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Contemporary workplace challenges
- 1. By Tera Weisbender MGT 301 CONTEMPORARY WORKPLACE CHALLENGES
- 2. TECHNOLOGY Constant Upgrades Social Loafing Electronic Failure Loss of Personal Connection
- 3. ATTRACTING, DEVELOPING, AND MAINTAINING A QUALITY WORKFORCE Recruiting Training and Development Retention
- 4. RECESSION Decision Making Budget Cuts Marketing
- 5. CHANGE Resistance
Editor's Notes
- With the constant changes in technology it is easy to fall behind. An affective manager must be able to train and retrain their employees, as well as adapt to constant changes in the workplace. With our computer software at work, there are updates ran at least once a month. Employees are required to take webinars in order to learn the changes and how to use the new features. Social loafing can be an issue in any workplace. With 93% of people owning a phone, and a large majority of those phones being smart phones, social media sites are literally at the employees fingertips. Without regulations and consequences for these occurrences social loafing could seriously affect a company’s bottom line. Electronic failure is a manager’s worst nightmare. With the extent of our dependence on technology in this contemporary age, it is vital that contingency plans are put into place. Many places have either online or hard backups of their server that are executed daily in order to keep valuable information safe. Our company even has external power sources that will allow us to maintain the phones and computers for up to an hour after all power has gone out. This allows us to contact patients to reschedule and minimize the damage that is done by the failure. One of the main issues with ecommerce is the removal of customer service from the sales. Using social media and online marketing makes it harder to make a personal connection with your consumer which takes away the competitive advantage of many small businesses.
- Recruiting both internally and externally can be challenging. External recruitment can bring in fresh ideas and new skills, but you do not know the potential employees as well as you would a current employee. Training a new employee from scratch can prove to be costly, as well as time consuming. This is why many employers choose to recruit internally. It has been proven to lower costs and build company moral, as employees feel more valued and see room for internal advancement. Anytime that you hire someone for a position there is a risk that the fit will not work out. This is where the interview process comes into play. It is important to ask the right questions in order to asses if the applicant is a good fit for the position. Many company’s have began to use personality tests as well to see if they will fit in well with the current employees, or have the key personality traits that the company is looking for. Training can be challenging in many fields, but it is crucial to a companies success. Proper training helps to avoid employees learning bad habits, and assures that productivity stays high. Managers must evaluate employees with performance appraisals. Regular appraisals help keep employees on task and let them know when they are doing well, or not performing to standards. Many companies use rewards such as merit pay, bonuses and profit sharing plans in order to encourage hard work. Compensation and benefits rank very high on an employees list of reasons to stay with a company. With high cost of health insurance and the economic slump, employees are even more receptive to a company contributing with insurance, bonuses, profit sharing, and stock options. With the recession however, it has become difficult for a lot of companies to offer the benefits to their employees that they would like to. The manager that I interviewed for my business class became creative. She started choosing an employee of the month and would buy a gift card for dinner and tickets to a local event in order to reward that employee. Either way, it is important to company success to keep your employees happy.
- With the economy in such a bad state it is vital that managers assess all of the risks involved before making a decision. The decision making process is five step process that helps to ensure that the choices are well thought through and evaluated. 1. Find and define the problem. 2. Generate and evaluate alternative solutions. 3. Make decision. 4. Implement the decision. 5. Evaluate the results. It is harder for a company to recover from costly decisions in today’s workplace. Once bad choice can ruin a company. Budget cuts are a very real part of the recession. Because of those cuts managers are faced with the tough decision on where to cut back. Often there are jobs lost and managers are forced to take on more responsibility. The decisions on who to keep and who to let go, along with the increased stress of added responsibility, can make the modern workplace a very challenging place. Marketing is a whole ballgame than it used to be. Traditional radio and television advertisements are taking a back seat to social media and web ads. The problem is that with a lack of income many companies are letting their marketing fall by the wayside. The challenge is to come up with the right amount to spend on marketing and finding marketing ideas that are cost affective. Facebook and Twitter are two great sites that allow you to stay connected with your customer base and cost little to no money.
- While there are many reasons that change is challenging, foremost is the resistance that comes with it. The main reasons that people resist change are:Fear of the unknown. If the employee does not understand what is happening or why it is happening, it can be a scary experience. Managers need to make sure to maintain open communication and be open to answering questions that their employees may have.Disrupted habits. When your employees are used to doing things a certain way sometimes it is hard to give up those old ways. Explaining how the changes will better the process, will sometimes give clarity to the employees. Loss of confidence. With everything changing and lots of new things to learn, employees may get a feeling of inadequacy. It is important to make sure that employees are properly trained on the new processes and feedback is given freely to encourage them. Loss of control. When change comes down the shoot many times employees feel like things are being done to them rather than by or with them. It is important to make sure that everyone feels heard and that the introduction of changes is done in a tactful manner. Communication is the number one problem solver in this situation. Poor timing. When change comes in there is often a lot going on at one time. Many times the speed that everything is introduced at can leave the employees very overwhelmed. Work overload. When employees are overloaded with work change can just seem like it would take too much energy to commit to. These are times where it is important that managers pay attention to the needs of their employees and encourage then as often as possible.Loss of face. Employees often feel like they are being put down or humiliated because the job they were doing the “old” way was not good enough. This situation can often be overcome by communicating the reasons behind the change. Managers should let the employees know that it isn’t that they aren’t doing a good job, but that the new way can help them to do their job in a more efficient manner. Lock of purpose. Many employees don’t know the research that has gone into deciding on the change. This can cause them to feel like there is no purpose for it and therefore that they are doing all the work to implement the change for no reason. Explaining the benefits of the change can also help the employees feel more comfortable.