Author: Annmarie Floyd

This weeks blog post is about labor unions and a deep dive into the pros and cons into labor unions regarding employees, employers and society.

Pros to Labor Unions

The benefits from unionization that middle-class workers receive far out weigh the cons. The US Treasury found unions raise the wages of their members by 10-15%, as well as improves the fringe benefits and procedures in the workplace, including retirement plans, predictable scheduling and policies in place to handle workplace grievances. Additionally, due to the increase in wages through unions, the competition in wages change industry wide, resulting in workers at non-unionized firms seeing an increase in wages as well. Finally, unions can potentially boost the productivity of a business by improving the working environments and giving experienced workers more input capabilities when it comes to making decisions regarding the procedures within a workplace. These are only a few of the many points the US Treasury covers on in their press release in 2023. If you’d like to read more, you can find the fact sheet here.

Cons to Labor Unions

According to the Maryville University, the downsides include less autonomy, improper use of funds by unions resulting in six-figure salaries for union leaders and luxury HQs, union dues, tension within the workplace, and potential slowing of advancement within a company. Employers see the cons of unions as stifling to employee initiatives, labor contracts may make it difficult to reward employees who are exceptional within a company, and unions may decrease business competition due to wage raises and better benefits. That last point goes in direct opposition to the US Treasury’s point of creating competition within the industry by raising wages and benefits. If you would like to look more into Maryville University’s pros and cons to labor unions, you can visit their 2022 article here.

Overall, I think I would join a union if I need to. What I mean by that is if the position I am in at a company is one that would benefit from unionizing, I would likely join a union to negotiate better pay, benefits, pensions, etc. If the position doesn’t need a union and everything is swell, I wouldn’t join it as I wouldn’t think it is needed in my current position. While I do not have personal connections to people who are a part of a union, I did find a Reddit post asking “Are Unions Worth It” and the overall opinion is they are always worth it.

I completed three stress test/personality tests for this weeks blogs. Below are the results and discussion on stress.

Life Stress Inventory Test

The Holmes-Rahe Life Stress Inventory test is done through marking and totaling the points that have to do with major stressors in a persons life within the past year. If a person scores 150 points or less, they have relatively low life changes and a low susceptibility to potential stress-induced breakdowns. 150-300 points means the person has a 50% change of having a major health breakdown within the next two years. Finally, points 300 and up raises those odd to about 80%. How much did I score? 167.

Coping and Stress Management Skills Test

The Coping and Stress Management Skills test is a 38 question test that scores you on your ability to handle stress and what you do to try to fix the stress you are experiencing. After completing my test, I scored an 88/100. I learned that I use more problem-focused strategies to handle the stress I am under. In cases where the stress is not controllable by me, using a problem-focused strategy may not be the most effective but when I CAN control the stress causing situation, I can use it to my advantage to modify/take charge of the situation to better cope.

Type A Personality Survey

The Type A Personality Survey is a 73 minute test which assesses whether you have the personality traits that match a Type A personality. These traits include things like difficulty expressing emotions, competitiveness, perfectionism, unhealthy dependence on wealth, status and/or power, hostility and patience. After completing this 20 minute survey, I scored a 20/100 on irritability/impatience. It found that I am mainly warm and tolerant most of the time, but some things may cause slight impatience and hostility. When I am stressed, I may last out or stew in anger/frustration but these occurrences are very rare. I tend to trust others so I am usually open to being emotional and I value relationships for the people, not what those people can do for me. According to this survey, I am not at an elevated risk of heart disease according to my score.

what did you learn about yourself?

After completing these three surveys/tests, I don’t think I learned anything different about myself. Everything was actually pretty spot on besides “stewing in frustration/anger” which sometimes I do, but I tend to get over things very fast so it is never really a “stewing” that happens. My irritation is few and far between and, again, last not long at all. I think these were all pretty accurate in what I already knew about myself.

Managing Stress in your Professional career

There are a lot of things that I, as well as others, can do to manage stress levels in a professional career. The first one, for me personally, that comes to mind is setting small, realistic goals to combat against overwhelming myself. For example, I have 15 assignments due each week this term as a 16-credit, full-time student. Instead of focusing on just how many assignments I need to complete, I focus on a single assignment. Once I complete that single assignment, I move to the next and so on and so forth. This reduces the amount of stress and overwhelm I experience when I look at the massive list of to-dos. I can use this in my professional career when I am faced with a large task. I can break it up into smaller, more manageable tasks to both keep me on track with the completion as well as maintaining a calm, least-stressed out demeanor. What goes along with this are breaks. Making sure I provide myself with much needed breaks can ensure I don’t end up burnt out from a massive amount of work. I do this now when I feel overwhelmed and know I need to take a step back. I remove myself from my work area and relax for as long as I need until I am ready to start my work again. Now I know this may not always be possible in a work setting, but knowing your boundaries and knowing what you can/can’t handle at once can provide you with beneficial insight into yourself and what you can handle before you reach the boiling point. Taking small breaks, even if its 5-10 minutes, has provided to be beneficial to myself and my stress levels. Finally, I organize and plan my day and week out. As I mentioned previously, I am a full-time student with 16 credits. I will maintain 15-16 credits until I graduate in Summer 2026. Pair that with two young children and two part time jobs and you have yourself a recipe for a stress disaster. My husband asks me how I do everything each week, and it is a common ask in my main job. The answer boils down to planning and organization of my time. Every Monday, I sit down and write about what I am going to do, what my tasks/assignments are and when I plan to complete them. This has maintained my sanity thus far and I will continue to plan and organize what needs done throughout the rest of my academic and professional careers.

Organizations and their attempts to help employees manage stress

In my research to find how organizations help their employees handle stress, I found Guidance and Tips for Employees for Workplace Stress, which discusses the key things employers should do. These include being aware, identifying what is making it harder for the organizations workers to get their jobs done, show empathy and provide access to resources and support networks and services employees can use. I found a 2020 article, What Managers Can Do to Ease Workplace Stress, that provides additional insight into how stress has caused workers to lose sleep, productivity at the workplace, and overall well-being. This particular article lists insight into how managers can assist with employees stress handling by encouraging the use of stress-management and wellness resources, ensure employees take breaks, and to encourage employees to take time for themselves by pursuing hobbies, talking with friends, and taking time off, in general, to name a few.

Overall, while this was a very long blog post, I solidified how I feel about myself and my actions when it comes to stress levels as well as what I can do in my professional, personal and academic careers to manage my stressors so I don’t end up croaking due to stressors.

The Situation

For this blog post, I think I am going to talk about my personal experience with a previous employer. I had originally been hired as a cashier at a popular thrift store. I was excited for this as I had just left a housekeeper position at a nearby hotel. After working at this thrift store for a couple months, I had wanted to move into a new position. Luckily, I was able to move to pricing shoes, rather than cashiering. Unfortunately, this opened the door for overworking. After I moved into the back, where everything is sorted and priced, I was tasked with sorting and pricing shoes, sizing and stocking clothing on the floor, stocking books, helping with incoming donations AND cashiering, all as needed. I was working five separate jobs for the price of one. On top of those five jobs, I also had to be available at the drop of a hat during my shift to help my manager and assistant manager with anything they needed. Lastly, they had introduced quotas we all had to meet. Imagine needing to meet a quota for four different jobs at once. It was a nightmare job.

If being overworked wasn’t enough, I got paid maybe $12/hr. It, overall, was not worth the time, effort or mental and physical exhaustion the jobs were putting me through. I started looking for a job and started reducing the amount of effort I put into my work. I’m not proud of it, but due to the quotas and constant stress from additional jobs needing done, I would price and put out shoes ridiculously high for a thrift store just to meet the quota so I could work on the other jobs needing done.

The Outcome

The entirety of this situation was absolutely motivated by compensation. Had I been paid for the effort I was putting in for those five jobs, I likely would have stayed longer. Additionally, I was getting irritated that I was tasked with so many different positions while my coworkers had one, maybe two, positions they had to focus on each day and they got paid more than I did. All of it was clear there was negative inequity occurring with myself and the positions I filled. I started with a decrease in output and ended with leaving the organization. It was such a bad experience that I swore I would never work for the company again unless it was my absolute only option.

Looking back, I haven’t taken many trainings. I can recount two instances, both positive and negative, that I think would be best to discuss for this blog.

Training 1: Group Video – Not Beneficial

In one of my previous jobs, about 5-ish years ago, I had worked at a well-known store. I barely remember what the training was about, which tells a lot about how impactful it was. I do remember we were called into the break room to watch a short 20-minute video on some sort of training topic pertaining to the company’s inner workings. After we completed the training, I believe we had to sign a paper saying we watched it and went on with our day. Looking back on it now, it was the absolute bare bones training a company could offer. If I can’t recall what the lesson was or even what the training was supposed to be about, it pretty much explains how poor it had gone. It lacked all of the core principles, as explained in the Week 6 – Lecture 2: Evaluating Training Effectiveness, needed to create a learning environment to promote the training and ensure employees retain the information and can use it later.

Training 2: Online Lessons – Beneficial

The second time that I have done a training, and remembered it, was actually quite recent. I had to complete multiple online training segments on sexual harassment and data/scam safety. I remember this a lot better due to it being recent and the specific videos and readings that were used. For the data safety, there were skits explaining the situation with two and three employees where one employee was like “Who cares about data safety” while the other goes into extreme detail on just how important data safety is and how to protect yourself from data attacks. When it came to the sexual harassment training, the training consisted of stories that had to do with the types of sexual harassment that could be present in a workplace and what to do in case you or someone you know has experienced sexual harassment. I found this was done very well as it was engaging and provided opportunities to test myself on what was covered with mini quizzes in the middle of each lesson.

Ultimately, I can definitely tell which business truly cares about their employees and customers well-being and which business just wants to meet quotas.

I completed the IAT test on skin color. Below is my results:

I went into the test believing I had no bias and preferred both dark-skinned people and light-skinned equally. According to the IAT, I suggest no automatic preferences to either skin tone and I was correct in my assumption on my implicit bias when it comes to skin color. I was thinking about choosing religion, I feel anyone and everyone can have differing religions and mixes of practices so I felt skin color would be the best option for this assignment as it is one of the major bias issues, specifically in the US (1),(2).

I understand how implicit bias can impact the reliability or validity of a selection process. I almost want to compare it with jury duty selections and how people are asked if there are any reasons why they cannot maintain an impartial opinion throughout the entirety of the case. If someone has a bias against a particular group of people, I feel they should not take part in the selection process as that can skew the decisions ultimately made. If anything, hiring processes should include multiple people of differing background, ethnicities, skin colors, etc., to allow for the most unbiased choice possible, but I understand that isn’t much of a possibility considering the amount of people that would have to be present for each interview. As explained in the week 5 – Lecture 4: Improving Interview Effectiveness this week, many interviewers have snap-judgements about the candidate within minutes of meeting the person. Having those differences in background and insight can be beneficial in hiring the correct people and possible reduce the risk of biased decisions being made, thus helping with the reliability and validity of an interview selection process.

(1): Anderson, M. (2023a, April 20). Most Americans say racial bias is a problem in the workplace. can Ai Help?. Pew Research Center. https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2023/04/20/most-americans-say-racial-bias-is-a-problem-in-the-workplace-can-ai-help/

(2): Noe-Bustamante, L. (2021, November 4). Majority of Latinos say skin color impacts opportunity in America and shapes daily life. Pew Research Center. https://www.pewresearch.org/race-and-ethnicity/2021/11/04/majority-of-latinos-say-skin-color-impacts-opportunity-in-america-and-shapes-daily-life/

What made the interviews you have experienced effective/ineffective, especially when you think about reliability, validity and utility?

In my life thus far, I have only done four interviews. Looking back on the few interviews I have done, most of them were effective. Now, take this with a grain of salt as my brain is not as it used to be, even though I am only 25 but that’s beside the point. Now when it comes to reliability, validity and utility, I am not quite sure how they set up their interviews internally, but for the main ones that had happened with more well-known businesses, those went rather well. I found the questions asked of me were pretty typical questions about my challenges, weaknesses, strengths, how I would handle a hypothetical situation, etc. I did have one of those interviews not be an actual interview, rather I got the job without interviewing, in a child care facility, which in itself is crazy to think about after the fact, and I immediately was given trainings to complete to be considered “qualified.” That specific situation was poorly thought through, very ineffective, and really dangerous for the children. The company in question actually closed down shortly after I had left due to poor child management.

If you could go back and advise those employers on how to improve the effectiveness of their interviews, what would you tell them? 

If I could go back and advise the employers on how to improve the effectiveness of their interviews, I would likely tell them to try to create a rapport with interviewees to make them feel more comfortable. Only 1/4 interviews made me feel at ease. All the others were unwelcoming, stressful and made my brain go completely blank, which then made me feel lost on how to answer questions. If an interviewer can connect with an interviewee, as explained in the Week 5: lecture 4 – Improving Interview Effectiveness, for this week, about the interview-related errors and biases, it could make the entire interview process much more pleasant for both parties.

I, personally, have had no experience at all with creating and maintaining job descriptions, but I do understand how tedious it can become. For example, For my work, we have to help another team find which emails need to be updates on a regular basis. To do this, we have to go into each individual email and find specific keywords and then add them to the list for the next team to assess. I am talking about this because of the reasonings behind employers not including things, like pay, in their job descriptions. There isn’t enough time in the day to track down each job listing a business has created to change based on what the salary or pay is that month.

Job descriptions can be difficult to create and maintain because times are constantly changing. As I mentioned above, if a company has the salaries posted in job listings, they have to go in and occasionally update the application with the new pay. This is the same with other types of details that may be found in the job descriptions, i.e., legal and environmental compliances. As explained in the article Job Worth Doin: Update Descriptions by Kathryn Tyler, there are significant risks in job descriptions that can be detrimental to a business. If a business doesn’t keep a very clear job description that is up to date with the required responsibilities, they can have a possible lawsuit on their hands.

Choosing strategies in how you want to address the gap that needs filled in your employee pool is a great start. As mentioned in Lecture 3: Workforce Planning for Week 4, asking how fast the gap needs filled and if the gap is expected to be long or short term begins the process, the “nature of the gap,” or how much human suffering would be caused and how easy or hard the consequences would be if the position wasn’t filled. In other words, if the business doesn’t fill that position, how detrimental will it be for the company? Lastly, the other considerations like training, quality/quantity impact and safety/morale implications if that position is not filled. All of these can create difficulties in creating a job position, but also create a significant amount of insight into just how important jobs within the company are.

Tyler, K. (2023, December 21). Job worth doing: Update descriptions. Society for Human Resource Management. https://www.shrm.org/topics-tools/news/hr-magazine/job-worth-update-descriptions

Hello All! After reviewing the Best Companies to Work For in 2020, I found four organizations that I was most interested in and I discussed how I think they use HRM. I also wanted to share how I’d like to be as a manager and what the most difficult parts of being a manager may be.

Fortune 100 Companies HR Practices

Capital One, Navy Federal Credit Union, Hilton and Veterans United Home Loans were the four companies I chose to comb through. The consensus among these four companies is each company provides ethical and competent management, has great employee benefits, and the employees feel they are cared about as people, rather than just a number.

The Type Of Manager I Aspire To Be

The type of manager I’d like to be is the manager to build up my employees. Start from the bottom and make sure they know expectations and have access to what they need to excel at those expectations and work up from there ensuring all needs are met. There is a sentence in the book First Break All the Rules: What The World’s Greatest Managers Do Differently by Marcus Buckingham and Curt W. Coffman that really stuck with me. “You are the manager who so loves your work that you get tears in your eyes when asked to describe how you helped so many of your people succeed.”(Buckingham, et.al. 2014). I feel this sentence correctly explains how I wish to lead as a manager.

Difficulties Of Being A Manager

The most difficult aspects of a managers job, I believe, would be to ensure all employees are supported in their own individual ways. As a manager, you cannot just use a blanket statement or practice in hopes to cover all of what your employees need. You need to notice, appreciate and harness your employees individuality and make sure each employee is supported using the 12 questions asked in the book mentioned above, but do so from the bottom up and individually.

Citations: Buckingham, M., & Coffman, C. W. (2014). First, break all the rules : What the world’s greatest managers do differently. Gallup Press.