Management Practices Assignment: Video Analysis of Norwegian cruise ship

Question

Task

Your task is to prepare a management practices assignment to analyze the YouTube video about Norwegian cruise ship in the context of management practices. This includes identifying good and bad management practices and relating them to theoretical concepts covered in class. Based on the identified management practices, in particular the bad ones provide recommendations on how these issues can be overcome.

Answer

Introduction
The purpose of this report on management practices assignment is to analyze the various concepts of management in the context of the assigned video. It also includes identifying the good and the bad management practices based on the various theoretical concepts of management and recommending ways that how such issues related to bad management practices can be resolved.

In the given case, the CEO of a famous Cruise line company disguises as an employee and tries to find out how things are going on right at the grass-root level. The company that has been chosen here is the third biggest cruise company in the world named as Norwegian Cruise Line or NCL, and the CEO is Kevin Sheehan, who is being filmed acting as an undercover employee. NCL has 11 cruise ships catering to more than thirty thousand guests per week, generating business worth $ 2 billion. The head office of the company is in Miami, Florida, USA.

Analysis
While watching the video, various aspects of good and bad management practices can be seen and some of which are as follows.

Good Practices
Among the good practices, it has been seen that this effort was made by the CEO of NCL to improve the performance monitoring system of the organization so that he can have a closer look at the level of performance belonging to the various level of employees. Another good practice was giving importance to the customer service provided by the employees.

The CEO had rightly identified the need of focusing on customer service since customers are the lifeline of any organization, and NCL has a huge customer base whom they need to provide quality service at regular basis. The undercover stint of the CEO with the grassroots level employees helped him understand that there are so many jobs that needed very close and direct contact with customers. He was looking to find ways by which his employees can consistently provide high quality of service to customers that would help in achieving further success for the organization (Bloom, et al., 2019).

In his early life, the CEO had himself gone through various experiences as a grassroots level worker as such, his past experience became very useful for this purpose. This effort of Kevin had helped him to understand that how the members of his company act towards each other, how it shapes the organizational culture of doing things as per the job requirement.

The entire exercise was done to understand what is required to improve the performance of the employees, to engage and inspire them to love their job and enjoy doing their job. Emphasis was put on understanding the different aspects of job specialization, departmentalization, the span of control and the formalization of work processes within the organization.

The above-mentioned factors towards the concept of McDonald's Boundaryless example where quality assurance is achieved by research and development as well as with offering training opportunities to the employees to upgrade themselves. This shows the positive aspects of the management practices that were being observed during this exercise.

Bad Practices
The most prominent example of bad management practices that can be found out from this exercise was that of Distance between the top management and the lower management. The lower management staff hardly had any access to the authority, and hence the top management remained oblivion about the various challenges that are being faced on a regular basis by the employees at the lower level.

Lack of connection opportunities between the top bosses and the ground level employees can create a large vacuum which might prove very harmful for the overall performance of the organization. As evident from the video, one of the employees mentioned to the CEO that promotion scopes are very limited in NCL, and even if they take place, they happen in a very slow pace. This can become a major reason for employee dissatisfaction.

Another issue was also raised in this context that instead of hiring new people from outside, why not promote internal resources to fill up such positions. This again highlighted the issue that lack of opportunities for getting promotion. As an organization NCL clearly lacked the knowledge that how to make the performers feel good (Prasad, 2020).

Another challenge was the long contract period of 10 months. Owing to the nature of the job this left the employees with very less amount of personal time. The employees urged to reduce the contract period for 8 months so that they can get to spend more quality time with their family and near and dear ones. This was another reason that might lead to frustration and discontentment among the employees. They are sailing in the sea for months, staying far away from their families. In many instances, they cannot be present at the death bed of their parents or cannot be beside their wife during the birth of their child.

Lack of communication has been the main reason for such bad practices. Only after this exercise did the CEO came to know about such problems faced by the frontline employees of the organization. However, this could have been found out much earlier if there had been a proper and smooth flow of information between the lower and upper level of employees of the organization.

Recommendations and Implementations
As shown in the video, the CEO himself had been able to identify the bad management practices and took immediate steps to overcome them. This clearly shows that he learned fast from the experiences gathered by him during his undercover assignment. The recommendations hence should be to have an internal promotion policy for the deserving candidates, the contract period should also be reduced so that the employees get to spend more quality time with their family.

Such recommendations can only be implemented by introducing the culture of forming a learning organization. Where employees will have more empowerment, sharing of information would be open and extensive. Such a practice would give rise to a robust culture of trust, openness, sharing of values and togetherness among the employees of the organization.

References
Bloom, N., Brynjolfsson, E., Foster, L., Jarmin, R., Patnaik, M., Saporta-Eksten, I., & Van Reenen, J. (2019). What drives differences in management practices?. . American Economic Review, 109(5), , 1648-83.

Prasad, L. M. (2020). Principles and practice of management. . Sultan Chand & Sons.