Human Resources Management Blog

Prior to this week, I felt that unions were outdated. However, after learning about the benefits of unions to workers and doing some independent research, I can see how they may continue to be relevant, even with new standards for workplace safety and compensation.

The article “Understanding the Pros and Cons of Labor Unions” reiterates the pros of working for a union as an employee, such as higher wages and benefits as well as better working conditions and job security, as well as risks to employer, including risk of strikes, potential for workplace tension, and higher costs. Additionally, this source also provides counterbalances to these arguments, including risks to employees. In addition to union dues and potential work stoppages, unions also have strict rules that limit autonomy and bind workers to agreements even when they disagree, and may favor seniority, which can disfavor new employees. The article also discusses additional benefits to employers in addition to having a formalized process for grievances, including the ability to more accurately predict future costs and unions setting broader economic trends and providing additional career training for employees.

After this week, I have changed my initial stance on unions. While I would not seek one out, I no longer feel that they are outdated and serve no purpose in today’s workplace. I see how unions continue to contribute to fair workplace conditions and can help both employers and employees, given the right circumstances. However, I do not think unions are necessary in all workplaces, and given great management and careful attention to workers’ needs and complaints, many workplaces can and do get by without the need for union intervention.

https://www.laborsoft.com/blog/pros-and-cons-of-labor-unions

Taking the surveys this week confirmed what I already knew about myself. Growing up, I was a lot more of a Type A personality, but over the years I have shifted my priorities after seeing how it has affected my mental health and created an unsustainable pace for working toward my goals.

For the Holmes-Rahe Life Stress Inventory, I scored a 114, with 150 or more increasing the chance of a major health breakdown by 50% in the next 2 years. This is important because looking for a new job after graduating this month will put me right at 150. Fortunately, on the Psychology Today “Coping Skills” survey, I scored an 85/100, showing that I use problem-focused strategies that are very effective when my stressors are controllable. Often, when I can control stressors, I choose to do what is best for me and prioritize my health and relationships. Unfortunately, in life, we can’t always control stressors, so being high on the life stress scale doesn’t leave a lot of room in the event something outside of my control happens. Lastly, for the Psychology Today “Type A Personality” survey, I scored a 25/100 for impatience and irritability. While I am overwhelmingly warm and tolerant, I can occasionally be impatient. When I do get frustrated, however, I rarely lash out and generally center trust and relationships in all of my interactions.

Based on these surveys, I know I do very well at managing most stress. Additionally, I have made plans to reduce my stress after graduation by considering job environment when job hunting and setting realistic priorities and pace.

In looking for sources on how companies also help manage workplace stress, I found “How Companies Are Addressing Employee Stress in the Modern Workplace.” This article lists common wellness programs: embedding mental health programs and culture in workplaces, introducing flexibility in work hours, fostering open and supportive communication with leaders, establishing a culture of recognition for performance, implementation of wholistic wellness programs, training leaders to recognize early signs of stress, and redesigning workplaces to center focus and comfort. These programs are valuable to employees but also actively increase productivity and engagement.

https://uprisehealth.com/resources/how-companies-are-addressing-employee-stress-in-the-modern-workplace/

When thinking back on jobs where I increased or decreased performance based on compensation, one job in particular stands out. At my most recent position, in between finishing my associate’s degree and returning to college to finish my bachelor’s degree, I was motivated to work hard based on initial pay, regular bonuses, and the promise of increased pay during regular performance reviews. However, after working for the company for almost a year, I realized that my role and duties were not clear, and despite working hard and performing at what I was being told was an excellent level, I was still receiving less than excellent reviews because the job description knowingly incorporated more duties than it was expected could be handled by one person.

Seeing that my hard work would not directly relate to increased compensation, and despite being paid fairly for the position I was working at, I chose to decrease my performance to meet standards, essentially putting in the amount of work I felt I was being compensated for. Unfortunately, because I started out as such a great employee, my manager and the owner noticed this. They spoke to me and tried several ways to motivate me to work harder, with my manager becoming more overbearing and micromanaging my breaks and work pace and the owner offering to move me to a different position. I accepted moving to a different position but found the new position to be less fulfilling as I didn’t feel as valuable, and there was not really room for moving up in the company. Despite being paid the same and removing the barriers to being paid more, I didn’t feel as challenged and valuable, and I ended up leaving the company.

While my decision to move forward was based on several factors, a large part of my decrease in performance and my perception of my value to the company was based on compensation. Both current compensation and whether or not future increases in compensation felt within my control. While I will always be grateful for this opportunity and team, and even am thankful that leaving that position motivated me to go back to school, I learned a lot from what was unsatisfying at that position and what led me to leave.

I’ve had many different types of jobs and gone through several different types of trainings. The best trainings I received were very hands on. They usually included a period of job shadowing with a clear checklist for us both to go through and a person who I could clearly go to to ask questions after the job shadowing period was over. The worst trainings I’ve had were focused on learning job knowledge through a printed manual or computer program by simply reading and completing required training. This information was important for the job, but difficult to absorb at such a fast pace and with such little context of the hands on job experience.

When I read the suggestion in “Your New Hires Won’t Succeed Unless You Onboard Them Properly” for onboarding to last up to a year, I was initially surprised. This is much longer than any onboarding I have ever received. However, I realized that my best onboarding experiences lasted several months, with clear, scheduled check-ins and learning spaced out between job shadowing and hands-on experience. If I were to be in charge of designing an onboarding program, I think this structure would be much more efficient, especially for more complex positions that require lots of technical knowledge or the use of multiple skills.

One of the benefits of this structure that isn’t really discussed in the article is that having training spread out is also more inclusive for employees with different learning styles and paces. This gives a lot more room to adapt teaching and learning styles to be more efficient and effective for the people involved in training. However, I agree that the basic structure of good onboarding should absolutely include checklists, check ins, and an accessible peer to keep training focused and productive.

For this exercise, I took an Implicit Attitude Test focusing on race. Similar to what I had expected, or at least hoped, my results were little to no association between race and association between perpetrator and victim. However, I could see at the set up of this test what it was trying to test, and I am in a unique position as a Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies major, who studies race and positionality, and therefore, indirectly, bias, to already be constantly checking my assumptions regarding to all forms of identity.

Part of why I chose my major is because I believe that implicit bias does have a strong impact on decision-making and that many people are not aware of the beliefs they hold that reinforce dominant and oppressive systems. Biases that people hold are shaped by where they grew up, what media they are exposed to, and who they meet. People may be aware of some biases, but unaware of others, and may even be defensive of these faults, especially in the age of cancel culture which does not encourage reflection and growth.

I’ve been asked several times as a WGSS major what my thoughts are on EEO, and I think it surprises people that I don’t necessarily think it is the answer. As noted in “Lecture 4” from Week 3, managers often feel these decisions are forced upon them and take away their discretion, and they don’t get to the root of the problem, systemic inequality, and implicit biases reinforced by culture. Instead, I think exercises like this, which allow people to privately address and receive education about implicit bias are helpful, and create change from the bottom up. Ultimately, I think education and focus on individual change will radiate out to create cultural change that will reshape communities and undermine and eliminate implicit bias, rather than simply enforcing EEO procedures that can cause automatic defensiveness and do not encourage personal growth.

I have had a lot of interviews over the years and a few stand out as good and bad measures of whether or not I was a good fit for the job. Starting with the bad experience, I once had a job interview where, after reviewing my resume and basic qualifications I was sat down for an unstructured interview. I got the sense very quickly that the interviewer liked me and at the time, wanting the position, I made a point to make personal connections with the interviewer rather than focusing on job questions, as they were very open-ended. I ended up getting the position, and as it was a lower level position, it’s not that I wasn’t a great fit or couldn’t perform the job duties, but I quickly realized how important job growth within the position was to me and did not feel this was something that would be available to me. I left that job in less than 6 months for another position which promised me more growth.

I had a much different experience at my most recent position. I actually felt really great about the interview experience, as the owner of the practice sat me down and discussed ideal principles and values, and then gave me a math test followed by a short job shadowing experience. At the time, I had never had this done a test at an interview and was surprised. However, it actually made me feel confident that I could prove my intelligence and linear reasoning which was necessary for the position. This test showed strong reliability and utility for the position, although I am not sure how valid it was, and ultimately I stayed at that position for over a year, only leaving due to understaffing and job rotation, which became overwhelming at a small practice.

If I could go back to both of these interviews, I would say that the first interviewer should have been a lot more focused, using structured interviews that focused more on the specifics of the position. To the second interviewer, I would say that this interview was actually a great way to test if I would be a good fit for the position. It was one of the most beneficial and structured interviews I have experienced and ultimately I might have stayed at this position for a long time, had it not been for understaffing.

While reading the materials for this week, I reflected back on my own experience with job descriptions while applying and working with different businesses over the years. While most were fairly straightforward and easy to follow, I also had one particular experience where my job role was very difficult to define, and because of this I ultimately left the position. To keep this business anonymous, I will say it was a small, specialized medical office, with three doctors and five other employees. When I was hired for the position, I was given a short job description as a front desk receptionist, which I was confident I could excel at based on my previous experience. However, after my training period, I felt like the goal posts moved. Once I was confident in my position, I was cross-trained for two other positions in the office in case those employees were to call out sick to keep operations running smoothly. I understood this logic and am always open to learning new skills, so I quickly agreed, but this was not the problem. The problem was, it quickly became apparent that I should be filling in for these positions at any point in time when each person was otherwise occupied with a patient, and I often was doing more than one job. Because of this, my own work suffered and I was often torn between keeping patients waiting and fulfilling my actual job duties. While reading Jobs Worth Doing: Update Job Descriptions, I thought back on this experience and realized how important a clear job description, and my input as the employee would have been to my longevity at the office. In fact, this experience made me return to school and change careers. Because of this, I would always be proactive in updating job descriptions using employee input and be upfront about job expectations upon hiring.

The fortune 500 companies whose management style I chose to focus on this week are Hilton, Cisco, American Express, and Capitol One. I chose these companies because they are large, well-known corporations, but also because of what their employees had to say about working there. At Hilton, employees talked about how they feel the company cares for them, similar to American Express, which has a strong focus on work-life balance that puts families first. Alternatively, Cisco focuses on giving their employees autonomy while providing strong support systems and diverse leadership and employees at Capitol One are encouraged to be unique, rather than conform to a company image.

All of these values stood out to me as ones that I would like to exhibit if I were to become a manager. This also ties in with Buckingham and Coffman’s text, First, Break All the Rules: What the World’s Greatest Managers Do Differently, in which they explain how great managers let people be comfortable with who they are and treat them individually. I also reflected on my personal values while reading the goals in the HRManagement Student Manual. Of the common goals listed, I found that I would be most likely to focus on being a people-oriented firm. Focusing on being people-oriented ties in with my personal values and interest in accessibility. However, because of this, I think the most challenging aspect of being a manager would be balancing company performance while putting people first, as this may sometimes conflict. Companies need to be sustainable, if not profitable and growing, and that could be hard to balance when trying to make sure people’s individual needs are being met within the company culture.