HR Challenge: Choosing a Performance Appraisal System

HR Challenge: Choosing a Performance Appraisal System

 

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Scenario You are a newly hired HR professional in a medium-size company, which is a video gaming company that is globally recognized as a leader and groundbreaking competitor. It is a young firm that has grown quickly, from one having no HR staff to having five HR professionals supporting over 700 employees and a performance appraisal system that has been in place for several years. The management team is not all that comfortable with any system of appraisal but has accepted that one is required. The organization currently has a healthy employee engagement program. Part of the program is a yearly organizational satisfaction survey that over time has provided employee input about what they perceive as a lack of performance appraisal effectiveness. Employees feel the current performance appraisal system is not capable of identifying struggling and failing employees. At the same time, it is also described as not having the capacity to recognize the best performers in the organization. That is, there is a stated desire from employees for a performance appraisal system that can better differentiate performance outcomes. The current performance appraisal system is similar to the traditional academic evaluation system with five levels of performance: superior, outstanding, contributing substantively, developing, and needing improvement. The leadership in the organization insists that a new three-level (superior, contributing substantively, and needing improvement) will favorably respond to the employees’ viewpoint. This new appraisal system that tracks the assignment of each level by employee would limit how many high threes would be given every year, thus most people in the organization would fall into the category of contributing substantively. Your Challenge As an HR professional in the organization, you desire the best outcome for your organization and its employees, and are not sure if this three-level system would be best. Your challenge is to select the best course of action among the following options and recommend that action to the leadership team. You can recommend 1) they retain the current five-level performance appraisal system, 2) they adopt the three-level system with forced-distribution preferred by the leadership team (superior, contributing substantively, and needing improvement), or 3) an alternative. Assignment Instructions Prepare a 2–3-page plan that states your recommended course of action. Along with your recommendation, include the following: An analysis of how your proposed solution contributes to organizational goals and strategies. A description of the legal factors you considered in making your decision. A brief explanation of the role you will take to influence the eventual outcome. Consider aspects of leadership, negotiation, and consultation. A discussion of the two SHRM behavioral competencies you think are most directly applicable to a successful resolution of this challenge, and why

HR Challenge: Hire From Within or Outside

HR Challenge: Hire From Within or Outside?

 

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Scenario You are a newly hired HR professional in a small private sector company that provides a broad spectrum of products for the cruise ship industry. The company repackages standard personal grooming products, perfumes, and lotions into smaller gift packages appropriate for customer appreciation gifts.

There are 300 employees in the firm and the organization has a history of a stable workforce with very limited turnover. Recently, the company gain

ed over 200 employees and there are a number of supervisory and managerial positions that need to be filled. The CEO has asked you to work with him to fill positions based on an organizational structure he has just created. He has indicated his preference for external candidates and feels no need to take any actions to notify or communicate the plans to the company’s existing employees. New supervisors and managers are needed in sales (one), marketing (one), operations (two), and security (one). Each of these areas has seasoned employees eager to compete for jobs though some may not be as qualified as external candidates. Currently, the company’s workforce is not representative of the demographic makeup of the surrounding community and there is a concern that because of this disparate impact the company may be at legal risk. Your Challenge You are now in a situation with a tough call to make. As the responsible HR professional, you must consider and decide which course of action will provide the greatest benefit for the company and its employees, and how to make a persuasive argument for your recommendation. Your options are to hire all of the needed new supervisors and managers from outside the organization, promote all from within the organization, or fill the positions from both within and outside the company. Assignment Instructions Prepare a 2–3-page plan that states your recommended course of action. Along with your recommendation, include the following: An analysis of how your proposed solution contributes to organizational goals and strategies. A description of the legal factors you considered in making your decision. A brief explanation of the role you will take to influence the eventual outcome. Consider aspects of leadership, negotiation, and consultation. A discussion of the two SHRM behavioral competencies you think are most directly applicable to a successful resolution of this challenge, and why.

Quantitative Reasoning – HR metrics

Description Search online for HR metrics will result in numerous lists all claiming to be the most useful HR metrics today, but there are some that are more useful than others. One of the top metrics used in HR is the Cost of HR per Employee. If you have an HR person or more than one person, this is how much you pay the HR team versus how many total employees you have. It helps you determine whether you need an employee dedicated to HR or multiple HR employees. A 9-box grid must also be included. The grid is most commonly used in succession planning as a method of evaluating an organization’s current talent and identifying potential leaders.

Project Quality and Risk Management

A common assumption following the completion of a project would be that the sun would rise the next day. Suppose for a moment the sun did not rise. The severity of this risk would threaten not only the completion of this project but most other projects. In other words, the risk posed by the sun not rising is extremely high; however, the likelihood of that happening is relatively small. On the other hand, consider a different sort of risk. Consider that one of the billing system database servers has been destroyed. The likelihood of this happening is considerably higher than the likelihood of the sun not rising. Unless the database was not recently backed up, the severity of this risk is relatively low. In other words, neither of these risks rises to a level that would threaten the completion of the project. What are the differences between qualitative and quantitative risk analysis? When is each type of analysis appropriate? What type of analysis will you use for the customer service system project? Assignment Guidelines: Address the following in 750–900 words: What are the differences between qualitative and quantitative risk analysis? Explain. When is each type of analysis appropriate? Explain. What type of analysis will you use for the IRTC customer service system project? Why? Use correctly APA style formatted references of solid academic quality for your resources and use correctly formatted APA style in-text citations to your references to substantiate your information and positions as well as to give credit to other author’s work.

DATA MANAGEMENT

The purpose of this assignment is to practice organizing data through ordering and grouping variables. Data often appear disordered and it is difficult to see any connections or relationships. Ordering the data by certain variables or grouping variables into specific categories, such as age or sex categories, can help bring clarity to the data. Knowing how to organize data is an important skill to initiate the analytical process. For this assignment, students will use Excel and SPSS Statistics to order variables. Using the “Example Dataset,” complete the steps below using both Excel and SPSS Statistics. View the Excel and SPSS tutorials for assistance in completing this assignment. Submit one Word document and include a screen shot of the data after completing the first two steps of Part 1 in Excel and SPSS to compare your results. Use a second Word document to complete Part 2 of the assignment. Part 1: Ordering and Grouping Data Using Excel and SPSS For Part 1, accomplish the following: — Order (sort) observations according to age. — Group observations by sex and investigate the age and income for males and females. — Create a new variable titled “Exercise Group” based on the variable “Minutes Exercise.” — Use the following categories to create your groups: 1 = 0-30 minutes; 2 = 31-60 minutes; 3 = 61-90 minutes; 4 = 91-120 minutes; and 5 = 120+ minutes. Part 2: Data Interpretation Study the results of the dataset grouping and ordering. Discuss the following in a 500-750 word summary: — Describe the measurement levels for each of the variables in the dataset. – Discuss what you learned from ordering the data by age and why this information is important. – Describe the process you used to group the data in Excel and SPSS. – Describe what you learned by grouping the variables by category of exercise. — Are these data from a correlational study, experimental study, or quasi-experimental (observational) study? Discuss your rationale and identify a study question appropriate for this dataset.

HR Plan

Overview You have acquired a vast knowledge about multiple topics relevant to managers and HR employees. You will apply your learning by presenting an overall HR plan for an organization that you have chosen to work on throughout the course (fictitious or real). This is your opportunity to demonstrate your ability to consider and recommend actions to management on how the organization can be most competitive in the global environment by utilizing the organizations best asset; its human resources. Development of the Plan You will come up with a fictitious organization or you can use a real organization that is familiar throughout the course. The end product is a paper that presents a comprehensive HR plan for the organization that includes the concepts that you have learned from the text and outside resources. Parameters for the organization: You are free to describe the organization with which you will be associated. You will need to provide some level of detail of your organization. Use your general knowledge, coursework, and research to accomplish this. Even though you are required to provide general organizational details, your primary function is human resources. Analyze based on this premise. Assume that a core group of managers and employees (approximately 250) are already in place. Your organization can produce a product or perform a service. Requirements for the Overview of the organization Description of what the organization does and organizational structure. Be specific. You may include an organizational chart. How does the organization operate? How are tasks/work projects accomplished? Is the organization domestic or international? Locations? Who are the competitors? What are the factors that you believe are critical to success in this organization? What is the culture like? How is information communicated? Why would people want to work for this organization? HR Topics that MUST be addressed in the paper

Integer Goal and Nonlinear Programming and Project Management

Assignment: in APA 6th format List the advantages and disadvantages of solving integer programming problems by (a) rounding off and (b) enumeration. How do the three types of integer programming problems differ? Which do you think is most common, and why? What is meant by satisficing, and why is the term often used in conjunction with goal programming? What are deviational variables? How do they differ from decision variables in traditional LP problems? The campaign manager for a politician who is running for reelection to a political office is planning the campaign. Four ways to advertise have been selected: TV ads, radio ads, billboards, and social media advertising buys. The costs of these are $900 for each TV ad, $500 for each radio ad, $600 for a billboard for 1 month, and $180 for each buy on social media (approximately 40,000 unique impressions). The audience reached by each type of advertising has been estimated to be 40,000 for each TV ad, 32,000 for each radio ad, 34,000 for each billboard, and 17,000 for each social media buy. The total monthly advertising budget is $16,000. The following goals have been established and ranked: The number of people reached should be at least 1,500,000. The total monthly advertising budget should not be exceeded. Together, the number of ads on either TV or radio should be at least 6. No more than 10 ads/buys of any one type should be used. Formulate this as a goal programming problem. Solve this using computer software. Which goals are exactly met and which are not? Mick Garcia, a certified financial planner (CFP), has been asked by a client to invest $250,000. This money may be placed in stocks, bonds, or a mutual fund in real estate. The expected return on investment is 13% for stocks, 8% for bonds, and 10% for real estate. While the client would like a very high expected return, she would be satisfied with a 10% expected return on her money. Due to risk considerations, several goals have been established to keep the risk at an acceptable level. One goal is to put at least 30% of the money in bonds. Another goal is that the amount of money in real estate should not exceed 50% of the money invested in stocks and bonds combined. In addition to these goals, there is one absolute restriction. Under no circumstances should more than $150,000 be invested in any one area. Formulate this as a goal programming problem. Assume that all of the goals are equally important. Use any available software to solve this problem. How much money should be put in each of the investment options? What is the total return? Which of the goals are not met?

Quality management

do it as ITAC. Issue, theory , application , conclusion . the chapter is here refers to the total ability of a product or service to meet customer expectations. Quality is about understanding customer requirements and ensuring that performance specifications are delivered. The surge of interest in managing quality has developed into two broad camps: those taking a total quality control (TQC) approach and those taking a total quality management (TQM) approach.48 These approaches share many of the same methods, but TQC tends to view quality management as needing a specialist team of quality engineers whereas TQM sees quality management as more of a movement and philosophical commitment led by the chief executive and involving everyone in the organisation. Total quality control Quality control is defined as the strategy for minimising errors by managing each stage of production. Quality control techniques were developed in the 1930s at Bell Telephone Labs by Walter Shewart, who used statistical sampling to locate errors by testing just some (rather than all) of the items in a particular production run. This saves inspection costs but still means that production goes on until errors are detected. Total quality control includes the following elements: Statistical quality control—the use of control charts and other statistical techniques to monitor work processes and identify any deviation from expected quality standards. Quality assurance—the key difference between control and assurance is that quality assurance focuses on ensuring that errors and faults do not occur in the first place. This involves a formal management system for managing quality, such as that recommended by the ISO9000 series of quality standards (see Chapter 14). Quality circles—a team-based approach to finding ways to resolve quality problems. Total quality management: creating an organisation dedicated to continuous improvement Total quality management can make use of many of the same tools as total quality control but remains closer to the larger philosophies of the two American quality gurus W. Edwards Deming and Joseph M. Juran. W. Edwards Deming Desperate to rebuild its war-devastated economy, Japan eagerly received mathematician W. Edwards Deming’s lectures on ‘good management’. Deming believed that quality stemmed from ‘constancy of purpose’—steady focus on an organisation’s mission—along with statistical measurement and reduction of variations in production processes. He also thought that managers should stress teamwork, be helpful rather than simply give orders and make employees feel comfortable about asking questions. In addition, Deming proposed his so-called 85:15 rule—namely, when things go wrong, there is an 85 per cent chance that the system is at fault, only a 15 per cent chance that the individual worker is at fault. (The ‘system’ would include not only machinery and equipment but also management and rules.) Most of the time, he thought, managers erroneously blamed individuals rather than the system. Page 65Joseph M. Juran Another pioneer with Deming in Japan’s quality revolution was Joseph M. Juran, who defined quality as ‘fitness for use’. By this, he meant that a product or service should satisfy a customer’s real needs. Thus, the best way to focus a company’s efforts, Juran suggested, was to concentrate on the real needs of customers. TQM: What it is From the work of Deming and Juran has come the strategic commitment to quality known as total quality management. Total quality management (TQM) is a comprehensive approach—led by top management and supported throughout the organisation—dedicated to continuous quality improvement, training and customer satisfaction. This gives TQM a much bigger emphasis on cultural change than does a TQC approach, which relies to a greater degree on quality experts than engaging the entire organisation in a mission to improve quality. The four components of TQM are as follows: Make continuous improvement a priority. TQM companies are never satisfied. They make small, incremental improvements an everyday priority in all areas of the organisation. By improving everything a little bit of the time all the time, the company can achieve long-term quality, efficiency and customer satisfaction. Get every employee involved. To build teamwork, trust and mutual respect, TQM companies see that every employee is involved in the continuous improvement process. This requires that workers must be trained and empowered to find and solve problems. Listen to and learn from customers and employees. TQM companies pay attention to their customers, the people who use their products or services. In addition, employees within the companies listen to and learn from other employees, those outside their own work areas. Use accurate standards to identify and eliminate problems. TQM organisations are always alert to how competitors do things better, then try to improve on them—a process known as benchmarking. Using these standards, they apply statistical measurements to their own processes to identify problems. Quality management today Quality management is included among our modern management ideas as it is another idea that was promoted as having universal applicability. TQM was at its peak of popularity in the early 1990s.49 One indicator of this is the decline of interest in business excellence. Business excellence started in 1987 with the Malcolm Baldrige Award in the US, which was adapted by the Australian Quality Council as the Australian Business Excellence Framework. These business excellence models and a similar one developed by the European Foundation for Quality Management were initially seen as ways of getting managers to ‘demonstrate excellence in the management of quality as their fundamental process for continuous improvement’. An award survives in Australia, but it now attracts comparatively little attention. Why quality management is important The quality management viewpoint has helped many organisations get closer to the just-in-time ideal. Few organisations can expect to survive without managing their quality, but today companies are more likely to adopt a more piecemeal approach to quality management than embrace TQM and its implications of building a culture solely around quality management.50 TQC has been given impetus through the development of Six Sigma, although this rigorous application of quality control is for a few organisations only

Recruitment and Selection Plan for Benefits Manager

Recruitment and Selection Plan for Benefits Manager

 

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Assume you are the Vice President of Human Resources within the manufacturing industry. Your goal is to hire a Manager of Benefits with experience in unions/organized labor. Your company values diversity; therefore, you also want to ensure your plan targets individuals who are underrepresented in the workplace. Refer to Exhibit 3-7 in Chapter 3 of in Fundamentals of Human Resource Management for the job description you will use in the hiring process.

Change Implementation and Management Plan

Description

Review the Resources I have included and identify one change that you believe is called for in your organization/workplace. This may be a change necessary to effectively address one or more of the issues you addressed in the Workplace Environment Assessment you just finished for me, which I liked. Thank you. Reflect on how you might implement this change and how you might communicate this change to organizational leadership. THIS PRESENTATION WILL BE USED FOR A 5-6 MINUTE PRESENTATION.

Your Change Implementation and Management Plan should include the following: An executive summary of the issues that are currently affecting your organization/workplace (This can include the work you completed in your Workplace Environment Assessment previously submitted, if relevant, WHICH IS THE PAPER YOU JUST WROTE.)

A description of the change being proposed Justifications for the change, including why addressing it will have a positive impact on your organization/workplace Details about the type and scope of the proposed change Identification of the stakeholders impacted by the change Identification of a change management team (by title/role) A plan for communicating the change you propose A description of risk mitigation plans you would recommend to address the risks anticipated by the change you propose.