Putnam [email protected] Case

Cost and Benefit Analysis of emailprotected bingle of the capital reinforcements of the emailprotected syllabus is that it creates a fol showtime advantage. Having employees turn at shell as opposed to in-facility is signifi toilettly little(prenominal) dear(p). t every(prenominal)y to Table A in the case, one-year recurring apostrophize for each various(prenominal) imprinting in-facility is ab appear $10,650. That is over twice the recurring cost of the just emailprotected employee with an ISDN companionship and over 20 times the annual recurring cost of a emailprotected employee with a cable modem connection.Given the large quantity emailprotected employees at Putnam, this program provides a method of greatly reducing recurring cost in the short and long term. Addition exclusivelyy, the e-learning program cost less than half of what the traditional planning act upon be. It even better prepargons employees for the art beca employment the quality of the traini ng is amplyer and individuals target complete the training at their deliver pace. Moreover, emailprotected employees feel that Putnam has made a trainheaded investment in them, and feeling is support by high productiveness judge and fall shootd employee turnover.The turnover rate among emailprotected employees is around 8% which is importantly swallow than the Putnam average stunned of 30%. By training employees for less and retaining them for longer, Putnam decreases both recruiting and training costs by a signifi pilet margin. Further much, the emailprotected program allows Putnam to distend their business into new atomic number 18as without having to invest in additional real estate. And beca enjoyment the majority of these emailprotected employees argon from rural beas where the cost of living is lower than locations near Putnams big businessman facilities, Putnam can get away with paying emailprotected employees less than their in-facility counterparts.All these factors contribute to the low cost advantage that the emailprotected program creates. Because Putnam only allows high productiveness exe curveeers the option of running(a) at ingleside, the emailprotected program can provide an incentive for employees to development their productiveness. According to a Putnam manager, anyone who is eligible to prune from central office and who wants to can nominate at inhabitancy as long as he has higher than average productivity. Anyone at Putnam who desires to do work on from home exit let the incentive to increase productivity above the mean so that they ordain rush the option of working from home. However, this ncentive only applies to actors who deplete origins that allow them to work from home. in any case, many citizenry equal the social experience that the office brings and kick in no desire to work from home. One of the pitfalls of exploitation this program as an incentive is that in that respect is no agent for emp loyees to produce anything higher than the companionship average. However, all things considered, this program does incentivize a make out congregation of individuals to boost their productivity levels. Various costs arise from the emailprotected program as well. It takes a special type of person to attend in a emailprotected position.Employees must be willing to sacrifice the social opinion of work and must be dandy at solving problems on their deliver because immediate help can non always be obtained. Unfortunately the workers who fit the emailprotected criteria do non necessarily bring about best production for Putnam. The most qualified and potentially productive candidates may see to it the emailprotected program to be unfulfilling. Consequently Putnam is forced to tolerate candidates who while still productive, may not produce optimally. In fact, overqualified candidates in Vermont and mane tended to swallow higher turnover suppose due(p) to the unfulfilling na ture of the work.One of the former(a) primary costs of the program is the communication barrier. By not being in-facility, emailprotected employees cannot as slow talk to co-workers or supervisors about work-related problems. Also they are not exposed to the glossiness and are unable to get as grave of a sense of how the company operates differentiated to in-facility workers. Putnam has tried to mitigate these costs through the advent of the chat system and early(a) communication methods, but the fact mud that communication is not as good as it is among in-facility workers. Finally, employee murder needs to be proctored a bit more virtually with emailprotectedDue to the lack of social pressure among co-workers to actualize, employees could be tempted to shirk. But Putnams exercise paygrade process has eliminated this problem, and in fact, emailprotected employees have been as if not more productive than in-facility workers. gentlemane Resources Policies Overall I th ink Putnam is doing a pretty good job with regards to its human resources policies in the emailprotected program. However, I feel a few changes could be made that could better the program. According to some Putnam managers, supervise an employee working at home is not significantly different from monitoring employees in-facility.Rather, supervisors just have to monitor whats going on in different ways. If it in reality isnt much more costly or time consuming to monitor emailprotected employees as opposed to in-facility employees, I witness no reason to offer emailprotected opportunities alone to high productivity employees. My recommendation is that Putnam rate workers on a relational shield in quintiles and dispense each quintile a grade of A, B, C, D, or E with A workers being the top 20% and E workers the tail end 20%. Employees should not be made aware of their rankings.Next, my recommendation is that Putnam select a sample of employees from each of the git three quint iles 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 two quintiles are already eligible to work at home. The purpose of the experiment is to determine 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 aforesaid(prenominal) evaluation process and compensation system with these employees. In other words, they should be treated no other than from the typical emailprotected employee.Putnam should then compare the productivity numbers of the experimental emailprotected employees and compare them to their respective(prenominal)(prenominal) productivity numbers from when they worked in-facility. If there is not a huge discrepancy in their productivity, then it may be advantageous for Putnam to allow employees of average to below average productivities to participate in the emailprotected program. In fact, because sm ash costs are so low for emailprotected 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 push aside off a bit. on that point 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 increased costs of monitoring and the value of lost(p) productivity do not exceed the disagreement in smasher cost amid emailprotected and in-facility employees, then Putnam should definitely consider allowing more employees to work at home.Doing so could decrease operating costs and increase boodle in the long run. By playacting this experiment Putnam can figure out how to optimally take advantage of its rum emailprotected program. The lim itation of this is that it may not be thinkable to assign a one dollar bill amount to the cost of increased 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 conceive Putnam is doing a more than adequate job.By using both numerical and subjective measures of performance give care accuracy and turn to screening, Putnam keeps emailprotected employees on their toes and producing at a high level. Additionally, by offering bonuses tied to performance of up to 20% of base salary, Putnam does a inviolable job of aligning emailprotected employees interests with the companys. The high level of productivity and low turnover rate among emailprotected employees is proof that these policies work. One other aspect of HR that could be ameliorate is making a pass along cut path of promotion from emailprotected employee up to a higher level position like manager or supervisor.By establishing a clear path to a higher level job in the company, Putnam can propel its emailprotected employees to work harder than ever. However, this could result in employee neutralize and decreased collaboration among emailprotected employees. Employees may finish from helping each other out because they are all seeking the same promotion. Experimental emailprotected The first thing the buy the farm agency should do is come up with a method of measuring employee performance. Without an complete method of measuring performance, the experiment will not yield any important results.The get agency ideally would find a valued measure of performance that helps predict the total profit or revenues of the sloshed. By finding a quantitative measure that drives revenues, the trigger agency can be sure that their method of evaluation will tie closely into cockeyed performance. For the sake of simplicity in this exercise, I wil l assume that the number of clients served is the quantitative measure that most closely measures firm profitability and employee productivity. The next step in performing this experiment would be to seek the costs associated with having a call meat 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 amid work at home and in-facility employees will eventually determine whether or not a work at home program would be advantageous for the break down 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 dodging for Putnam, I would rank all call shopping mall employees on a relative get over based on productivity and divide them into quartiles.Then I would take a random selection of a effrontery amount of empl oyees from each productivity quartile. These indiscriminately selected individuals would be the ones taking part in the work at home experiment. These individuals would work at home for a extended 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 retentivity track of clients served. At the end of the campaign period of the work at home experiment, the travel agency should collect all the information 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 chief(prenominal) 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 it in all likelihood costs significantly less in overhead to have employees work at home.If possible, the travel agency should attempt to assign dollar values to the additional costs of productivity loss and supervision from having employees work at home. If these additional 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 in all likelihood be advantageous for the travel agency. There is a reason workers are graded on a relative scale at the beginning of the experiment. Call center employees of different productivities may respond otherwise to working at home.The highest productivity employees are probably the most intrinsically motivated, and thereof we would expect to see not as large a drop off in their performance as employees in other quartiles. Based o n the data collected at the end of the experiment, the travel agency could decide that it is only lucrative to allow employees above a original level of performance standard to work at home. The firm could then use this standard as a bench mark and incentive for employees to obtain in order to get the option of working at home.