Patagonia Case

Patagonia, Inc

Patagonia workbook process was designed to make information about company's strategic planning, budgeting, and quality improvement process available to all employees and to encourage the employees to be an active part of the company's planning, operating review, and decision making processes.

Benefits of Workbook Process:

* Workbook process is used in decentralized organizations to share with all employees the financial condition of company. It helps employees to understand how his or her job affects the financial success of the organization, and allows employee to see the interdependence and importance of each business functions.

* Employees would better understand how their job fits within the strategy of the company. They would be more likely to think strategically because they would be allowed easy access to the highest levels of planning within the company and would have the knowledge to understand it.

* Workbook process encourage employees to think out-of-the-box ideas from those who feel more vested in the company's success. It believe this added employee focus on the success of the business benefits the bottom line as the operation becomes more cost-effective, maximizing each employee's value.

Concerns for the Workbook Process:

* Offer more training to educate each employee how to read and understand the statements and help employees understand how to spread their forecasts across the months.

* The quality of the Workbook results is also under question. For example, some of the defined goals and objectives are very hard to measure and define either they are achieved or not. Besides, the amount of objectives varied from team to team.

* Some of the top managers are not convinced in the project from the beginning, they can transform the negative attitude to the employees. It is very important to integrate Workbook process to the corporate culture, develop a habit for workers to use it. At this stage, it is essential to make it clear for workers which benefits they get from using the system.

* The company has informal rewarding system. During the better periods for the company, all of the employees were given equal rewards. However, when the profitability decreased and top managers suggested that only the worthy employees get the reward, employees decided that nobody should be given a bonus. From one point of view, this kind of behavior aligns with the corporate culture, grown by the company leader. But from the other hand, people start lacking motivation for the development and showing better results. When thinking about the formal reward system, a lot of background work should be done, regarding to the planning, defining performance measurements etc. Thus, at this stage, rewards can be linked with the Workbook process. It would motivate people