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How do you get your team members to exercise appropriate independent judgment? How do you get employees to be more accountable for their actions? Leaders need team members to be empowered and proactive post COVID-19. What are the roadblocks? How are they overcome? Most books on employee empowerment bypass two critical relationships: the employment compact and the job holder and their job. These two relationships hold the key to unlocking employee empowerment. This breakthrough book is for leaders who want to maximize performance through empowerment. It offers a new approach and practical strategies to energize employees to exercise their initiative when needed and be accountable for their actions. A proactive employee is engaged in their job and can confidently make decisions without overly relying on their manager.

For the past 100 years, we've progressively dehumanized our places of work. We've learned to systemize, homogenize, and mechanize - all in the quest for greater efficiency and cost-saving. We've forgotten that the human being is the center of work. This book highlights the ten essential performance and development conversations leaders must have to restore human spirit at work. First, it explains the importance of cultivating an authentic workplace by resisting the dumbing down of work and respecting employee dignity. Second, it presents five developmental conversations, from coaching to relationship-building. Third, it outlines five performance conversations, from climate review to innovation. An organization - any organization - is a group of people working together towards a common goal, but we tend to lose sight of this simple idea. Too often, human resources are lumped in with technological resources, administrative resources and financial resources. Managers become obsessed with processes, procedures and systems. Tim Baker provides leaders with a roadmap to bring the human being back to work.

"'That's not my job.' If you don't want your employees to say that, why do you start your relationship by giving them a narrow task and competency focused description of their job? We need people to fulfil many different roles at work - yes the need to do their job, but they also need to contribute positive energy, collaborate, and take personal reasonability for innovation and personal development. How do they fit into a traditional job description? It is futile persevering with the job description borne out of the scientific management movement one hundred years ago. The world of work is vastly different to the assembly lines of the Ford Motor Company of the early twentieth-century. Building on the phenomenal success of The End of the Performance Review, Baker examines four essential 'Non-Job' roles that all employees must fulfil and shows how to create meaningful role descriptions that can help you recruit better people and enable them to deliver better results. "--

Without influence, managers are ineffective. There is growing recognition that this is a core leadership competency for managers, across industries, geographies and sectors. Managers need to influence up, down and increasingly, sideways as organizations become flatter, more manoeuvrable and less hierarchical. The New Influencing Toolkit is expertly designed to diagnose and develop managerial influence. Four influencing strategies make-up the "Influencing Capabilities Framework": investigating, calculating, motivating; and collaborating. On completion of the diagnostic included within the book, managers are given practical techniques and methods to enhance each of these four influencing strategies. These strategies are at the heart of leadership for the 21st Century manager

A thoroughly tested, distinctive alternative to the appraisal process that draws on well-established principles of organizational behavior. Based around Tim Baker's '5 Conversations' approach, and with a timely focus on fostering innovation, this book is practical and easy to use - featuring case studies, interviews and useful templates

For any organization to achieve its goals people need to interact, and those interactions require dialogue and conversation. Thanks to technology, we seem to be having fewer genuine conversations than we used to. The question every contemporary manager must address is: How often am I using (or even hiding behind) technology when a person-to-person, face-to-face conversation is possible, or preferable? Simple, everyday, supportive conversations are the building blocks of effective relationships; they establish the context for more difficult, challenging conversations by building acceptance and understanding. The ability to hold meaningful and constructive conversations is one of the essential skills leaders at all levels of organizations must develop. A mark of leadership must be the courage and competence to talk openly, clearly, fairly, and confidently about issues that matter - the ability to have conversations at work. --

ABSTRACTService guarantees consist of a promise to a customer (marketing), the delivery of a service to the customer (operations), and actions to appease the customer when service failures happen (recovery). A part of recovery involves offering the customer an economic and/or noneconomic payout when things go wrong. When the economic payout is too high or low, the impact on the organization and the customer is usually negative. Therefore, determining the size of the economic payout is of critical strategic and tactical importance in businesses. Yet, no systematic quantitative methods are found in the literature to help managers determine the economic payout for service failures. The current ways an economic payout is determined are management judgment, the consensus of customer focus groups, competitive benchmarking, and the use of simple expected value methods. In this article, we define the Economic Payout Model for Service Guarantees (EPMSG) that provides an optimal service guarantee economic payout under certain conditions. The EPMSG and its objective function considers customer revenue over the short‐ and long‐term, the cost of creating and providing the service, the cost of recovery, the probability of a service failure, and the probability of customer retention as a function of economic payout. A numerical example is provided of how EPMSG works. Customer retention probability distributions are examined assuming normal and gamma distributions. We end the article by describing the theoretical contributions, model limitations, managerial implications, and opportunities for future research.

ABSTRACTThe Internet is providing an opportunity to revenue management practitioners to exploit the potential of auctions as a new price distribution channel. We develop a stochastic model for a high‐level abstraction of a revenue management system (RMS) that allows us to understand the potential of incorporating auctions in revenue management in the presence of forecast errors associated with key parameters. Our abstraction is for an environment where two market segments book in sequence and revenue management approaches consider auctions in none, one, or both segments. Key insights from our robust results are (i) limited auctions are best employed closest to the final sale date, (ii) counterbalancing forecast errors associated with overall traffic intensity and the proportion of customer arrivals in a segment is more important if an auction is adopted in that segment, and (iii) it is critically important not to err on the side of overestimating market willingness to pay.

ABSTRACTWe develop a stochastic model to explore the benefits of incorporating auctions in revenue management. To the best of our knowledge the extant literature on modeling in revenue management has not considered auctions. We consider three models, namely, a traditional fixed price (non‐auction) model, a pure auction model, and a hybrid auction model and evaluate their revenue performance under a variety of conditions. The hybrid approach outperforms the other two in all 24 scenarios and yields an average revenue increase of 16.1% over the next best. A surprise finding is that there is no significant difference between the performance of the fixed price and pure auction approaches. A sensitivity analysis reveals that the relative superiority of the hybrid revenue management strategy is reasonably robust.

ABSTRACTA number of market changes are impacting the way financial institutions are managing their automated teller machines (ATMs). We propose a new class of adaptive data‐driven policies for a stochastic inventory control problem faced by a large financial institution that manages cash at several ATMs. Senior management were concerned that their current cash supply system to manage ATMs was inefficient and outdated, and suspected that using improved cash management could reduce overall system cost. Our task was to provide a robust procedure to tackle the ATM's cash deployment strategies. Current industry practice uses a periodic review system with infrequent parameter updates for cash management based on the assumption that demand is normally distributed during the review period. This assumption did not hold during our investigation, warranting a new and robust analysis. Moreover, we discovered that forecast errors are often not normally distributed and that these error distributions change dramatically over time. Our approach finds the optimal time series forecaster and the best‐fitting weekly forecast error distribution. The guaranteed optimal target cash inventory level and time between orders could only be obtained through an optimization module that was embedded in a simulation routine that we built for the institution. We employed an exploratory case study methodology to collect cash withdrawal data at 21 ATMs owned and operated by the financial institution. Our new approach shows a 4.6% overall cost reduction. This reflects an annual cost savings of over $250,000 for the 2,500 ATM units that are operated by the bank.

ABSTRACTRevenue Management Systems (RMS) are commonly used in the hotel industry to maximize revenues in the short term. The forecasting‐allocation module is a key tactical component of a hotel RMS. Forecasting involves estimating demand for service packages across all stayover nights in a planning horizon. A service package is a unique combination of physical room, amenities, room price, and advance purchase restrictions. Allocation involves parsing the room inventory among these service packages to maximize revenues. Previous research and existing revenue management systems assume the demand for a service package to be independent of which service packages are available for sale. We develop a new forecasting‐allocation approach that explicitly accounts for this dependence. We compare the performance of the new approach against a baseline approach using a realistic hotel RMS simulation. The baseline approach reflects previous research and existing industry practice. The new approach produces an average revenue increase of at least 16% across scenarios that reflect existing industry conditions.

Heat kills more Australians than any other natural disaster. Previous Australian research has identified increases in Emergency Department presentations in capital cities; however, little research has examined the effects of heat in rural/regional locations. This retrospective cohort study aimed to determine if Emergency Department (ED) presentations across the south-west region of Victoria, Australia, increased on high-heat days (1 February 2017 to 31 January 2020) using the Rural Acute Hospital Data Register (RAHDaR). The study also explored differences in presentations between farming towns and non-farming towns. High-heat days were defined as days over the 95th temperature percentile. International Statistical Classification of Diseases and Related Health Problems, Tenth Revision, Australian Modification (ICD-10-AM) codes associated with heat-related illness were identified from previous studies. As the region has a large agricultural sector, a framework was developed to identify towns estimated to have 70% or more of the population involved in farming. Overall, there were 61,631 presentations from individuals residing in the nine Local Government Areas. Of these presentations, 3064 (5.0%) were on days of high-heat, and 58,567 (95.0%) were of days of non-high-heat. Unlike previous metropolitan studies, ED presentations in rural south-west Victoria decrease on high-heat days. This decrease was more prominent in the farming cohort; a potential explanation for this may be behavioural adaption.