Question

In May 2011, Mississippi River flooding hit Vicksburg, Mississippi, and the Optima Air Filter Company. Many employees’ homes were devastated. Optima found that it had to hire almost three completely new crews, one for each shift. The problem was that the “old-timers” had known their jobs so well that no one had ever bothered to draw up job descriptions for them. When about 30 new employees began taking their places, there was general confusion about what they should do and how they should do it. The flood quickly became old news to the firm’s out-of-state customers, who wanted filters, not excuses. Phil Mann, the firm’s president, was at his wits’ end. He had about 30 new employees, 10 old-timers, and his original factory supervisor, Maybelline. He decided to meet with Linda Lowe, a consultant from the local university’s business school. She immediately had the old-timers fill out a job questionnaire that listed all their duties. Arguments ensued almost at once: Both Phil and Maybelline thought the old-timers were exaggerating to make themselves look more important, and the old-timers insisted that the lists faithfully reflected their duties. Meanwhile, the customers clamored for their filters.

Questions

4-16. Should Phil and Linda ignore the old-timers’ protests and write the job descriptions as they see fit? Why? Why not? How would you go about resolving the differences?

4-17. How would you have conducted the job analysis? What should Phil do now?

Answer 1

4-16

Ignoring the protests and the comments from old-times may turn out to be a mistake as they are the most experienced staff at this point of time. With so many new employees ,it would be hard to understand all the duties without guidance which can only be obtained if phil and linda listened to the old-timers. If they choose to ignore ,they may face low productivity for a period as they will have trouble orienting new employees and develop clear job descriptions.

4-17

The most common way is to conduct interviews. Interviews help better capture the information provided by workers. Using questionarres might also be a good idea since it helps in preparing the duties and then using it for verification a lot easier. Once I've the data ,I'd use the input of supervisors and old-timers to verify them and then move on preparing job descriptions based on that.