Research has shown that compensation does have an effect on employee motivation and behavior. Proper compensation gives employees the job satisfaction they want and need, and it also incentivizes employees to do better and get better results. But not having proper compensation can have the opposite effect and cause employees to decrease effort, which is what I did in a previous position.

I was previously a medical assistant for a hospital and was assigned to work at a COVID testing site. I worked at this testing site for 6 months and was the senior emplpoyee at this site, meaning I was considered the lead/supervisor. On paper, working at a testing site was an easy job since you only swabbed patients, but in reality, it was very taxing. We swabbed rougly 250-350 patients per day, which was about one patient every 1-2 minutes. With the high patient load, we were moving nonstop and hardly received breaks. We worked in every weather condition, delt with difficult, angry, and sometimes dangerous patients, and the ever-changing policies/guidelines by the hospital and CDC.

In order to get their medical assistant back into their home departments, the hospital decided to hire temporary medical assistants through recruiting agencies to work in the COVID testing sites. Since I was the senior employee, I trained the new temps and was supposed to work alongsite them until I was released back to my home department. The problem with this though was that the temps made twice or more money as I did, performing the exact same duties as me.

Throughout the 6 months before the temps, myself and the other medical assistants working at the site requested additional hazard pay or compensation from the hospital for the work we were doing, but we never received any. So, when the temps came in making twice as much money as me, my motivation quickly declined. I provided them with the training that they needed to perform their duties and then I saw around and supervised them for the rest of my time at the testing site.

This unfortauntely is an example of how motivation can be lowered with improper compensation. I would have continued putting in effort if I was making the same wage as the temp employees, but I didn’t feel very valued by the organization after requesting a higher pay for months, which led to a decrease in my effort and motivation.

The effectiveness of training or a class can vary based on every person because individuals can have different learning styles. For myself, I am a very hands-on learner and would prefer to watch someone a few times and then have them watch me for the remainder of the training, if that is an option.

I went to school back in 2014 to become a medical assistant and attended a trade school for this program. It was one of the best schooling experiences I have had throughout my education because it was so different than sitting in a classroom and reading chapters from a book. The first half of the program was “bookwork”, and the second half was our clinical period, however even during the bookwork half, we weren’t in a traditional classroom for every class. We did have times where we read chapters from books, but we also had educational games, interactive videos, guest speakers, and hand-on roleplay scenarios. We were larning by doing the actions of what we would be in the healthcare field.

Other trainings/classes that I have taken that were very beneficial have been the American Heart Association BLS training course and a few classes through OSU. What made these trainings/classes effective were the virtual simulations that accomplanied the coursework. I recently took a marketing class with OSU, and we had a backpack simulation every week where we learned different aspects of marketing. We had to design out backpacks based on what group of individuals we were targeting, had virtual employees walking us through the simulation and providing us feedback on our choices. and received instant results from our choices with the option to retry 2 additional times. By having the simualtion, I was able to have hands-on learning and received feedback based on my choices with explainations why my choices were positive of negative.

UPS recognized the need for hands-on training for the future of their company and opened a $34 million-dollar full-service pilot training center. They learned in focus groups that Gen Y employees wanted something simple, to be given hands-on training. They liked the interaction with the computer, but they didn’t like learning from it and by receiving hands-on training, they were able to better understand what was expected from them and the demands of driving for UPS.

Interviews are an important part of the hiring process, and it allows employers to get to know their candidates on a more personal level. I have been on both sides of the table during the interview process and have learned what can make an interview effective and ineffective.

Being in a supervisor position, I performed interviews for two different departments in a health clinic. The organization itself had a structured set of questions but these questions were geared toward primary care offices, and we were interviewing for specialty clinics. My manager and I agreed to create our own structured set of questions to ask that pertained more toward our clinic.

From my experience on both sides of the table, I believe that having a combination of an unstructured and a structured interview is the most effective. Having an unstructured interview at the beginning “breaks the ice” and allows the interviewee to see our personalities as well as us seeing theirs. After the interviewee is more relaxed, they have an easier time answering the structured interview questions that we had for them.

I was involved in one fully unstructured interview, where a provider and manager went “off book” and at the end of the interview, I felt that I, as the supervisor, did’t gain any useful knowledge on the interviewee because the provider asked a lot of close ended questions. Unstructured interviews have limitations and can produce a large amount of data that can make analyzing the information difficult when making recommendations to move forward.

Structured interviews are designed to measure job-related competencies of a candidate by inquiring about their behaviors in past experiences. On the interviewee side, I believe structured interviews are easier to prepare for because most companies have similar questions. As a candidate, it allows me to think of situations ahead of time and practice how I would answer some of the questions that I believe will be asked. On the supervisor side, structured interviews provide more useful information about a candidate’s competencies and how they handled specific situations in the past.