Stephanie Nekoba

January 27 , 2019
Julia’s job title is “Human Resource Manager for the Midwest Division”. Julia has her
SHRM certificate, her Associate’s in Applied Management, and she is currently working on her
degree in Human Resources. The career path that I’m taking is that I want to get into the
hospitality industry, and what I found interesting that I did not know before was that Julia
actually works in the hospitality industry. She works for a company called Welk Resorts and so
she does a lot of travelling to each location to assess the not only the cooperativity of the
employees with one another, but also to see where help is needed in terms of following policies,
if an investigation needs to be conducted, or just to see if any service can be provided based on
that location’s needs. Overall it was actually interesting to learn what exactly she does, because I
want to go in the hospitality industry for the purpose that you get to serve people, and so hearing
that her job in HR and hospitality is all about service made me a bit more interested in that career
path.
One thing that Julia wishes all employees knew about HR was that they are all about
communication, and that you need to have interpersonal/soft skills. She said that a lot of the
problems that occur within the company is that management lacks the interpersonal skills needed
to deal with customers and other employees. They do not know how to speak properly to people
or they lack the interpersonal skills needed to communicate effectively with one another. Human
resources is all about communication, and even employees not in HR should be able to interact
with other people in a way that is effective and not diminishing. In Julia’s department she
actually encourages her employees to interact with other people throughout the company in order
to not only work on their interpersonal skills, but also so that people can see that HR is not just
the bad guys. She wants to show her coworkers that HR is there to help protect and guide them.
She has each of her employees designate a minimum 1 hour each day to just walking around and
interacting with other employees. This is to put a face to HR so that people can see what they do
and how they can help them. She encourages them to check up on other employees to see maybe
where their services are needed and how they can help. I think that this is relevant to what we
learned about this week with fearless performance reviews because that is basically what she is
doing. She has her employees go out and conduct a casual review of other employee’s work and
how they can help them/what the employees can do better. It really put into perspective for me
the things that we are learning. Sometimes we learn of all these techniques that businesses use
and we think that people don’t actually use them. This however demonstrated that fearless
performance reviews are actually used in the workplace in order to promote more casual and
effective reviews.
Lastly Julia and I talked about keeping motivation up within a company. Often times she
finds that people within her own department aren’t motivated, and so then it becomes difficult to
get her other employees motivated. They see that HR is lacking motivation so they think that
they too can slack off. The trick is to figure out what people are motivated by, and part of this is
achieved when the HR employees walk around and talk with other people. They are able to find
out people’s interests and what motivates them. It all goes back to communication. All people
are motivated differently, some people are motivated by money or some people are motivated by
family. For example, in one of their resorts, they noticed that the housekeeping crew was
motivated most by family. So, in an effort to keep them more motivated, they have removed
photos of the lodge that were displayed in the lounging area, and they have replaced them with
photographs of the housekeeping crew’s families. This allows them to feel like their families are
encompassed within their job. So, to sum it up it’s about understanding what you can do for your
employees that can help them ultimately do a job well.
Overall, I think this interview was definitely beneficial for me because if taught me a lot
more about what HR does other than deal with breaking policies such as sexual misconduct.
They are all about service and how they can motivate/help their employees to create an overall
successful company/work environment.