OGL 481 Pro-Seminar I:

PCA-Human Resource Frame Worksheet

Worksheet Objectives:
1. Describe the human resource frame
2. Apply the human resource frame to your personal case situation

Complete the following making sure to support your ideas and cite from the textbook and other
course materials per APA guidelines. After the peer review, you have a chance to update this and
format for your Electronic Portfolio due in Module 6.

1) Briefly restate your situation from Module 1 and your role. 

I am the training manager for a manufacturing company. The technicians that build our products
conduct dangerous statements of work that require certifications. Depending on the statement of
work, an employee may need a certificate as called for by the company to complete the statement
of work. Furthermore, government and OSHA regulations require specific procedures to be
certified. Medical certifications are also needed for certain statements of work. My organization
is the manufacturing training organization and is responsible for training the manufacturing
technicians on all certifiable requirements. My organization is accountable for scheduling,
conducting, and marking completions for certification training. In this situation, I will be
assessing an employee on one of the programs we support who found a loophole in our learning
management system and marked over 500 certification completions fraudulently, putting the
entire company and individuals at huge safety and regulatory risk. 

2)   Describe how the human resources of the organization influenced the situation.

Human resources had a considerable role to play in the situation described above. While human
resources were not involved in the problem, they would help guide my organization with a
mitigation plan, collaborating with Ethics and our Legal Department. Human resources is a
support organization that assists when employees' actions need to be evaluated. In this specific
situation, human resources and our ethics department would decide what to do with the
employee that committed the fraudulent activity. 
This was only one part of the job of human resources. They also needed to ensure that this was
fine with an organizational culture that led to this employee marking things out of compliance.
They needed to evaluate if other employees were affected or influenced by this behavior,
evaluating if this was a localized or systemic problem to the program and organization. Having a
department specializing in laws surrounding employee investigations and disciplinary actions
ensures that my organization is making the right moral and legal moves involved in our
mitigation plan. 

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3)   Recommend how you would use the human resources for an alternative course of
action regarding your case.

The human resources department found that this employee was out of compliance, and he ended
up being terminated. However, this is where their investigation stopped, and they determined that
no further research was needed. I suggest further investigating how this employee was allowed to
mark so many certification completions before being caught. Furthermore, it was found that
management was pressuring the employee to keep other individuals' certifications from expiring.
Therefore an investigation into the culture the employee found himself in would have been
helpful in truly correcting the behavior of the program. Human resources must always keep the
company's image in mind, which means sweeping issues under the rug. This can lead to deeper-
rooted problems allowing them to go unchecked, like lousy management. I would have
recommended a much more widespread investigation into the leadership that supported this
individual and his actions. 
 
When situations like this occur, human resources does its best to isolate and mitigate the issue.
However, where appropriate, I would want human resources to share internal risks that have
been identified to ensure they don't occur in other programs or functions of the organization.
Furthermore, I would have utilized human resources to talk to more of the individuals that
conduct the employee's same work responsibilities to make sure that they know the impacts and
lessons learned from such a situation. 

4)   Reflect on what you would do or not do differently, given what you have learned about
this frame.

Given what I have learned about the human resources frame, I would have done much the same
regarding my situation. The moment I discovered the issue after running an internal audit, I
engaged human resources immediately as I trusted their processes would handle situations like
this that I had little experience managing. Thanks to a fantastic human resources department, I
could focus on my work while they completed their investigation and provided recommendations
to my organization and me. I have worked with the same human resources business partner for
three years now and having a relationship that relies on trust and transparency ensured that this
issue was elevated immediately and handled correctly. 
 
The only thing I would have done differently, knowing what I know now, is engaged human
resources to share some lessons learned or risk aversion tactics to prevent this problem from
happening again. A situation like this is stressful for all individuals involved, and having human
resources provide a follow-up and lessons learned from their frame would be beneficial to ensure
mistakes aren't repeated. 

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 Reference or References