Penelope Ramirez
BUS 230
Bill Forte
June 2, 2013

Fuzzy Hugs
Maintaining a high-quality, low-cost strategy is a philosophy many companies try to pursue in today’s competitive market. Not everyone can achieve that without hard work, massive time and other resources dedicated to ensure methods. Keeping a diverse work force is what we strive for. It allows employees from different backgrounds, different educational and occupational experience to collaborate and reach common goals. Adverse impact and validity are among the topics in this analysis; as follows.
Effectively using information to make business decisions is vital to a company’s success. Analyzing data can help organizations determine if they have a high quality and talented workforce that can perform, meet objectives, and implement strategy. Successful data analysis can also help with hiring, training, and planning decisions. Yet, this same information can be used for decisions on down-sizing, and layoffs. It is important and fundamental to have measurements t assist in making decisions.
The problem we face is deciding between two assessment systems, both of which are relatively expensive. As Fuzzy Hugs pursuing and maintaining a high quality low cost strategy is the business model. Furthermore, underperforming manufacturing employees cannot be afforded to be employed given the lean staffing model. The first system brought forth by Fuzzy Hugs has high validity and predicts job success well, but it results in fairly high levels of adverse impact. Avoiding legal trouble is a concern for Fuzzy Hugs so maintaining a diverse workforce is important. The assessment tools within the new system are important so we can get more bangs for our buck.
I want to fist start talking about adverse impact, which occurs when an action has a disproportionate effect on a protected group, regardless of its intent. For example, written tests, educational requirements, height and weight requirements, and strength requirements. Adverse impact affects employees, job titles and positions, and more importantly the families that this job serves and employees. An additional problem with adverse impact is race norming which is comparing an employee’s performance only to members of his or her own racial subgroup and setting separate passing or cutoff scores for each subgroup. Moreover, although unlawful, basing tests or performance numbers on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin it is still done today. The courts have put laws into place to reduce race norming and have put into place EEOC laws to make the workplace more diverse. Yet, some of the most useful assessment methods for predicting job performance can often result in adverse impact. Validity is the most important issue in selecting a measure, how well a measure assesses a given construct and the degree to which you can make specific conclusions or predictions based on observed scores. Strategic staffing and assessments key contributor is validity. Validity will tell you how useful, accurate, and important a measure is for a particular situation. This measure is great to determine many things, for example reference groups, target groups, and to gage overall performance and efficiencies. The information we see needs to make sense it needs to be dependable and can be interpreted easily.
If you wish to use date to make good business decisions, then the information must relate in meaningful ways to particular goals, objectives, and standards. Reliability will summarize how consistent scores from a measure will be. Combining validity and reliability, and having the ability to guess high quality talent with numerous tests will give Fuzzy Hugs a competitive edge over firms that do not use these models. It is important to understand the difference between the two. For example, you can measure a person’s height and weight (reliable) but, that probably won’t translate to the person’s performance related to the job (validity).
Analyzing the problem on hand, the new assessment system and the assessment tools identified are both relatively expensive. Considering and constructing cost-benefit analysis will indicate that the new assessment system with high validity and high levels of adverse impact is recommended. My recommendation is to pursue, install and dedicate all capital and resources to the new assessment system. This would make production fast, cheap efficient, and productive. The ultimate objective is to maximize profits and minimize losses. The new assessment system will grant more access to reliable, accurate, and numerous statistics that can help make better business decisions. Considering the cost of the new system versus the old and also the cost of the assessment tools is why I recommend the new system. Let me compare Fuzzy Hugs with other companies. For instance retail, every retailer has online surveys which give decision makers more information on how they can better serve their customers. Dunkin Donuts has timers to measure customer wait time. In addition, Dunkin Donuts has an assembly line of employees working to better assist each and every one of us at the window or at the counter. As their slogan indicates “America runs on Dunkin”, and they understand which allows them to better serve the public. Another example would be college professors and the course evaluations. This is a measure that colleges and professors use to constantly improve and better serve the students.
In summary, the examples I just ran through all have one common factor, results. Each industry has measures and statistics that help decision makers with their decisions. Adverse impact, validity, and reliability are fundamental in data analyzing. The more informed the better, regardless if you are a consumer or a business. More in this instance is always better which is why I recommend the new assessment system.