Essay: Case Study On Organisational Learning In Service Business.

Students will conduct a case study of the organisational learning mechanisms employed by a specific business for a particular purpose, e.g., how a service business designed and utilised organisational learning mechanisms to introduce a successful, new corporate brand. Case study will be provided in the Learning management system

Address the following questions in the case analysis:

1. Diagnose and analyse the organisational culture.

2. Evaluate the change effort – to what extent was the company successful or unsuccessful? Support with some research and data.

3. Examine the factors that have influenced or impacted the outcome based on organisational change and organisational learning principles?

4. Critically analyse a range of learning mechanisms, and evaluate their impact on organisational performance, effectiveness and reputation;

Evaluate organisational learning mechanisms with respect to their capacity to establish and maintain the ongoing active involvement of internal stakeholders (employees) both as individuals and as teams.

What are your recommendations for the next phase of learning and change? 

Diagnose and analyze the organisational culture.

Sanitarium Health and Wellbeing is an Australian health food company, which was established in 1898. They developed the introduction of ready-to-eat breakfast cereals, peanut butter, and other vegetarian products. They make healthy food and its products are popular in most Australian and New Zealand and exported around the world. They define their culture as shared expectations, values, and norms that guide their individual in respect of approach of doing work and co-operate with each other. They are guided by an employee value proposition that encompasses leadership, recognition, culture, and development (Alqahtani, Ashton, Katopo, Haque, Jones & Kasapis, 2016).

They focus on maintaining a workplace culture that gives the best possible results to their customers with the help of the satisfaction of their personnel. Sanitarium important elements are learning, living, and leading by values, which build a culture of professional growth by giving emphasis on training from induction. Growth opportunities are offered through workshops, e-learning, on the job training, peer learning, retreats, 360^o feedback, off-site training, coaching, and webinars. This matter of initiatives is centered on involving employees to the Sanitarium mission & vision and associates to a performance review system called “iGro” (Clifton & Keogh, 2018).     

They have ensured that it continues to maintain the company culture and staff behaviour. They view its shared purpose as the drivers of behaviour and maintain a positive image in the minds of customers. They contribute to health & hope and had prime responsibility for producing an adaptive culture of performance, integrity, and honesty. It aims to maintain a line of sight to the Sanitarium business approach and enables two-way communication between people and their managers. Their culture enhances the well-being of employees through Better Utilization program and activities. They deliver a variety of activities and services including physical activity, nutrition, mental health, and management of activities. This has pioneered the employee health and well-being goals to lead the market (Ortega, Corona, Hernández, Montaño, Garduño, Cerecedo & Robles, 2015).   

The company has successfully gained the value and recognition from an outpouring of goodwill of customers. It has helped to build its brand relationship and corporate image of the company. Beyond selling a product, Sanitarium has changed the people lives for the better, in maintaining its corporate brand image. They have accomplished severe household penetration and in the next six months, had developed Gluten-Free Weet-Bix as to lead the market. They have promoted positive PR and have launched positive coverage across the traditional and digital channel. They have provided critical feedback on the direction of change effort and development of better and more innovative solutions to meet the needs of customers. They have faced progressive changes with the markets and driven a shift in consumer taste, lifestyle, and needs (Wang, Sanderson, Dwyer, Venn & Gall, 2018).

They are adapting to the change to the “snackification” of the organization where people do not sit for breakfast as they are looking for something fast to take on the way out the door.  It has been identified that taste is changing and they are doing best to meet those needs. They became primarily beverages based, despite cereals-based organization, which has risen up their shares at a greater level. Sanitarium placed equal attention to employee behaviour, performance, and development. Those culture-building efforts have certainly paid off. In the matter of retention, they have a progressively low-turnover rate of around 1per cent every year. This is a very positive indicator as they have the right workforce and the right culture to achieve productivity and success. They pride in choosing the right workforce for the right job (McMahon, O'Shea, Tapsell & Williams, 2014).

Evaluate the change effort of the company. Also, support the points with facts and data.

Sanitarium was promoting for the benefits of wholesome plant-based foods and healthy food to the Australian customers. Their main commitment is to improve the well-being of Australian and New Zealand customers, which add value to the achievement of the company. They embarked on a major communication infrastructure are based on an Internet Protocol (IP) communication network. They deploy IP Telephony and generate a platform for measuring the track progress of the customers. The Sanitarium Food Company has demonstrated a contribution for funding and support the breakfast club to raise awareness to decrease the food insecurity in Australia. The demand for Weet-Bix TM cereals has increased at a rapid pace, which reduces the gap among leader of the market, Kellog’s and Sanitarium. The organization has an immense potential in the coming future as the trends for awareness and healthy food has increased recently by 2% (Beech, MacIntosh, Krust, Kannan & Dadich, 2017). 

Fig: 1 Graphical representation of Sanitarium target

(Blackburn, 2017)

Sanitarium creates a prime responsibility to maintain a progressive culture of performance and integrity. They succeeded in establishing a culture that redirected its historical values and achieves its mission and challenging Fast Moving Consumer Goods industry. Their philosophy is to maintain a positive culture and understand customer behaviour, needs, and preferences and most importantly their way of thinking. They have introduced a biannual culture tool utilizing two Human Synergistic tools i.e. Organizational Effectiveness Inventory (OEI) and Organizational Culture Inventory (OCI) (Banta, Lee, Hodgkin, Yi, Fanica & Sabate, 2018).  

The factors, which have influenced leader and managers, placed a great emphasis on making good relationship with employees.

• Introduction of new technologies- It introduces new skills and capabilities to explore the changes and meet the requirements of the customer. This can be beneficial as well as harm the reputation of the company. As by introducing new technologies, it will help in delivering the best quality products and manages the productivity of the company. However, organizational changes take place by utilizing the resources effectively (Ordabayeva & Yessimzhanova, 2016).
  
  
• Risk and Experiment- The leaders maintain the behaviour and adopt the learning principles to deliver vegetarian and non-dairy milk products with frozen desserts to customers. Employees should take the risk to increase the variety of products particularly vegetarian, as quality should not be compromised. This improves the performance of the organization (Ninan, Kriter, Steele, Baker, Boniferro, Crotogino & Dourova, 2014).
  
  
• Knowledge management- It contributes and provides assistance to learning principles. Employees can gain knowledge, which can help in providing the best quality products and ensuring success in the organization (Schwaninger, 2018).

Sanitarium establishes culture coach across the business and personnel are trained effectively trained to support and maintain organizational change. These factors should be established well and focus should be on learning groups, leadership, and cultural beliefs. They believe in the potential of every Australian customer to be happy and healthy. It means that they should get healthy food, which is affordable and easily accessible by the customers. They should address healthy eating, culture, and gender in a creative way that aims to educate about nutrition and food.  This would influence the organizational principles and change in the betterment of customers (Thyssen, 2018).

Evaluate the organizational learning mechanism with respect to the active involvement of internal stakeholders-

Sanitarium engages the participation of internal stakeholders which has progressively embedded and is more important for decision-makers to take decision and actions, and power to influence the stakeholders. They should develop the learning mechanism to maintain the positive image, reputation, and performance of the organization. They have accomplished extensive popularity among media and corporate managers. It is significant to understand that individuals and groups act and behave differently in different situations (Williams & Onoshchenko, 2015). The influence stakeholders can have on organizational strategy, policy, and approaches are dependent on their relationship with customers, employees and their issues of concern. They should be actively involved in the management activities of seeking that employees are doing their job in an effective way, customers are happy with the services, and maintain the quality of the product. They should maintain the hierarchy and control of strategic resources. They should work cooperatively with other entities, monitor the concerns of all employees, and satisfy the needs and requirements of the customers. The learning mechanism for stakeholders needs to be appropriate for maintaining and gaining ownership (Majeed, Lu & Javed, 2017).  

• Sanitarium should raise the level of knowledge and understanding of nutrition and customers.
  
  
• They should promote to encourage efforts to execute dietary in a coordinated manner for maximum value that will lead to promote health.
  
  
• They should build a workplace so that staff has the understanding to contribute to organizational mission and goals.
  
  
• They should communicate with the staff to adapt to the cultural change and learning processes.
  
  
• They should engage with their staff to maintain a corporate culture and achieving development.
  
  
• Sanitarium should drive cultural change to ensure a high level of viability, reliability, and ensuring that customers should get a healthy food and away from diseases and contaminated food.
  
  
• They should manage and develop a high-performance culture to produces only nutritious food to many customers and attain profits and it can be utilized to help the local community and humanitarian social work (Tian, Gall, Patton, Dwyer & Venn, 2017).

References

Alqahtani, N. K., Ashton, J., Katopo, L., Haque, E., Jones, O. A., & Kasapis, S. (2016). Effect of storage on the textural profile of insoluble fibre incorporating UHT beverage. In Gums and Stabilisers for the Food Industry 18, 295-304.

Banta, J., Lee, J., Hodgkin, G., Yi, Z., Fanica, A., & Sabate, J. (2018). The Global Influence of the Seventh-Day Adventist Church on Diet. Religions, 9(9), 251.

Beech, N., MacIntosh, R.,Krust, P., Kannan, S., & Dadich, A. (2017). Managing change: Enquiry and action. U.K: Cambridge University Press.

Blackburn, C. C. (2017). ‘Greater good’versus civil liberties in the United States: Tuberculosis and Seattle’s Firland Sanatorium. Journal of public health policy, 38(4), 482-492.

Clifton, P., & Keogh, J. (2018). Cholesterol-Lowering Effects of Plant Sterols in One Serve of Wholegrain Wheat Breakfast Cereal Biscuits—A Randomised Crossover Clinical Trial. Foods, 7(3), 39.

Majeed, S., Lu, C., & Javed, T. (2017). The journey from an allopathic to natural treatment approach: A scoping review of medical tourism and health systems. European Journal of Integrative Medicine, 45(6), 231-345.

McMahon, A. T., O'Shea, J., Tapsell, L., & Williams, P. (2014). What do the terms wellness and wellbeing mean in dietary practice: an exploratory qualitative study examining women's perceptions. Journal of human nutrition and dietetics, 27(4), 401-410.

Ninan, A., Kriter, G., Steele, M., Baker, L., Boniferro, J., Crotogino, J., & Dourova, N. (2014). Developing a clinical framework for children/youth residential treatment. Residential Treatment for Children & Youth, 31(4), 284-300.

Ordabayeva, M., & Yessimzhanova, S. (2016). Development of Healthcare and Wellness Tourism Marketing. International Review of Management and Marketing, 6(5), 118-124.

Ortega, A. O., Corona, J. R., Hernández, E. S., Montaño, O., Garduño, S. A., Cerecedo, M. T., & Robles, C. (2015). A systemic model of analysis of organizational culture in health care services. Nova Scientia, 7(15), 321-342.

Schwaninger, M. (2018). Governance for intelligent organizations: a cybernetic contribution. Kybernetes, 34(2), 678-766.

Thyssen, G. (2018). Boundlessly entangled: non-/human performances of education for health through open-air schools. Paedagogica Historica, 56(8), 1-18.

Tian, J., Gall, S., Patton, G., Dwyer, T., & Venn, A. (2017). Partnering and parenting transitions associate with changing smoking status: a cohort study in young Australians. International journal of public health, 62(8), 889-897.

Wang, S., Sanderson, K., Dwyer, T., Venn, A., & Gall, S. (2018). Job Stress in Young Adults is Associated With a Range of Poorer Health Behaviors in the Childhood Determinants of Adult Health (CDAH) Study. Journal of occupational and environmental medicine, 60(3), 117-125.

Williams, C., & Onoshchenko, O. (2015). An evaluation of the persistence of blat in post-soviet societies: a case study of Ukraine's health services sector.