MGMT 453 Blog Posts – Ivan Ochoa

After taking the  Take the Life Stress Inventory, Coping and Stress Management Skills Test ,and Type A Personality Survey I learned a lot about myself. One of my biggest takeaways from these tests was that I can be impatient at times and focus on my problems when coping with stress. I can get easily overwhelmed, making me stressed and impatient. This is something that I will have to work on for future careers where I can easily become impatient. I like to get things done in a timely manner, so whenever something doesnt follow a schedule I can get a bit irritated and become impatient.

I reviewed an article that researxhed on what organizations were doing to help their employees mental health, what I most predominantly saw was that implementing an employee assistance program that provided a no-cost therapy session, and putting an emphasis on employee work flexibility. With most companies pusing to get employees back in offices, the emotional change can have detrimental impacts on employees mental health. After working virtually for so long some employees are going to need support to fully transition to their new work environment. It’s important for companies to see the importance of making sure their employees’ health is okay. Current concerns, other than emotional, that organizations are currently worried about are the work-life balance and amount of family time an employee is able to get. These two factors can influence a lot of stress behaviors that may inhibit an employee’s ability to get work done. Employees are stressed out when taking on new tasks that are cutting into their personal life. To combat this, some organizations are taking employee flexibility feedback seriously to help support employees mental health, and especially help manage their stress.

References:

Goldberg, E. (2022, March 30). Everyone is not ok, but back at work anyway. The New York Times. Retrieved May 27, 2022, from https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/30/business/return-to-office-mental-health.html

Decreasing effort is a behavior I exhbitied from a past job that was based on compensation. Working at a restaurant that is family owned was a new experience for me. I was a server, but when I had first started working there I was essentially doing many different jobs. Cooking, cleaning, greeting, seating, and ultimately serving were some job duties of mine. Being at a younger age, I assumed I was being a great worker and would love the extra work. My paycheck was based on the hours I put it in, but I was earning minimum wage at the time so it wasn’t very much. Talking about job pay in the workplace can be very awkward, especially when you find out that some employees are making considerably more than you and they don’t work as hard. Ultimately, this led me to believe I was being underpaid but with my experience level there wasn’t much advocating I could do for myself. Learning that a new employee was being hired, who was also closer in age to me, was exciting because it meant I got to train someone. After the first shift together, I learned that he had a higher starting wage than me and it saddened me. I felt I was being undercompensated, while performing many job duties that are essentially for a manager, I started obtaining a behavior of decreased effort. 

Outlined in this week’s lecture notes, compensation has an effect on employee fairness perception. Pay transparency is important because it allows for employees to know if they are being paid fairly among other employees, based on experience level. Compensation motivated this behavior because I valued extrinsic rewards over intrinsic. At the beginning, I was motivated to work harder and more for what I thought would be greater compensation. After learning that newer employees were earning more than a current employee, I developed a behavior that reduced my effort. Ultimately, this behavior contributed to me leaving the company but compensation was the root of it. 

References:

Week 8: Compensation Lecture Outline (Lectures 1-3)

In the past, I have had several different types of training. Whether it be learned from a class, or from a position I applied for, I have had beneficial and not so beneficial experiences. Training for a position at a fulfillment warehouse was an experience that I considered beneficial. The training was one-on-one, which allowed me to fully grasp the position and ask questions where needed. The trainer was also very professional, they provided a realistic daily routine for the position and allowed me to watch them perform specific job duties. I am a visual learner, so watching someone perform the job while explaining everything they were doing was beneficial for me. Safety and technical terms related to the position were also tested regularly. This was beneficial as it allowed us to always keep in mind the safety rules needed for the job. These types of training are important for employee performance! They allowed me to succeed in the position, while also allowing me to develop into different roles and being able to relay the same type of training I had to new hires. 

These experiences are important for employee development. A bad training experience will affect employee performance, work relationships, and further development related to the position. I have had a bad training experience which was not beneficial to me. It was not interactive, hands on, not meaningful, and was not coordinated well. I was to watch a series of training videos, for hours, in which I was staring at a computer screen for the majority of a shift. I could not take the training videos seriously, they were outdated, presentation wise was not appropriate, and did not help me understand the importance of my role within the organization. It left me with many questions, with no one to answer them. The system the videos were on was very slow, whenever there was a technical difficulty, there was just myself waiting for the video to resume. I was uncomfortable to ask someone for help and I did not learn the basic aspects of my role effectively. This was not an experience I found beneficial.