Ballard Integrated Managed Services, Inc. (BIMS) is a service company that provides various service products to their clients, mainly large businesses and corporations. BIMS services consists from janitorial cleaning to foodservice, and even physical plant maintenance. BIMS allows companies to outsource all of their non-business operations activities from one spot. This makes things very simple for BIMS clients and it also makes BIMS a very marketable company. Unfortunately, BIMS has been feeling the pressure of low employee morale and turnover numbers have been increasing. Our team will be looking at researching why this issue is happening to BIMS. We will try to un-code data collected from an employee survey to see if we can help BIMS find a solution to this problem that is slowly crippling them.
One of BIMS largest contracts is with their client, The Douglas Medical Center (DMC). BIMS provides DMC with three major services housekeeping, food service, and physical plant management. BIMS would like to solve it’s high turnover issue so that they can guarantee the retention of the DMC contract. Here are some possible research questions: Why is employee morale dropping? Is there a direct correlation between low morale level and the increasing turnover rate? Can we control the turnover rate by attempting to improve employee morale? Human resources at BIMS deployed an employee survey to try to figure out the reason morale levels were low, this may help them pinpoint the underlying issue. The instrument used for data collection was a survey. The survey was used as a data collection tool to gather information regarding employees’ opinion, attitude and overall satisfaction with the company. The data collected from the survey is mostly qualitative. The answers given in the survey, even though numerical, cannot be added to give any meaning. Two answers of 5 which are each coded to very positive do not equal 10 or very very positive. The survey’s interpretation of the data is mostly qualitative. Basically, the numbers are collected, then decoded and interpreted using qualitative methods to possibly find a solution to BIMS problems. The data is coded a few different ways. For the gender question if the employee answered female it was coded with a 1 and 2 for males. Likewise for supervisors they were assigned a 1 in data entry and 2 for non. The three departments food, cleaning, and maintenance were coded with 1,2,3 respectively. The ten main questions were coded on a scale from 1-5 for very negative to very positive accordingly. In data entry 6s were accidentally in place of 5s and 0s were entered when answer was left blank. We converted the 6s back to 5s and removed the 0s so they would not skew the averages. The way we analyzed the data was by taking the average response to each of the ten questions and graphing it on a chart. Immediately we can see that two questions with the lowest averages are six and nine. Six deals with employees being content with their pay. Nine is about the company's communication ability. It quickly begins to look like moral might be able to be lifted if BIMS made an attempt at raising wages and maybe having seminars or events that can improve communication between employees.
CONCLUSION
BIMS conducted a survey to 449 employees, however only 78 employees provided feedback, which represented a 17.3% response rate. Our team was hired by the upper management to analyze the data collected and hopefully answer why there is a high turnover rate among their staff, which is affecting the company’s performance. We concluded that the data collected is appropriate to analyze this management crisis. After un-coding the data and converting it into a graph of averages, our team was able to conclude that the primary cause of low morale within BIMS is low wages and the lack of communication from upper management to the subordinates within the company. Our team believes that in order to improve employee morale within the organization, the company should provide competitive wages and better benefits to their part-time employees, which could help to improve the employee turnover, since nowadays people try to find job security by having a job that offers enough working hours to secure their financial well-being and their families as well. The company could also provide ongoing training for the upper management on how to communicate and interact effectively with subordinates in order to improve business productivity and lower the turnover rates.