Month: April 2025

Week 4 course materials really highlighted how important job description are. The weeks content also highlighted how hard it is to get the description down to the minute details. I have first hand experience on how a job description need to be maintained, not having a proper description and not having a description at all.

From my own experience I always remember a job I applied for at a sushi restaurant. The job I applied for was to be a dish washer when I was in high school. The job description didn’t really have much other then washing dishes and I figure it was pretty straight forward enough. It was a low entry job so I didn’t expect much from it and did any task my superiors asked of me.

In recent times i got another job working on ships for a cargo company operation out of Hawaii and many other parts of the world called Matson. When I applied for the job the description was vague for example “performing task on the ship” and ” wake up calls”. The task descriptions didn’t capture the actual work i would be doing on the ship which was extremely tasking then what it sounded like on paper. In the article Job Worth Doing: Update Descriptions stated by Tracy McCarthy ” Having a bad job description is worse than [having] none at all”. That statement really resonated with me because its like my description was so far off from the actual work I was doing that it would have felt better to not have a description at all.

The examples above really high light how important it is to modify and update job descriptions as time goes on. Over all this weeks learning materials really showed how important optimized job descriptions are for the people applying for these job. Its not a curtesy but a necessity for people to understand what they are signing up for.

Source:

https://www.shrm.org/topics-tools/news/hr-magazine/job-worth-update-descriptions

The companies that we will be looking at are The Cheese Cake Factory, Wegmans Food Markets Inc, Protiviti, Workday are the four companies that are chosen from the list of the 100 companies that was provided.

The Four companies mentioned above all share a huge emphasis on treating employees so well that it really feels like a family more then a workplace because of how friendly and caring the managers and the employees are. The workplace feels so welcoming that it promotes a stronger work ethic for the employees as they want to work harder for the company because they are treated so well. The companies above ideals reflect on how I would like to be a manager, I would want to treat my team or employees as if they are family because I’m a pretty caring person.

However, in situations where I have to “put my foot down” I find it the most challenging part because my empathy for my employees may conflict with the goals of the company. For example, since I see my employees as family it will be harder for me to make hard decision’s that must be made to reach the goal of the company like firing employees, resolving conflict between employees and making sure the work flow is appropriate. From the content we read in week one Strategic Planning from the lecture two slides seems to be the solution because it stated an “Overall plan for how an organization will match its internal strengths and weaknesses with external opportunities and threats”. Strategic planning will help me address the issues I have with my employees by labeling our specific goals and making sure everyone is following them even if they are seen as family.

Sources:

Fortune 100 Best Companies to Work For® 2020

Lecture 2 – Strategic HR Management