Discussion Topic: Chapter 8

Concept and Brief Description
Organizations create performance management systems to meet 3 purposes: strategic, administrative, and development

Emotional Hook
As a manager, what will happen to profitability if your employee's performance does not fall in line with the organizations goals?

Key Points

1. Organization must first identify its expectations and whether or not they are being met
2. This enables the org. to determine whether corrective action is necessary, such as training, incentives, or discipline.
3. Strategic Purpose: Accomplished when the measurement is linked to organizations goals
4. Administrative Purpose: Refers to the way the information is used on day-to-day basis
5. Developmental Purpose: Serves as a means for developing employees skills and knowledge.
   

Facilitative Questions
What are some ways that strategic purpose can be measured in a performance review? What are some ways that Administrative purpose can be measured? Developmental purpose?

Lecture Summary: Chapter 7

Today we had guest speaker, Ryan Brown, Sr. Manager, Sales & Service. He spoke about his career and commitment to organizational change at Tahitian Noni. The three most valuable concepts I received in class today were:

1. Quote: "Teaching skills only increases performance incrementally. Cultivating passion towards vision will increase their performance drastically."
2. Increase Sales + Decreased Cost = Value (training program success)
3. Address root cause instead of consequences.
   

• For example: The customer service Department was performing poorly. Initially, it was thought that the customer service department needed training when; in fact, it was the computer software the department was using that was inefficient. The computer software was the root cause. The customer service performance was a consequence of the root cause.

Discussion Topic: Chapter 7

Concept and Brief Description

Readiness for training requires a combination of employee characteristics and positive work environment that permits training. This means that the candidate must have the cognitive ability to learn the material or information, but managers needs to promote an environment that allows an employee to be open to being trained.

Emotional Hook

Imagine being hired for a position where no training, encouragement, or feedback was offered. You were simply expected to show up for work and learn the job by observation. This would be an environment where expectations are unclear and directionless. Lack of feedback would leave you uncertain as to whether or not you were performing the job as expected.

Key Points

Employee readiness characteristics: Includes cognitive ability to use written and spoken language, solve math problems, and use logic to solve problems.

Work Environment: the organization’s people encourage training, give trainees praise and encouraging words, expressing positive attitudes towards the training programs.

Facilitative Question

Would Pre-tests, Pre-training, Prep documents, and e-learning modules can help ensure readiness for training? Why?

Lecture Summary: Chapter 6

Today’s lecture was very helpful in teaching varying ways to interview candidates. Keeping the interview focus narrow and job-specific is the best way to avoid grey areas that could be viewed by the candidate as discriminatory. Small talk should be avoided at all cost. Asking questions such as, “Tell me about a time when…?” or “What did you do when….?” or “What was the end result….?” Allows the interviewing an opportunity to assess a candidates interpersonal skills, creativity, and communication skills. This also allows the candidate an opportunity to talk about their experiences and applicable skills and knowledge as it relates to the position.

Discussion Topic: Chapter 6

Concept and Brief Description

Conducting interviews is the most common method of candidate selection. Interviewing allows the employer to obtain information about the candidate, but also allows the candidate to experience what it might be like to work for the company.

Emotional Hook

Interviewers need to be trained to avoid bias, which could result in hiring candidates most like themselves.

Key Points

There are several different types of interviews: nondirective, structured, situational, and behavior description. One of the most effective ways to avoid bias is to conduct panel interviews where several members of the organization meet with the candidate.

Discussion Topic: Chapter 5

Concept and Brief Description

The transitional matrix lists job categories held in one period and shows the proportion of employees in each of those job categories at a future period.

Emotional Hook

Identifying transitional trends in your workforce seems invaluable to me. How can a company know where they are going if they don’t know where they’ve been? I have worked for too many company’s that have no idea how to develop their employees or motivate them into wanting to stay and not move on.

Key Points

Being able to pinpoint the career path of each employee through a transitional matrix would allow HR to determine trends and better create training and development programs for their employees. This will ultimately lead to a higher level of empowerment and motivation to stay with the organization.

Discussion Topic: Chapter 4

Concept and Brief Description
Job description vs. job specification. Job description is the list of tasks, duties, and responsibilities (TDR) that a job entails. Job specification is the list of knowledge, skills, abilities, and other characteristics (KSAOs) that an individual must have to perform a particular job.

Emotional Hook
In order to have a good job-fit, it is vital that the HR Manager consider both the description of the job (tasks, duties, responsibilities) and the specification (knowledge, skills, abilities, and characteristics) equally. As the book states, an individual can take pictures (task = job description), but may not have a thorough understanding of photography (knowledge/skill = specification). Another example is, a computer programmer may know the current computer language (description), but are they willing to take the initiative to learn new languages as they are developed (specification)?

Key Points
Job description focuses on the activities involved in carrying out a job . . .the observable parts of the job that can be seen, tested, or referenced. While job specification is the characteristics of people and are not directly observable. Job specification can include personality traits or proficiency, which can be difficult to gauge in an initial interview.

Facilitative Question
What characteristics are required to ensure an excellent job fit? What are some questions or methods of observation in the interview process that can be used in detecting these characteristics?