Human Resource Policy Research Paper

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Overview

Policies provide standardization and structure to employees. The employee handbook is a venue for communicating expectations and can be a resource for employees as they have questions. In this assignment you will present as to why 4 policies should be included within the employee handbook. This assignment allows you to apply some of your HR knowledge to a fictional small company of 15-25 employees.

Instructions

In a research paper, provide researched rationale for the nature and substance of your 4 selected, distinct policies. This paper is to be reflective of an academic research paper. The research paper must address the reasoning and/or rationale for the inclusion of the selected policy elements in a policy manual.

The selected policies must correctly address employment legislation pertinent to the stated size of the company (15–25 employees). In elaborating on the rationale, you may want to consider the following questions: Why should these elements be in a policy manual? What laws or principles mandate an organization follow these guidelines? What cases have established precedent for this issue to be addressed clearly in an organization’s employee policy manual?

Support your rationale with (at minimum) 10 reputable, practitioner sources (ex. SHRM) or scholarly journals. Government websites (FLSA, EEO, etc.) can also count towards your sources (note some government websites will not be a match – such as the dress code for the Wisconsin’s FDA investigators. The .gov isn’t automatically an applicable source. Be discerning. These sources will likely be the same as the ones on the HRPP Annotated Bibliography but pay attention to your instructor feedback if a source or a policy topic needs to be changed for this work. The 10 sources are in addition to the required use of the textbook and the Bible.

The paper must be at least 1,750 words, in addition to the cover page, the abstract, and the references page. It must be written in current APA format. Papers submitted with less than the minimum word count will not receive full credit in this area of the grading rubric.

Following are some examples of HR policy topics. These are only examples. You may identify/select other topics that would be relevant and appropriate for a general employee policy manual/handbook.

Dress Code
Technology Use
Fraternization Policies (workplace dating)
Confidentiality
Harassment
Benefits (This can be more specific to areas such as paid time off, health care benefits, and so forth.)
Leave
Moonlighting
Attendance

Human Resource Policy Research Paper

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Please DO NOT pick:

Training
Recruiting/Selection
Code of Conduct
Ethics
Performance Reviews

Some of these are more procedural and more for one person in a role at the company or for supervisors. Code of Conduct is easily confused with the more common Code of Conduct in publicly traded organizations.

Keep the company size in mind as you research. Stay in the US when it comes to laws and try to keep out of specific industries and areas that are not a match. For example, an article on school dress code is not a good match to researching a dress code at the workplace. An article on Transyvanian ceramic engineers who experience harassment is going to not have good carryover to a small US coffee shop and the definition of harassment will be not the same as the one in the US.

This paper is a rationale for the policies and the company is not important other than to keep the small size in mind. You can write the paper in general terms (policies for a small company, etc.) or adopt a fictional company (ex. ABC Coffee Shop). Do note this is not a research paper and you are not looking at specific companies and what they have. This is also not the policies themselves and the tone will not be addressing employees but rather a formal paper about the importance of the policies you pick. Spend your time and effort on areas that advance the paper and align with the assignment instructions and rubric.

The policies you select do not need to be the most important four policies a company should have – just any four policies that are of interest to you and a good match to a small company handbook.