MGMT 453 Blog

This week’s blog post is a thought provoking one for sure. Researching the pros and cons of labor unions yields a wide variety of information and a wide range of opinions. Depending on who you ask, labor unions may either be loved or hated. For me they fall somewhere in between. I find that there is a clear utility behind employee collectivism and collective bargaining, (i.e. better working conditions, safer workplace, higher wages, etc.) (Klawans, 2025). This is especially true when you look back over the last 100 years and read about what types of working conditions employees faced at the turn of the 19^th century. Wages and working conditions have improved dramatically over this time and I believe there is clear evidence to show that labor unions helped play a role. On the other hand, I also believe that unionization is not a catch all solution that will solve every worker’s problem. The truth is that employee dissatisfaction stems from a variety of areas and simply unionizing a company will not solve many of the intangible, company culture related issues. Unions are effective in the areas where they have historically been effective (i.e. wages, safety, working conditions, etc.), but less so in the more intangible areas. I also think that certain industries lend themselves to unionization better than others. With that in mind, I don’t believe my work as a project manager within the construction industry lends itself to being in a union. In fact, my role in a company could many times find me on the opposing side working with unions. Regardless of whether I’m part of a union or not, my key focus in working within the construction industry will be to walk in excellence and work hard to accomplish whatever tasks are at hand with the people that are available, whether they are union or not. Ultimately I just want the job to be done and done well.

Klawans, J. (2025, February 13). The pros and cons of labor unions. The Week. https://theweek.com/business/labor-unions-pros-cons

I just finished taking my Life Stress Inventory, the Coping and Management Skills test, and the Type A personality survey. The results stated that I am “not very stressed”, and “not a type A personality”. As a Father with three kids, a job, and full-time school its not that I’m not stressed, its more that I’ve learned in the last several years how to effectively manage it and maintain a positive outlook under difficult circumstances. Among the lessons I’ve learned is the need to pursue gratitude for the things in my life. In many hard seasons, or on a hard day, what can begin to turn the tide is simply taking time think “gratefully”. The change isn’t always immediate, but as I shift my thinking, my perspective begins to change. Other important strategies include having a close support network to rely on for emotional support. This includes my wife, close friendships, and mentors. Lastly, I exercise and work to remain active even during busy times. As I progress through my professional career, the tools I’ve learned will only become more important to maintain a healthy work-life balance.

As I’ve researched the issue of workplace stress, a key issue that organizations are facing is employee burnout. Research from SHRM in 2024 noted that 44% of U.S. workers are burned out from their work and that almost half of those employees are seeking a new job as a result (“Employee Mental Health: May 2024 EN Insights Forum,” Society for Human Resource Management, 2024). Not only does losing an employee impact the organization, but the resulting stress negatively affects the physical and mental health of the employees. This can cause employees to gain weight because of stress eating, or even cause personal relationships to suffer or end (“2024 Workforce State of Mind Report,” Headspace, 2024). To fight this epidemic, some of the most relevant strategies organizations are using include setting boundaries for employees to have time for personal connection (such as not requiring work on weekends or overtime) and encouraging employees to engage in peer-to-peer or intergenerational mentorship (“2024 Workforce State of Mind Report,” Headspace, 2024). There are other strategies as well, but these are important options that carry weight when relied upon.

When I think back for this question what stands out to me are examples from my time in real estate. During most of my experience I worked as an agent on a real estate team. Working as a real estate agent you typically will either choose to work independently or to join a team. In joining a team you choose to give up a portion of your commission in exchange for the additional leverage, support, and services the team can provide. Being on a team provided me with excellent training, positive camaraderie, and key admin support I wouldn’t have had if I had been independent. While the benefits I received made it and easy decision for me to be a part of the team, it wasn’t the case for everyone. Over the 5 years I worked there, I saw people come and go. One guy joined the team as a personal friend of our Principal broker, and he came into the agent role with high expectations on his income potential. Part of the allure of real estate is the freedom from a typical 9 to 5 schedule and the opportunity to scale your income dramatically. While he started out strong, over time his effort began to lag. The challenge with this role for many people is a feast or famine experience. The commission checks that come in can be big, but for the smaller time agent or new recruit just getting started, the lack of consistency can be challenging and you may end up making less than being at a regular job. When you are working harder and not seeing the results you expect, it can be demoralizing. On top of that, when doing fewer transactions, every penny can feel (and becomes) that much more important. It was these reasons in the background that led him to leave the team after a year of moderate success because he felt it would pay better working by himself. After trying it out on his own, in the end he decided that real estate just wasn’t a good fit for him and he moved onto another career.

Over the years I have taken many classes and trainings. Trainings for Real Estate, both to get licensed and then in continuing education; trainings in the construction field related to safety. I’ve been given general onboarding training for many of the positions I’ve taken, whether working at a restaurant or stocking shelves at an OSU dining center. Having experienced so many of these different experiences, it is easy for them to begin to blend together. With that in mind, two key groups of trainings, online individualized ones, and hands-on in person ones. One example that comes to mine with this existed in the real estate licensing and continuing education space. Here, while I found learning the content to be rather straightforward, the complete training experience existed entirely online in preset modules. From my perspective as an aspiring real estate agent, it worked to provide a quick and easy path to getting my real estate license. However, this “Presentation” training method worked only to provide book knowledge for the role, but did nothing to provide an understanding of what a successful real estate agent looked like, and what skills I would have to learn in order to succeed in my job. This training method had no hands-on experience provided, nor was it done in a group environment where questions could be asked of the instructor. If that had been my full training experience within real estate, I’m sure my time working in this field would have been very short. Instead, I made the decision early on to join an existing real estate team that came alongside the severe limitations of basic training to prepare me for what I was actually going to face. With this team, I had structured on-the-job training where my supervisor spent dedicated time teaching me the ropes of what they believed made a successful agent. He sat with me and walked me through phone calls, taught me scripts, and all the other components necessary to understand my role. Finally, our Principal broker held weekly coaching meetings with me to first assess my areas of talent and then work with me to ensure that those talents were maximized into real estate production (e.g. more transactions, etc.).

I took an implicit bias test that compared European Americans and Hispanic Americans with ‘Good’ and ‘Bad.’ According to the results of the test, I was faster at sorting out ‘European Americans’ with ‘Bad’, and ‘Hispanic Americans’ with ‘Good’. With that said, I would highlight the Scientific American article that specifically highlights that “the stability of the test is low, meaning that if you take the same test a few weeks apart, you might score differently. And the correlation between a person’s IAT scores and discriminatory behavior is often small.” By no means do I dispute the existence of implicit biases. However, I seriously doubt the usefulness of this type of test when writings about them highlight their lack of stability. When you deal with economics, economists typically find survey material to be the lowest form of data and prefer to use other numerical methods to distill a person, or group of people’s behavior based on their actual actions, rather than how they report their actions and beliefs to be. While this test is not a direct survey, I view its reliability as the lowest form of data available surrounding this topic, especially when the results of these tests do not even correlate to discriminatory behavior. Because we live in a world of patterns, our minds are made to generalize in order to streamline operational processing in our brains and to survive better in a world full of millions of individual stimuli. Since implicit biases are connected to generalizations, I think that being aware of your beliefs and how they affect our day-to-day decisions is important. Once again, because of how we are wired, no one can live this way all the time, but we can try to bring a level of intentionality to the things we do and the decisions we make. I find it useful to try to understand the underlying assumptions and motivations behind many of the choices I make in my life. Looking back to the hiring and interview process we focused on this week, I think the better strategy here, and in a lot of other key areas within HR management is not necessarily to try and eliminate all forms of implicit biases. Rather, as our lecture and reading materials highlighted, I believe it is more effective to create standardized processes that work to minimize or eliminate the ability for present biases to impact the results of key decisions. When you take the ability for bias to influence the final decision, I believe you end up with a better hire when it comes to the interview process, and a better decision, when it comes to other parts of the business.

I’ve been involved in numerous interviews over the years. Most of the time, it follows a traditional multi-step process of interviews designed to whittle out candidates and gradually distill who my employer felt was a good fit for the position. Sometimes the multi-step process included a group interview as well in front of a panel of future co-workers. Depending upon the level of skill and the value of the position, the amount of competition and effort I saw that the employer put forth to find applicants varied greatly. Without knowing too much behind the scenes, the lines of questioning from each hiring manager were conversational and relaxed and did not seem to follow a particular line of questioning. From our readings this week, Iris Bohnet highlighted how the common perception of most hiring managers is that unstructured interviews are the most effective way to understand the relevant and interesting traits of an applicant. She continued by highlighting that “while unstructured interviews consistently receive the highest ratings for perceived effectiveness from hiring managers, dozens of studies have found them to be among the worst predictors of actual on-the-job performance — far less reliable than general mental ability tests, aptitude tests, or personality tests (Bohnet, 2016, How to Take the Bias Out of Interviews).” As previously stated, I’ve seen this reality play out consistently across my interview experiences. In the experiences I’ve had, the most notable interview process was for a real estate agent position on a large well-established team. In that process, I was required to take a personality test that was incorporated into conversations and referenced during job placement. Later, as I was involved with hiring, I saw how we used an applicant’s test to help craft more direct questions. That was a useful baseline, but I’ve come to see from the readings this week how valuable it is to have a standard question set that is applied across all applicants in a pool, with answers ranked numerically. Not once have I knowingly encountered that process and I really see the value that that can bring to the table. It not only can help eliminate bias but create opportunities for candidates to be judged equally on their merits, likely resulting in a better overall candidate choice in the end.

The use of clear job descriptions within a company is foundational to having a successful HR management function. Jill Bidwell from Job Worth Doing discussed how she preaches “to all our mangers and HR staff that the job description is the mother of all HR processes. Everything from recruitment and training to performance evaluations and compensation all stems from that document (Tyler, 2013, Job Worth Doing: Update Descriptions).” The document by itself is important, but the process and the conversations that stem from trying to create it help to make it even more useful. I’ve experienced the challenges that come from leaving a job undefined firsthand. I work for my Father-in-Law within his construction business as a project and office manager and have been here for over 4 years. During that time, I’ve worn and continue to wear many hats. This is common in ours and many other family businesses because the company is not large enough to support an inordinate amount of job specialization. While I understand my job clearly, we have never taken the time to officially write out my responsibilities. When something needs to be done that falls within my sphere of influence, I take care of it. However, this lack of clarity sometimes causes miscommunication. For example, where there are job overlaps between me and other members of our team, the lack of clear boundaries has sometimes caused tasks to fall through the cracks, leading to mistakes and issues that could have been avoided if our roles were better defined. At the same time, we are beginning to move in a new direction. Part of this year’s goals are to clearly describe the roles and responsibilities of everyone within our organization. In doing so, it will create a launch pad for discussions around job performance, compensation, mission and vision. Simply quantifying what it means to be successful in each role will create standards by which managers can hold their employees accountable. Just as described in our readings, for this work to be effective on a ongoing basis, it will be crucial to refer back to this information regularly. Some businesses reported changing it three times in the same year. No business is perfect, but ours is striving to improve and make clear changes like this to position us for future success.

For my review I chose three fascinating companies, Delta Airlines, Power Home Remodeling, and Wegmans Food Markets, Inc. Though these companies are all large, many of the employees describe their various company cultures as very caring and family-like. Many reported a similar view that “when you join the company, you are made to feel welcome” and that they “want to work here for a long time.” The ability for a big company to feel small is just one of the “new HR” strategies described by Breitfelder and Dowling that these companies are using in their innovative talent management systems (Breitfelder & Dowling, 2008, p. 42). When employees feel like they are part of a team, connected to their workplace and coworkers, they are far more likely to stay longer and report greater job fulfillment. At a base level we know from our readings that the “Base Camp” level of questions cover the essentials of personal work expectations and the ability to have the materials and equipment to do the job right (Buckingham & Coffman, 2016). As a manager in any large corporation, having clearly defined roles for employees is most likely already established. The greater task here I believe is knowing how to encourage individual employees about the unique role and value that they bring to the organization. For employees to feel like they belong, there must be a sense that the work they do matters, and that they as individuals are recognized for that work. While there are plenty of other aspects of management, I think I want to be a manager that clearly communicates employee expectations, gives them the basic tools they feel they need to succeed, and finally, can encourage them of the unique value they bring to the table. As I can encourage people under me to be confident in who they are and what they can achieve, it begins to lay a foundation that future development can be built from.        

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