Compensation Management

Section 2 -Scenario Short Answer Questions(35 marks)

INSTRUCTIONS: All questions are based on the scenario below. Complete ALL of the following questions. Please observe the page limit for each question. Your submission/ response should be double spaced with 1-inch borders using 12-point Times New Roman.

SCENARIO: Sparkles Home Sanitation Benefits Needs

Sparkles Home Sanitation Company is a small family-owned company in Jamaica. Efficiency and cost control are very important to their financial success.

Sparkles Home Sanitation has traditionally provided only legislatively required benefits for its employees. These include all legally required leave benefits and others such as National Housing Trust and National Insurance Scheme. In addition, the company also provides Workers Compensation for all employees through an insurance provider. The principals of the company, Shelton, Trisha, and their families, have individual, family-supplied health and life insurance.

Trisha has identified several potential problems with the company's management of benefits and services. These are outlined below;

a) One is turnover, the company has lost several good employees to competitors. She wants to do a study to determine whether similar small companies experience a return on providing health & life insurance and other benefits. Her preliminary thoughts are that instituting benefits might enable Sparkles to reduce employee turnover and perhaps pay lower wages.

b) Trisha is also concerned that her company has no formal policy regarding paid time off.

It is left up to supervisors to agree time-off terms with employees. Employees sometimes just take the day and are still paid and it would seem that paid time-off is unlimited. Vacation leave is also problematic. Sometimes, employees who have been on the job for 6 months are granted more vacation leave than legally required by Jamaican law. In other cases, requests for vacation leave is treated as no-pay leave. Trisha believes that the leave situation must be made more consistent.

c) Employees sometimes are absent because of the need to care for their children. She therefore wonders whether it would be advisable to establish some type of day care centre for the employees' children. She knows that the vast majority of the employees' children have either no place to go during the day (they are pre-schoolers) or have no place to go after school, and she wonders whether a benefit such day care would be in the company's best interests.

Question A Answer in no more than 1 page 12 MARKS

Explain the importance of Trisha investigating what other small business offer to their employees as discretionary benefits?

Question B Answer in no more than one page13 MARKS

With the exception of legislated paid leave in Jamaica, how would an integrated paid time off policy or paid time off bank be of benefit to Sparkles?

Question C Answer in no more than one page10 MARKS

Discuss two ways in which Sparkles could offer a day care benefit to their employees. Propose one of the two and explain why this would be the better choice using information from the case.