Summary: Learning From The Simulation

Learning From the Simulation: One of the most important lessons we learned from this simulation was the overwhelming importance of work/life balance for our employees. The positive feedback we received in this category far outweighed that of any other category. Right off the bat we chose to implement flex-time scheduling where our employees had only to work the core hours of 10-3 and chose to come before and/or stay after in order to achieve their daily 8 hours. This decision was permanent in our simulation after getting the initial response that “it just makes life better!”. Moving forward we added various other work/life balance decisions such as Elder care and child care. When these were implemented, the response was all positive making …show more content…
For having this practice as one of our key topics of discussion, we were unable to dial in our best decisions. We were fortunate enough to eventually learn from our mistakes once we took the time to process the feedback we received from the simulation. Our employees were not pleased with our first four quarters regarding our compensation practices. We learned that our employees wanted to feel as if they were part of a bigger picture relating to our company. Offering a stock program was a way to potentially offer our employees with more money. Our group noted that employees are most likely to appreciate our compensation decisions if they’re well informed about it, as well as not making the office contend against each other. According to the HRSim Manual, money affects performance most positively when a greater effort enhances performance; when money enhances status; and when money avoids reducing intrinsic motivation and perceived …show more content…
It is obvious that training is important for employees to productively perform their job in the company. Where we learned a lot about this practice is the effect it has in so many areas. An example that comes to mind is in the game we played “Ask Matt”. That game, as well as the simulation, portrayed how many areas of business, and key performance indicators, training has an impact on. Training has a large impact on productivity, which is commonly known. What we learned is how this has an impact on turnover rate, well-being, absenteeism, diversity, and innovativeness. Training has an impact on turnover rate due to the employee’s performing their job at a high level. This reduces involuntary turnover, as their performance appraisals increase and management is satisfied with the employee’s performance. We learned that well-being increases when employees receive training and mentors, as well as learning how to do other roles in the company. Our training decision stayed very consistent throughout the simulation. The decision was to offer training and mentors to employees that were with the company for less than two years. This decision lead to an increase in productivity immediately. As we continued this decision, our percent change in productivity remained fairly constant. We did notice that in our largest jump in productivity was from quarter 8 to quarter 9. This could be due in part to our decision to