Search results for ""Author Jody Hoffer Gittell""

This book offers management lessons from the world's most profitable airline. 'As a former Southwest insider, I often wondered why other organizations couldn't duplicate the business model. Anyone who wants to understand how it works should read this book' - Libby Sartain, Senior VP of Human Resources, Yahoo. 'Professor Gittell has tackled one of the hottest and most important topics in business circles today - why some airlines continually fly high over the economic wreckage of the rest of the industry' - Thomas Winkelmann, VP - The Americas, Lufthansa German Airlines. 'Through extensive research, Jody Hoffer Gittell gets to the bottom of what has sustained Southwest Airlines' positive employee relations and high performance through good and bad times' - Thomas A. Kochan, professor, MIT Sloan School of Management, MIT Global Airline Industry Program."Fortune" magazine calls Southwest Airlines "the most successful airline in history." In an industry that regularly loses billions of dollars, Southwest has had 31 consecutive years of profitability. "The Southwest Airlines Way" reveals the secret to Southwest's remarkable success - high performance relationships - and it creates enormous competitive advantage in motivation, teamwork, and coordination among Southwest employees. Based on Professor Jody Hoffer Gittell's eight years of field research, this book explores Southwest's innovative policies, strategies, and techniques, showing how these methods can be implemented in any organization, and explains how to: lead with credibility and caring; invest in frontline leaders; hire and train for relational competence; use conflicts to build relationships; and, encourage mutual respect among employees, managers, unions, and suppliers.

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Whether from customers, supply-chain partners, policymakers, or regulators, organizations in virtually every industry are facing calls to do more with less. They are feeling compelled to provide higher-quality outcomes, more rapidly, at a lower cost. This book offers a road-tested approach for delivering these outcomes through positive organizational change. Its message comes just in time, for too many companies have gone the way of low-road strategies, such as cutting pay and perks, and working harder not smarter. Drawing on her path-breaking research, Jody Hoffer Gittell reveals that high performance is fundamentally relational—rooted in both human and social capital. Based on this insight, she provides a unique model that will help companies to build meaningful relationships among colleagues, develop smarter work processes, and design organizational structures fit for today's pressure test. By following four organizations on their change journeys, she illustrates how "relational coordination" unfolds in real-world settings. Tools for change guide readers as they learn how to implement this new model in their own workplaces.

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This guidebook goes beyond people analytics to provide a research-based, practice-tested methodology for doing relational analytics, based on the science of relational coordination. We are witnessing a revolution in people analytics, where data are used to identify and leverage human talent to drive performance outcomes. Today’s workplace is interdependent, however, and individuals drive performance through networks that span department, organization and sector boundaries. This book shares the relational coordination framework, with a validated scalable analytic tool that has been used successfully across dozens of countries and industries to understand, measure and influence networks of relationships in and across organizations, and which can be applied at any level in the private and public sectors worldwide. Graduate students and practitioners in human resource management, health policy and management, organizational behavior, engineering and network analysis will appreciate the methodology and hands-on guidance this book provides, with its focus on identifying, analyzing and building networks of productive interdependence. Online resources include data appendices and statistical commands that can be used to conduct all these analyses in readers’ own organizations.

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"And you thought the passengers were mad. Airline employees are fed up, too-with pay cuts, increased workloads and management's miserly ways, which leave workers to explain to often-enraged passengers why flying has become such a miserable experience."—The New York Times, December 22, 2007 When both an industry's workers and its customers report high and rising frustration with the way they are being treated, something is fundamentally wrong. In response to these conditions, many of the world's airlines have made ever-deeper cuts in services and their workforces. Is it too much to expect airlines, or any other enterprise, to provide a fair return to investors, high-quality reliable service to their customers, and good jobs for their employees? Measured against these three expectations, the airline industry is failing. In the first five years of the twenty-first century alone, U.S. airlines lost a total of $30 billion while shedding 100,000 jobs, forcing the remaining workers to give up over $15 billion in wages and benefits. Combined with plummeting employee morale, shortages of air traffic controllers, and increased congestion and flight delays, a total collapse of the industry may be coming. Is this state of affairs inevitable? Or is it possible to design a more sustainable, less volatile industry that better balances the objectives of customers, investors, employees, and the wider society? Does deregulation imply total abrogation of government's responsibility to oversee an industry showing the clear signs of deterioration and increasing risk of a pending crisis? Greg J. Bamber, Jody Hoffer Gittell, Thomas A. Kochan, and Andrew von Nordenflycht explore such questions in a well-informed and engaging way, using a mix of quantitative evidence and qualitative studies of airlines from North America, Asia, Australia, and Europe. Up in the Air provides clear and realistic strategies for achieving a better, more equitable balance among the interests of customers, employees, and shareholders. Specifically, the authors recommend that firms learn from the innovations of companies like Southwest and Continental Airlines in order to build a positive workplace culture that fosters coordination and commitment to high-quality service, labor relations policies that avoid long drawn-out conflicts in negotiating new agreements, and business strategies that can sustain investor, employee, and customer support through the ups and downs of business cycles.

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