The NEOMA Business School (NBS) is one of France's top "grand coles" and the result of a 2013 merger between the Reims Management School and the Rouen Business School. It has campuses in Reims and Rouen as well as a campus in Paris. In addition to its highly ranked Masters of Management program, it offers undergraduate business degree programs, a variety of specialized master's programs, an MBA and Executive MBA, and a doctoral program. To support this broad range of programs, NEOMA has over 200 faculty members with responsibility for teaching, producing top quality research, and supporting the school's programs and students.

As part of the merger process, the faculty support organization was reorganized. The Responsable Unit d'Appui Administratif et Oprationnel (UAAO) or Administrative and Operational Support Unit is responsible for providing administrative support for the faculty. It produces course syllabi, reimburses relevant faculty expenses, maintains faculty databases to ensure compliance with accreditation requirements, and other activities. The unit, in collaboration with faculty department chairs, also supports and coordinates the faculty recruiting process.

The UAAO is comprised of four professor assistants who have been with the school for a long time, each of them having been with the Reims Management School since before the merger. As full-time employees in France, they enjoy a 35-hour work week, generous vacation and health care benefits, and a relaxed academic work environment. The assistants occupy the same large office and support a certain set of faculty members. That is, one assistant supports faculty members with the last name beginning with A-G, another assistant supports faculty with last names beginning with H-N, and so on. The four assistants enjoy each other's company and when professors visit their office, they are greeted warmly. There is usually some good-natured joking involved.

The UAAO assistants report to a manager, who in turn, reports to the associate dean overseeing the faculty and research programs at the school. Other administrative units at the school provide other types of support services including grading and reporting requirements, scheduling, and communications with students. These other units report up through a different associate dean. Where the work of the UAAO begins and ends compared to these other departments is relatively clear to the UAAO assistants but not readily obvious to new faculty. As a result, the UAAO assistants often have to re-direct faculty requests to the other appropriate offices.

Support procedures are highly formalized and reflect the French tradition of hierarchical control. The assistants are required to follow the protocols including when and how faculty are to request services, the quality and speed of service to be achieved, and so on. A professor needing help with a class makes a request of the assistant who then plans and performs the work. However, the requests can vary considerably. Sometimes professors require a lot of support and help, for example when they are teaching a new class or when the professor is new to the school and does not understand the procedures. However, because each professor, class, or department is somewhat unique, the specific tasks or actions cannot always be specified in advance and several exceptions and unique situations arise during each day, month, or year.

Recruiting activities, in particular, are highly variable. Although there tends to be a recruiting season, each candidate and each candidate's schedule is slightly different. The assistants have to arrange travel to and from the school as well as between the different campuses in different parts of the country, schedule interviews with different faculty members and administrators, and prepare and distribute different materials. Invariably, a candidate's visit requires last-minute adjustments and the assistants have to be available to make the arrangements.

The associate dean for faculty and research who was part of the merger resigned in 2016. The new associate dean and the manager of the UAAO received feedback from a variety of sources suggesting that the way work was being done in the unit and the level of satisfaction among the assistants was not up to the level or standard that everyone wanted. They noticed a pattern in the feedback from faculty members, department chairs, and the UAAO assistants themselves. The assistants were concerned that requests from faculty in different departments varied greatly in terms of complexity, timing, and urgency. Finance professors might want large spreadsheets to be produced while organization behavior professors might want different cases prepared. It also often required different levels of discipline knowledge. For example, supporting Dr. A, a member of the strategy department, was quite different from supporting Dr. B, a member of the finance department. Similarly, the department chairs were concerned because different UAAO assistants performed different tasks in different ways. Dr. C and Dr. Z, who taught the same course but were supported by different assistants, could have different experiences in terms of quality or timeliness because of the different discipline-related requests.

To improve the quality of the unit and the satisfaction of the assistants, the new associate dean and the manager began thinking about how the jobs of the assistants were designed. Was the variation in performance and engagement due to personal skill differences, inconsistent procedures, or task structure? They remembered that in the past, the assistant's work had been assigned by the department, not alphabet. Each assistant would be responsible for supporting all of the faculty in two departments and they wondered if returning to this way of working would improve the engagement and satisfaction of the assistants and improve the quality of the work" (Cummings & Worley, 2020, p. 93).

After review, answer the following questions.

Is there anything that NEOMA did really well? If your opinion, did NEOMA do anything wrong? If you were an agent in this school, is there anything you would have done differently? Why or why not..