Analyzing Jobs at Custom Carpet Cleaning As the Office Manager at Custom Carpet Cleaning, Bob Huffman must handle a wide range of responsibilities. As the company has grown to over fifty employees, the human resource management practices of the company have become a more significant part of his role. Bob has had little formal education or training in human resources management, but works hard to ensure that the company manages its’ staff effectively. With a new fiscal year approaching, Bob is examining many aspects of the company’s budget. As he reviewed the payroll budget, he noted some wide variations in pay rates of the carpet cleaners across the company’s seven locations. He also noted that some of the pay rates seemed to be higher than what the competition pays. Pay rates and pay increases are determined at each location by the local supervisor and as a result, there is not consistency in the company’s pay practices. Some of the pay differences may be justified. Different locations work on different types of assignments and the jobs the carpet cleaners do may be different. For example, some locations work primarily at residential clients. Cleaners at these locations work directly with the clients and need strong sales and customer service skills in addition to carpet cleaning skills. Whereas locations that work primarily on commercial property have very little client contact, but they face tougher cleaning challenges and must have stronger technical skills. However, Bob does not have a good understanding of which locations have which kinds of responsibilities. He has done some research online and believes that a good starting point for examining the company’s compensation practice would be to conduct a job analysis and create written job descriptions. Based on what he learned through his research, he has decided to create a questionnaire to complete the job analysis process and he will ask one cleaner from each location to complete it. The questionnaire asks the employee to explain the tasks they complete and how they complete them. It also asks the employee to describe any equipment used. Bob plans to use the information collected in the questionnaires to create written job descriptions. Once he has the job descriptions complete, he will use them to help determine if internal pay rates are consistent and if the company is paying competitively in the market.
1. Do you think Bob’s approach to job analysis will be effective in creating useful job descriptions?
2. What can be done to improve this job analysis process?