My Experience With Organizations
Throughout my educational and professional journey, I have
always been involved in organizations. Some have been more structurally sound than
others, with a strong hierarchy of administrators put in place. Others have had
abusive management authority leading to negative externalities in the workplace.
In the following paragraphs, I will touch on a few organizations to highlight
the failures to optimize their overall success.
Freshman year I took on a role working at a bar on campus which
I still work at to this day. The overall structure of the promotional ladder is
that you start out as a “door guy” which is at the bottom of the ladder. You do
not have any respect from the workers or patrons of the bar. Your job is to
simply overlook the customers and ensure a safe environment. At times you may
be required to kick someone out of the bar or confiscate drinks from underaged
students. However, the main role is to pick up cups and take out the trash after
the bar has closed its doors. You are often forced to work late into the night,
clocking out around 3-4:00am. The main way to become promoted is to put your
time in at your current position and wait for spots to open up in the positions
above you. Upper management also tends to treat you poorly and devalues any of your
feelings, beliefs, or prior commitments.
As a bartender now, I often look back on my days as a bottom
tier employee. I am now given the uttermost respect from the entire staff and
am not required to do anything other than pour drinks. There is almost no incentive
for bartenders to help clean the bar since you are not paid anything extra or appraised
for it. This lack of incentive is a transaction cost that is unaccounted for by
upper management. However, one transaction cost that is taken into account is
the amount of liquor that is given away for free by the bartenders. The general
manager knows there is almost no way to regulate this since there is no
official inventory that is taken prior to a night of operation. Rather, they
know they are going to lose some economic profit from the lack of fiduciary
duty from bartenders. I think instilling the core values from the bottom of the
ladder could be a huge way to improve efficiency. Also, providing workers with
an incentive to work harder and put forth more effort would result in an
overall increase in operational efficiency.
Before school starts in late August and after school ends, I
work for a moving company that stores students’ belongings in a warehouse. It
is quite an easy job and doesn’t require much skill besides the ability to pick
up and move heavy objects. It pays quite well, at $15 an hour so you are often
well compensated for your time and effort. In addition, you can receive cash
tips when completing an order that has chosen the room service option. However,
one area in which the business lacks is the communication from upper management
to the employees. Work schedules are often sent out on a whim late at night requiring
you to work the next day. This often resulted in employees missing their scheduled
shift times. This inefficiency could be better explained by the lack of
managers in the hierarchy. They are often overloaded with work and not able to
create the operation and transportation logistics of the business. Adding a few
extra positions to the company structure would result in an increase in profits.
When someone misses their shift, it may only put two workers instead of three
on a truck. This increases their wage for the day, while the amount of work completed
remains constant.
Overall, there are many factors that play into the efficiency
of an organization and minimizing transactional costs plays a large role in their improvement.
Though you are in group 3, supposedly an off week for my commenting, there are not enough posts coming in from groups 1 and 2. So I will comment on your post. Your teammates should do so as well.
ReplyDeleteOn the door guy - bartending experience, first let me get some facts straight. Is there a minimum age requirement for each of these jobs? I assume the answer is yes. I assume the minimum age for a bartender is 21. For the other job, I don't really have a feel for it. I was surprised that you said you did this as a freshman. The other, facts to get out on the table is about the overall market for part time work when you were a freshman. Did you look for other jobs as well? How come you landed in this one.
My impression is the bartenders do get tips on occasion and that might provide some of the incentive for cleaning up that you said wasn't there. Also, bartenders might pour drinks that are larger than they are supposed to, just to get a better tip. The manager must have some system in place to ensure that this isn't too widespread. From my point of view, that's where you'd find the transaction costs with this particular work. I wish you had mentioned it in your story. You can say something about it in your response to this comment.
On the first job, since you described it as menial, I guess there is some incentive to shirk. You might have written about what shirking means in this context and how shirking is prevented. Truthfully, in many menial jobs it is not prevented. And in this case the only incentive might have been not getting fired so eventually becoming a bartender.
You only need only example here, and in future posts I'd encourage that. It's better to get into the example more deeply than to have a couple of examples where you mainly just touch the surface.
The minimum age requirement to work at the bar is 19. At that age you can technically take on any role within the establishment, even pouring drinks isn't out of the question. There are actually quite a few workers who are under 21 and serve alcohol to their friends, however it is quite rare as they often require you to start out as a "door guy" and work your way up the ladder. The only option to bypass this traditional path is to bring in the highest sales at a "bar battle." You are not always given the option to take place and compete in such an event, however if you are chosen you are generally racing against 7 other people. In order to win the competition, you have to have the highest sales for the night which comes from how many drinks you are able to sell. There is a high correlation to your sales and how many people you were able to bring out to the bar to support you.
DeleteThe reason I actually chose to take on this job is because it was a job that was given to me from an upperclassman in my fraternity. I was told by him that it was a very rewarding job in terms of the cash you can make along with the perks that come with it. The perks being skipping the lines, not paying cover, and paying just about a nickel for a drink (free). It also allowed me to help my fraternity keep their strong reputation for having lots of workers at different bars on campus.
In order to ensure that the drink giveaway is not too widespread managers have access to view the number of sales and transactions you made throughout the night. This makes it easy to see if you were giving away too much liquor/beer. This is where transactional costs arise, since the customers are paying the same price for the drinks even though there might have been drinks given out for free to other people. However, since the profit margin at college bars is so high, it is easy for it to go unnoticed in such a hectic environment where inventory is often not accounted for in the most efficient manner. The new hires are often the ones in charge of bringing product up form the basement and stocking it on the shelves. There is no system in place at the end of the night to count all the bottles and compare the number of bottles we went through.