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Company E

Company E is a telecom consultancy company that outsources contracts for both civil site constructions and equipment installations, the company was founded in 2011. The company started out small with five construction workshops, at first they relied on the co-founders’ contacts and reputation in addition to competitive price bidding to sign their first contracts, over the following two years the company illustrated high standards when it came to work quality as well as tight commitment to deadlines, it also versified their services to include equipment installation and maintenance in addition to their original construction core services, which led to relatively huge growth in both their revenues and market share. On 2014 company A signed a strategic partnership agreement with one of the two mobile operators in the country, the agreement granted the company with financial funds in return to managing most of the operator construction and equipment installation all over the country. Following the partnership, the company widened its service coverage to include new regions and went through a restructure phase to fully integrate its service chain with the new partner.
We have held four interviews with participants from company E, three of them were with technical engineers and the fourth was part of the marketing team, all the participants have joined the company at least a year before the partnership was signed. After conducting all four interviews and summarizing the data collected we can say that company E had gone through the below changes perceived by the employees themselves after the partnership.
Before the partnership the employees described the workload as “relatively big” and “fluctuates a lot” but that changed after the partnership due to the fact that the number of employees have increased and despite the increased overall work volume the employees’ individual workload has been perceived to be “less” and “more consistent” than before the partnership. The newly introduced processes have limited the employee’s freedom over their tasks as the company made it clear that everyone should uphold these processes. The employees felt that their contribution and work value to the company have decreased, they also felt that the job was less challenging than before the partnership took place. Some changes were introduced to the working hours after the partnership, the company increased break time and encouraged the employees to take them in order to recharge their energy, at the same time the company became stricter about upholding starting and leaving hours.
As the hierarchy of the company expanded vertically some of the participants felt that their understanding of their roles and responsibilities decreased, before they had a “higher level of understanding” this understanding mainly meant that they had an idea about how would they fit in the strategy of the company, after the partnership they only had a “low level of understanding” about their tasks and how they are supposed to handle them. Part of the introduced processes was to allocate the employees to one project only, before it was very common that one employee would be working on several projects, which created a conflicts between tasks under different projects and the employees used to spend a lot of time to prioritize their tasks but after this process was introduced these conflicts were only limited to the transition time between the end of one project and the start of the next one.
The employees felt they had enough physical resources to perform their jobs and that was consistent throughout their whole employment period. As for the information required to perform the tasks, before the partnership the employees often needed to research them especially when they faced “uncertainty” while performing a task, after the partnership the employees were mostly provided with enough information before they were required to perform their tasks.
Since most of company E’s work was directly connected to customers requirement employees couldn’t predict their activities and tasks far ahead of time, in most cases they had a rather general plan that got changed and tuned according to the customer’s requests, before the partnership the technical employees had a lot of interaction with both the marketing and sales teams which provided them with more information about what to expect their job would be and what contracts are being signed but as the company restructured the hierarchy the inter-division interaction became minimal cutting out that source of information and making it even harder for the employees to predict their job related activities.
As mentioned before employees used to be assigned several projects before the partnership however, afterwards they mostly handled only one, this allocation helped the employees focus their time and energy and become more efficient but at the same time it meant that employees sometimes had to work only on activities that wasn’t “fulfilling” for them, thus in order to change that they felt obligated to show their qualifications and experience to get to do the “desired tasks”. When it comes to the balance between the quantity and quality of work, the employees were more satisfied with that balance before the partnership took place, they felt the the freedom and challenge to face uncertainty motivated them to be “creative” and give their best, on the other hand the strict processes and instructions after the partnership increased the efficiency but left the employees feeling “limited” and restricted from being creative.
The social interactions between co-workers especially in the same divisions were described as “open and fun” and “supportive” and that remained for the most part consistent throughout the participants’ employment period in company E, but as mentioned before the inter-department relationship became “slightly competitive” due to the structured hierarchy. When asked about their supervisors support the participants distinguished between two terms first, “support” which meant the likelihood of their supervisors hearing their problems and acting to solve them, second “guidance” which meant the likelihood of their supervisors providing advises regarding their work and position in the company. According to the employees the levels of both support and guidance have increased after the partnership took place.

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1 Introduction
1.1 Work Environment
1.1.1 Understanding The Work Environment
1.1.2 Consequences of Work Environment .
1.2 Funding Choice
1.3 Problem
1.4 Purpose
2 Theory
2.1 Review of Work Environment Models
2.2 Work Environment Model Comparison
2.3 Selected Dimensions
2.4 Effect of External Funding
3 Method .
3.1 Research Approach
3.2 Research Design
3.3 Data Collection .
3.3.1 Case Selection
3.3.2 Question Guide .
3.3.3 Interviews .
3.4 Data Analysis
3.5 Research Trustworthiness
3.5.1 Credibility .
3.5.2 Transferability .
3.5.3 Dependability .
3.5.4 Confirmability
3.6 Ethical Considerations
4 Results
4.1 Company A
4.2 Company B
4.3 Company C
4.4 Company D
4.5 Company E
5 Analysis
5.1 Company A
5.2 Company B
5.3 Company C
5.4 Company D .
5.5 Company E
5.6 Integrated Analysis
6 Conclusions .
7 Discussion