- Identify an organization to study. I recommend using your network when approaching a company. Using a company, you are currently working or recently worked for is a great idea. If this is the case, you can use yourselves as one of the interviewees. You will need to conduct a total of three interviews with current or former employees of this organization. Interviewing someone from HR is desirable, but not required. The interviewees need to be knowledgeable about the topic you study. Note that having all interviewees from the HR department is not necessarily a good strategy, as their view of performance management and reward systems is often more positive relative to that in other departments.
- Choose a topic. Topics are listed below. Your chosen topic should fit the organization you are studying. For example, if you are studying incentives, you should study an organization that actually uses incentives. If your topic is performance reviews, the company in question must have a structured performance review system in place.
List of Topics: Benefits
· Incentives (Describe the financial incentive systems in place in the company, provide a critique of strengths and limitations, along with your recommendations). Note that incentives have a specific definition in this course. Incentives are programs that tie pay to individual, group, and/or organizational performance. This is different from benefits, and different from the dictionary definition of incentives.
· Benefits (Describe the discretionary benefits in place in the company as it is experienced by employees, provide a critique of strengths and limitations, along with your recommendations.) Note that in this course we are interested in benefits that are considered to be a person’s overall pay (e.g., 401k plans, health insurance, child care, tuition benefits etc) and not on the general benefits of working in a company (such as advancement opportunities). Your paper should focus on benefits as defined in this course.
- Master your topic. In the final report, your job is to first describe what the company is doing, then analyze its strengths and limitations, and offer recommendations. In other words, your entire report will consist of a description of the company’s activities (obtained from your three interviews and any other publicly available information about the company) and your recommendations. Before you go to the interviews, you need to master your topic so that you can create smart and meaningful questions. Start by reading the relevant sections from the book. I would also encourage you to read additional articles on the topic from outlets such as Harvard Business Review, SHRM website, Workforce, People Management etc.
- Develop a list of questions. Your questions should attempt to uncover what the company is doing, as well as strengths and weaknesses of your chosen company in your topic of study. The purpose of these questions is to see whether the company is doing the things identified in your literature review, as well as what this company is doing right, and what can be improved. Avoid asking for sensitive or confidential information.
- Research the company through interviews and other sources. You need to interview three current or former employees of your chosen company (one of them may be a team member). In addition, you may gather relevant information through the company’s website, news articles, and any other sources.
Make sure that the responses of your interviewees are strictly held confidential. Do not attempt to gather information through surveys or via e-mail. Surveys do not give you the opportunity to expand on the answers and tend to contain brief responses, which leads to a superficial analysis of the organization of interest. Instead, I would like you to talk to the people in question and ask further questions to clarify answers. Zoom meetings are perfect for this.
