Putnam [email protected] Case

Cost and Benefit Analysis of email&clxprotected i of the primary improvements of the email& one hundred sixtyprotected plan is that it creates a greet advantage. Having employees twist at home as unlike to in-facility is importantly little bely. harmonise to tabularize A in the case, annual recur be for severally single(a) naturalizeing in-facility is around $10,650. That is over twice the recurring court of the second-rate email& one hundred sixtyprotected employee with an ISDN connection and over 20 times the annual recurring comprise of a email&clxprotected employee with a cable modem connection.Given the large mea for certain email&clxprotected employees at Putnam, this platform provides a method of greatly decrease recurring be in the short and tenacious term. Addition whollyy, the e-learning program cost less than half of what the traditional nurture process costs. It even wagerer prep argons employees for the job beca drug abuse the quality of the trai ning is high and individuals can complete the training at their own pace. Moreover, email&160protected employees feel that Putnam has made a equitableish investment in them, and feeling is supported by high productiveness rates and decreased turnover.The turnover rate among email&160protected employees is around 8% which is significantly lower than the Putnam average of 30%. By training employees for less and retaining them for longer, Putnam decreases both recruiting and training costs by a significant margin. Furthermore, the email&160protected program set asides Putnam to expand their business into new areas without having to invest in extra real estate. And because the majority of these email&160protected employees are from rural areas where the cost of sustainment is lower than locations near Putnams office facilities, Putnam can hold up forward with paying email&160protected employees less than their in-facility counterparts.All these presentors contribute to the low cost advantage that the email&160protected program creates. Because Putnam only allows high productivity thrashers the option of working at home, the email&160protected program can provide an bonus for employees to add their productivity. According to a Putnam manager, anyone who is eligible to work from home and who wants to can work at home as long as he has high than average productivity. Anyone at Putnam who desires to work from home will keep the inducing to increase productivity above the mean so that they will impart the option of working from home. However, this ncentive only applies to workers who have jobs that allow them to work from home. Also, many people like the social experience that the office brings and have no desire to work from home. angiotensin-converting enzyme of the pitfalls of using this program as an incentive is that at that place is no reason for employees to produce anything higher than the company average. However, all things considered, thi s program does incentivize a select group of individuals to boost their productivity take aims. unhomogeneous costs arise from the email&160protected program as well. It takes a special(prenominal) type of person to succeed in a email&160protected position.Employees essential be willing to sacrifice the social aspect of work and must be good at solving problems on their own because fast help can non always be obtained. Unfortunately the workers who fit the email&160protected criteria do not necessarily bring about optimal production for Putnam. The almost qualified and potentially productive candidates whitethorn find the email&160protected program to be unfulfilling. Consequently Putnam is forced to accept candidates who while sedate productive, may not produce optimally. In fact, overqualified candidates in Vermont and Mane tended to have higher turnover rates imputable to the unfulfilling nature of the work.One of the other primary costs of the program is the communicatio n barrier. By not being in-facility, email&160protected employees cannot as easily talk to co-workers or supervisors about work-related problems. Also they are not exposed to the culture and are unable to get as good of a sense of how the company operates equalityd to in-facility workers. Putnam has tried to mitigate these costs through and through the advent of the chat system and other communication methods, but the fact rebrinys that communication is not as good as it is among in-facility workers. Finally, employee surgical procedure needs to be monitored a bit more closely with email&160protectedDue to the lack of social pressure among co-workers to perform, employees could be tempted to shirk. But Putnams slaying evaluation process has eliminated this problem, and in fact, email&160protected employees have been equally if not more productive than in-facility workers. Human Resources Policies Overall I think Putnam is doing a pretty good job with regards to its human resources policies in the email&160protected program. However, I feel a few changes could be made that could improve the program. According to some Putnam managers, monitoring an employee working at home is not significantly diverse from monitoring employees in-facility.Rather, supervisors just have to monitor whats qualifying on in different ways. If it really isnt oft more costly or time consuming to monitor email&160protected employees as opposed to in-facility employees, I see no reason to poke out email&160protected opportunities exclusively to high productivity employees. My recommendation is that Putnam rank workers on a relative scale in quintiles and assign each quintile a grade of A, B, C, D, or E with A workers being the top 20% and E workers the bottom 20%. Employees should not be made informed of their rankings.Next, my recommendation is that Putnam select a sample of employees from each of the bottom trine quintiles to work at home for a period of 6 months to a year. The reasoning for only using the bottom three quintiles is that the top 2 quintiles are already eligible to work at home. The purpose of the sample is to go out from a cost standpoint whether or not it is beneficial to allow average and below average employees to work at home. Putnam should use the exact same evaluation process and compensation system with these employees. In other words, they should be treated no differently from the typical email&160protected employee.Putnam should then compare the productivity numbers of the experimental email&160protected employees and compare them to their respective productivity numbers from when they worked in-facility. If there is not a enormous discrepancy in their productivity, then it may be advantageous for Putnam to allow employees of average to below average productivities to participate in the email&160protected program. In fact, because overhead costs are so low for email&160protected employees compared to in-facility counterparts, it could still be advantageous from a cost standpoint for Putnam to allow these employees to work at home even if their productivities flip off a bit. in that respect are two major concerns I would have with employees in the bottom 3 quintiles working at home. One is that worker productivity will drop without direct monitoring. The second is that monitoring costs will spike due to the employees lack of motivation to do the job alone at home. If the increase costs of monitoring and the value of lost productivity do not exceed the difference in overhead cost between email&160protected and in-facility employees, then Putnam should definitely consider allowing more employees to work at home.Doing so could decrease operating costs and increase profits in the long run. By performing this experiment Putnam can figure out how to optimally take advantage of its unique email&160protected program. The limitation of this is that it may not be possible to assign a dollar amount to the cost of i ncreased supervisory monitoring or the value of lost productivity. In light of this, it may be difficult to determine any cost advantages from performing this experiment. With regards to employee evaluation and compensation, I believe Putnam is doing a more than equal job.By using both vicenary and subjective measures of implementation like true statement and call screening, Putnam keeps email&160protected employees on their toes and producing at a high level. Additionally, by offering bonuses tied to mental process of up to 20% of base salary, Putnam does a solid job of aligning email&160protected employees interests with the companys. The high level of productivity and low turnover rate among email&160protected employees is proof that these policies work. One other aspect of HR that could be improved is making a clear cut path of promotion from email&160protected employee up to a higher level position like manager or supervisor.By establishing a clear path to a higher level j ob in the company, Putnam can inspire its email&160protected employees to work harder than ever. However, this could result in employee countercheck and decreased collaboration among email&160protected employees. Employees may refrain from helping each other out because they are all seeking the same promotion. observational email&160protected The first thing the cash in ones chips agency should do is baffle up with a method of measuring employee performance. Without an accurate method of measuring performance, the experiment will not yield any meaningful results.The touch off agency ideally would find a quantitative measure of performance that helps predict the total profit or revenues of the firm. By finding a quantitative measure that drives revenues, the break agency can be sure that their method of evaluation will tie closely into firm performance. For the stake of simplicity in this exercise, I will assume that the number of clients served is the quantitative measure th at most closely measures firm profitability and employee productivity. The next tonus in performing this experiment would be to research the costs associated with having a call bear on employee work at home as opposed to in-facility.If it is not any cheaper to have employees work at home, then there is no reason to even perform the experiment. This difference in cost is between work at home and in-facility employees will eventually determine whether or not a work at home program would be advantageous for the tour agency. The major cost would likely be installing the work phone in each employees house. There could be other costs in addition, however, like increased supervisory costs. Next, similar to my strategy for Putnam, I would rank all call center employees on a relative scale based on productivity and divide them into quartiles.Then I would take a random selection of a given amount of employees from each productivity quartile. These randomly selected individuals would be the ones pickings part in the work at home experiment. These individuals would work at home for a lengthy period of say 6 months to a year. The travel agency should heavily monitor their productivity during their time working at home, which in this case would be keeping track of clients served. At the end of the trial period of the work at home experiment, the travel agency should collect all the data regarding the participating individuals productivity.Their productivity should be compared to each individuals respective productivity in the 6 months to a year prior to the experiment. Also, to adjust for possible seasonal factors influencing productivity, the travel agency could compare each work at home employees productivity to other employees in the same quartile who work in facility. The main concern here should be that worker productivity could decrease to the point that it would not be cost effective for the travel agency to have employees work at home, in spite of the fact that i t probably costs significantly less in overhead to have employees work at home.If possible, the travel agency should attempt to assign dollar values to the redundant costs of productivity loss and supervision from having employees work at home. If these special costs are less than the difference in overhead cost between work at home and in-facility employees, then implementing a work at home program would probably be advantageous for the travel agency. There is a reason workers are ranked on a relative scale at the beginning of the experiment. Call center employees of different productivities may respond differently to working at home.The highest productivity employees are probably the most intrinsically motivated, and thus we would expect to see not as large a drop off in their performance as employees in other quartiles. Based on the data self-contained at the end of the experiment, the travel agency could decide that it is only productive to allow employees above a certain le vel of performance example to work at home. The firm could then use this standard as a benchmark and incentive for employees to obtain in order to get the option of working at home.