Functional Areas of a Business

Functional Areas of a Business

Introduction

This assessment concerns a healthcare services provider that has numerous geographical representations. The entity’s main goals involve providing quality care for health improvement, constant research for advanced care, provision of accessible and affordable care, and positively impacting the surrounding community. The entity offers specialized care to patients who suffer from nerve-related conditions. This means that it serves a vast population in various locations due to numerous referrals from other facilities. The healthcare organization’s human resource, sales, marketing, production, and operations areas are critical to its structure’s functionality and stability.

Human resources

The human resource function is essential to the organization. The human resources function is responsible for ensuring that the company has a workforce that fulfills the primary roles of an entity. The human resource unit hires workers, trains them, ensures compliance with labor laws, attends to their welfare, negotiates benefits, ensures remuneration is availed, and manages the company’s risks. Managing human resources is beneficial to an organization in many ways. These benefits include strategic management, which leads to the enhanced bottom line for the entity, achievement of goals, mission, and vision, internal branding, talent management, creation of employee awareness, and management of conflict. Create a conducive culture and maintain a conducive workplace (Noe, Hollenbeck, & Gerhart, 2018). These elements contribute to the organization’s ability to compete in its specific sector.

In this era, organizations have realized the potential that an efficient and dependable workforce holds. More organizations are embracing diversity, talent management, performance management, and training and development as strategies for improving the workforce. The employees offer the entity a competitive advantage that is used to its advantage in the market (Anger, Tessema, Craft, & Tsegai, 2021). The inimitable nature of a competent workforce places an entity ahead of its competitors. The result is an efficient workforce that is empowered to perform their roles and responsibilities while leading to organizational success (SHRM, 2021).

Sales and marketing

The sales and marketing department is responsible for making sales. Initially, the department informs its clients about the available products and services. The marketing process helps the company’s department create awareness regarding the product/service portfolio, attributes, prices, expected benefits, and accessibility. This information allows clients to make comparisons to other companies offering similar services or products (UWA, 2017). As a result, they are empowered to make decisions about various purchases.

In an organization’s structure, the sales and marketing department performs its role with the objective of meeting the overall goals of the company. It complements the activities of other departments through collaboration and liaising. Once marketing activities are conducted successfully, the organization can achieve its sales. Sales lead to the achievement of financial goals through the generation of revenue. In addition, the sales and marketing department helps the organization achieve its non-financial goals related to market share and coverage. These elements contribute to the overall success of an entity.

Production and operations

The production and operations area is responsible for the entity’s core aspects. These aspects include the production of goods and delivery of services. In an organization where the products include both services and actual products, the entity’s production units assemble the raw materials required for the final product. The delivery of such products includes other essential services. The healthcare organization’s operation and production team are dependent on doctors, nurses, and other healthcare providers, who collaboratively administer the various products and services to patients. Without this area, an organization cannot exist. This area offers and delivers to clients the main items that meet the identified gap in the market. They offer various attributes that can set an organization apart. These include quality, quantity, accessibility, convenience, performance, efficiency, effectiveness, durability, appeal, affordability, versatility, and reliability. These attributes can attract or put off clients. Therefore, the workforce must be well-trained and motivated to achieve the right attributes consistently.

Through the activities that ensure marketing and sale of products or services, the organization can achieve both financial and non-financial objectives. The financial goals are related to the revenue obtained from the sales of goods and services. The non-financial goals are related to the organization’s popularity, brand positioning, market position, and customer loyalty. These elements sustain an organization’s operations through profit generation.

Recommended Organizational Structure

The healthcare organization should utilize a horizontal or flat structure. The horizontal structure has minimal management levels, and as a result, it will be easy to make decisions faster. The workforce can also be involved in the process of decision-making to enhance their skills at this rate (Palepu, Nitsch, & Narayan, 2020). The structure is recommended for the health facility because of the nature of operations that it runs. Attending to patients with neural conditions, who are mostly referred from other facilities in emergency situations, requires the organization to make decisions rapidly. The level of sensitivity that is associated with health operations demands that the workforce receives intense training. The bureaucracy that is found in traditional organizational structures would inhibit efficiency and success. In addition, the entity would work well with this structure due to the need for teamwork.

When treating a patient, the facility’s workforce must collaborate to meet the diverse needs simultaneously. This implies that a patient may need a surgeon, a nurse, a counselor, a sonographer, a chemist, and an anesthesiologist concurrently. This requires that all the health care providers participate in the process of making decisions. While they report to different managers, the absence of multiple middle managers reduces the time consumed when making decisions. Most importantly, the staff members require intense training to ensure that they are equipped to conduct their roles and responsibilities. This structure is ideal for ensuring that the organization is effective and successful at meeting its goals.

Conclusion

When using a flat or horizontal organizational structure, the process of decision-making is rapid and shared. The elimination of multiple levels of managers in the middle saves time on decision-making. It also leads to consultation among the healthcare workers to ensure that patients receive the best care. This structure will push the organization to embrace current training and development techniques for its human resources and create a culture that supports continuous learning. Shared decision-making will make employees feel responsible for their actions and the patient’s well-being. Thus, the healthcare providers will be committed to collaborating with their team members to ensure quality decisions are made. As a result, the entity will deliver its promise to clients, improve their health, and earn revenue sustainably. The empowerment of the workforce to manage their tasks in the three functional areas efficiently is critical for goal achievement.

References

Anger, O., Tessema, M., Craft, J., & Tsegai, S. (2021). A Framework For Assessing The Effectiveness Of Hr Metrics And Analytics: The Case Of An American Healthcare Institution. Global Journal of Human Resource Management, 9(1), 1-19.

Noe, R. A., Hollenbeck, J. R., & Gerhart, B. (2018). Fundamentals of Human Resource Management. McGraw-Hill Education.

Palepu, S., Nitsch, A., & Narayan, M. (2020). A Flat Organizational Structure for an Inclusive, Interdisciplinary, International, and Undergraduate-Led Team. Front. Educ., 5(102). doi:https://doi.org/10.3389/feduc.2020.00102

SHRM. (2021). Developing and Sustaining High-Performance Work Teams. Retrieved from Society of Human Resource Management: https://www.shrm.org/resourcesandtools/tools-and-samples/toolkits/pages/developingandsustaininghigh-performanceworkteams.aspx

UWA. (2017). Types of Positioning in Marketing.

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Scenario

Different areas within organizations work together to achieve organizational goals. These areas are often referred to as functional areas and typically include:

Human resources.
Sales and marketing.
Information technology.
Production and operations.
Finance and accounting.
Suppose leadership in the organization where you currently work (or have worked) is considering changes to organizational structure—in particular, to the functional areas it currently has. Before making any changes, the leaders have asked several managers, including you, to develop a white paper that outlines the manager’s recommendations for three functional areas that he or she believes to be essential to the success of the company. Based on the recommendations of each manager, as well as the strength of each manager’s arguments and supporting references, leadership will make final decisions.

Instructions

Based on the scenario above, select the three functional areas that you believe to be essential to the success of the organization. For each functional area, describe the primary purpose of the area and explain how that purpose works to promote and support the organizational goals.

Based on the scenario above, use the Week 6 Assignment Template [DOCX] to develop a white paper with the following sections.

Title page.
Introduction.
Explain the type of organization the assessment is based on and its primary goals.
Identify the three functional areas you believe are essential to the organizational structure.
Functional Area 1.
Explain the primary purpose of the functional area of an organization and why it is essential in supporting the overall organizational structure.
Explain how the purpose of the functional area supports the organizational goals in terms of continued organizational success.
Functional Area 2.
Explain the primary purpose of the functional area of an organization and why it is essential in supporting the overall organizational structure.
Explain how the purpose of the functional area supports the organizational goals in terms of continued organizational success.
Functional Area 3.
Explain the primary purpose of the functional area of an organization and why it is essential in supporting the overall organizational structure.
Explain how the purpose of the functional area supports the organizational goals in terms of continued organizational success.
Recommended Organizational Structure.
Describe the type of organizational structure best suited for the functional areas you selected, and justify your recommendation.
Conclusion.
Explain how your recommendation will promote the continued success of organizational goals.
References page.
Your white paper should be 3–5 pages in length, well organized, and written in clear, succinct language. Follow current APA rules for attributing sources that support your analysis and conclusions.