December 08, 2006
HR Simulation - Negatives
While there were many things that went well in our group, there were also things that I felt we could have done better. If I were to participate in this simulation again, I would allocate more money to our first quarter budget. Our group was playing catch up the entire time because of our conservative spending in quarter one, and we were never able to fully recover. The incidents were also a bit difficult to follow. After the third quarter, our group finally realized that even if we were assigned a certain incident, the simulation program would run through the incidents in alphabetical order. Unfortunately, we did not discover this until one of our incident reports caused a large blow to our morale. Because we turned in the incorrect decision form in quarter six, our company suffered greatly. Looking back, it would have helped our company if we always made sure to double check our work before handing it in.
HR Simulation - Positives
Looking back on the HR simulation, there were many positive aspects. Most of these came from how our group worked and taught me valuable skills that I will be able to apply in future projects. As a whole, our group worked well together. We were able to treat each other with mutual respect and cooperated to meet and reach our deadlines. When a member of the group was unable to make a deadline, they were talked to privately instead of being confronted in front of the whole group. I feel that this enabled the person to explain themselves to Shelley and receive help or feedback if necessary better than a public confrontation would. These meetings did not happen often, but when they did the group members did not seem to be upset afterwards and made their best effort to get their work in as soon as possible.
HR Simulation Q8
After our seventh quarter success, the eighth quarter was abysmal. With over one hundred employees that had to be terminated, we had to spend a substantial amount of our budget on severance pay. Unfortunately, we were already short of money compared to where we originally hoped to be. This meant that we had to cut spending in our main programs, and were unable to give our employees substantial raises. Because of the massive amount of firings, the morale of our employees plummeted. This also led to lowered productivity and increased absenteeism. Our company, in one quarter, went from above average to last or next to last in the industry in almost all important performance categories.
HR Simulation Q7
To account for our mistakes in the sixth quarter, our team decided that we would overspend this quarter in an attempt to bring the company back above the industry averages. By spending over $600,000 this quarter we hoped to make the employees feel more valued than employees of other companies in our industry. We also held off from firing the extra workers because we did not want to lower the morale of our workforce. In hindsight, it would have probably made sense to fire the extra workers this quarter when we were spending the extra money instead of waiting until we were restricted to an extremely tight budget. After spending over $600,000 this quarter, we were left with under $300,000 for our final quarter. However, when we received the results from quarter seven, our company was doing extremely well in all areas and our group was quite pleased.
HR Simulation Q6
In our 6th quarter, we had more employees that needed to be laid off. With our high productivity, this allowed our group to spend more money on the programs that we felt would be helpful. After our meeting, we were confident in our decisions and felt that our company would make progress towards our goals. However, our group accidentally turned in the decision form from the previous quarter. This meant that we would now be massively overstaffed in the next quarter. In the fifth quarter, we also budgeted a bit conservatively, so the progress that we were hoping for was not realized. We took this into consideration while planning our budget for quarter seven and followed a course of action that we hoped would help the company get back on track.
November 10, 2006
Application of the MBTI test
Earlier this week, a few friends and I were discussing our plans for the future. When one of my friends was unsure what he wanted to do, I thought back to the class about the MBTI test. I found an online version of the test and had my friend take it, and then helped him interpret the results. By using www.personalitypage.com, I was able to help my friends understand themselves better. This also enabled them to see what careers they may excel in.
HR Meeting #5
Starting with our second year, our meetings have been organized differently. Before each meeting, Shelley will input her recommendations for hiring as well as adding in the constant costs of our extra programs. After this, our group discusses the results from last quarter and how to adjust spending to fix any problems. We then discussed the incident for the quarter, and totaled up all of our costs. By making these changes, our group has been able to cut meeting times in half.