Archives for the Month of November 2005 on Amanda Juliano's Online Journal
HR Simulation Meetings
The meetings for my HR Simulation group have changed drastically over the past 8 weeks. At the beginning of this simulation, we would spend 2 hours laboring over our incidents and other decisions. We were incredibly cautious with regards to our budget and would always under spend just to be on the safe side. At our meeting last night, which was only 30 minutes, we spent every last penny that we could without exceeding our budget. This is a very different team than the one we started with eight weeks ago. Even though we are not putting as much time into each meeting, we seem to be getting better results from our quicker decisions and less cautious spending. I think we had a much better Y2 than we would have if things hadn’t changed.
Blogging
I really enjoy the blogging assignment. I think it was a great option for the grading contract and should be continued in the future. The only problem with it is, I sometimes forget about it and I end up doing three blogs the night before they are due! I know we are in college now and it’s not the professor’s job of reminding us to stay on top of this, but that would be nice. Maybe Prof. Powley could just insert a reminder in his slide with our upcoming assignments for the next week. I know I could benefit from a small reminder once a week, and I’m sure other students could too.
Improvements for Appraisals
Yesterday in class we discussed how to make the performance appraisals of Case professors better. I think the appraisal need to leave more room just for writing out your thoughts about the professor and the class. The standardized questions sometimes leave things out and they don’t always let you express concern in a particular area. I know there have been times when I wanted to address a certain problem and the form didn’t give me the chance.
I also liked the suggestion of having, in addition to the students, an expert come in and evaluate the professor. This may not be a feasible idea, but it would have its benefits. There was also the idea of having the professor leave the room and having the person who deals with the evaluations come in and have a discussion with the class. I don’t know if many people would be comfortable putting their face with a complaint. I know I am always concerned that my evaluation of a professor might come back to haunt me later.
Feedback
At my last job, we had performance reviews every six months; at least that’s what they told me. I worked there for a year and a half and never received one when I should have had three. What I found really interesting was we still got our raises that were supposedly dependent upon our performance reviews that we never got. There was absolutely no feedback at this job. No explanation of why someone else, who had been there a much shorter time than you, was promoted before you were. Managers really need to step it up and give feedback. It just creates unhappy, resentful workers if they don’t. For example, I had a friend who was with this company for three years; she was a crew trainer at the time that our crew chief left. So of course she was expecting to get the promotion to chief but instead the managers gave it to someone who hadn’t even been there a year yet. My friend was so upset she put in her two weeks. She and the managers eventually talked over the situation and she was made a manager, but the whole problem could have been avoided if they had just given reviews and explained what she needed to do to get the promotion.
HR Simulation - Annual Report
For my part of the annual report, I had to write about the progress we are making on the goals we established at our first meeting. We have made progress on all of our goals, but I think it was mostly incidental progress. We never sat down at our meetings, looked over our goals and then proceeded from there, we always just added a new program, or increased the amount of money to a certain area and that was it. We didn’t set out at our meetings to meet our goals. I think this is something my team needs to change in Y2; we need to be more focused on our goals, and actually set a specific number to reach for morale, turnover, etc. This would give us a better focus for our meetings and they might go a little quicker.
Jonah Creighton Case
I have to say I wasn’t very surprised by the outcome of the Jonah Creighton case. You could see it coming from the very beginning that the company was going to get rid of him so they wouldn’t have to deal with the problem of discrimination. What did surprise me was how little Jonah fought considering he held this belief so highly. I thought he would have alerted Martin to the situation sooner and nudged him to pursue it. The upper level management would have taken Martin more seriously, because he was the victim of the discrimination, and they knew he could have taken legal action, unlike Jonah.
Ethics
The topic of ethics is such a sticky one. People have all kinds of differing ideas about what is ethical and what is not and most likely you will not agree on everything. The exercise we did in class was interesting, especially because we were able to compare our results to those in the book. On some topics we were pretty close, but on others, such as the taking the $200 football tickets, we weren’t so accurate, in fact, we were completely opposite. The book said, I think, 70% said it was unacceptable to take the tickets and our class had about 60% say it was ok. Maybe we’re just really big football fans and they weren’t.
HR Simulation : Ambiguous Once Again
For the past two quarters, my HR simulation group has received the same comment in the messages section of our Human Resources Report. The message says that our “level one workers are VERY discontent that others received raises. Talk of unionization.” The thing is, we gave them raises, both times. The simulation has so many flaws in it. Last night we worked on Incident H – self directed work teams. The incident never said if all the workers in the company were going to be on teams, or if there was only going to be one team. This caused our group to spend more time debating that issue than we did actually debating about the options we wanted to include. This is just one of many things that are ambiguous with this simulation. If there was anyway to rewrite some of these incidents it should be done so they are clearer cut. The teams should have to spend so much time trying to decipher them.
Harrah's Casino
As I was reading the Harrah’s Casino paper, I was thinking back to when I stayed at their Las Vegas location a few years back when the incentive plan was first being introduced. I remember how fantastic the staff was, and know I know why. I think the incentive plan was a great idea. It was a way to get employees motivated quickly and keep them motivated for a short while. Eventually though, the plan ran out of steam and employees were fed up with it. I think the plan can be salvaged if the HR department reinvigorates it by changing the types of goals the employees must meet. They could still be customer service related goals, and maybe the teams could be smaller and there could be non monetary rewards involved as well. Something the whole class agreed on was rewarding those teams who kept their customer service ratings at a constant level from quarter to quarter. The HR department should also look into how to individualize the reward system, so those that aren’t pulling their weight can be found out and worked with or just terminated. The incentive plan should be maintained but slightly altered for Harrah’s Casino to achieve the same kind of results as when it was first implemented.