Final Paper

Key topics to apply to my career

GR-505

Melody Martin

International College of the Cayman Islands

FINAL PAPER Melody Martin 2

Introduction

I commence my final paper by expressing how much I enjoyed finishing my degree with

the course GR 505, Methods and Procedures in Personnel. Course GR 505 provides a throughout

overview of key areas within the Human Resources field. Therefore, it allowed me to recap

aspects from many different learning objectives I completed throughout the degree program at

ICCI. It was difficult for me to select only a few topics so I narrowed them down to the topics

that relate to development goals I have set for myself with my current employer. In this paper I

will discuss Employee Engagement, Talent Management, Diversity, and HR and International

Business. Upon discussing each topic, I will identify why they will be useful in my role and I

will elaborate on how I will apply each one.

Before getting into the key topics, I would like to provide some background on my place

of employment. I work with an international law firm that operates in seven different

jurisdictions including Cayman, Hong Kong, Dubai, London, Dublin, BVI, Singapore, and New

York. Globally we employ over 850 team members and over 400 locally. Cayman is the

headquarters; therefore, our HR team is the largest with eight people in the team. My role in the

firm is HR Assistant Manager, focusing mainly on Recruitment and Onboarding. I have one

direct report, and I assist with managing the two HR assistants. I recently became a manager;

therefore, I constantly look for ways to develop fruitful skills in this period of my career. I

strongly believe that some of the points I will touch on will be useful towards my role and

progression.
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Employee Engagement

Increasing employee engagement has become a recent goal for our firm and HR

department. Research shows four out of 10 workers are disengaged globally (Vorhauser-Smith,

2013). We have identified and agreed with that statistic, and we (the firm) do not want to fall into

that category. Employee engagement is very important for my role especially for retention

purposes because engaged employees do not resign (Dessler, 2017). Engaged employees are

likely to be motivated and stay committed to their organization and achieving its mandate

(Vorhauser-Smith, 2013). I feel that our company compared to others in the local community

makes a good effort to engage employees. Some of our current engagement initiatives include

quarterly social events, community involvement, a global benefits package, frequent team

meetings, sports teams, and scholarship opportunities, etc. However, compared to some of our

competitors, I feel we have room for improvement.

This year I was asked to be a part of the recently formed engagement committee. The

committee is headed by the Head of HR and includes the Chief Operating Officer (COO), two

partners, four members of the Marketing and PR team, and myself. During one of our initial

planning meetings, we created a survey to send to all employees to gain their input on how they

would like to be better engaged. In addition to the survey, each member of the committee is

supposed to gather ideas to bring forth before the upcoming meeting on October 5th 2017. The

discussion and assignments on engagement during this course gave me some great insight into

suggestions I think would benefit our firm. The ideas that I gained in this course and will present

in a few weeks will include; recognizing staff internally and externally for their achievements

(promotions, graduations, certifications, milestones), creating and implementing a wellness

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program, implementing a flex-time program, updating the office environment, and revisiting the

dress code policy (especially for support staff).

Talent Management

We can define talent management as a goal-oriented and fundamental process of

planning, recruiting, developing, managing, and compensating employees (Dessler, 2017). For

leaders to effectively manage the talent in their teams, they must understand talent management

tasks are parts of one unified process; ensure talent management decisions such as staffing,

training, and pay are goal-directed (Dessler, 2017). They must also consistently use the same set

of competencies, traits, knowledge, and experience for potential employees; actively segment

and proactively manage employees; and integrate all underlying talent management activities

(Dessler, 2017).

As a recruiter, Talent Management is vital to my role to ensure that I am selecting the best

candidate not only to fill the role but to fit the culture of the firm. Based on the knowledge I

gained in this course, I plan to improve a current annual project of mine, the renewal of job

descriptions throughout the firm. Previously, I would place responsibility solely on the specific

manager to update the description. However, in the upcoming year, I will meet and work with

each manager on the project. Therefore, I will gain a better understanding of the needs of each

department and how to better recruit to fulfill those needs through a job analysis.

Diversity

The Cayman Islands are significantly diversified; there are over 30 different nationalities

represented within our shores. Therefore, I dont feel we have an issue with welcoming and

accepting other cultures to our country and companies. During this course, we got much deeper

into diversity; beyond culture issues. The topic of diversity includes relocation, groups of people
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(elders, disabled, etc.), gender issues, interviewing processes, bias, marriages and domestic

partners, etc. (Dessler, 2017).

While I find that all topics mentioned above are important, I will focus on the relocation

aspect of diversity. Considering that I manage the onboarding process, I have been assigned a

2018 goal by my Head of Department to revamp the onboarding and orientation process. I did a

research paper previously for an independent study class at ICCI and found that 78% of people

found that relocating to Grand Cayman was much easier than they were expecting. Despite the

high satisfaction rates, 67% of people still felt that more could have been done by their

companies to alleviate some of the frustrations they had regarding relocation. I have given this

project some thought and I have come up with the following ideas to improve the relocation

process for expatriate employees:

Create a FAQ relocation reference sheet;

Create or source a virtual tour of the island to send prior to relocation

Create a CaymanKind welcome bag separate from the new employee package;

Create and conduct a Cayman culture training session into the orientation

presentation; and

Schedule a quarterly island history tour.

HR and International Business

My aim for the topic of HR and International Business piggybacks off of the Diversity

topic above. Even within my recruitment role of HR, I am still required to conduct international

business through overseas candidates. For many positions in my firm such as Lawyers,

Developers, Analyst, etc. that have such a small talent pool locally, we have to recruit from
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overseas. During the recruitment process, I also have the responsibility of selling the company

to the candidate through something similar to a sales pitch.

How I plan to apply this topic to my career is by taking the time to study the main foreign

countries that I recruitment from. I want to be able to understand their culture and values to be

better able to tailor my pitch to ensure I cover key things that would be considered relevant to

that particular individual.

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Conclusion

To conclude this paper and GR 505 course, I am confident to say I am immediately able

to apply many learning objectives to my career. The additional knowledge that I gained will

allow me to professionally develop in the areas of Employee Engagement, Talent Management,

Diversity and HR and International Business. The topics discussed throughout the paper will be

used during my goal setting session for 2018.

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References

Dessler, G. (2017). Human Resource Management (Fifteenth Edition ed.). New Jersey, New

Jersey, United States of America: Pearson Education, Inc.

Vorhauser-Smith, S. (2013). How the Best Places to Work are Nailing Employee Engagement.
Forbes.