Assignment 4: Recognizing Employee Contributions

Due Week 10 and worth 300 points

You are the HR manager of a relatively new retail company that has both retail stores and Internet sales.  Your company is steadily growing in revenue and profitability. The company realizes that in order to retain the solid, highly productive workforce it currently has in place, it is important to enhance the base compensation and benefits package offered to the employees. The company currently offers a basic compensation program and only federally mandated benefits. Employee surveys suggest the compensation and benefits program may be out of date. Employees are beginning to consider leaving the organization.

Write a six to eight (6-8) page paper in which you:

1. Propose two (2) methods an HR professional could use to determine incentive pay. Specify the principal manner in which the proposed methods take into consideration individual, group, and company performance. Justify your response. 
2. Examine the core legal requirements affecting employee benefits in today’s competitive environment. Determine the legally mandated benefits that the company must currently offer to its employees. 
3. Recommend at least three (3) additional benefits that the organization should consider providing to its employees. Suggest at least two (2) important concepts that a company must consider when designing benefit plans. Provide a rationale for your response.
4. Assess the efficiency of common techniques for effectively communicating compensation and benefit plans to employees. Support your answer.
5. Suggest two (2) ethical risks of making incentive pay a large portion of employees’ total compensation. Propose two (2) recommendations for ways the company might mitigate or reduce these risks.  
6. Use at least three (3) quality academic resources in this assignment. Note: Wikipedia and other Websites do not qualify as academic resources.

Your assignment must follow these formatting requirements:

• Be typed, double spaced, using Times New Roman font (size 12), with one-inch margins on all sides; citations and references must follow APA or school-specific format. Check with your professor for any additional instructions.
• Include a cover page containing the title of the assignment, the student’s name, the professor’s name, the course title, and the date. The cover page and the reference page are not included in the required assignment page length.

Your boss has chosen you to give a presentation to a number of foreign officials regarding the United States Federal Reserve System. These officials are very interested in doing business in the United States, but they would like to learn more about the Federal Reserve and how it operates as compared to the official’s home country.

*Your instructor will provide a list of countries from which you may select as the home country of the “foreign officials”.

Develop a 10- to 15-slide Microsoft^® PowerPoint^® presentation including detailed speaker notes.

Address the following questions and include a notes page which contains the write-up portion to each question:

• What are the factors that would influence the Federal Reserve in adjusting the discount rate?
• How does the discount rate affect the decisions of banks in setting their specific interest rates?
• How does monetary policy aim to avoid inflation?
• How does monetary policy control the money supply?
• How does a stimulus program (through the money multiplier) affect the money supply?
• Currently, what indicators are evident that there is too much or too little money within the economy? How is monetary policy aiming to adjust this?
• What are some major differences between the Federal Reserve System and the monetary system in the officials’ home country?

Format consistent with APA guidelines including a reference slide.

How do airlines plan routes to minimize distance and, therefore, very expensive fuel costs, while connecting all airports served by the airline? How do cable companies determine where to put fiber-optic cable?

Imagine that you are a field manager for a cable company. A new housing development is being built and advertises that all utilities will be underground. This new development will have 200 homes covering approximately 3 square miles. Your job is to provide cable access for every house in the development while minimizing the amount of underground cable that is used. What would you do and how could you document that the amount of cable you propose to use is the minimal amount possible to provide cable access to all houses?

We can answer these questions using what are known as network models.  These models are being used extensively for different applications in business and industry.

In this unit you will learn how to solve this and other similar problems involving networks using the three major techniques of (1) minimal-spanning-tree, (2) shortest path, and (3) maximal flow through a network.

Minimal Spanning Tree Technique:

The minimal-spanning tree technique involves connecting all the points of a network together while minimizing the distance between them. Simple examples of this technique would be minimizing the amount of fiber-optic cable needed to connect all houses within a subdivision or to minimize the cost of providing power and water to these houses.

The Shortest Path Technique:

This technique finds the shortest route between two points in a network. For example, it finds how a sales person can travel from one location to another minimizing the total distance traveled.  Another example would be satellite navigation system which is set to create a shortest route to a destination. 

Maximal Flow Technique:

The maximal-flow technique involves determining the maximum amount of material that can flow from one point (the source) to another (the sink) in a network. This technique can be used to determine the maximum number of cars that can flow through a highway system, the maximum amount of liquid that can flow through a series of pipes, and the maximum amount of data that can flow through a computer network.

Looking forward to review your examples for each of these techniques!

Please attached document.

To Tom Mutunga.