Entries in the Category "MGMT250"
Wrap Up
Everyone gets something out of the classes they take each semester. Therefore, this entry will be dedicated to talking about one of the lessons I learned because I took MGMT 250. Out of the several points I took away from the course, I feel that one of them is extremely important and can be used in the course of my daily life as well as my future career. This point is that there is no set way to do something or achieve a desired result. What works for one person will not necessarily work for another nor will what works under one set of circumstances necessarily work under a different set of circumstances. Just like there was no set formula in the HR Simulation that said doing “A” will cause “B”, reality is not based on a formula. This situation is why there are several ways to motivate people, to appraise their performance, and to train people. It is also why we had several different forms of classes ranging from lectures to small group discussions. In my opinion, the ability to recognize this and act accordingly is a very important part of decision making and problem solving.
The HR Simulation: Evaluating Performance
There are many ways to measure a company’s performance, and many of them are dependant on what one is looking for. For example, investors look at a company’s profitability and how risky the investment would be while creditors look at how capable the company is of paying off its debts. Different departments within a company look at different things; the HR department looks at different ways of measuring the performance of employees whereas the finance department looks at the state of the company’s finances and how to best use the available funds. However, there is one common way of measuring a company’s performance, and all concerned parties look at it. This measure is the bottom line.
Unfortunately, during the course of the HR simulation, we were never given our company’s bottom line or any other measures of how well our company as a whole was doing, such as sales or operating income. Instead we were mainly given HR-related measures with a few other measures mixed in. These measures were how many units were produced at overtime, the quality index, the productivity level, the accident rate, fringe benefits, the turnover rate, the morale level, the number of grievances, the absenteeism rate, and some industry averages. It is conceivable that many, if not all, of these measures affect more than just HR. In fact many of them probably have an impact on the bottom line. It could have been extremely helpful to see how the HR measures affected the overall performance of the company. If the company was able to be extremely competitive despite some low HR results, then some of the pressure to be better than everyone else in terms of the HR measures would be removed. Conversely, if the bottom line was extremely hurt by low HR performance, more pressure would be applied to the HR manager because the company needed to remain competitive in order to survive. I also think it is unrealistic that the HR department would not have access to this information.
Recruiting
The other day in class we discussed recruiting from an employer’s perspective. I could not help but wonder if the discussion could be useful in applying for jobs. In my own personal experiences, I have always found that it is easier to do well when I knew what was expected of me and what to look for. While I realize that every employer is going to be looking for something different, I believe that having a general understanding of how employers view and approach the process of recruitment can be extremely helpful. The knowledge of how many recruitment resources they have at their fingertips could be especially helpful. Keeping this fact in mind should ensure that an applicant works hard to leave the best impression because he or she will realize how easily the employer can just move on to the next applicant. It also gives people a better idea of how to apply for a job. Being able to get a job after college is an extremely important part of career development, and I believe that because we have discussed recruitment from both an employer’s and an applicant’s perspectives, we will be in a better position when that time comes.
The Right Internship?
In writing the second portion of the Learning Plan, we had to come up with several goals for ourselves. One of my goals was to get a good job immediately after college. This job had to be representative of my desired career path. In the Learning Plan, I stated that one step I would take towards achieving this goal was through summer internships.
Not only are summer internships an important part of getting a job after college, but they are a good way to make sure that one’s desired career path fits with one’s personality and interests. However, can one really be sure that the internship he or she accepts is actually related to what he or she wants to do? I ask this because this is exactly what happened to me this past summer. I accepted an internship that I thought was similar to the Wall Street-type jobs that I think I would like to pursue such as financial analysis. I made this assumption based on the job description I was given which while it did not actually lie about the job, was extremely misleading and left many of the details open to interpretation. I suppose you could say that I saw what I wanted to see. It turned out that the job was nothing more than mindless grunt work that helped the company’s clients perform financial analysis and/or make investment decisions. My job was to compile the information as opposed to actually doing anything with it, and not once did I actually come into contact with someone whose job was even remotely similar to what I was looking for. It was extremely disappointing and left me no closer to knowing if I was making the right choice for a career.
Fortunately for me this internship was after my freshman year of college; I have two more summers to get it right and really test the waters, but what about someone who did not have this luxury? Some people wait until the summer before their senior year to intern and others decide their planned career is not the right one after performing an internship and change paths. These people need this chance to make sure that they are choosing the right career. If they choose the wrong internship because of a misleading job description, they will be denied this chance, and I do not think that is fair. Unfortunately, I am not really sure anything can be done about it.
Conscious in the Business World
Yesterday in class we discussed the Tom Mendola case. This case involved a worker whose family desperately needed his income, but he was unproductive and had already been given chances to improve his work ethic. In my opinion, the obvious choice for the company is to fire him. His lack of work ethic negatively affects the bottom line and could negatively affect the performance of his colleagues, especially if he is given unlimited chances. Therefore, from the company’s standpoint there really is no choice but to fire him.
However, my conscious kept nagging at me about the decision to fire him. Even after talking about offering Tom a generous severance package and help finding a new job, my conscious kept bothering me. All I could think was that his family really needed the money. If this situation was real, I do not know if I could have lived with myself for firing someone is such dire circumstances.
Obviously this is the type of choice that businesses and all other institutions that employ people have to make all the time. I would imagine that more often than not employers make the choice that is best for the company, but does their conscious ever interfere? This situation was not even real and my conscious was giving me a hard time which I doubt bodes well for reality. It left me wondering how one reconciles their conscious with corporate needs. Is it possible? Does one just abandon their conscious or do they let it guide their decision? Is their even room for a conscious in the business world? We put so much emphasis on ethics these days, and I cannot help but wonder what role that should play here.
No Feedback is Good Feedback?
Whether positive or negative, feedback is almost always a good thing. It tells people what they are doing well and what they need to work on. So what happens when a person is not given feedback? I was placed in this situation this past summer when my boss never gave me any indication of how well I was doing until my last day. As a result, I was only able to guess what my boss thought of my work. While I realized that a monkey could have done my job, I needed feedback to make sure everything really was fine. For all I knew my job could have seemed so easy because I was oversimplifying it. If this were the case, I could have been making mistakes without even knowing it. Normally, this situation would definitely lead to feedback, but I was not even sure my boss was examining my work because I imagined that if he was, he would have said something. At the same time, I remembered the saying “no news is good news” and wondered if this could apply to feedback as well. It was a very confusing situation, and I do not think it was a good situation.
My Goals
Today in class we talked about goals, and one thing we had to do was come up with a list of our dreams. It made me realize just how few goals I have in life. It’s not that I do not want to accomplish a lot, but rather all my goals are broad. For example, I want a successful career in finance, but I have no goals about how I am going to get there or what I am going to do when I do get there. It also made me realize just how focused I am on my professional life.
Coming up with ideas about my personal life was extremely difficult. Aside from the fact that I think it might be nice to have a family one day and that I want to spend several months in Europe between college and starting my first job, I did not know what else to say. As a result, my dreams became somewhat repetitive. I am someone who has always been extremely future-oriented, but I never realized how much of my future I had devoted to a career. While coming up with a list of dreams seemed obnoxious at the time, it made me realize what areas of my life I need to focus on more in order to be happy.
HR Simulation
At this point in the semester, we are about half way through the HR Simulation. Therefore, I decided I would use this entry to reflect on the simulation thus far. Honestly, it is not what I expected. I do not feel like I am in charge of anything but rather like I have to assign arbitrary values to things. Even though I know that my group is trying to keep our company competitive, it does not feel this way. I think that this is because we do not actually see how things play out. Instead we just receive a sheet with numbers on it that is supposed to be indicative of how well we performed each quarter. I have no idea how the simulation could be made to feel more realistic, but I think if there is a way to do so, it will be much more valuable.
Ethical Missteps
The thing I remember most from my accounting class last semester was simply a statement my professor made. He said that business schools had been coming under fire for teaching students to place too much emphasis on the bottom line and not enough emphasis on ethics. The scandals, such as Enron and WorldCom, that have occurred in the last few years gives the statement a basis, but can one really blame business schools for these scandals? Can you train someone to have a skewed sense of right and wrong? Can you train someone to believe that unethical behavior is okay? I find the possibility of a positive answer to these questions scary. Not only does it make me feel as if someone could program me, but the possibility of being programmed to do something that I currently think is wrong makes me feel as if my moral compass is meaningless. Most people’s sense of right and wrong is established before college, so would business schools just be playing off of an already warped view of what ethical behavior is? After all, many people do not see a problem in their behavior when it is unethical. I do not recall Ken Lay denying that he had done what he was accused of during the period between his conviction and his death this past summer. I just remember him saying that he had done nothing wrong. Does mean that he believed that there was nothing unethical about his behavior? Perhaps this question is the scariest of them all. Regardless of whether or not this is the case, the fact that high levels of unethical behavior in the business world even exist is tragic. Laws such as Sarbanes-Oxley should not even have to be talked about let alone enacted. Unfortunately, we live in a world where reality is very different. The good guy does not always win and the bad guy does not always lose, and oftentimes the bad guys take a few good guys down with him. Both Enron and WorldCom did this to their shareholders. Until reality somehow changes, people will continue to make ethical missteps.
Training Difficulties
For the past couple of class periods, we have been discussing employee. These discussions have gotten me thinking about my own experiences with training. Having held several jobs, I have had multiple training experiences as both a trainee and a trainer. However, all of these experiences have been one on one. In my opinion, in a one on one training experience, it is harder to be the trainer than the trainee.
On the one hand, as a trainee all I had to do was observe the trainer, practice under his or her watchful eye, ask questions when I was confused about something, and in one instance decode some very poor instructions. No one ever sent me to do things on my own until I was ready, and even then, I was always given the chance to ask questions about different areas that I struggled in. My only worry was that any questions or struggles I had would lead to my coworkers thinking I was a fool.
On the other hand, being the trainer requires much more. The most obvious aspect of training is knowledge. No one would be asked to train someone else if they did not understand how to do the job. In my case, all the jobs I have had have been extremely repetitive, and therefore, I had a firm understanding of how to do them. As a result, I was able to do my job rather quickl, and had to force myself to slow down when training someone. Another aspect of training someone is being able to explain how to do the job in a manner that is simple and concise so that someone who has never performed the job and/or has little background in one or more aspects of the job can understand. People’s explanations almost always make sense to themselves even when they do not make sense to others. I would worry that I had failed to make things clear enough for the trainee to understand, especially because I tend to talk fast. Even when I would have a trainee walk me through each step of my job, I worried that they were just regurgitating what I had said earlier without actually understanding it. In one case, the person I was training was supposed to be taking notes but he was not writing anything down. Personally, I found this to be extremely frustrating as I had to tell him to write things down. Finally, I found it difficult to know how to split the time between a trainee observing me and a trainee practicing. I would worry that I was not giving the trainee enough practice time. In my case, I was also worried that I would miss a mistake made by a trainee and then get in trouble for it. This difficulty was especially problematic because my jobs have usually been extremely boring. While I normally would have welcomed the chance to do anything else, I always found watching someone else do my job even more boring than doing it myself. As a result, I did not want to let the trainee practice. All these challenges combined to make my experiences training people more difficult than my experiences being trained.
Fringe Benefits and the HR Simulation
Every week when working on the HR Simulation, we have to make a decision about whether or not to increase fringe benefits. If we do decide to increase fringe benefits, we have to determine what benefits to add and therefore, how much to increase fringe benefits by. According to the simulation, benefits play a role in morale and therefore, employee productivity and retention. However, in class yesterday we learned that benefits have an even greater role in the workplace. The benefits a company offers can either attract or deter potential employees. As a result, benefits play a role in the hiring process. Personally, I think it would be useful to include this aspect of benefits in the simulation. After all, recruitment and hiring are aspects of human resources. Moreover, hiring employees is an aspect of the simulation as evidenced by both Incident D and the fact that we are responsible for figuring out how many employees to hire at each level each quarter. The results we get from Professor Poonamallee could include a section on how many potential employees were lost to other firms because of benefits. This section could be useful as it would help us see how the benefits each “company” in the simulation offers affects their abilities to attract employees and compete in the local industry. I believe that this would show us what benefits matter to people, and it would make the simulation more realistic.
Motivating Factors
In order for employees to be as productive and efficient as possible they have to enjoy what they are doing. Otherwise they are apt to not only get bored, but to get distracted as well. This situation was apart in both my not from this past summer and the office as a whole. In my specific case, my job was the same exact thing everyday. I basically spent my day copying and pasting tables into an excel spreadsheet and then sorting the spreadsheet, typing the same sentence about 100 times in a row, and finally typing numbers next to the item they corresponded with. There a few other little projects I was supposed to work on if I had time, but these projects were pretty much more of the same boring stuff as my daily work. As a result, I got distracted very easily. In fact I probably spent about twenty percent of my day doing random things on the internet instead of actually working. Everyone else in my department, including the department head, seemed to be in the same predicament. While none of us did the exact same thing, their jobs were equally mindless and boring. In fact one of my coworkers admitted one day that about every ten minutes, he would go and play an online game that he did not like or really even know how to play because it was more interesting than what he was supposed to be doing. I never once got reprimanded for my activities nor do I believe anyone else did. As far as I know, we all consistently got all of our daily work done each day. However, had we been more focused on what we were supposed to be doing, we would have had more time for small projects and therefore, more projects would have gotten done. Moreover, there were no other factors to motivate us. With the exception of the department head and one other member of the department, we were all either summer interns or on a summer-fall co-op so we did not have promotions, raises, or any other aspects of permanent employment to consider. The department head was in no danger of being fired; not only did he help found the company, but his brother was the owner and CEO. I suppose the company’s profit might have been a factor in his case, but it clearly was not enough to deter his lack of focus. My experience this past summer showed me just how much interest is important in terms of motivation and productivity. It also showed me that if I were to ever have a job similar to the one I had this past summer, I would probably go crazy.
Career Fair
Today, I spent about an hour and a half at the Career Fair. I did not need to go because I am only a sophomore, and therefore, I will not being applying for a full time job for two years. Furthermore, most places will not begin recruiting interns until around January. I only went because I figured it would be a good learning experience that would afford me the chance to see how one worked. It wound up being much more than that. My first stop was Key Bank, and it was here, that I found myself getting into the Career Fair. Originally, I just planned on asking a few questions in order to learn about the process. However, I found that the recruiter was more than willing to talk about the bank as well as the internship opportunities they have there. I even learned that they have an office back home in Boston, despite the fact that they do not actually have any branches there. Afterwards, I began to do this with other companies that were there, and a while later, I was not sure if I was there to learn or to start planning my future.
Overall, it was definitely a good experience. I had no idea that something like a career fair could be valuable if you are not looking for a job, but it was. Through the Career Fair, I learned about what type of companies have positions that interest me as well as what I can expect from different types of positions. It also made me realize that I could never be a recruiter. All the recruiters I talked to seemed to be able to just sell the company and the opportunities their company has to offer which is a skill I certainly do not possess. Furthermore, I do not understand why, but I was nervous about attending the career fair and every time I approached a new booth. Each recruiter seemed to be able to seamlessly assuage my nerves. I do not believe I have the people skills to do this. While I had no intention of becoming a recruiter in the first place, but I now know that I will never change my mind. To my surprise I learned much more than I expected at the career fair. It was probably the most valuable part of my week.
Teams
I think it’s safe to say that everyone’s worked in teams at one point or another. These days, it would be impossible to go through school without doing some type of group work or group project. Given the role groups and teams will play throughout our lives, it makes sense that we would have to work in groups when we’re younger. Teamwork is a major part of life, and it is important to acquire these skills when we are younger. All professions require people to work together. In the business world, professionals almost always have to collaborate with each other and work together on projects and presentations. In settings such as the OR and the trauma room, medical professionals have to work in teams in order to reach a common goal, usually saving a patient’s life. Similar situations can be found in most, if not all, professions. All of these environments require people to work together and depend on each other in order to reach the desired outcome. However, I can’t help but wonder if we use the word “team” too much and in the wrong context. For example, at my job this past summer, the employees were divided into teams, but I never got the sense that we were actual teams. In my team, we all did our own jobs and there was very little collaboration in terms of the actual work. To my knowledge, no one’s work depended on any one else’s. I suppose in some sense we all had the same goal. However, it was a very broad goal, and I believe it was more of the purpose of the “team” than an actual goal. Honestly, I felt like it would have been better to describe us as a department because in my mind, that’s what we were. My experience has shown me that the word team no longer means team, but has become interchangeable with any other word that can be used to describe a group of people. I don’t know why we do this. Although if I had to venture a guess, I’d say that people, especially, in the business world have it ingrained in their minds that people are supposed to work in teams, and when this isn’t the case, they stretch the meaning of team to make themselves feel better. After all, people always seem determined to make things work the way they’re supposed to work. Why should teams be any different?
Discrimination
The other day in class we discussed discrimination in the hiring process. Laws such as the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Americans with Disabilities Act make it illegal to discriminate based on disabilities or characteristics such as race, gender, and ethnicity. These laws exist because society believes discrimination to be wrong. However, discrimination still happens in all aspects of life, including the hiring process. From my own life I can think of two instances in which people were not given a fair shot at receiving a certain job for one reason or another. The first example is based on an experience occurred during my job this summer. My boss was accepting resumes to fill the vacancies that would exist once the summer interns left. My boss threw out all the resumes of applicants who did not live in the area because he felt that interviewing people from out of town was inconvenient for both him and the applicants. He felt this way because the company was small, and they would have to come to Boston to be interviewed. While I feel that interviewing people from out of town may sometimes impractical, I believe that eliminating applicants simply because of where they are from is discrimination based on location. I actually learned of the other incident in MGMT 250. During the resume session, one of the talked about throwing out a resume of a feminist on the basis that it was impractical to hire her to work with a group of brokers due to the conflicts that would arise. While this may be true, it may not be. The applicant may very well have been able to suppress her feminist side and perform the job better than any of the other applicants. It may have been better to ask the applicant how she would handle working with the people she would work with and give her examples of things she might encounter. After hearing her responses and seeing her responses, a judgment could have been made. While I do not believe that these laws protect people who are not given a chance based on a personality trait or location, I believe that to do so is discrimination. What does everyone else think?
~Jen
First Entry
So this is a little late, and for that I would like to apologize. To be honest, I completely forgot about the September 15th deadline and figured that I just needed five entries by October 13th in order to meet the first deadline. I promise that from now on I will pay more attention to when all the deadlines actually are.
Now onto the introductions. My name is Jen, and I'm a sophomore management major, who is concentrating in finance. I'm writing this blog as an assignment for my MGMT 250 class (which should be tagged at the bottom--I hope that works). I chose management as my major and finance as my concentration because I've always been interested in the financial world and enjoy watching CNBC occassionally. My goal after college is to go into some career that involves working with investments. Although I'm not sure what I want to do specifically. Well, that's me.
~Jen