P1.Attributes valued by employers
Introduction
I have been tasked with writing an investigative report inquiring
about attributes that are valued by employers in today’s workplace. In
preparation for this task I have created a questionnaire to inquire into the
attributes valued by employers in the workplace as well as any health and
safety regulations employers expect employees to follow. I handed out three
copies to different employees. My questionnaires use exclusively open-questions
as I find closed questions (yes/no questions) give fairly simple answers and do
not give insightful answers. I have also tried to give my questionnaires to
three employees in fairly different industries in order to get a better range
of answers. The three employees in question are an NHS Medical Directorate, BT
Private Service’s Operative, and a Deyes High School Teacher. As well as
analyse, I will compare and contrast the different responses to investigate if
there are any correlations in the findings I receive.
Findings
The questions
concerning attributes are questions 3, 4 and 5, which basically asks the
employee to outline the attributes they require for their job and how often
they require these attributes in daily tasks. Question 3, (asking what specific
attributes the employee’s employer was looking for) had a tick list of answers
with an ‘other’ option in order to remain open. The tick list included:
Confident, Good Teammate, Leader, Planning/Organising Skills, Independent and
Responsible. What was interesting about the result was that the NHS Medical
Director and the teacher both ticked every attribute, whereas the BT Operative
ticked all but leader. This implies that similar skills are valued by
employers, even across a wide range of different workplaces, even skills that
you would expect to be restricted to jobs like teacher or manager, are
applicable even in manual jobs such as a private services engineer.
Questions 6, 7 and 8 deal with legislations that come into
effect in the workplace. Questions 6 and 7 in particular focused on health and
safety legislations. Before looking at the responses you would assume that the
NHS Medical Directorate would have by far the most health and safety
legislations to follow, this assumption turned out to be true, as everything
from wearing protective gloves, to wiping surfaces with anti-septic, to
infection control was included in her response. The BT Private Service Operative
also had many health and safety legislations to follow, which again could be
presumed in a job that involves many workplace hazards. As for the teacher, her
response was “Health and safety procedures in the classroom” leading me to
believe that there were considerably less legislations and precautions in this
line of work, because of the details lacked in the answer. So while the range
of attributes required between various jobs is quite similar, it would seem
that health and safety regulations differ quite a lot. I also asked the
different employees to give the legislation decreeing their various health and
safety precautions; however none of them could, so I researched the possible
legislations decreeing so. While there have been many legislations concerning
employee well-being in the workplace, the most likely legislation responsible
for the precautions in my responses, is the Health and Safety at Work Act (1974).
While the employees did not know the individual legislations decreeing each precaution,
they gave different answers in response to how they know about their respective
precautions. The NHS medical directorate
answered standard procedure, as well as daily checklists, the Teacher answered
inset days and the BT Operative answered training. These three different
answers could be a result of the difference in jobs or the different
legislations required in each workplace.
Question 8 asks
whether the employees job tasks them with withholding any confidential
information and, if possible, to name the legislation decreeing so. All three
employees answered that they are required to hold confidential information in
their line of work. However, unlike health and safety legislations, two of the
three (the Teacher and BT Operative) could name the act decreeing so, the Data
Protection Act (1998). The NHS directorate could only identify that the confidential
information she withholds is prohibited by the NMC (Nursing and Midwifery Council).
This suggests that employees are more informed, about legislations involving
information systems, which may be because more jobs nowadays require employees
to withhold confidential information.
Conclusion
In conclusion, it would seem that even across a large range
of jobs, near identical attributes are valued by different employers. I have
come to this deduction based on the fact that all 3 employees required a near
identical set of skills, coupled with the fact that they all had to know an
equal amount about different legislation information, that being not quite as
much on health and safety legislation as data protection legislation.
http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1974/37/contents
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