Statistics paper

PAE

The company that I work for is called Bob’s Construction, and the main thing that I do there is material handling and sometimes, I am the customer service representative, with my work being to answer the phone when prospective customers call, and given them relevant information. Bob’s Construction is a company that works on new house constructions, or even repairs and random jobs that need to be done on houses, mostly using materials such as wood and glass for the construction. The company employees over 250 people, all of them specialized in different fields, thus allowing for constructions projects to be handled with the professional urgency that they require in order to have done a good work on them.

The company management is composed of 3 departmental leaders, with one CEO. The three departments include the hiring and accounting department, the constructions department, and the employee welfare department. The welfare department is one that ensures employees have the right tools they need for the work, the accounting department is useful for calculating the costs of projects, and determining the fair pay to the employees, while the constructions department is responsible for ensuring that the employees always have tasks to work on, and the tasks they are given are workable within a reasonable amount of time, and within proper working conditions.

Problem at the Company

The one problem at the company, is in the way the management approaches the issues of management in actual sense. This implies a situation whereby, the employees feel that they are not properly managed, and this has led to the company experiencing a serious issue of employee turnover. The average rate of employee turnover is between 6months and 1 year, and the situation means that employees regularly leave the company to go and work in other construction companies. This has had adverse effects on employee morale, because the problem does not allow employees to form any meaningful relationships that can be useful even in the long run. Ideally, the employees feel that their efforts are not valued, which is one thing that could explain why the employees feel that for the kind of work they do, they are not properly managed by the management with respect to the wages, working conditions, and work distribution done by the company.

Research Variable from the Problem

The one research variable that will be good for investigating this problem being experienced at the company is the job satisfaction that the employees have in their job, and how this relates to issues of employee turnover. This kind of a variable would allow for the collection of a good amount of both quantitative and qualitative data to help with coming up with a conclusion for the level of job satisfaction the employees have towards their roles at work, and the impact of this level on employee turnover, with regard to whether or not they see themselves as having a bright future at the company or not.

The first data collection method will be the answering of a questionnaire that starts with closed ended questions such as “what do you feel is the level of your job satisfaction presently?” for such a question, a Likert scale with five entries will be used for the scaling purposes, with a score of 1 showing that the person is very dissatisfied at work, and a 5 showing that they are very satisfied with the work they do. After this question is answered, the questionnaire will have more questions touching on the specific aspects of their work that makes them feel the way they do, and what the employees think the management can do about it, or whether or not the management is to blame for what is being experienced. After the completion of the questionnaire, there will be a face to face interview between the researcher and the employees, to get a better understanding of what they feel is the reason that causes the high rate of turnover, and whether or not the management is to blame (Gill, 2008). They will also be asked what they think can be done in order to change the situation around, and this will be a good means of collecting very relevant information touching on the causes of the root problem, and how this problem can be appropriately dealt with by the employees or even the management.

Use of focus groups and observations will also be another means of collecting data on this variable. With the observation, the researcher will simply shadow the employees over the course of a predetermined working period. In this time, the researcher will be checking for any cues that are indicative of the employees’ feelings towards their work, the nature of the management and how management plays its managerial roles of governing the employees, and the employee relationship with the management (Johnson, 2003). The focus groups on the other hand will be six, and will be composed of 9 members each. The groups’ tasks will be to address various aspects of their job positions and their roles, and then the results of the interactions will be used to come up with a model explaining the employee feelings towards their work.

For this reason, the focus groups will be asked questions such as what kinds of roles they do, whether or not they are comfortable in their job positions, what they think the management could do differently to make their job much easier, what they consider the most important part of their job, whether they feel valued as employees, and whether this affects their ability to deliver on the promises they made when signing up for such tasks, and how often they think about quitting on a monthly basis.

Analysis of Data Collection Methods

To analyze whether the data collection method yield valid and reliable data will involve looking at the kind of data collected first, whether this data informs on the research variable selected to be used to conduct this research, the quality of the data with regard to consistency or diversity of the answers given by many different employees to the same question, and finally, the usefulness of the data in terms of making a conclusion about the main problem that the company is experiencing.

Expectedly, the kind of data collected should be somehow consistent among the different employees, because it will be testing what they feel towards the same job tasks, and the management of their organization. The kind of data collected will also be judged on whether or not the information presented is sufficient enough to help with making a decision on the problem being experienced at the company. Therefore, the data collection methods will yield valid and reliable data if the kind of data collected through such methods is of a high quality, and is relevant enough to warrant being used to form a deeper understanding of the problem at hand facing the company (Pandey, 2016).

References

Gill, P., Stewart, K., Treasure, E., & Chadwick, B. (2008). Methods of data collection in qualitative research: interviews and focus groups. British dental journal, 204(6), 291-295.

Johnson, B., & Turner, L. A. (2003). Data collection strategies in mixed methods research. Handbook of mixed methods in social and behavioral research, 297-319.

Pandey, K. N. (2016). Data Collection, Analysis and Interpretation. In Paradigms of Knowledge Management (pp. 129-210). Springer India.