This project demonstrates efforts being made and realistic steps taken to create a more ethical and inclusive organization from a damaged and failing one. Prior to this effort to effect organizational change, the library system was wildly inefficient and staffed with unhappy employees who saw their workplace as a stagnant and outmoded community service that had become all but obsolete.
The reorganization plan for the Arrakis County Library System has several prominent components that will be occurring simultaneously and working together. What will be perhaps the most conspicuous of these systemic components is the Human Resources Department— this new department will be responsible for establishing and cultivating positive, desirable elements of organizational culture within organizational policy. As they conduct routine performance appraisals of staff and oversee the hiring and onboarding processes, they will be confronted with numerous opportunities to instill an awareness of our organizational values , which will again serve as the guiding principles for all operations and projects carried out by the Human Resources department.
This section of the Library Reorganization Plan will outline the functions of this new HR department, describe how it is structured, and furthermore explain how it fits into what is a vastly reconceived organizational structure. This new organizational structure will be described in detail, and a timeline for the reorganization project will be provided. Finally, the performance appraisal process will be examined so that the emphasis on our organizational values and their integral connection to our processes can be demonstrated. It will furthermore be shown that these processes are orchestrated in such a way as to engender a diverse and inclusive environment within the organization.
Because there has been no proper Human Resources department in the Arrakis County Library System and there continues to be no meaningful HR presence, the ACLS is in the difficult position of immediately needing to create the department from scratch. The ACLS library reorganization plan is largely an endeavor that will deal explicitly with matters traditionally handled by human resources—establishing and communicating policy and organizational values among staff, auditing and overseeing employee performance, confronting issues involving interactions between personnel, maintaining employee satisfaction, hiring new employees—so the most crucial component of the LRP, at least in the initial stages, is the creation and integration of a department that deals with these things exclusively. Every significant aspect of the project to modernize and overhaul the prior, ineffective ACLS into a new and vibrant one will depend heavily on the support of a dynamic and capable Human Resources department.
A new position will be created, that of the Director of Human Resources. It will be important to develop a list of criteria the ideal candidate for this position should fulfill. Certain qualities may be up for debate—previous experience in a public library setting, for instance— and so a hiring committee will need to be assembled that will work to establish these criteria and qualities as a group as well as the weight each of these criteria hold. After a Director of Human Resources is successfully brought onboard, this individual will begin overseeing the process of creating and staffing the HR department as a whole. The size of the department is expected to be two full-time individuals (including the HR director) and one part-time or volunteer staffer, so this hiring process is not expected to consume much of the timeline before the main thrust of the reorganization plan can begin. It will be strongly suggested that hiring internally from within the pool of existing staff would be most ideal in terms of time and budgetary concerns, but that hiring the best candidates overall is of the utmost importance (Moran, p.237). The newly hired director of HR will be informed that Circulation Supervisor Ben Franklin is a potentially viable candidate for the full-time HR position—he is known to be extremely welcoming and of great assistance to new employees. Additionally, he speaks fluent Spanish and will thus be a great asset considering our push toward creating a more diverse, inclusive and welcoming work environment.
The organizational structure of the Arrakis County Library System will be changing rather drastically. What currently exists is an inefficient, rather flat, and lopsided system in which entirely too many supervisors report directly to one individual, Public Services Manager Bernie Sanders. This reflects a situation which is regarded as being an inefficient one for libraries—the abundance of employees reporting to Sanders greatly affects his workload, significantly reducing his capacity to engage in non-supervisory work (Goldman, p. 9). The Systems Manager and the IT Manager, along with their staff members, are siloed into their relatively small departments and have little reason or incentive to work directly with staff members or to contribute to the public-facing side of the organization. Consequently, staff members who are not part of these departments rarely interact with those employees. The three branch managers are similarly restricted from contributing to the overall organizational culture in addition to the various operations of the organization in general by virtue of their limited proximity to the main branch.
The organization's structural problems are myriad, but the ACLS library reorganization plan is designed to address these issues, as well as many others. The most salient of these impending changes is the extreme reduction in the hierarchical aspects of the organizational structure in favor of one that is more team oriented. Instead of staff members reporting directly to one supervisor (in this case, it was Public Services Manager Bernie Sanders), employees will be organized into teams which tend to be inclined toward self-regulation and management (Moran, p.224). Almost all full-time employees will be part of a team, including clerks, techs, and librarians. Exceptions will include managers Bernie Sanders, Melvil Dewey, Ladybird Johnson, Jane Austen, and myself, Director of the ACLS.
The main branch will have four teams consisting of five employees. Each of the branches will be their own team—the two smaller branches consisting of five staff members, while the larger branch will consist of seven. These teams will be devoted to handling various aspects of our internal operations, library assessment and improvement, and public relations and community outreach. Employees' voices will be valued and heard in this new arrangement, and they will have more agency in terms of helping to create a more gratifying work experience. While each of these teams will include a supervisor or branch manager, those individuals are not necessarily meant to be the leaders of their team—rather, they will function as liaisons between the team and management. Each team is to be run democratically where each voice is heard and valued. One of the four managers or the director will be assigned to each team to check in on progress from time to time and may ask for periodic updates and reports. The four managers and the director will comprise the management team, whose primary focus in the new organizational structure will be to ensure that the culture thrives and to measure progress toward the organization’s goals.
The Tech Services and Information Technology departments, managed by Vlad Harkonnen and Lady Bird Johnson, respectively, will be merged into one department, renamed Information Services. Unfortunately, Vlad Harkonnen will be asked to resign from his manager position due to his prolonged underperformance in the role. Lady Bird Johnson will be given the title Information Services Manager, and she will initially have the three employees from both original departments under her wing. Additionally, she will be asked to search either internally or externally for a viable candidate to fill the new Assistant Manager of IS position. Other major shifts include promoting Jacob Grimm, Children's Tech and MLIS student, to manager of the small branch library currently managed by Jane Austen—Ms. Austen will be vacating the role due to her promotion to the new position of Branches Manager. Duncan Idaho will be moved to Circulation Supervisor while the search for a replacement Genealogy Librarian will commence.
The performance appraisal program will begin when the new Director of Human Resources is brought in and after they have acclimated themselves to the organization and met the staff (Moran, p. 255). The staff will by this time have been made fully aware of the coming changes to the ACLS organizational structure and the addition of the Human Resources department. Additionally, their team assignments will have been communicated to them and they will have begun to meet as teams periodically. The HR director will be charged with creating a new performance appraisal program that incorporates and is guided by the four organizational values (Accountability, Dedication, Equity, and Versatility). The appraisals will additionally include a 360-degree component to ensure that multiple perspectives (from surveys given to peers and patrons) are incorporated into each review (Moran, p. 257). Performance appraisals will be a vital and effective system with which the HR department and managers will be able to incorporate and deliver future plans or projects (Stilling, p. 368). An all-staff meeting will acquaint employees with the new performance appraisal system, the preliminary evaluations of which will begin three months after this meeting. It is expected that thereafter performance appraisals will occur at six-month intervals (Moran, p. 256).
Diversity, equity, and inclusion will be a major focus of the Human Resources department. The routine implementation of performance appraisals will work to nurture in the employee the organizational value of equity. Working within their team, respecting differing viewpoints on issues, treating fellow employees with an equal measure of respect—all of these qualities will be examined and reinforced through periodic performance reviews. This will be a significant and effective method through which the ACLS can develop the reputation of a diverse, respectful environment for staff and patrons. Furthermore, the Human Resources department will be instructed to review the American Library Association’s segment on encouragi9ng organizational diversity through focused DEI hiring practices, conduct further research into the subject, and then present a report to the director about potential adjustments to our hiring practices (Moran, p. 237). It is through these means that the Arrakis County Library System will change from a static and dull library environment to a dynamic one in which diversity and inclusion are valued cornerstones.
Goldman, C. (2019). Structure, culture, and agency: Examining succession planning in California State University (CSU) libraries. Journal of Library Administration, 60 (1), 1–21. https://doi.org/10.1080/01930826.2019.1671035
Moran, B. B., & Morner, C. J. (2018). Library and information center management. Libraries Unlimited, an imprint of ABC-CLIO, LLC.
Stilling, G. E., Byrd, A., Mazza, E., & Bergman, S. (2018). Still a deadly disease? Performance appraisal systems in academic libraries in the United States. College & Research Libraries, 79 (3), 366–400. https://doi.org/10.5860/crl.79.3.366