Most of the senior managers and people leaders are forced to work from home due to the pandemic: Organizational Behavior and Company Culture Dissertation, UBS, Singapore

Please choose one subject area:

• Accounting
• Strategy, Int. Business, Business in Society
• Finance Organizations, Work and Employment (Inc. HRM)
• Marketing ☐ Managerial Economics
• Entrepreneurship and Local Economy
• Procurement and Operations Management

Background

Briefly describe the background to your research. What contexts will you be looking at, and which specific organizations?

Most of the senior managers and people leaders are forced to work from home due to the pandemic. Their 1-1 interaction between subordinates has become significantly less and employees might in danger of loosing organizational culture values. Companies are struggling to find new ways of connecting with shopfloor employees and do engagement activities. This thesis is to find out more from “middle managers” who are struggling in between employees and top management to upkeep employee engagement. Business leaders on the other hand struggling to sustain or improve organizational culture through online. Companies need to innovate and bring in new ideas of connecting and engaging workforce. This dissertation is explaining this struggle, the ineffective ways currently adopted and suggesting new ideas.

Research objectives

What objectives will your research attempt to fulfil?
1. Understand the current Organization culture deterioration due to Work From Home requirement specific to manufacturing sector in Singapore
2. How this long-term impact affecting middle managers in sustaining organizational culture, dynamics and employee engagement
3. What are the “ineffective” ways currently adopted ways by companies currently
4. What are some of the identified ideas & strategies which are effective and proven over the last one year
5. Research and suggest some ideas for better establishment / re-establishing employee engagement in the “new norm”

Research strategy and methods (including access)

Outline your research strategy. How, in broad terms might you approach the research? You cannot know the detail of your research strategy or method right now, but you might like to consider whether the work will involve interviewing people, research in secondary data sets, observation, survey work etc.  Provide some preliminary ideas about where your data will come from. Do you anticipate any difficulties with access?
1. Meet 10 senior leaders (General Managers / HR managers / Directors) to understand the impact through Web meeting
2. Survey 100 middle managers to understand their struggle to keep the employee dynamics and engagement through survey
3. Research and read relevant papers online to understand the innovative ideas in practice
4. Reach out at least one consultancy company to understand how they changed their approach recently in guiding some of the big organizations
5. Suggest your own ideas