OGL 481 Pro-Seminar I:

PCA-Political Frame Worksheet

Worksheet Objectives:
1. Describe the political frame
2. Apply the political frame to your personal case situation

Complete the following making sure to support your ideas and cite from the textbook and other
course materials per APA guidelines. After the peer review, you have a chance to update this and
format for your Electronic Portfolio due in Module 6.

1) Briefly restate your situation from Module 1 and your role.

In Module 1, I spoke of my role as a Treasury Management Implementation Associate III

in the Treasury Department of City National Bank. The situation referred to the transition
to working from home during COVID-19 and how the department was not ready or
prepared the the amount of work that came and how that would trickle down to the
colleagues. The senior colleagues who were used to providing training based on their
skill set were not able to transition smoothly to virtual training and did not like to provide
training. Fortunately, I was the only colleague who did not mind providing virtual
training and liked it. I went from training on one system to four systems and creating
guides while still assisting in completing my normal workload. I noticed my schedule
went from 25% training with the completion of my daily workload to about 65% training
with the completion of my daily workload which naturally became an issue.

As a result, I would have to advocate for myself to either have a training role created or
for the training to go back to being evenly distributed so that I could maintain my
required workload. This did work in my favor and a new role was created for me as a
Quality Assurance Implementation & Training Associate I, where I solely focused on
training colleagues to complete the tasks correctly. When I wasn’t training colleagues I
was performing quality control on completed assignments so that I could gauge which
colleagues needed a refresher course.

2) Describe how the politics of the organization influenced the situation.

As it pertains to the politics that revolved around my situation, due to the nature of the
times (it occurred during COVID) there was not much politics involved. The only thing
that was under the realm of politics was having to campaign for the position to be
created. This included different emails and phone calls convincing the Department
1
 Manager that this position was indeed necessary. Thankfully no one else was eyeing the
opportunity or wanted the trainer position, but that was because they did not have the
patience or capacity.

The advocating for the position to be created that took place involved a few emails and
some conference calls with different colleagues. The initial email was sent to the head of
the department with my daily tasks, a breakdown of how much time is spent on each task,
the guides that have been created (including the previous one before upgraded
information was added), and the outcome of our department’s analytics during the span
of my becoming the sole trainer. After she reviewed the email a Teams Meeting was set
up and there were a series of questions asked including, how sustainable the position is,
where are the guides stored, and whether or not there were guides provided by the
respective departments. Luckily, once I provided the guides that were distributed by
product managers and we compared them to guides I had created the advocating portion
was over and the position was approved.

3) Recommend how you would use organizational politics for an alternative course of
action regarding your case.

Since this was my first time in an instance where office politics were involved, I cannot
think of an alternate way that this could have been handled. If anything, I would advocate
for this position to exist in every department. Currently, training is handled by existing
senior colleagues where it feels very much like “sink or swims.” Hence there ought to be
an existing trainer who can assist new and existing employees learn the job. This will
keep the department updated on new and all changes in real time ensuring they stay
ahead of the problem before there is one. Currently, any updates are seen until a Quality
Control colleague notices it, which means they were receiving them days or weeks later.

4) Reflect on what you would do or not do differently given what you have learned
about this frame.

All in all, there is nothing that I would do differently in my situation stated. Instead, I
prefer to advocate for the Learning and Development Department to have active trainers
in all departments before I entered the department and COVID-19. My particular
situation was unique since there was never a reason for a virtual trainer. This position was
only considered and taken seriously because the implementation information was mostly
held by senior employees. When senior colleagues retire the vast amount of knowledge
leaves with them which unfortunately is a known pattern with employers.