2/25/2010

We had the opportunity to have a guest lecturer in class on Thursday. Jeff Weber is in Human Resources at ancestry.com. He talked about legal requirements and current trends of compensation. I learned about the Fair Labor Standards Act and how many companies are not in compliance with this act. Jeff talked about how investment is an investment. Every company needs to sit down and make-up their philosophy and decide base pay. Companies have gone to flexible salaries and market. Each area at ancestry.com gets a little different pay. Why? Because it cost more to live in San Fransisco for example than Salt Lake City. Jeff said that variable compensation programs vary from base pay by 3 to 20 percent. If company performs well then board members like to pay out. He talked about some long-term incentives that companies do help employees stay at their company. An example of a long-term incentive is stock options, but sometimes options go under water and they have lost their value. Jeff said they best way to decrease turnover is most affected by career development. And he brought donuts for the class heck yeah! He told us about how their company feeds their employees and they tried taking away donuts and their employees got pretty mad at him.

2/23/2010

Sorry gang no post for today because we had no class so I slept in.

2/18/2010 Reflection

Managing turnover was the topic of the class discussion. Every organization recognizes that it needs satisfied loyal customers. If they don't it is probably only a matter of time before they are out of business. Success requires satisfied loyal employees. Research provides evidence that retaining employees help retain customers and increase sales. Organizations with ow turnover and satisfied employees tend to perform better. Then we talked about progressive discipline. Companies should have a policy in place and let their employees know about it. Documentation is critical in with company policies. Companies need to be assertive in telling employees about their expectations. That gives the employee the chance to meet those expectations before they are fired for something they didn't know about. We also touched on the definition of job satisfaction. Job satisfaction is a pleasant feeling resulting from the perception that one's job fulfills or allows for the fulfillment of one's important job values. We talked about how people will be more satisfied with their jobs as long as they perceive that their jobs meet their important values.

2-9-2010

We did some class reflection on Ryan's presentation from last class time. We talked about interviewing effectively.
1. Be prepared
2. Assign responsibility
3. Put the applicant at ease
4. Ask about past behaviors
5. Figure out what your employees do and ask question that look for similar behaviors.
6. At the end of the interview make sure the candidate know what to expect next.
We also talked about PAR=Problem Action Result. Use PAR in job interviews to help show them what you can do. Interviewing is a skill. Instructional Design is a process of systematically developing training to meet specified needs. Some different training methods that we talked about were:
Classroom instruction
Audio visual
Computer based training
On-the-job training
Simulations
Business Games and Case Studies
Behavior Modeling
Experimental Programs
Team training
Action learning

My Apologies Gang

Hey everybody I have an apology to make. I am two chapters behind in the reading. I haven't done any discussion topics for those chapters. I have an explanation. I am in a construction management competition. I have been preparing since the beginning of this semester. It is like being on a sports team. I will be going to Reno this week to compete. So after this week I might have a chance to catch up and keep my blog up to date. I have also been busy preparing my compare and contrast paper. Hope yall are doing well.

2/4/2010 Reflection

Yesterday we had the privilege of hearing from a representative from Tahitian Noni. I learned a lot from him about employee training. The benefits of employee training have to be tracked well by showing improvement in sales or customer service. The average training ratio for other companies is 50:1. The training ratio for Tahitian Noni is 20:1. Tahitian Noni has 30 minute briefing sessions each day. The lecturer also told us it cost double to get a new employee than to hang on to an employee. He also talked about how they keep training internal in their company than bring in outside trainers. I learned from him that training helps keep the companies mission in focus. He told us that in companies that need to cut spending usually cut the training programs first. The most important thing I got out of this lecture is was to have training programs and to have a training program objective.

Chapter 6 Discussion

Discussion

It is part of human nature to not get along with every human being. Some people you just wont be able to get along with because of a personality clash or an ego clash. These differences can sometimes be difficult to hurdle. One or both parties have to be willing to make a compromise and hold back or lower their ego to be able to get along with the other person.

Emotional Hook

Lets say you were in charge of human relations for a big company. How would you deal with these differences? If you were the human relations for a company and you had a personality clash with the best interview candidate; what would you do?

Key Points

You are hired to do what is best for the company and hiring the best individual for the job position.

Question

Should you be the one to always be making the compromise if you are the one doing the hiring?