Oticon case study

Résumé du document

The Human Resources course we had taken enabled us to wonder about the best way to deal with employees, how to improve their efficiency, how to increase their motivation and provide them with the best work environment possible. We also saw that the answers to these questions depended on the type of company, the type of market you are in and the type of employees you work with. Defining these three ideas will give you a clear answer on how to manage your company and make it both more efficient and more agreeable to work in. The third fact (knowing your employees) is the toughest one of the three, since defining someone's personality is difficult but defining a whole team or the staff's way of thinking is a lot harder. As a Human Resource director or employee, you need to find out how it can work best in each employee or team. So working in a Human Resource department is not an easy task. Through many cases, we were able to grasp this difficulty. For the assignment, we are asked to discuss a case, the Oticon case, which deals with a brand new way of organization. Through four questions asked by the professor, I have to describe this new system, its pros and its cons.

Extraits

[...] So what triggered the change of organization? Lars Kolind felt that the changes made in the company would only last a few years, all the more since the market was dramatically declining. He wanted to create and set a profitable and thoughtful longterm strategy for the company; and thus offering it the possibility to stay active and powerful over the decades and not suffer from the declining market. .An original and innovative way of working at Oticon It is in January 1st 1990, with a four-page memo, that Lars Kolind announced to all the employees how he was seeing the future organization of the company. [...]

[...] So when Lars Kolind arrived, he decided to cut expenses. And to do so, he changed the structure of the company by making of Oticon Holding the managing center of the company (and not solely the financial structure it used to he realigned the main functions (put all the important departments and decisions makers in the same place) in order to make the company more clear. The aim was to make it more efficient to have a better view of the market and allow the subsidiaries to have both a better view of the needs and concentrate of the sales. [...]

[...] Creativity comes from imagination, expression and thinking. And being part of a team, not of a hierarchy gave the employees the confidence to focus more on their ideas and freely communicate about their thoughts and their way of seeing the project. On another level, creativity is something you can learn to have or learn to be, but some people are more or less creative. So the recruitment process is another way to foster creativity. I learned, by reading the Oticon case3, that it has became a real challenge and that it was aiming at finding people that were naturally creative, open-minded and efficient. [...]

[...] The third fact (knowing your employees) is the toughest one of the three, since defining someone's personality is difficult but defining a whole team or staff way of thinking is a lot harder. As a Human Resource director or employee, you need to find in each employee or team how it can work best. So working at a Human Resource department is not an easy task. Through many cases, we were able to grasp this difficulty. For the assignment, we are asked to discuss about a case, the Oticon case, which deals with a brand new way of organization. [...]

[...] But the introduction, in the late 1980s, of the In-The-Ear aids made the Behind-The-Ear aids that Oticon was producing almost obsolete. Following the tremendous losses that this lack of market expectations and studies created, it was decided to put in place a new management. Still, at this time, the company was implanted in thirteen countries and sold its products in a hundred countries all over the world. As for the management and the organization, before the arrival of Lars Kolind, the company was organized “normally” with a very defined hierarchy (directors, managers, employees). [...]