Essay about Analyzing and Interpreting Data

Submitted By johcrawford
Words: 3065
Pages: 13

Analyzing and Interpreting Data
QNT/351
Monday, July 21, 2014

Introduction
Ballard Integrated Managed Services, Inc., is a cost to cost company that provides different combining services, such as housekeeping, food services, general cleaning, and physical plan maintenance (University of Phoenix, 2014, Week Two Supplement). Some of its client lists include 22 Fortune 100 businesses, over 100 midsized firms, 16 major universities, 14 medical centers, and 3 larger regional airports (University of Phoenix, 2014, Week Two Supplement). However, at the Douglas Medical Center location with 452 employees; BIMS has experienced an increase in its turnover rate from 55-60% to 64% in the last four months, which had affected the customer’s satisfaction as well. To try to identify the root cause of the decrease in morale from the employees, BIMS decided to run a survey that did not produce useful findings because of several flaws developing the questions (biased, and worded awkwardly), and in the data entry (errors when keying the data). Due to these faults, there was only a 17.3% response rate from this first survey (University of Phoenix, 2014, Week Five Supplement).
Due to the low response rate of the first survey, Debbie Horner, the HR manager for BIMS asked for another chance at data collection. “Debbie designed another survey instrument. This time she circulated it among the senior management team, inviting each person to complete the survey, reading for comprehension and flow of the actual wording, as well as for completeness” (University of Phoenix, 2014, Week 5 Supplement). Debbie shared the survey with senior managers and employees who were on medical leave to get feedback, and she then made the necessary corrections before handing out the survey for the second time. “Questions in surveys are always standardized before administering them to the subjects. The researcher is therefore forced to create questions that are general enough to accommodate the general population” (Sincero 2014). Some of the research questions that helped Debbie get what she needed were, if the employees were being treated or paid fairly. She was interested in finding out if the employees felt they were trained properly, and if they felt their managers treated them fairly. She also asked if they liked where they work, and if they could easily travel to and from work. The main reason why she used these questions in the survey is to answer the research question, what is causing low morale and high turnover rate with employees at BIMS?
The objective from the second survey is to find the reason why there is low morale among the employees. When the data collection was delivered from the employees’ responses, the consulting group decided to start selecting the data from the most important questions. From the 14 questions that were given in the survey, some of them had more importance than others, and were more helpful in getting to the bottom of the issue. For example, the first data that should be analyzed, is which division had the highest turnover rate. For QA, “In which division did you work,” the higher turnover rate was in housekeeping department with 46%, and the food department with 41%. Both of them represented total of 87%, which is a very high rate comparing with the maintenance department with only 13%. Due to this new data, the consulting group decided to focus on these (housekeeping and food service) two departments for its findings.

Figure 1Work Division
After the work division analysis, the consulting group decided to start analyzing each question and comparing them with each of the divisions. In this analysis, it was decided to exclude the maintenance division due to its low sample (13%), which could affect the significance of the results. The initial findings from the survey revealed, that BIMS low morale and high turnover rate was due to the lack of training, poor