Role of the manager

The Evening Courier is the main title of a group of regional newspapers. It is published every day apart from Sundays, and is the only local daily newspaper in a town with a population of 200,000. The paper has significant circulation in the surrounding area as well as the town. Because it is the only paper in this area it has a semi-monopoly of local advertising. The Courier is dependent on advertising as this revenue directly accounts for about 80% of its income. It is also a significant factor in generating circulation of the paper. The advertising department is split into three main sections. The largest is classified adverts, in which 20 people are employed plus a section supervisor. There are two sub-sections in classified adverts, one for handling phone requests and another for handling requests received by e-mail. Five people are employed in the motor trade section. There is also a display advertisement section in which a further five people are employed. Both these smaller sections are supervised by Margaret Dawson, who is also Deputy Manager of the Advertising Department. The advertising department also handles requests for paid announcements and these are handled either by the display or classified sections according to their size and complexity. The department is open for business from Mondays to Fridays. Over recent years the labour turnover in the department has risen alarmingly, particularly in the classified advertisement section where turnover is running at 270% a year. It is running at about 180% in the other two sections. Absence and sickness rates are also much higher than for the rest of the employees. These indices of poor morale and performance are attributed to the poor quality of staff available. Staff are paid at an hourly rate, which on the face of it seems competitive, and given the opportunity to earn significant commission on the volume of advertisements that are placed. Staff in all sections of the advertising department are given a week's formal training before being placed on the job. The Advertising Manager, Alison Merton, conducts the training. During the last training course, when queries emerged about all the things that could and did go wrong, Alison explained that this was almost entirely because of the poor quality of staff that had previously been recruited. She further explained that she was now trying to rectify this by the selection of higher quality staff, such as those people on the current training course. Alison is aged 38 and has been with the paper for the last fifteen years. Doreen Adams joined the display adverts section, having recently moved into the area. She is a graduate and had worked previously in the newspaper industry in another part of the country and also on one national magazine She reports to Margaret Dawson, the Deputy Advertising Manager, who is aged 35, and who has been with the paper ever since she left school. Doreen soon found out that the liaison between production and sales was far less effective than in her previous organisation. Whilst the creative quality of display adverts was often good, there was a high degree of error in what was actually published, particularly the wording and display features of adverts. This was exacerbated by the fact that many of the errors were of a recurring nature. This included the blurring of display adverts and the frequent re-positioning of adverts on a non-colour page when a colour premium had been paid. Another recurring error was that when clients wanted corrections in repeat adverts these often did not feature in the advert when it was published next. In some cases even ordinary repeat adverts were published incorrectly. This appeared to be because of poor filing and cataloguing. This could lead to old adverts being repeated rather than the most recent one. Doreen found that errors in the advertising production department necessitated her spending about half of her time checking that adverts were correctly worded and displayed. This also involved much time spent in proof reading. A consequence of this was that there was little time for 'cold calling' of potential clients or maintaining contacts with established clients. Doreen also found that there were some public relations disasters with important established clients. One recent example had been the 'pulling' of a large display advert by the Editor, without any attempt to notify the client. Significant costs had been involved in the preparation of this advert but the Editor found out about it by chance and considered that it was too sexually suggestive. The first the sales team knew about this was when the client demanded what to know what had happened to the advert. After a few weeks in her job Doreen Adams found that the staff were expected to put up with customers requests, however, unreasonable. This involved a regular flow of complaints and insults about the accuracy of previous advertisements. These errors had been mainly committed by staff who had since left the organisation. The deadline for placing adverts was clearly stated as 5.p.m. Monday to Friday. However, one regular client would not ring in their display adverts until 5.30 p.m. and the staff were expected to spend on average half an hour each time processing these adverts on unpaid overtime. A feature of work in the classified and motor trade sections is its monotonous nature. The work is very repetitive and this caused one of the other staff, appointed at the same time as Doreen, to say that it was very similar to working at the call centre where she had been previously employed. It also emerged that there was a clearly defined status hierarchy at the paper. Advertising is regarded as a necessary evil with very low status and the classified ads section has the lowest status within the advertising department. The highest status area is journalism. The Editor, Edward Coulouris, had started work with the paper as a journalist. He was particularly keen to maintain and develop the editorial standards not just in the paper but the whole group. He found it useful to have regular lunches with the editors on the other papers in the group. He was proud of his journalistic background and retained his membership of the National Union of Journalists. Doreen tried to do her best in what she found was an increasingly frustrating job. It occurred to her that the demands of selling and checking adverts were incompatible. Not only were different types of skills involved, and very likely different temperaments, but it was very difficult to check adverts when your were regularly interrupted by telephone calls from existing or potential clients. After a few months, the strain began to tell and she was ill with a chest infection for two weeks. She then found that she was not covered by the company sick pay scheme as she was only employed on an hourly-paid basis and could only claim state sickness benefit. It had also emerged by this time that she was unlikely to earn the significant commission that the Deputy Advertising Manager had suggested was attainable when she was interviewed. This was because of the large amount of time that was needed ensuring that adverts appeared correctly. Doreen began to reflect more and more on the actual organization arrangements at the paper. She discovered that the service provided by the production department had been good up until a few years ago. However, in a cost cutting drive, the existing production staff had been made redundant and replaced by hourly-paid staff who had been employed on a short-term contract with pay and conditions very much below those that had been enjoyed by their predecessors. Production 'cover' was now achieved by two shifts of six hours a day for five days a week. A cost advantage to the company of this was that they only gave one half an hour's break to production staff during their shift and had eliminated the need for meal breaks. Previously the production staff had been employed on a seven- and-a-half-hour shift each day for five days a week, with overtime worked when necessary, an element of which had been compulsory if required. Technical developments had enabled the paper to recruit staff with little or no previous newspaper experience though some internal training was needed to bring them up to the required standard. This had resulted in the staff employed in advertising production being mainly consisted of people recruited straight from school and students who found it convenient to make their work at the paper dove-tail with college courses that they were doing. Such dove-tailing was often facilitated by informal arrangements for swapping shifts. The main production department, responsible for the news content of the paper had experienced similar changes and also had the benefits of on-line type-setting from journalists. However, in the display adverts section in some areas the work had increased in skill level. This was because of developments such as desk top publishing and computer art. This meant that less work needed to be contracted out to specialist sub-contractors. Other features of the way the actual organization worked include: The Head of Advertising Production, Pam Middleton, has a strong personality and social links with the Editor, who is the most senior person employed by the organization. No member of management has left or changed jobs in the last three years. The journalists have a high status in the local community and a strong network of local contacts. The practice of giving exit interviews to advertising staff who had handed in their notice has been discontinued because it was considered that the large numbers who left has made this too time consuming. Whilst the journalists are members of the National Union of Journalists they are now the only members of staff who apparently are in a trade union. The organization culture is insular. Few of the senior staff have significant experience at other publications. The emphasis is also on technical competence and no one in the organization appears to have received supervisory or management training. The one exception to this though, ironically, is Doreen, who completed a management module on her degree course. Advertising revenue is steadily falling. A factor in this seems to be greater use of the internet and the increasingly vigorous efforts of the local radio station to attract advertising revenue. The only response by management to this has been to put more and more pressure on the advertising department to meet increasingly unrealistic sales targets. Having made her assessment of the problems faced by the newspaper in general and her job demands in particular, Doreen decided it was time to review her future at the paper. After much thought, and having worked for the paper four months, she approached Margaret Dawson and said that she had had to seriously consider her future there. She further explained that the one thing that could persuade her to stay was if a 'proof reader' was employed in the display adverts section. Doreen explained why she thought this would be self-financing because of the extra effort she would be able to make selling, instead of correcting work made by production staff. Margaret responded by saying that there was no chance of that happening. Doreen's reaction was to say that regrettably this gave her no option other than to hand in her notice. Doreen was not best pleased to hear later that Margaret had said to one of her former colleagues that 'Doreen had been very honest in admitting that she had not been capable of doing the job she had been given'. Some months later Doreen met the Editor, Edward Coulouris, at a prestigious local wedding. He did not recognize her but in the conversation they had Doreen explained how much she was enjoying working in the advertising department of the local radio station and the progress they were making. This caused Edward to speak rather intemperately about the failings of the advertising department at the Courier and how their short-comings were threatening the very survival of the paper. He added that they could do with a person like Doreen to help 'turn things around' at The Courier. At this point Doreen responded by saying what a pity it had been that they had not made more use of her expertise when she actually had been employed by them. Doreen then gave a blistering account of what she considered to be the organization and managerial weaknesses at the Courier. Later, a rather chastened Edward left the wedding party and in the cold light of the next day wondered how seriously he should take Doreen's comments. Questions From the information given in the case study, draw an organisation chart showing how the departments relate to one another. (10 marks) Give your assessment of the situation as if you were Edward Coulouris, identifying any problems that you think need attention. (50 marks) Assuming that you think that there are problems that need attention, what would you do about them? (40 marks)