someone can get through the layers of management to get to the Overland group to relay the message back to management that the mechanic and related group are unhappy with their current representation and believe the company should have stayed neutral in the dispute.
Perhaps teamtwu members will be kind enough to post contact information for the Overland Group?
 
Decision 2004 said:
OOhhhh, I'm getting excited about the propects of an outside agency managing the company and the union.

Overland for AMR

Abernathy for TWU

What do we pay our leaders for?
You're not getting "excited" Dave, I believe that you are getting scared and a little bit nervous! We are succeeding and amfa is failing. WOW!!! YOU SHOULD BE SCARED!! Just think how much money you will be out paying for the amfa drive and the amfa union hall (hotdogs included!) and all!!!!
 

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Buck said:
The Overland Group has been in business for over 20 years, and has worked with a number of large corporations and their associated unions.
"Associated" is close, lapdog would be a better term for the afl-cio cultist unions.