Assignment: Development Plan
The best-laid plans are always subject to disruption, especially when outside parties, tight deadlines, and too many people are involved. When employees do not understand their jobs' connections to the organization's outcomes, sometimes managers have to redirect and refocus the employees. This week's project will help us clean up a mess caused when an outside vendor and two internal employees dropped the ball on mailing an important package by a critical deadline.
To prepare for this Assignment, you will examine the "Missed Pickup Means a Missed Opportunity for 30 Seeking a Fellowship," provided in this week's resources. Then, you will prepare needs assessments to analyze two employees' current skill levels, and a gap analyses on what should have happened, and what did happen in the scenario. Based on the needs assessment, you will address how to improve the performance of the mailroom specialist and the administrative assistant in their current jobs. Finally, you will create two performance improvement plans that outline for both employees their expected behaviors, metrics for improvement, steps they will take, consequences for not meeting the plan's expectations, and their managers' role, according to an established form.
Note that PIPs are a bit different from individual development plans (IDP), which are career management documents. Using an IDP, an employee creates a plan to develop skills over time, to prepare for new job opportunities, or promotions. Rarely are IDPs properly used to correct a missed step in work processes. PIPs are used when mistakes happen that are so egregious that the manager needs to put the worker on notice that the behavior must stop; they give the employee a plan of action.
As HR manager, draft the PIPs, along with instructions to the manager on how he or she should conduct a meeting with the employees about improvements and consequences. Your paper should include the following:
1. Introduction, briefly summarizing what happened.
2. Needs assessment with gap analysis (for both employees).
3. PIPs for both employees (create two Appendices for these - Appendix A and B).
4. A set of instructions for the manager on what s/he should do to implement the PIPs.
5. No conclusion is required - this is a work-based document, parts of which will go into the employees' files.
Include a reference and title page. Use APA. In cite citations
Missed Pickup Means a Missed Opportunity for 30 Seeking a Fellowship By DEAN E. MURPHY FEB. 5, 2004 A missed courier pickup, an honest clerk and an unyielding federal bureaucracy have conspired to deny 30 college students here the chance to compete for a prestigious Fulbright research grant. ''It seems surreal to me,'' said Mary Ann Mason, dean of the graduate division at the University of California, Berkeley. ''It is an unnecessary, foolish, tragic incident.'' The students, all enrolled in doctoral studies, got the news on Tuesday night from the university's chancellor, Robert M. Berdahl, that their applications were disqualified because they were late. Dr. Berdahl had earlier flown to Washington in a failed bid to persuade education officials in the Bush administration to change their minds. ''For these students to lose out on the opportunity to compete for the Fulbright award in this way is outrageous,'' Dr. Berdahl said. ''No one could have imagined the Department of Education could have reacted the way it did.''
The department, which administers the Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad Fellowship Program, rejected the applications because they were not mailed by the Oct. 20 deadline, according to a letter to Dr. Berdahl from Sally L. Stroup, an assistant secretary of education. On that day, the applications were in an envelope at the university's Sproul Hall for pickup by Federal Express. But the courier did not come until the next morning because of a ''software glitch,'' said Sandra Munoz, a FedEx spokeswoman. The company provided the university with two letters acknowledging the mix-up and accepting blame for the late delivery. It also backdated the shipment's air bill to reflect the intended Oct. 20 pickup date. ''We realize how serious this is, and the inconvenience we are causing everyone,'' Ms. Munoz said. ''We certainly apologize.'' Late in the day on Oct. 20, an employee with the university's graduate division sent an explanation by e-mail to the Education Department, which told the university to send the applications with the explanation from FedEx, university officials said. For months, the university officials assumed the problem had been worked out. But the e-mail exchange, Dr. Mason said, came back to haunt them. It was cited last month by lawyers for the department as grounds for rejecting the applications, she said. Since the air bill had been backdated, the correspondence was apparently the only evidence that the applications had not been sent on time. ''The final terrible remark of the lawyers was, 'If you hadn't e-mailed Washington, we would have let it go because we wouldn't have known there was a problem,' '' Dr. Mason said. The implicit message, she said, was, ''Honesty is not the best policy.''
A spokeswoman for the Department of Education did not respond to several telephone messages seeking comment. In a statement released Wednesday, Assistant Secretary Stroup defended the decision. ''Although we are very sorry for UC Berkeley's graduate students who had hopes of Fulbright-Hays doctoral fellowships, the facts are indisputable: UC Berkeley was negligent in failing to mail its application on time, despite the fact that for years the university has applied for this program each fall,'' she said. ''When it became apparent that Federal Express would not arrive in time, a simple trip to the post office would have ensured that the university's application met the deadline,'' she said. ''Sixty other institutions met the application deadline.'' Last year, 15 of the 30 applicants from Berkeley were awarded Fulbright fellowships, ranging from $20,000 to $64,000.
In retrospect, the officials said, it would have been prudent to take the package to a nearby FedEx office or the post office, but no one had envisioned a delivery error would have such consequences. Now, officials are looking to FedEx to bring about some sort of happy ending. Dr. Mason said lawyers for the university were ''talking with FedEx about sharing some responsibility.'' She said one idea was that FedEx would provide some doctoral research grant money. Ms. Munoz said FedEx was eager to resolve the situation. ''Obviously,'' she said, ''our goal is always 100 percent customer satisfaction.'' Jason Seawright, one of the applicants, said that while he would appreciate any help, it would be hard for any other grant to match the résumé-building force of a Fulbright. ''In addition to the money, this is something that opens doors in your career,'' he said. ''Right, I'll put that on my résumé: the FedEx fellowship.'' The New York Times Company.