HRM540 Week 3

What a challenging week.

Our company experienced layoffs of our maintenance man and administrator assistant. I was sick with the flu and had to miss work.

This week of learning kept me energized. It is so exciting being able to relate what you learn to your day to day life. I was able to do some team building with my two of my employees that were having issues.

The reward came when my senior employee, Mike, completed the experiment again with the rest of my team. I was out sick for our training morning and he conducted it with the other staff. I asked him for his feedback.

He said the team enjoyed it. They laughed and fussed at each other during the experiment. The great news was the outcome and how they shared about the importance of communication and listening skills. They also shared how helping each other is so important. Mike added how teamwork is valuable to the success of what we do each day.

My next challenge for this week was diagraming a problem. I went with a current problem we have at work. The admissions team is held accountable for maintaining new students for their first 28 days of class. The problem is they do not have control over the situation. Given it is policy, I have to dig deeper in how I can train and coach, so we can have better outcomes.

I am going to become more involved with the students and the instructors the first 28 days of class.

For now, we just monitor their attendance and call if they were absent. I am now going to be proactive instead of reactive. I am very excited about working with the dean and also brainstorming with the team for ideas.

I am also going to conduct a panel of students and ask them how we can help them from dropping out of school. We can put together some resources such as childcare, and transportation, to help them. I am loving this new project I am looking forward to making some changes that will positively affect the outcome.

The biggest lesson learned is accepting accountability for parts of my job that are problems and what can I do about making changes.

HRM540 WK 2

This was another great week of learning.  

 I was so excited to be able to apply what I learned to my job.

The first area I reviewed was performance evaluations. I realized the importance of a good performance evaluation. As a future HR manager I would like to focus on creating performance evaluations. 

As a Director of Admissions my job is to coach and train admissions reps to enroll and start students into school. We have quotas that each rep must meet. The problem is that we cannot evaluate the reps based on meeting their enrollment quotas. It is against the department of education rules to reward or punish reps for enrolling students into school.

So, the question arises on how to evaluate and compensate an admissions rep. We have a set salary for every new hire and a set pay increase amount. Depending on their hire date, they receive their pay increase in April or October. Their pay increase is not based on their evaluation. It is not fair that one person can produce much more than the next but yet they receive the same pay. Once person can receive an excellent evaluation and the other person can get a just meets, but have the same salary.

If I were the HR manager this would be an area I would research. I would ask other schools how they evaluate their employees. I would also ask other employees how it may have been done at their previous jobs.

Performance evaluations are not as important for the manager but are important for the employee receiving the evaluation. I take the delivery important when reviewing with an employee. Making this an important task can keep the employee engaged.

Employment engagement was the next area we studied. I enjoyed our assignment. I was able to create a survey to analyze how engaged are my employees. I was surprised at some of the results.

Our company is going through a major transformation with our accrediting body. Corporate management is challenged to make a lot of major decisions on the success of our company. Their actions and decisions they make are going to be very vital to having engaged employees.

Engaged employees are your most loyal and valuable employees. They are committed to coming to work. They use less sick time then an employee that is disengaged. When an employee becomes disengaged it can cause the company to loose profit.

As manager, it is very imperative to keep my employees engaged. HR has to be available to assist us with task on employee engagement. They have to keep the companies temperature in check so they can be a profitable company

HRM540-week 1

This was an awesome week of learning! I started this journey last spring and let life get in my way of completing what I had started. I was so nervous starting this week. My approval process took longer than expected so I started class late. I was a ball of nerves.

I was so excited learning new things.  I was ecstatic learning that there were many students in my class that works for the same company. As we learned about different systems, I fell on familiar territory.

I thought Workday was an ECA tool. I was surprised that it is universal and that there are so many different talent management tools available. I never had the pleasure of working with PeopleSoft, which was co-founded by David Duffield, but now I have the opportunity to work with his creation of Workday.

This class challenged me to study and learn more about Workday. I took more time to learn all that it has to offer me as a manager. I also challenged my staff to learn more about it so they can become comfortable with the process. I shared with them about my class and informed them they can add Workday to their resumes.

I also learned how important talent management is to businesses. As a manager, I have to depend on my HR team to assist me with screening, recruiting and hiring staff. Without their assistance, it could take me hours upon hours to go thru the process the recruit and hire the right talent. I understand and value them for creating a seamless process.

This week also encouraged me to continue to create my presentation on training and development of personnel. I want to have all steps covered so employees are trained and ready for advancement within the company. My company does not have a succession plan for employees that want to grow within the company.

I spoke with my regional vice president this week and she is very excited to see what I put together. I also took the initiative to request to train the newly hired admissions staff. This step will help me develop the needs and expectations of what they expect for their new career. This plan will also save the company money by reducing turnover of quality employees.

The biggest area of opportunity I faced this week was building a competency model and career path. When I first looked at it I was excited about putting it together. Once I started I was overwhelmed and did not understand the proper steps. I reviewed model after model until they were all a storm in my head.

This is an area I want to become very familiar with to assist me with my succession plan presentation. I found I am going to have to dig deeper to present all the different steps of my plan. Placing it in a competency model will be a great visual tool to show my superiors. Creating a good competency model will help the employee understand their skill and expertise they will need for their jobs. It will also help my company define the different competencies needed to be a successful admissions representative. It can also help define the next steps to grow in their career.

The wow moment for me this week was reading how some of my classmates are qualified for promotion but stuck in their current position. This was so familiar to my past employer. It saddened me to hear this but motivated me to be a better manager for my employees.

My last director position I encouraged my top employee to go for a program director position. I was very happy when he was promoted. The downside was I did not prepare or train someone to fill his position. My area suffered until I found a strong replacement. This whole week of learning came full circle with my career and with my succession plan to promote growth and opportunity! I am eager to learn more and to be able to use what I am learning in my day to day work.

www.workday.com