▶ Your Answer :In this memorandum, the author recommends that employees at
Dexter Gorman Instruments should complete their work during the regular 40-hour
work week and only work overtime when there is an emergency. To support this
recommendation, the author quotes an internal study conducted in the company,
which indicates that employees across several divisions who worked 48 or more on average per week tend to make more work errors than
their fellow employees. This looks convincing at the first glance, but there
are several questions with regards to the author’s lines of reasoning that
requires further analysis. The argument could end up being quite
convincing, or invalid in the end.
To start with, the author’s recommendation relies heavily on
this internal study, which has not been proven to be reliable and to be able to
generate statistically significant conclusions. It
did not mention the number of employees involved in this study, which can be
also viewed as the sample size. The number of individuals in a study must reach
a certain number to generate statistically meaningful results, otherwise, the conclusion derived from a study is not reliable
at all. There might only be four or five employees in this study, and
coincidently, they made more errors than others. It would be unreasonable to apply
this “incidental” result from a small sample group to a general case. Moreover,
the candidates in the study were chosen by the managers, which might bring some
potential errors into this study. The managers are obviously occupied by
various issues at work, so they might not be aware of the working hours of each
employee in their divisions. Therefore, the validity of this study might
seriously challenge the author’s suggestion or strengthen the author’s suggestion
once it is answered.
The second question that I would like to ask is the
reliability of the so-called “documented work errors”. The author made his/her
claim based on the number of documented work errors. This conclusion relies on
the assumption that all errors at work were documented, and no errors were
missed. There is no guarantee that the employees would report all their work
errors, and all the work errors were found by them. Therefore, whether the
documented work errors were the total errors needs to be verified to support
the author’s claim.
Moreover, we need to consider the reason behind the larger
number of work errors by the employees who worked overtime. Employees who
worked overtime might complete a much larger amount of work than those who did
not, which naturally might lead to a larger number of work errors. Intuitively,
more work, more errors; less work, fewer errors. Yet, if the author can provide
more information about the work amount and work error, his/her suggestion might
still be reasonable.
To sum up, there are still several questions that need to be
answered so that the author’s recommendation can be tenable. Only after those
questions are adequately addressed can we effectively evaluate the author’s
argument and reach a logically sound conclusion. |