At a regional power company, managers are in charge of assigning training and development opportunities to their employees. These opportunities are sponsored by the company, and employees are entitled to their regular pay while attending training and development sessions. Recently, there has been a growing number of complaints that managers were engaging in favoritism by only assigning these training and development opportunities to their favorite employees. Favoritism violates company policy, which states that all employees must be given equal opportunities. The HR director aims to address this issue.
Some managers claim that they assign training and development opportunities to their high-performing employees as they believe it is an incentive to stay at the company. How should the HR director determine whether this has been effective as an objective?
A new HR director is hired into the HR department of one at a midsize, engineering company. The HR director immediately notices that, unlike all other major departments, HR is never invited to any important meetings, or involved in strategic discussions. The president of the company sees the sole use of an HR department as meeting legal requirements and the core duties of the HR director are to onboard new employees, help them complete their paperwork and address employee complaints. The HR director sees several areas where HR can add value to the company such as improving employee engagement, automating various HR systems, and introducing a performance review process. The HR director recognizes that the company needs one to two additional HR employees to truly be able to implement these important initiatives.
When the HR director asks the president about the possibility of hiring two new HR employees, the president laughs and replies that one HR employee is costing the company more than enough.
While developing the performance appraisal system, several employees explain to the HR director that they largely work independently, making it difficult to provide ratings for others. What approach should the HR director propose to meet the needs of the company?
Which best describes a conflict in the workplace?
The marketing department at a large financial services company chooses five high-performing staff members every year to receive a performance award, which includes a monetary reward and recognition at an end-of-year meeting. Employees are chosen by managers in the marketing department. Each manager nominates two direct reports, and then all managers meet as a group to discuss nominees until a consensus is reached. The names of the winners are given to HR for final approval. The marketing department is preparing to begin this year's nomination process. There have been repeat winners in each of the last three years. A marketing employee files a complaint with the HR director about favoritism in the award process.
Additionally, the employee points out that newer employees rarely win the award, which lowers their morale.
New employees tend not to win because they spend a couple of years training and shadowing experienced employees before receiving tasks to perform independently.
How should the HR director minimize the perception of favoritism in the selection process?
A large retail company opens a distribution center directly across the street from a small competing firm's distribution center and posts a sign advertising open entry-level positions. The plant manager of the small firm notices that the sign indicates the advertised salary is higher than what the firm pays its entry-level employees.
The plant manager is concerned employees will leave the firm to seek work at the competing company. The plant manager notifies the HR manager of the pay differences and requests immediate pay matching for all entry-level employees. The HR manager sets up a meeting with the plant manager, compensation manager, and HR business partner to discuss the issue. They decide to increase base pay to match the competitor's base pay but only for a subset of entry-level roles identified as critical. They also decide to put the pay increase into effect immediately, and the HR manager agrees to monitor the situation over the next three months.
How should the HR manager analyze the impact of the pay increase on entry-level employees over the three-month period?
