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MICHAEL DEMPSEY - Cranfield University

MICHAEL DEMPSEY - Cranfield University

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Teams<br />

senior full time officer meetings but that has fallen into disrepair.<br />

They were badly attended at the start and they got worse since<br />

(Interviewee H)<br />

This is despite their strategic espousal of the idea:-<br />

We have cascaded the team working process right the way<br />

down the organisation, with limited degrees of success but that<br />

is the plan (Interviewee K)<br />

But, in general, reference to teams was overwhelmingly positive and<br />

full of aspirational language relating to team building and maintenance.<br />

There has been a great drive towards team working and team<br />

working works in open plan areas more successfully than it<br />

would in cellular offices where you are cut off and close the door<br />

and you are in your own little area. So team meetings team<br />

working, sharing of information, sharing of workloads, sharing of<br />

the general concept of PCS I think has improved considerably<br />

as a result of that. (Interviewee L)<br />

I operate very much on a team approach. There are three teams<br />

in here concerning three different areas which are pensions,<br />

accounting and then processing all the payments and income<br />

and expenditure. Each has got a front-line manager and they<br />

operate very much as a team with me as the captain, if you<br />

want. So that is very much the model of management that I<br />

follow (Interviewee C)<br />

One manager reports putting an enormous amount of effort into<br />

building the teams in his unit:-<br />

Maybe it goes over the top but what I end up doing is holding a<br />

range of team meetings -- full team meetings, officers team<br />

meetings, commercial sector team meetings and so on. So on<br />

Monday my day is taken up by meetings of the different teams<br />

and so on. We keep it free. We have just done it now because<br />

we have had a number of staff changes. We will get a facilitator<br />

in and just review what we are doing and how we are doing it so<br />

that we can move on again and try and do things differently. And<br />

then also for the negotiators and the organisers and for the<br />

PAs/office managers. Weekly is an exaggeration; probably<br />

fortnightly -- it depends who it is. If we sit down and there is half<br />

an hour kept in my diary and their diaries -- what to do, what do<br />

they want to talk about, what do I want to talk about. That takes<br />

a lot of time but it has been worth doing. (Interviewee B)<br />

And methods of developing teams involved perceptions that openness,<br />

in different respects, was an important value:-<br />

181

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