Task: Choose a company and identify all motivational (employee-centered)
programs that the company has in place. Then ascertain the significance and
objectives of these programs. Next provide a critique of these programs.
Finally, recommend changes that will improve on the programs and/or new programs
that will better meet the objectives articulated above. Overview: The company
that I have chosen as the subject of my research is the AAA Travel Agency. More
specifically, I have interviewed several travel agents from the Reno,
Pennsylvania location, which serves patrons from Western Pennsylvania as well as
West Virginia. The bulk of the information for my analysis has come directly
from the in-office interviews with Ms. Tiffany Pacior, the senior travel agent
for the Reno office. She has provided me with information directly out of the
AAA employee handbook as well as personal information covering the positive and
negative effects she has experienced from the programs I will be discussing.
There can be little doubt that the backbone of every successful business or
company is its staff of employees. Employees are the vital parts of the business
machine that can aid in its success or contribute to its failure. It is for this
reason that it is imperative to possess the ability to acquire and maintain
effective employees. The chief method by which a business or company can
accomplish this task is through employee-centered motivational programs. The
goal of these programs is to encourage employees to maximize their performance
by targeting three specific motivational stimuli. These include morale,
satisfaction, and rewards. After researching their policies and interviewing
employees,
I have came to the conclusion that AAA of Reno, Pennsylvania has adopted
Fredrick Taylor’s approach to motivating their employees. In this paper I will
demonstrate how AAA applies Taylor’s scientific management approach to target
the three motivational stimuli stated above. I will also provide some insight
from the employee’s perspective as to how effective the programs are at what
they are designed to achieve. The scientific management approach to motivation
evolved from the work of Frederick Taylor. He believed that when highly
productive people discover they are being compensated basically the same as less
productive people, then the output of highly productive people will decrease.
Consequently, the scientific management approach to motivation is based on the
assumption that money is the primary motivator. This seems to be the ideology
that AAA has adopted to produce high morale, achieve satisfaction, and reward
their employees. Morale, as it applies here, may be defined as the overall
feeling of the members of an organization. Generally speaking, a company with a
high morale among its employees enjoys above average performance and a lower
than average employee termination rate.AAA has several programs in practice,
which support the scientific management approach to motivation to produce high
morale. First, it is not uncommon for a travel agent to work beyond the
scheduled forty-hour workday to complete the tasks of a heavy business day. It
was for this reason that the company offers overtime compensation for the
dedication of their employees. The company pays one and a half times their
regular hourly rate of pay when an agent works more than their scheduled hours
per week. Also, for those individual days when an agent works more than ten
hours per day, they are entitled to overtime dinner pay. The employees stressed
that this is a worthwhile program because it allows overtime workers to order
dinner from local delivery shops.
