Friday, February 28, 2020

Employee Context at K wik-fit Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 2500 words

Employee Context at K wik-fit - Essay Example Case study reveals that work force is distinctly tiered into hierarchies of grass root workers, supervisors and managers. The main employee and HRM context at K wik-fit is that of employee turnover. This context can best be classified as a problematic context as the employee turnover has been very rapid at K wik-fit.Figues reported in the case study indicate that in the K wik-fit's Lanarkshire call center the employee turnover used to be as high as 52 percent. In the year 2001 such high employee turnovers used to translate into vacancy rate as high as 21 percent. This used to present three fold HRM problems. There was a colossal waste of organizational resources invested in training and upgrading employees who only decided to quit soon after receiving such training. Two, an equivalent effort and resource deployment was required to fill the resulting vacancies and three resources had to necessarily deployed yet again to train and upgrade the new recruits. This results in adverse impac t on employee productivity and continuation of the organizational work and, in the final analysis, impacts overall company results and profits. The main features of K wik-fit's human resource strategy center on two core concepts found in any human resource management strategic move. These are: one, analyzing in the work environment the possible factors responsible for employees' rapid turnover and removing such factors as far as possible, and, two promoting intra organizational conditions and tie ups which would help motivate the workers to high productivity and enthusiasm. The results of this two fold human resources management programme ,adopted in K wik-fit in stages, has been astounding enough to give it an industry award for human resources management. Factually the stage one of the human resources management initiate has brought down the employee turnover rates from the high of 52 percent to 34 percent with another 2 percent fall being achieved in a matter of couple of months. The initiative has been so successful that t even helped halt employee turnover in the month of January where turnover used of be highest. Even in this month the employee turnover instead of rising over the annual average continued to plummet indicating deep impact of the human resources management initiative. A closer look at these initiative clearly reveals that two sets of human resources tactical moves can be identified separately i.e. one that improves work environment for employee and helps boost their motivation and two that offer to help employees solve work related issues and problems and move to higher productivity and better work standards. In the fact the latter move appears to be an initiation of a system of Total Quality Control (TQM) in the services organization. Behind both tactical moves there is a realization that selling insurance is a complex assignment which is not only monotonous and repetitive but which also requires up to date product knowledge and employee empowerment to meet the challenges posed by growing competition. To top it all such tactical moves have been carefully based upon employee feed back carefully collected earlier on. In the former category one finds that employee motivation is sought to

Wednesday, February 12, 2020

Ancient Flood Stories (Problems for Critical Scholarship) Essay

Ancient Flood Stories (Problems for Critical Scholarship) - Essay Example However, it is not an easy task to find out the important details of these flood stories because of their extreme antiquity and the lack of supporting evidence except for a few broken shards or fragments of pottery that detail these flood stories. It is unswervingly a very daunting task indeed to verify the stories that will anchor them on historical details as many of these stories are seemingly myths or legends. This brief paper examines some of the challenges encountered in critical scholarship of stories like great floods which occurred a long time ago and for which records are incomplete. Discussion The aim of critical scholarship is to set historical records straight but problems are inevitable when the records are themselves incomplete or at times even contradictory. Many scholars, academicians, historians and archaeologists realize these limitations but still try to carry on with the task. In this regard, to claim certainty in the absence of corroborating pieces of evidence i s not only risky but also considered as reckless in terms of academic scholarship. To refer to something without a degree of certainty is likewise faulty, even deceptive. Several issues with regards to critical scholarship concerning these ancient flood stories pertain to the provenance of these stories, their lack of correspondence and the contradictions, the use of varying terms or emergence of several versions by different authors that hinders the task. The two most famous and well-read flood stories are that of the Biblical Noah's Ark and the Epic of Gilgamesh. The latter predates the former by a good thousand years or more, going back to at least the period of an actual king named Gilgamesh who had ruled a kingdom of Uruk in ancient Sumeria at around 2700 B.C.E. (before current era) but was written down on clay tablets only at around 2000 B.C.E. which were discovered only fairly recently in the libraries of King Ashurbanipal, who ruled around 700 B.C.E. by a young British museu m curator named George Smith back in 1872 and translated even much later (Mitchell 4). It is a story considered as the oldest-ever written story but what is even more remarkable is that it is very similar to Noah's Ark, especially the story about an immortal named Utnapishtim and a massive flood in his time. There are also many other similar stories about a great deluge in other cultures, namely that of the massive waters released by the Greek god Zeus, the Chinese version of a deluge in the great central river valley of the mighty Yangtze and the Indian story of Manu mentioned in ancient Sanskrit religious texts dating back to around 600 B.C.E. These stories have a familiar theme, the futility of fighting against the force of Nature or the powers of God although the themes may vary a bit, depending on context (History-world.org 1). Provenance – as stated earlier, the exact or precise origins of these flood stories defy even scholars and historians because of the passage of e xtremely long periods of time, dating back to antiquity itself. Based only on fragmentary records, with many pieces of evidence lacking, the best that can be done is make a conjecture or an approximation of their origins. It believed that the Epic of Gilgamesh is actually a literary masterpiece constructed by several authors and not just one writer, the story embellished with each successive re-telling. In many instances, the similarities between the Noahic story and Gilgamesh made historians surmise it was actually copied and translated into Hebrew by Moses circa 1450 B.C.E. and the Israelites brought