HR499 Unit 8 Seminar Reflection Example

The Cap I Defended and the Rule That Undid It: A Unit 8 Seminar Reflection

[Student Name]

Purdue University Global

HR499: Bachelor's Capstone in Human Resource Management

Unit 8 Seminar Reflection

[Instructor Name]

[Date]

Hobbyline Crafts, the seminar group and the ordinance are composite and illustrative, the ordinance is the case file's own version, and classmates are not named; the sources cited are real.

The Argument I Made

I argued for keeping the cap, and I still think the argument deserved a hearing. Every part-time associate who averages 30 hours or more becomes full-time for the employer coverage rules, and each one adds an employer health contribution of about $6,480 a year that the budget did not include. Hobbyline has 956 part-time associates. If even a tenth crossed the line, the cost would approach $620,000 before any associate saw a raise. Complying with the ordinance at the nine covered stores, and leaving the cap alone everywhere, seemed to meet the legal deadline at the lowest price. The group agreed quickly, partly because the cost figure was the only number anyone had calculated.

The Objection

Our classmate was playing a district manager for the city stores. She said, close to these words, "The ordinance says I have to offer extra hours to my part-timers before I hire anyone new. If they're capped at 29, I can't offer them the hours, so I hire someone new to work hours my people wanted. How is that compliance?"

Nobody had an answer. After the session I checked the ordinance summary in the case file. The rule reads as she described it: before hiring from outside, a covered employer must offer the additional hours to existing part-time employees who are qualified for the work. A hard cap means some of those offers can never be made, so at the covered stores the cap and the ordinance pull in opposite directions. The result would be more hires to fill the same hours, which is the churn the capstone is trying to reduce.

I had kept the legal rule and the staffing fact in separate compartments, and the classmate who joined them was the one thinking about an actual store on an actual Thursday.

Why We Moved So Fast, Twice

The group moved quickly in both directions, first to consensus and then away from it. Janis (1982) described how cohesive groups can converge on a decision without testing it, and I think that is part of what happened: the cost figure was concrete, nobody wanted to argue against a number, and the ordinance seemed like a separate legal box to tick. The reversal was just as quick once someone showed the two pieces touching. The common cause was that my cost argument had never been tested against the other functions, the stores and the law, whose rules it would have to live alongside.

What Holds and What Does Not

What holds is the cost concern. Benefit costs for associates who cross into full-time status are real, and the capstone recommendation must price them. Lambert (2008) documents employers passing the cost of unpredictable demand to hourly staff, and dropping the cap with no plan would simply pass part of that cost to the benefits budget. That concern did not disappear in the seminar. It did shrink when I rechecked it. My $620,000 figure assumed that every associate who crossed the line would enroll in the health plan. At the 52 percent take-up the benefits team uses for current full-time staff, the same tenth of part-timers would cost about $322,000. That is still a large number, but it is half of what I told the group, and the group accepted my figure without asking how it was built, which is the same untested agreement I described above.

What does not hold is the cap as the tool. At the covered stores it conflicts with the ordinance, and everywhere it pushes open shifts toward newer associates. Choper et al. (2022) found that unstable schedules strongly predicted turnover among hourly service workers, and the cap is one of the things that makes Hobbyline's schedules unstable.

How the Recommendation Changed

Our group's recommendation moved from Option B to Option C: a chain-wide fourteen-day standard and 60 core positions at 32 hours, with the benefit cost of those positions priced in the cost estimate rather than avoided by a cap. The cost concern now lives in a budget line instead of a policy that works against the law.

What I Would Do Differently

At the start of any decision that crosses functions, I would ask each function's owner how the proposal would change one specific week of their work, before agreeing to anything. A district manager's Thursday is exactly where my argument failed, and nobody had asked to see it until a classmate did. I would also show how every figure I bring was built, assumptions included, before asking a group to rely on it. A number that nobody questions is not a strong number; it is one nobody has looked at yet.

References

Choper, J., Schneider, D., & Harknett, K. (2022). Uncertain time: Precarious schedules and job turnover in the US service sector. ILR Review, 75(5), 1099-1132. https://doi.org/10.1177/00197939211048484

Janis, I. L. (1982). Groupthink: Psychological studies of policy decisions and fiascoes (2nd ed.). Houghton Mifflin.

Lambert, S. J. (2008). Passing the buck: Labor flexibility practices that transfer risk onto hourly workers. Human Relations, 61(9), 1203-1227. https://doi.org/10.1177/0018726708094910