Sprint-Nextel, Essay Example

The organization at the focus of this project is my employer, Sprint-Nextel. Headquartered in Overland Park, Kansas, Sprint is known worldwide as a major telecommunications company, and wireless provider.  Employing over 50,000 people globally and providing service to over 55 million customers Sprint is second only to Verizon in coverage.   Sprint primary services including providing mobile phones and maintaining mobile phone networks, providing air card services, and landline service. In addition, Sprint runs the largest wireless broadband network in the United States and is the third-largest long distance provider in the country.

Since April of 2006, I have been employed with Sprint, participating in the maintenance of the Sprint network.  During this time, I have witnessed more than six economic downturns and several cutbacks, which brings us to the problem I will discuss. During the last 12 months, Sprint-Nextel has laid off more than 6500 employees including the closing of all facilities in Reston, VA. In fact around 6000 of them were released from the Overland Park offices themselves. In addition, Sprint lost a significant number of customers to other companies, mostly due to customer service issues. As a result, Sprint recently provided a mandatory customer satisfaction training program to all call center employees. This training session did not however assist Sprint in recovering from the loss of many top-level engineers.

In addition to these problems in 2009, Sprint has been organizing the turnover of the daily management of its wireless network to Ericsson, based in Switzerland.  While Sprint will keep control of the network, Ericsson will operate out of Sprint’s Overland Park headquarters in an outsourced merger of sorts.

The problem is one of instability, because Sprint has laid-off so many workers recently, there is an air off tension and unrest. How can Sprint-Nextel improve the customer service in the light of constant cutbacks? I say that the two major problems from a Leadership and organizational behavior standpoint are those of employee motivation and organizational culture. If that culture can be made more amiable, the employees will adjust better to joining of Ericsson and highly motivated employees will work harder to help Sprint avoid more layoffs.

While the scope of this problem spans the entire business, those at lower levels are at the highest risk of losing work, but they are also the heart of the Sprint-Nextel customer service system, and as such have an impact on the entire company’s profitability. It is important to note that there are no definite solutions to this problem because of the societal and economic elements involved. While the economic climate across the world surely has had an effect on the happenings at Sprint–Nextel, there are several changes that (according to LOB concepts) could have positive ramifications.

For example the customer service training for the call center employees, was a good idea and rather effective. Perhaps an adjusted program could be provided to all the employees to establish how important customer service is to the company’s well-being, and thus positively affect the Organizational culture.

As for motivation if Sprint were to provide more non-monetary compensation and match(or better) the benefits of competitors specifically to the high level engineers, perhaps this would have a positive impact on retention of these employees.  The current benefits offered including medical, tuition reimbursement, and of course, the free employee phone plans are excellent. Perhaps further education on what is available to employees will also release some anxiety and smooth the company culture.

The answers I have provided are piecemeal solutions as the current economic downturn is bound to have a negative effect any major company. However, I still believe that even with the constant barrage of negative media (in particular of the outsourcing of the wireless network to Ericsson) that is great place to work with potential to get back on top.