Nominal Group Decision-Making Earning Team Creative Problem-Solving

Nominal Group Decision-Making

earning team Creative Problem-Solving Demonstration: Topic "Coming late leaving early" Please Nominal Group Technique Discuss choose technique solve problem. - Nominal Group Technique Explain technique chosen briefly summarize technique conducted a virtual team environment.

Coming late and leaving early: Nominal group technique

Currently, our office is faced with a very difficult problem: people are arriving late and leaving early. The result is that productivity is decreased and people are getting paid the same amount of money for doing less and less work. To curtail this behavior, instead of issuing directives, management has decided to encourage buy-in by using the nominal group technique method, an alternative to brainstorming. This technique has the advantage of not 'pointing fingers' at specific employees, given that all employees have likely come late and left early at some point, meaning that no one is innocent of the crime. The objective of the exercise is not placing blame, but solving the behavior. Coming to a collective decision encourages buy-in by all of the group members.

First, the leader of the group frames the issue. "It has come to our attention that some members of our organization are coming to work late and leaving work early. What should we do about this?" The issue is framed in a non-directive and non-accusatory fashion. It also suggests that all group participants want to do something about the negative behavior, rather than contributing to it. Then, all members of the group are given time to brainstorm ideas individually. Some of these ideas might include "using a time clock;" "having people sign-in at the front desk," "docking pay after unexcused absences." After everyone in the group has taken the same, specific time period to brainstorm ideas, then the group leader tells them to stop and writes down all of their suggestions on, so they can be publically viewed. For this topic, there is likely to be a fair amount of overlap between the different suggestions, and no suggestion is written down twice. No criticism ("that's really stupid") is allowed, although group members can ask for greater clarity about the suggestion, and suggestions may be rephrased for compression's sake. In a virtual team setting, members can submit their ideas by email, and the group leader can list all of them in a 'poll' form, which all members can take by logging into the system anonymously. There can be a delay of a day or two before the poll results are tallied, and the poll can be altered if there is confusion about the meaning of any of the listed responses.

Then, all of the group members vote on the best measure to take through anonymous voting. The voting is purely democratic, with a one vote, one person system. The various contenders do not try to 'sell' their ideas to the voters, which could cause debate and divisiveness over this sensitive issue and lead to the type of finger-pointing the organization wishes to avoid. Instead, there is faith that the people who are 'causing' the tardiness can 'fix' it through their collective investment in the decision.