Beijing EAPS Consulting Inc.
Founded in 2001, Beijing EAPS Consulting, Inc (BEC) started with only 6 employees. Today, the company is the largest and the first Employee Assistance Program (EAP) provider in Mainland China, dedicating in improving employees’ psychological capital, relieving personal distress, helping organizations to foster a workforce with Health, Happiness, and High Performance, and enhancing organizational competitiveness and harmony by providing EAP services (“Research Initiatives,” n.d.). Companies (such as Lenovo, China Development Bank, Guangdoing Mobile, Siemens, Samsung, IBM, etc.) came to BEC to provide their employees with psychological assistance benefits in order to reduce stress, to improve employees’ relationships, to improve the work environment, and to increase job satisfaction for all employees. Because of BEC rapid growth in business and profit, it was primarily due to the company had adopted a new project management system. This approach utilizes project managers to organize with employees across different functional departments. As a result, most employees worked on multiple projects and reported to both the department and project managers. This became an issue among employees because of conflict among the managers with task assignments. Employees at times must prioritize their tasks themselves which could result in a task not getting done on time for one of the managers.
Another issue within the BEC Company is collaboration between the project and department managers. This is partly due to both managers are on the same organizational level, according to the company’s new organizational hierarchy chart. In other words, the project and department managers have to be able to work as peers and establish good departmental relationships. That was not the case in this case study. Mr. Zheng, CEO, must decide on how he can