The following appeared as a memorandum from the Human Resources director at Dexter Gorman Instruments, a company that manufactures saxophones.

“On this year’s survey about work habits, our employees tended to strongly agree with the idea that if they took less time to complete their assigned work, the quality of their work would suffer. However, we recently conducted an internal study that proves this idea wrong. Managers across several divisions identified an overtime group: the employees who worked an average of 48 or more hours per week over the past year instead of the expected 40 hours per week. We then looked at the number of documented work errors produced by all of our employees during the past year and found that the overtime group was responsible for significantly more work errors overall than their fellow employees. On the basis of these findings, our recommendation to the company president is to require employees at Dexter Gorman Instruments to complete their work during the regular 40-hour work week and allow overtime only for urgent circumstances.”

Write a response in which you discuss what questions would need to be answered in order to decide whether the recommendation and the argument on which it is based are reasonable. Be sure to explain how the answers to these questions would help to evaluate the recommendation.

The argument presented in this memo concludes that overtime pay is a waste of time and money. This conclusion is based on the assumption that if the overtime employees work fewer hours, the quality of their work will be higher. However, this memo is silent on the work that the employees perform, which in all likelihood includes routine chores that could easily be done during regular business hours. If the employees perform tasks that require extra concentration and attention to detail, then they might indeed be fatigued and less efficient. However, if the employees perform tasks that are easily done during normal work hours, then the company might be paying for hours that its employees could otherwise use for more lucrative work. This memo also fails to explain how the employees’ work errors were documented, which makes it impossible to know if the overtime group was under-performing because of the hours that they actually worked or because of poor management. Without this information, the company president’s recommendation needs to be revisited.

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