7017-8

  Evaluate Organization X to Recommend Items for Change Instructions It is your first day as Director of Personnel Administration for Organization X. You walk into your office to find a letter on your desk from a former employee who very recently separated from the organization. The letter explains many experiences the employee witnessed or personally experienced before resigning. The employee’s letter is provided as an assignment prompt included in your weekly resources. You take the letter to your boss, who instructs you to do two things. First, rank the issues in order from what you believe to be the most important to the least important. Briefly state why, citing the literature as support. Second, create a new policy or program to address what you believe is the most important issue in this letter. State why, citing the literature, along with one possible way to measure the effectiveness of the policy one-year post-implementation. Also, create an infographic highlighting the new program or policy in a way that employees will understand and support. Some free infographic tools include Piktochart, Canva, and Venngage. Length: 12 pages, not including title and reference pages, but including your infographic References: Include a minimum of 15 scholarly resources. In addition to these specified resources, other appropriate scholarly and professional resources, including seminal articles, may be included. Your assignment should demonstrate thoughtful consideration of the ideas and concepts presented in the course by providing new thoughts and insights relating directly to this topic. Your response should reflect scholarly writing and current APA standards where appropriate. 

Dear Sir or Madam:

This is the worst company I’ve ever worked for. I’ve been in my role
for less than one year and can no longer stand it here. So, I’ve quit.
The working conditions and management are the worst I’ve ever
experienced, and I’d like to tell you why. Let me walk you through the
last eight months of my employment with Org X.

Career Development

When I started, I was told that Org X prided itself on employee
training and development. Two weeks after I started working here, I
was so excited about my first training course! It sounded amazing on
paper, but in person – not at all amazing. The consultant hired to
facilitate the training came in with a million PowerPoint slides, and a
rehearsed speech that was so boring half of us were asleep by the end
of the first hour. Everyone had questions, but the consultant had no
answers. I don’t even think the consultant knew anything about the
topic we were supposed to be learning.

Also, we were told we’d be given lunch and snacks since the training
spanned the whole day. This would have been nice except they only
served tuna fish sandwiches… made with peanut butter as the secret
ingredient. Several people in the office are allergic to fish and knew
they couldn’t eat the sandwiches, so they just basically starved. But
the people allergic to nuts had no idea they couldn’t eat the sandwich,
and TWO people ended up in the hospital! Thankfully no one died. The
snacks were also terrible: Stale potato chips and watered-down
lemonade. I actually think they just squeezed a lemon into a giant jug
of water and added some sugar.

Subsequent trainings were also terrible. And nobody ever talked to us
about advancement opportunities within the organization. People who
had been there for over 20 years were unwelcoming of any new ideas,
and sometimes their ideas were really terrible and based on outdated
best practices that have since been found to be contradictions for a
successful organization. Yet those ideas are the ones we were forced
to implement because the old-timers outnumbered the new people –
who were to be seen and not heard.

In addition to the awful trainings, Org X did a massive recruitment
sweep shortly after I started, and maybe 2 of the seven people they
hired were actually qualified for the job. This meant that I (and a few
others who also knew what they were doing) had to pick up the slack

for the untrained and uninformed new hires. And not at all shocking to
me, the least qualified of all of them just got promoted to a new
position within the organization—a job that would have been perfect
for me. I don’t even know how it’s legally possible to promote a new
college graduate with a history degree and no experience in
management to a project management position. This person doesn’t
even have the certification the state requires to do the job. So, I’m
choosing to cut ties with this organization instead of fighting their
choices.

Work-Life Balance

I came in every day at 6 a.m. so I could leave at 3 p.m. to pick my
children up from school. This flexible schedule is one of the reasons I
took the job. I would always come in at 6, but almost every day right
around 2:30 p.m., my manager would call me back and give me
something to do that day. As a result, I was almost always late picking
up my children from school, and it got really stressful – especially on
days I had to ask my spouse to pick up the children. This stress was
intense, causing us to constantly argue at home; and I never felt
comfortable enough to tell my manager I couldn’t do the work that
needed to be done just as I needed to leave for the day. Once when I
tried, my manager threatened to fire me.

Working Environment

I don’t even know where to start with this one. Half of the employees
in Org X clearly have no personal hygiene regimen. Walking through
the halls, it smells like a high school locker room. People steal other
people’s lunch from the common area fridge; they cook the worst
smelling things in the microwave and leave trash all over the kitchen
for other people to clean.

The person in the cubicle next to me always played loud music that
was not even appropriate for the office. A few of the younger
employees like to play pranks and would play inappropriate jokes on
me and others, like loosening the screws on our chairs so when we sat
down, we’d plop to the ground. One time, I walked to the copy
machine and didn’t lock my desktop computer screen, and they put
some screen saver on my screen of a person doing inappropriate
things with loud music, and I couldn’t remove it – and right then, my
manager came around and thought I was trying to be funny. It was
terrible.

Management

Speaking of management, my manager was the worst. We were all on
pins and needles because we never knew from one day to the next
which manager was showing up for work—the one in a good mood or
the one in a bad one. Additionally, the management style ranged from
laissez-faire to micromanaging, and it was impossible to know on a
daily basis which one we would get.

Beyond the mood swings and poor management style, our manager
had favorite employees who always got to do less work or leave early
without penalty. I was not one of those employees. I consistently had
to do more work so that other people could do less. And like I said
before, the stress of all of this nearly ruined my home life.

My manager has been with this organization for almost 20 years and
had no plans to retire. Other people who have been around that long
act the same way – mood swings and all. I think a big part of the
problem is that they see new hires as threats to their ideas and way of
doing things. They’re all so set in their ways of thinking; it was just
awful trying to communicate any ideas that would actually work and
make the organization function so much better overall.

Benefits and Perks

Our benefits were similar to those at other public organizations, but
somehow the payroll system would take days away from us that we
never took off. I don’t know if someone was making an error or if it
was just a glitch in the system. But, there were several days I took off
for vacation, and I was never paid for that time because of this
computer error – and I STILL haven’t been reimbursed.

Also, the extra hours I had to work for my manager were never
compensated. I was a salaried employee, but I was still only supposed
to work 40 hours a week. And this was a message that was sent out
several times by higher-ups. Yet, I almost always worked at least 50
hours a week with no relief or even a “thank you.” A couple of times, I
came in an hour late, but in my 6-month review, my manager looked
up my clock-in schedule and gave me a very low score on work
attendance because of those two days, and said no matter what I
must always get to work on time or they would take that time out of
my vacation.

Diversity and Equal Opportunity

There is none. I will leave it at that. Except, I know for a fact that
women in this organization receive 8% less in salary than men in the
same position, with the same level of education.

Overall, this was the worst place I have ever worked. Org X provides a
great service to others within the community, and I implore you to
please bring these issues to the attention of someone who can begin
to enact real change. I understand that you have experience in public
personnel management, so I wish you the best in putting everything
you’ve learned in school and the field to good work here!

Sincerely,

Sad and Disgruntled Ex-Org X Employee

Dear Sir or Madam:

This is the worst company I’ve ever worked for. I’ve been in my role
for less than one year and can no longer stand it here. So, I’ve quit.
The working conditions and management are the worst I’ve ever
experienced, and I’d like to tell you why. Let me walk you through the
last eight months of my employment with Org X.

Career Development

When I started, I was told that Org X prided itself on employee
training and development. Two weeks after I started working here, I
was so excited about my first training course! It sounded amazing on
paper, but in person – not at all amazing. The consultant hired to
facilitate the training came in with a million PowerPoint slides, and a
rehearsed speech that was so boring half of us were asleep by the end
of the first hour. Everyone had questions, but the consultant had no
answers. I don’t even think the consultant knew anything about the
topic we were supposed to be learning.

Also, we were told we’d be given lunch and snacks since the training
spanned the whole day. This would have been nice except they only
served tuna fish sandwiches… made with peanut butter as the secret
ingredient. Several people in the office are allergic to fish and knew
they couldn’t eat the sandwiches, so they just basically starved. But
the people allergic to nuts had no idea they couldn’t eat the sandwich,
and TWO people ended up in the hospital! Thankfully no one died. The
snacks were also terrible: Stale potato chips and watered-down
lemonade. I actually think they just squeezed a lemon into a giant jug
of water and added some sugar.

Subsequent trainings were also terrible. And nobody ever talked to us
about advancement opportunities within the organization. People who
had been there for over 20 years were unwelcoming of any new ideas,
and sometimes their ideas were really terrible and based on outdated
best practices that have since been found to be contradictions for a
successful organization. Yet those ideas are the ones we were forced
to implement because the old-timers outnumbered the new people –
who were to be seen and not heard.

In addition to the awful trainings, Org X did a massive recruitment
sweep shortly after I started, and maybe 2 of the seven people they
hired were actually qualified for the job. This meant that I (and a few
others who also knew what they were doing) had to pick up the slack

for the untrained and uninformed new hires. And not at all shocking to
me, the least qualified of all of them just got promoted to a new
position within the organization—a job that would have been perfect
for me. I don’t even know how it’s legally possible to promote a new
college graduate with a history degree and no experience in
management to a project management position. This person doesn’t
even have the certification the state requires to do the job. So, I’m
choosing to cut ties with this organization instead of fighting their
choices.

Work-Life Balance

I came in every day at 6 a.m. so I could leave at 3 p.m. to pick my
children up from school. This flexible schedule is one of the reasons I
took the job. I would always come in at 6, but almost every day right
around 2:30 p.m., my manager would call me back and give me
something to do that day. As a result, I was almost always late picking
up my children from school, and it got really stressful – especially on
days I had to ask my spouse to pick up the children. This stress was
intense, causing us to constantly argue at home; and I never felt
comfortable enough to tell my manager I couldn’t do the work that
needed to be done just as I needed to leave for the day. Once when I
tried, my manager threatened to fire me.

Working Environment

I don’t even know where to start with this one. Half of the employees
in Org X clearly have no personal hygiene regimen. Walking through
the halls, it smells like a high school locker room. People steal other
people’s lunch from the common area fridge; they cook the worst
smelling things in the microwave and leave trash all over the kitchen
for other people to clean.

The person in the cubicle next to me always played loud music that
was not even appropriate for the office. A few of the younger
employees like to play pranks and would play inappropriate jokes on
me and others, like loosening the screws on our chairs so when we sat
down, we’d plop to the ground. One time, I walked to the copy
machine and didn’t lock my desktop computer screen, and they put
some screen saver on my screen of a person doing inappropriate
things with loud music, and I couldn’t remove it – and right then, my
manager came around and thought I was trying to be funny. It was
terrible.

Management

Speaking of management, my manager was the worst. We were all on
pins and needles because we never knew from one day to the next
which manager was showing up for work—the one in a good mood or
the one in a bad one. Additionally, the management style ranged from
laissez-faire to micromanaging, and it was impossible to know on a
daily basis which one we would get.

Beyond the mood swings and poor management style, our manager
had favorite employees who always got to do less work or leave early
without penalty. I was not one of those employees. I consistently had
to do more work so that other people could do less. And like I said
before, the stress of all of this nearly ruined my home life.

My manager has been with this organization for almost 20 years and
had no plans to retire. Other people who have been around that long
act the same way – mood swings and all. I think a big part of the
problem is that they see new hires as threats to their ideas and way of
doing things. They’re all so set in their ways of thinking; it was just
awful trying to communicate any ideas that would actually work and
make the organization function so much better overall.

Benefits and Perks

Our benefits were similar to those at other public organizations, but
somehow the payroll system would take days away from us that we
never took off. I don’t know if someone was making an error or if it
was just a glitch in the system. But, there were several days I took off
for vacation, and I was never paid for that time because of this
computer error – and I STILL haven’t been reimbursed.

Also, the extra hours I had to work for my manager were never
compensated. I was a salaried employee, but I was still only supposed
to work 40 hours a week. And this was a message that was sent out
several times by higher-ups. Yet, I almost always worked at least 50
hours a week with no relief or even a “thank you.” A couple of times, I
came in an hour late, but in my 6-month review, my manager looked
up my clock-in schedule and gave me a very low score on work
attendance because of those two days, and said no matter what I
must always get to work on time or they would take that time out of
my vacation.

Diversity and Equal Opportunity

There is none. I will leave it at that. Except, I know for a fact that
women in this organization receive 8% less in salary than men in the
same position, with the same level of education.

Overall, this was the worst place I have ever worked. Org X provides a
great service to others within the community, and I implore you to
please bring these issues to the attention of someone who can begin
to enact real change. I understand that you have experience in public
personnel management, so I wish you the best in putting everything
you’ve learned in school and the field to good work here!

Sincerely,

Sad and Disgruntled Ex-Org X Employee