Written Assignment 5: Formal Report

Your final writing assignment is to compose a formal report based on one of the scenarios described below. In each of the situations, you are asked to conduct research (in trade journals and magazines, industry reports, academic articles, or on the Internet) to help you recommend a change in company policy or procedure or to develop employee benefits.

Group Work

You will work in groups of 5 to conduct the research and to make the team presentations, which will be described by your speech instructor. To begin the assignment, your team must invent the company. We suggest that, at minimum, you define these aspects of your organization:

Company Name: ______Size: ______Location: ______Product or Service: ______Goals: ______

You may also find it helpful to establish the demographic characteristics of your employees or customers. You may base your company on an existing business. When you hand in your report, include a list of these details on an attached sheet of paper.

Once the company has been created, you will want to get quickly and efficiently into the research. Develop a strategy for dividing up the research that must be done amongst your team members, and schedule meetings to disseminate and discuss the information gathered (some class time will be given next week).

Individual Work

Each student will write a separate, individual report. Therefore, you don’t have to be in perfect agreement with the other team members on your method of analyzing the problem, or on the conclusions that you draw in your written report. However, you will be asked to put together a cohesive oral team presentation. The report should be approximately 1200 words, or 3 single- spaced pages, long.

Consult Chapter 11 for the format of the long report, but take special notice of these changes: . The table of contents is not required. . The “synopsis” will be called Executive Summary and will follow the pattern of organization established by the rest of the report.

Keep in mind that this is an analytical report that recommends a specific course of action. It is very important that you develop a logical and clear method of analyzing the problem and that your analysis lead to a precisely stated recommendation. BUSINESS SCENARIOS

1) Your CEO is proud of her family-centered company and works hard to make employees’ work conditions as pleasant as possible. However, company productivity is suffering because employees are being forced to take days off to care for their children either when they are sick, or because of inadequate childcare arrangements. Your CEO now believes that it may be in the company’s best interests to establish a company-run daycare center on-site at all company locations, or at least to enter into a joint venture with a reputable childcare company that would open a company daycare site for employees in the vicinity. You have been selected to investigate the possibilities of this venture, and you will need to find companies that have successful childcare partnerships/on-site ventures to select for analysis. Once you have compared the childcare arrangements of at least two of these companies, make recommendations for the childcare solution that would best fit your company’s structure and needs. (Useful resource: Working Mother magazine www.workingwoman.com; Fortune magazine)

2) While your company has always had an informal code of ethics, expressed in newsletters and memos, your board of directors has been impressed by Lockheed Martin’s online code of ethics, with its six key virtues (visit it at www.lockheedmartin.com/exeth/ethset.html). Your CEO would like to develop a similar one to fit your corporation’s needs and goals, and he has selected you to do some research on corporate ethics codes. You are to present a 3-page report to them on your findings, and to make recommendations for your company’s ethics code. You need to find at least one other company’s code of ethics for comparative purposes.

3) Your company is expanding fast, but it is struggling to recruit and retain top workers in today’s competitive labor market. The Vice President for Human Resources, after reading an issue of Fortune that presented the latest “best company” award winners, believes that the incentives and rewards offered by top companies may be the remedy for his recruitment and retention headache. He wants you to write a report that summarizes and prioritizes some of the incentives that seem most appropriate to your company and your employees. Make recommendations for those that you think your company could most usefully incorporate. (Some helpful resources: www.containerstore.com; Fortune magazine’s “best company” issue.)

4) The success of Federal Express's package tracking web site (http://fedex.com/us/) and of the on-line access to JanSport's warranty service (http://www.jansport.com/pages/JanSport_USA.asp) has led your CEO to consider whether your company should invest in a customer service web site. Evaluate the benefits of such a web site for your company by looking into the online customer services of other companies and by finding out what industry experts have to say on the topic. In your report recommend whether your company should create its own customer service web site and, if it were to do so, how the site should be configured.

5) Your company has begun to take advantage of the speed and convenience of e- mail in conducting its daily operations. But the higher-ups took notice as Microsoft was hurled into its legal trouble, largely on the evidence found in e- mail messages. After dealing with a number of difficult problems stemming from the use of e-mail by your own employees, your CEO has asked you to develop a policy regarding the use of e-mail within your company. Look at the e-mail policies of other companies and conduct research to find out exactly what issues should be covered by a policy suitable for your particular organization. Write a report that analyzes the e-mail policies of at least two companies, examines ways to prevent problems that could be caused by your company's use of e-mail, and recommends guidelines by which a policy can be written.