Author: Clonia Franklin

The company that I work for currently has sites across many different countries. One country that I could potentially work in would be Germany. In terms of Hofstede’s cultural dimensions, this country differs from the US in multiple ways. The Germans have a high uncertainty avoidance score meaning they are much more risk adverse than we are in the US. As I have worked with some of our German employees, I see this to be accurate. Another cultural dimension difference is in communication. The Germans tend to be more formal and detail-oriented than we are in the US. Again, working with Germans many times, I have proof that this is actual. That is something that I appreciate about them. I believe in clear, concise, and detailed communication. Something that I would enjoy working in Germany instead of the US is that they often better encourage and support work life balance. They have shorter hours, ample vacation time, and a huge focus on employee well-being. Some factors I would consider before determining if I wanted to take the international opportunity is the pay scale and the retention rates. Due to the larger focus on work life balance and employee well-being, I would assume that the retention rate is much higher than that of US sites. Ultimately, the thing that would be the deciding factor for me is my salary. It would have to be great enough to provide my family with everything we need while we are there and enough to put money back to get ahead.

When it comes to stress in my life, it is something that I have learned to deal with over the years. I have noticed that no matter how much I get done or how good I am doing in life, I am always stressing about the “next thing”. These surveys didn’t tell me much about myself that I didn’t already know, they just gave it a name and a potential risk. I was not a surprise that I am in the middle of the ratings for the Holmes-Rahe test. I was also not a surprise to me that I rated in the middle of the type A personality test as impatient/irritable. Lastly, I was again not surprised at the low rating on problem-focus coping.

According to all three of the surveys, I am at risk of health issues due to my results. From my research, these surveys are correct in that my scores all tend to be influencers of heart disease and high blood pressure. Almost one year ago, I had an issue with my blood pressure spiking. After many trips to the doctor and numerous tests, my doctor diagnosed me with anxiety. Once I started taking medicine for this, I have been much more balanced and relaxed. For the past three years, my wife had begged me to talk to my doctor about getting anxiety medicine because she seen that I could benefit from it. However, I am stubborn and it took a health scare for me to consider the medicine. Looking back, I wish I would have started the medicine years ago. It has been life changing.

I was motivated by money recently. I had an idea to start a small, unofficial, business on the side to put a little more money in my pocket each month. I started buying dog food wholesale and reselling it about 1 year ago. At the time, I wanted to start a business out of it so I would have a second income. Because of the potential large monetary gain of a second income, I was very motivated to market it. However, I quickly learned there was little profit in selling dog food unless you sold a large volume. As I learned this, I lost my motivation because I was not selling much feed and that meant I wasn’t making that extra money. Without the motivation from money, I stopped promoting my potential small business.

Fast forward almost 1 year, and I got an opportunity to start buying wholesale dog supplies and dog food. As I learned more about the profit margin of the dog supplies, I realized there was much more money to be made in supplies than in food. Again, I became extremely motivated to market my potential new business and products. I have been selling supplies and feed for 3 weeks and have made a good profit to keep me motivated. I have made flyers and a Facebook page for additional marketing, and I will soon file for my business license and make my side hustle an official LLC. As this business continues to pick up, I am already thinking about what other products I can offer to my customers to bring in more profit.

Effective Trainings

In my role at the manufacturing facility that I work in, I am required to facilitate problem solving teams. Before I could do this, I was required to get certified through our company training program and be evaluated on my ability to facilitate according to our standards. This training had multiple parts. The first part was a classroom setting learning/teaching approach and was facilitated by trainers. This classroom portion used things from our learn this week such as opportunity to practice, timely feedback loops, shared training experience with the other trainees in the classroom. This training was very effective because of these key principles of making a training effective.

Ineffective Trainings

In a leadership training that I participated in a few years ago, we had to attend for 4 hours per week for 16 weeks. This training was not very effective because the instructor for the training missed the very first principle listed in our learning material which is to communicate the relevance of the training. From the first meeting we had, it was clear that it wasn’t very organized nor did the instructor ensure we all knew the learning objectives of the training. All we really knew was that we were learning about leadership. This training also fell short because it didn’t have opportunity to practice anything so therefor it also didn’t have anything to give feedback on. The only thing about this learning that followed the principles in our learning was that they “chunked” the material up and made it digestible.

In the interviews that I have been part of in the past, we used a panel system that was multiple interviews with two interviewer. This gives us a very well rounded evaluation of the interviewee because multiple people get to hear the same answer and they will all pick up something different out of it. We also use scoring guides that allow us to ensure we are being fair to each interviewee when making a decision. This system helps prevent the common issue with thinking a interviewee is better than what they are just because the previous interviewees were terrible. Structure is another thing that we have in our company when it comes to interviewing. We have a interview questionnaire that has categories and each category has a few different questions that can be asked. The talent acquisition team decides for the interviewers on what category they will be interviewing in the panel.  This doesn’t ensure that the same questions are asked to all candidates like the material mentions but it limits them to only being asked a few preselected question. We also provide interview training through our company call “Effective Interview Training”. Just as our learning material states, the training stated that taking notes, making sure to give the interviewee time to ask questions and explaining next steps are all important to effective interviews. Pressure to hire doesn’t mean settle. Our mindset is to hire tough and manage easy. Task based work samples are something I think we should use in my company, especially welding test to ensure the validity of our interviewee’s experience and skills.

Job descriptions are very critical to hiring good staff in all types of industries. I found it very important to have clear and detailed job descriptions when hiring for manufacturing jobs such as machine operators, assemblers, and welders. As our facility has a “one team” mindset, it is impossible for us to say that you will only do what your title says you do. Our HR team has done an okay job in writing and maintaining our job descriptions. However, there is an opportunity for improvement.

To be useful, our job descriptions need to be much broader than they are currently but include more detail than they do currently. You can tell by reading them that the HR team has worked with the supervisors in each department to help guide the job descriptions to fit each role. However, as mentioned in lecture one, they used a competency modeling approach mixed with a critical incident approach to get as generic as possible to allow the job descriptions to be managed more easily.

One thing we could benefit from is having a team that conducts a Task-KSAO Analysis as mentioned as an approach in lecture one. I often see new hires that come into our facility that have never seen a battery-operated drill and for sure have never used one. This is a problem because most of our assembly jobs require the use of drills all day to complete your job tasks. Our job descriptions are written so generally that they say use of hand tools instead of calling out the specific hand tools commonly used in the job. If we had this increased level of detail, it would possibly weed out candidates who do not have these skills unless they lie about their skills. That would save a lot of money for onboarding and would save money on training costs.

According to “https://www.greatplacetowork.com/best-workplaces/100-best/2024” the top three companies to work for in 2024 are Hilton, Cisco, and NVIDIA. The two most common reasons the employees say these are the best places to work are people and culture. This shows that these companies understand the importance of human resources management. In lecture one for this week, it discusses why human resource management matters. It is said that people matter and organizational culture matters. Human resource management has an effect on both people and culture. Human resource management is about helping the people (employees) and ensuring that they are happy with the culture, benefits, and environment of the organization.

As I am in a leadership role already, I have a great sense of the leader I want to be. I strive to be a servant leader, putting the needs and success of my employees above my own. This ties to the idea of people matter in the human resource management world. This also builds a culture that embraces the voice of everyone and the development of everyone. A quote by the Jocko Willink, “To implement real change, to drive people to accomplish something truly complex or difficult or dangerous — you can’t make people do these things. You have to lead them.”, sticks out to me when it comes to the type of leader I strive to be. I want to ensure I manage my human capital in a way that ensures they are supported to accomplish all they set out to accomplish in their career by being a leader and not a boss.

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