Assignment 1: Case Study 1

Credit Weight: 30% of your final grade
Due: after you have finished Unit 6
Length: 1500 words: 500-word memo, 1000-word analysis

Case

You are a HR practitioner in a medium-sized company that hires approximately 25 employees per year in entry-level positions. The average age of your company’s new employees is 25 years old (typically post-secondary graduates with 1–2 years of work experience) and approximately 57 per cent of your new employees are female. Approximately half of your female new hires take maternity leave within three years of hire, necessitating the hiring of temporary employees and the redistribution of some tasks.

Your boss has expressed frustration with the cost and work associated with accommodating maternity leaves. After three relatively new employees announced they were pregnant last week, the boss has directed you to “do something” about this problem and has authorized you to propose changes to job design, HR planning, recruitment, and selection that will function to reduce the number of maternity leaves in the company. Your boss requires a memo to senior management in response to this request by the end of the week.

Instructions

1.      This assignment has two components:

a.     a memo of approximately 500 words.

b.     a 1000-word reflection and analysis of your memo.

Full sentences and paragraphs are required, although you may use bulleted or numbered lists where they increase clarity.

2.     Before writing the memo, consult the tipsheet “Writing Memos” at the bottom of the HRMT 386/ORGB 386 course website. When writing the memo, consider all of the different ways in which you might respond to your manager’s request. Consider the pros and cons of each, and select the option you will advance. Then begin drafting your memo.

3.     After writing your memo, reflect on and analyze  your memo, and address the following questions in about 1000 words:

a.     What organizational goals were you trying to achieve in writing this memo?

b.     Who were the two audiences for this memo? What did each audience “need” from this memo?

c.      Did the manager’s direction cause you any discomfort? (Hint: it should have.) What was the nature and cause of this discomfort?

d.     Why did you make the recommendation that you made?

4.     Clearly reference the source of any information that you paraphrase or quote directly, including material you find in the Study Guide. Please use APA Style. 

For help on using APA format, visit OWL at Purdue University—Using APA Format or consult the AU Centre for Psychology APA Style Tutorial.

5.     Before you start your assignment, review the information about interpretations of and penalties for plagiarism and academic misconduct in the Athabasca University Calendar.

Contact your tutor if you have any questions about this assignment or about properly citing material that you are paraphrasing or quoting directly.

 

 Memo

 

To:       Senior Management  

 

From:    Name, Human Resources

 

Date:     6/25/2015

 

 

Background:

 

The costs associated with maternity leave have become problematic and therefore a solution to this problem has been developed. Statistics indicate that after an average of three years most new female employees take time off for maternity leave. This proves an immense problem as the company cannot expand their market share while consistently having to fill holes in our internal work structure.

 

Potential Options: 

 

A potential solution to reducing maternity leave is a change in Recruitment that specifically targets men more so than women. This can be achieved by presenting the required position to require skills such as leadership, aggressiveness, and initiative. As a result this will have an effect on the amount of women that will still seek employment and therefore increase the percentage of male employees within the company.  

 

A change to job design making it more physically demanding is another way to increase the ratio of men compared to women that will apply for vacant positions. While this may provide some negative some negative repercussions in the way of having some inefficiencies leading to subpar job performance. However this can in turn be remedied by the amount of men that will enter our workforce and therefore reduce the number of maternity leaves and the associated costs it brings.

 

A different approach to the problem lies in a change of our selection process. This way, the company can actively be in control over how many women will enter the workforce. This will result in either no women joining the workforce or only very few. There are however some repercussions to this solution,

both publicly and internally. While publicly the company could start to lose credibility and therefore customer support, internally it could be harder for new female employees to join our workforce if it is so heavily male dominated. As a result this solution should only be used sporadically for no more than a couple years in a row. This sporadic use should be able to limit the negative repercussions, but at the same time also limit the effectiveness of lowering the internal rate of maternity leave.

 

Recommended option:

 

As a personal recommendation, making changes to the recruitment process to allow the company to attract employees that are in an older age range than we previously employed. This will have the effect that most of the women in our workforce will already have had children and are not likely to plan on taking any more maternity leave. Adding to this change, the company can implement a change in the selection process to screen out any women that are under the age of 35. As a result, this will allow us to drastically lower the rate of women leaving for maternity leave while still actively employing women. This solution offers both a decrease in maternity leave taken by employees, while at the same time retaining the benefits of employing women in the workforce.

Personal Analysis

 

After considering the assigned task and trying to look for ways to fulfill the assigned request to reduce internal maternity leave. It was immediately evident that the accomplishment of such a task would be heavily in favor of the employer and exploitive of female employees. The organizational goals that I was trying to achieve through this memo, was first and foremost to find as many possible changes to our internal policies as I could, that would in one way or another accomplish the task given to me. As a secondary goal I was also trying to find a solution that would be more of a middle ground between employer and employee. This middle ground was also emphasized to be a more long-term plan since having women in the business can help to better understand how to appeal to female customers. This insight is extremely valuable, since it has been proven that women in some countries have control or influence of 72% of household spending (business.gov.au). So the overall organizational goal was to fulfill my manager’s request by reducing the amount of maternity leave, while still trying to keep a healthy amount of female employee base.

 

            As well as trying to fulfill organizational goals, keeping in mind the two audiences affected by the memo and how best to represent their needs. On one side there is the company that is requesting to have a reduction in internal maternity leaves developed. While on the other side we have the employees that would be affected the most by those changes, which are young women anywhere up to 35 seeking employment. The needs that had to be fulfilled for the company were very simple, reduce the amount of maternity leaves and therefore indirectly increase profits. While this is the original command however, other things have to be taken into consideration while looking at the company’s needs. Those needs being avoiding a lawsuit against gender discrimination through differential treatment (Steen, 2013, p. 36), as well as trying to not hurt the company’s long-term profits. On the employees side we have the needs of stable employment and need for maternity leaves in the case of a pregnancy for women. One income families are exceedingly rare nowadays as well as the possibility of a women trying to raise a child by herself, in both those cases stable employment and maternity leave benefits are crucial for women to sustain themselves or their family without having to sacrifice either their health or financial situation.

 

            When looking at the request made by the manager to reduce the amount of internal maternity leaves, the first opinion that would come to many peoples mind is that of course they would try to eliminate costs as best as they could. Sadly in today’s society it is seen as the norm that a company tries to exploit its labor force as much as it can, and from many peoples point of view is not only justified but also expected. The real problem with such a way of thinking however is that it gives the company power to keep operating under very loose ethical and moral standards. On one side if the manager issued this request to a man, this man would have to come up with policies that would be detrimental to his own wife for example or face being eliminated from the company himself. Even worse, if the manager issued this request to a woman employee, she would basically be eliminating herself from employment either way. Adding to that predicament is the fact that a family more often than not relies on double income, or single women might not even have that second income in the first place. This tells us that the company is basically dropping their morals and potentially ruining the livelihood of many women and families. The final problem having to be looked at here is that the company full well knows that an economy where no one would hire young women because of potential maternity leave would end up hurting their business even more than employing them does. However the company still choosing not to employ, tells us that they are willing to drop their own moral standard and hope that other companies will not do the same and make up for them. All in all this makes me see the company as a very unethical entity that is only after profits and has no commitment for its employees or the community around it.

           

           

After considering all this, I was still in the position of being an employee that has attained the task of finding a solution to the manager’s request. The first three potential options were just anything I could think of that would achieve this goal, no matter how inefficient it would end up being. The recommended choice that I gave however was made with trying to minimize the damage it would do to the labor market as a whole and the community that thrives around the company. Having women in the company is not something I wanted to give up on, this lead to me trying to portray the maternity leave problem not as a women problem, but rather only a young women problem. This is coupled with a change in the recruitment process to make the company seem more attractive to women over the age of 35 since it was stated that before most new women were still around 24. This change could be anything from how the company presents itself, to maybe implementing bonuses geared towards families that are already at a later stage in life. This would also have the side effect of creating incentive for the current relatively young employee base to stay with the company well into the future since they feel like they are eventually going to reap those benefits as well. This was the best solution I could come up with while trying to keep a healthy middle ground of fulfilling the company’s request as well as not outright excluding women from the company.    

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Bibliography:

 

 

 

Women in the workplace. (n.d.). Retrieved July 1, 2015, from http://www.business.gov.au/business-topics/employing-people/diversity-in-the-workplace/Pages/women-in-the-workplace.aspx

 

Steen. (2013). Human Resource Management, 3rd Edition. [VitalSource Bookshelf version]. Retrieved from http://online.vitalsource.com/books/9781259102042/page/36