Ballard Integrated Managed Services Essay Example for Free

Ballard Integrated Managed Services Essay When Barbara Tucker, General Manager for Ballard Integrated Managed Services, Inc., realized that her employee’s attitudes and behaviors were on a declining course, Barbara knew she must act promptly. Barbara oversees 452 workers divided into three divisions, each including its own management team; these divisions are food service, hospitality and maintenance. In order to fix the problems with employees, Barbara had to identify the problem first; with the help of coworkers, Barbara was able to create a plan. The plan identified and stated the problem, purpose, research questions and hypothesis for the research; Barbara also had to decide which instrument to use for data collection. Barbaras research plan identified how the data would be collected and identified measurements for the variables involved in her study. Once the study was completed, the data was analyzed by eliminating the data input errors. In the end, a conclusion must be made about the appropriateness and applicability of the data to meet the ultimate purpose of the study. A closer look into the research and the execution of the plan will give management the answers to their questions about employee morale. BIMS management has noticed negative changes within the company over the past 4 months. The turnover rate for the company has increased by close to 9%, the use of sick time has increased, management is noticing a large amount of employees killing time throughout their work day instead of working, and the quality of work has declined as well, creating complaints from the Douglas Medical Center administration, which contracts BIMS. Unfortunately for Barbara and her team of managers, employees leaving the company have not left any clues as to why these things are happening when exit interviews were conducted, leaving this management team to explore on their own in hopes of finding solutions. Barbara and the managers  involved in finding solutions to the obvious problems decide to use an employee survey instrument in order to collect data which is thought to be relevant; HR manager Debbie Horner was put in charge of creating the employee survey since she completed her MBA and based her thesis on employee motivation. Debbie created a survey with ten questions asking workers to express their view about working conditions, shift hours, quality of training, and level of compensation, fair treatment, internal company communications, and job security. The employees were asked to answer the following questions on a scale from one to five, with five being very positive; 1. How well do you enjoy working for BIMS? 2. You enjoy your assigned shift. 3. Your request for your desired shift was fulfilled. 4. How many times have you called in sick in the last month? 5. You are well trained for your work. 6. You are paid fairly for the work you do. 7. Your supervisor treats you fairly. 8. Your supervisor’s boss treats your division fairly. 9. The company is good at communicating. 10. You do not fear that you will lose your job. A few demographics were also included so that Debbie could separate responses by division; Debbie included demographics because she wanted to compute descriptive and frequency techniques, and then further study the data for possible correlations. The Quantitative research done in this case was created as an employee survey in order to get a glimpse at employee’s thoughts and feelings about their job and to decipher whether employees feel they are being treated fairly. This survey was distributed with payroll checks originally and a reminder message was sent out with the following payroll checks. The instrument to be used is a survey based on the questions that were asked of the employees, the type of statistical questionnaire was inferential statistics it was based on questions asked of the employees and was given to a sample size of estimated 449 employees; however, the way the survey was administered was not effective for the 449 employees to complete and only 78 employees completed the survey. The variable is quantitative and coded with discrete information, which is conducive to the type of survey used, and clearly shows gaps between values, however it is not representative to concluding a finding due to the sample size being smaller then what the survey was designed and planned for. Unfortunately, the General Manager was not successful at administering the survey that resulted in a 17% response rate, which does not show a good  sample size nor does it generate the results intended to make concrete improvements and changes to the company. Reference Descriptive vs. Inferential Statistics Whats the Difference. (December 1, 2011). Retrieved from http://www.mymarketresearchmethods.com/descriptive-inferential-statistics-difference/