Archives for the Month of December 2006 on Sean Detwiler's MGMT 250 Journal
HR Simulation Final Report
Once again, we had the opportunity to reflect on our decisions and results from the HR Simulation. Our second fiscal year was quite different from the first. For various reasons, we had a substantial budget that allowed us to run each program, spend money on incidents, and raise wages and benefits every quarter. One of the main things that we were forced to learn during the second fiscal year was that deciding what to do with excess employees could not have a positive result. When we terminated excess level one employees, morale dropped considerably. When we decided to leave the additional employees on the payroll, productivity was severely affected. This result is a very unfortunate one for companies that have varying levels of production each quarter. Overall, the simulation provided many such insights that I am sure will be beneficial for me to have learned in the future.
Discipline and Termination
The last topic that we discussed in class this semester was discipline and termination. I can imagine that it is very difficult for a manager to have to discipline an employee, and even more difficult to terminate an employee. Such a situation can be upsetting in many different ways. For the employee, losing one’s job is clearly demoralizing and can have emotional and financial consequences. For the manager, it is difficult to have to experience the employee’s grief, to know that the employee may suffer emotionally and financially from the experience, and also to realize that hiring the individual may have been a bad decision in the first place. I can only hope that my career in management will see few such situations.
Performance Management
Performance management was one of the more interesting topics of the semester, which we read about and discussed in class for several days. In today’s business world, it is clear that companies must have detailed and effective performance management systems in order to ensure maximum performance from employees. Each step is vitally important; from setting goals, to training, to rewarding employees for their hard work. If even one of these steps is executed properly, then employee performance will suffer. My first job did not have any type of performance management system, and while I worked there I experienced first hand that employee performance was far worse than it should have been. Not too long after I left, I was not surprised to find out that the store had been shut down.
Feedback
In the last several weeks of class, we frequently discussed feedback. At first, we talked a lot about people’s fear of feedback. I can understand why people are afraid to be critiqued, but it is still a very important mechanism of the learning process that cannot be ignored. Receiving feedback is one of the primary ways that people learn from their actions. Without proper and timely feedback, people will continue to make the same mistakes, and that is unacceptable on a personal and professional level. Perhaps the most important aspect of feedback is its timeliness. For example, if a professor neglects to return a graded exam in a timely manner, students may not remember the exam well enough to learn anything from the results.
Goal Setting
Throughout the semester, this class has strongly stressed the importance of goal setting and career planning. We were introduced to the SMART and START NOW goal frameworks for use in our learning plans. Each of these frameworks forced me to further specify the details of my goals and the actions I would take to attain them. This specification helped me to truly understand my goals, and I believe that I am better prepared to work towards them now. I intend to make use of these strategic frameworks in the future whenever possible, and I am sure that doing so will always be beneficial.