FIN60003 The Melbourne Law Firm

The Melbourne law firm is currently considering the challenges for the new generation of workers, and management has decided to implement new strategies in the law firm to improve the work environment. The owners of the company are interested in expanding their activities and have identified the area to find the spirit of peers among employees, reduce stress and improve productivity.

The purpose of this report is to provide the address with preliminary information on: (i) the general capacity to create a controlled social media environment; and (II) important management decisions that need to be taken to ensure their job satisfaction, stress and peer-group support. The study supports the viability of business modeling in job satisfaction and employee stress support; a global financial analysis of the company is not a supplier because of the modification of the guidelines.

In the study two analytical concepts were used, namely the descriptive analysis and the inferential analysis. Descriptive analysis focuses on the age and initial attributes of employees in the social media access environment in which the firm operates; the inferential analysis investigates the management hypothesis and finds the difference in the properties of the employees attribute based on the changed environment. The study data is derived from the help of a questionnaire covering these two environments, including: job satisfaction, stress and peer support data, and the age of workers and gender information.

Analysis

The report is divided into two main sections: an area of analysis containing information on both environments, with respect to employees of the law firm; and a final part, which gives suppliers a concrete closure of the analysis of all the departments of the company.

Descriptive Statistics

Gender of the sample of 100 employees was explored first. This demographic detail of the employees revealed that there were 58% females with 42% male presence in the sample. The random sample of 100 employees was selected from the population of 810 employees of the law firm. Preponderance presence of female employees was identified from the sample’s demographic characteristics.

Employees were found to be evenly distributed from the details of their age (18.5 years – 69.2 years). Average age of the employees (M = 42.17, SD = 13.32) reflected presence of enough number of middle-aged employees in the firm. The consistent impact of social media has been observed earlier for this age group and the introduction of controlled social media environment was expected to be beneficial for these employees. From the Figure 2 of age distribution it was identified that employees’ age was normally distributed.

Considering the time spent on social media by the employees, the scholar noticed that a major section of the staffs (P = 72.0%) were involved for less than 2 hours a day on social media platforms. Remaining 28% of the employees were noted to be addicted to the social media sites, and were surfing them for more than 2 hours a day. Some of the employees were even spending 3 hours or more on social media sites.

The productivity of the employees was measured by the number of billable hours. Distribution of productivity revealed that 41% of the employees were working around 13 to 17 billable hours for the firm. An employee with 31.5 billable hours of productivity was also identified from the distribution. That particular observation could be considered as an uncharacteristic number of billable hours for an employee.

Job satisfaction, stress level, and support from peer group were measured as categorical variables and the percentage distribution details have been presented in Table 2. Almost 40% employees were identified to be disappointed with the firm, and their levels of satisfaction were confined at 3 or below. Stress levels were observed to be comparatively lower and 41% of the responses of the employees were restricted to level 2 of the scale. Peer support in the firm was noted to be symmetrically distributed, and the trend was in line with previous literatures of the usual office culture (Kang, and Sung, 2017). The entire descriptive analysis for categorical variables was conducted before the blocking of social media access to the employees.

Confidence Interval

With 95% confidence it was possible to conclude that average of all the employees in the firm was in-between 39.52 years and 44.81 years.  Time spent by all the employees of the firm was assessed to be somewhere between 1.11 hours and 1.52 hours in a day. The scholar is 95% certain about the claim about the average social media involvement timing of the employees.

Hypothesis Testing

Firstly, it was hypothesized that time spend on social media by the females (M = 1.54 Hours) were higher compared to that of the males (M = 1.01 Hours). The claim was accepted with 95% confidence (t (94) = 2.63, p < 0.05) by a right tail t-test. Secondly, it was also hypothesized that the stress level of the employees got reduced in the controlled social media environment in the office.

At 5% level of significance it was found that average stress level in social media access situation (M = 2.54, SD = 1.30) was significantly higher (t (99) = 5.44, p < 0.05) than that in the collegial environment (M = 2.31, SD = 1.0) by a right tail paired t-test. Finally, it was also assumed that peer support level would increase in the controlled social media environment at the firm. At 5% level of significance, it was found that average peer support level in collegial environment (M = 6.09, SD = 2.4) increased significantly (t (99) = - 4.88, p < 0.05) compared to social media access situation (M = 5.31, SD = 2.66) by a left tail paired t-test.

crelation and Regression

The linear relationship between time spent on social media and employees’ productivity was evaluated. The correlation was almost zero and the trend of the relation was apparent from the diagram in Figure 8. The estimated regression was done for job satisfaction (JS =Dependent variable) on time spent on the social media (SM = Independent variable), and the equation was found as. The linear relation was found to be statistically insignificant at 5% level of significance Increase in social media involvement is identified to decrease job satisfaction, but the impact was not significant enough for valid evidence.

Conclusion

The primary concern of this study was whether the controlling access to social media in the law firm is a viable option for increasing employee satisfaction level along with lowered stress levels. Based on both of the descriptive and inferential analyses, the conclusion drawn is that such an idea of controlled access to social media with  social spaces where employees could interact  of the business is likely to be a sound investment.

The study also considered a gender basis study on time spent in social media, and the results reflected that females were more addicted towards the social media compared to that of the males. The negative effect of involvement time with social media on satisfaction level of the employees was noticed, but there was no evidence of linear relation between the satisfaction and social media involvement time. The Management issues that would need to be considered to ensure the success of the model were accordingly as follows.

1. The target employee section should be female employees, with equal emphasis on social media control environment for males.
2. The focus should be on high quality social space in the company so employees could interact and enjoy their breaks.
3. Peer support should be taken into account of the office environment attribute, though it was not directly associated with satisfaction levels.
4. In line with the demographic of the firm, business strategies should be mainly organized around the creation of collegial environment (Thompson2017).
5. To ensure the retention of staff, an emphasis should be placed on developing the proper space for entertainment of the employees.

References

Kang, M. and Sung, M., 2017. How symmetrical employee communication leads to employee engagement and positive employee communication behaviors: The mediation of employee-organization relationships. Journal of Communication Management, 21(1), pp.82-102.

Thompson, J.D., 2017. Organizations in action: Social science bases of administrative theory. Routledge.