Solving Team Challenges at DocSystems Billing, Inc.

The case study is based on an insurance billing company called DocSystems Billing, Inc. It is a call centre that has an onsite and an outsourced center. The onsite call centre has forty employees, 10 Senior Insurance Consultants (SIC) and 30 Medical Insurance Specialists (MIS) divided into two teams. The outsourced company has 100 employees called Billing Specialists who perform the initial billing work and data entries. The issue is mainly on the onsite center where the recent reshuffle of the team members and combining of MIS (15 members) and SIC (5 members) on each team headed by Dana and Alex as the managers. Jim is the senior director whom the managers report to. The case revolves around the situation where Jim wants to redesign the teams because the second team structure does not seem to be productive and efficient. Jim, thus, appoints Dave, an OD consultant over a meeting to discuss about the possible bottlenecks and solutions to enable them create a productive and efficient team.
The problems that exist in the organization are internal problems which arise from conflicts between team members and teams, ego issues, insecurity, poor leadership and lack of mutual cooperation and interaction. Due to this, there is inefficiency in productivity causing delay in job completion and ultimately poor customer satisfaction. The delay is caused by the ego issues that the team members have with the senior team instead of trying to work together and complete them on time.
Basing on the teams’ roles, the SIC team feels that since they have been there and done it all because of their tenure and experience in the organization as well as the various processes aligned to it. After being shuffled along with the MIS team members, they feel the combination do not work which is actually due to their ego issues. Their understanding is that if the MIS team escalates cases at a faster pace, they label them as incompetent or lazy to finish their jobs.
On the other hand, the MIS team feels insecure that if they cannot complete their allotted cases, they might be labeled lazy or incompetent ultimately losing their jobs. They feel that they can handle it while actually too much to juggle leading to committing errors which further causes the delay. They also feel that they do not require the seniors watching over them or assisting them since they know their job well.
The employees object to Jim’s proposal because as Carlos clarified, it would never work out since the senior team feels that they are given extra work load while relieving it from the MIS team which would even make them lazier.
The meeting ended without any noticeable progress and Jim called it off only to reconvene after a week. Based on the data concluded, I think it would be appropriate to first of all get the two teams together, i.e., the MIS and SIC team and resolve their inter-group conflict. Dave can perform this intervention by following the 8-steps method designed by Blake and his associates (Blake et al., 1964; Blake, Mouton, & Sloma, 1965). This intervention is not to resolve the problem at hand completely but to try and improve the relationship among the team members through understanding their differences. The second step involves listing the description of how they see themselves as well as how they see the other team and this would be done by both the teams. This would reveal their characters and attitude, examine their own group image with the other. The third step would include exchanging the lists that were created by each team and give time for thoughtful evaluations. The fourth step lets the members clarify and ask questions relating to the lists created. In the fifth step, each teams are addressed separately again where they start to analyze and find relationships between the misunderstanding of interpretations and perceptions. These diagnoses are then exchanged again where additional views and insights are shared and discussed to understand each other better and maybe resolve past differences in the sixth stage. The seventh step would help them create another list of issues that needs to be resolved and bring about a common understanding of values, ideas and views with respect and openness that would eventually strengthen the relationship. The eighth step would be the creation of a task force or the project team similar to what was initially formed, however, this time after initiating the intervention.
Once this intervention is completed, the team members of both the MIS and SIC would understand one another better and with improved relationship and communication, designing a new team structure would not be an issue. In fact after this, they can follow the same team structure with just a little modification with the process where the seniors would be handling the urgent red cases and even help with other red cases if they fix the issues at a quicker time. This would decrease the delay in closing the case offering better customer satisfaction as well.