MIS770-Assignment 2 Solved

Overview 
 

The purpose of this assignment is to investigate a dataset that has been produced as a result of the survey you conducted on employee turnover. You now need to interrogate the dataset in order to answer questions posed by your client, Globex Corporation. Ultimately, you will need to analyse the data, interpret the results, and then draw appropriate conclusions.

The aims of the assignment are to:

•       provide you with some examples of the application of data analysis

•       test your understanding of the material presented in the relevant topics

•       test your ability to analyse data and effectively communicate your results in a language best suited to target audience

Before attempting the assignment, make sure you have prepared yourself well. At a minimum, please read the relevant sections of the prescribed textbook and review the learning materials provided in modules 1 and 2 (i.e., Topics 1 to 7).

Scenario 
Globex Corporation has previously commissioned you, Leanne Levesque (Chief Analyst at Survey House), to develop a survey to help them gauge the views of the company’s employees regarding “Employee Turnover”. Now, in order to implement possible staff retention initiatives, the company, through their representative Phil Rowe (Manager, Human Resources Department), wants you to process and analyse the data gathered from your survey and then answer several questions.

Phil does not have an analytics background, so it’s important that you utilise “plain, easy to understand language” in your answers. If you believe you need to include any technical terms, then you must explain these in a clear and succinct manner using layman’s terms.

The questions you need to answer are contained in the following memorandum.

Memorandum 


Can you please carry out an analysis of the recent Employee Turnover Survey data (contained in the file EmployeeTurnoverSurvey.xlsx) and prepare a report containing answers to the following questions.

Q1. Summaries of key variables of interest 
Can you please provide me with separate summaries of the following variables, just by themselves? In other words, please investigate each variable individually without reference to any other variable in the dataset.

(a)    “AverageYearly%SalaryIncrease” – the average yearly % salary increase each employee has experienced in their time with the company.  

(b)    “JobSatisfaction” – how happy employees are with their current roles within the company.

Q2. Exploring relationships between two variables 
(a)    I suspect there is some link between the hourly pay rate (“HourlyRate”) and the duration of time employees spend working at the company, both the hours they work each week (“HoursPerWeek”) and the number of years they have worked for the company (“YearsAtCompany”), but I’d still like you to establish from your sample data if there is anyrelationship  between these three variables.

(b)    I’m also interested to establish if there is a relationship between attrition (“Attrition”) and whether an employee is often required to work overtime (“Overtime”).

(c)     Further, it would be helpful if we knew if the age (“Age”) of a person had any relationship to their experience of work-life balance (“WorkLifeBalance”).

Q3. Estimating Work-Life balance measures 
(a)    Another factor possibly affecting work-life balance and employee attrition is the time required to travel to work. Therefore, can you estimate the average (“TravelTime”) employees are experiencing working for the company?

(b)    As you may realise, time spent working can constitute a large amount of an individual’s lifetime and therefore the quality of relationships people have in the workplace can greatly affect a person’s wellbeing. Due to this, I’m interested to know if you can estimate the combined proportion of all employees who state that they experience Medium or Low relationship satisfaction (“RelationshipSatisfaction”) at our company.

Q4. Confirming existing claims 
(a)    A previous report provided to Globex indicated that in order to manage staffing expenses the average hourly pay rate (“HourlyRate”) offered should not be in excess of $70 per hour. Are you able to confirm that this recommendation is being followed based on your survey data?

(b)    Another finding in that report concerned the work environment of Globex employees

(“EnvironmentSatisfaction”). The report indicated that at least 70% of employees had a High or Very High rating for their work environment. Can you also check this claim against your survey data?

Q5. Appropriate sample size 
Finally, I am somewhat concerned about time and cost associated with collecting the sample date from the 1470 employees for this survey. For future surveys we intend, we would like to be able to:

(a)    calculate approximately the average hours worked per week (“HoursPerWeek”) that is representative of the company to within 0.5hrs, and

(b)    estimate the proportion of employees that have decided to leave the company each year (“Attrition”) accurately to within 2.5%.

Therefore, what is the minimum number of employees we would need to include in next year’s survey to provide accurate results and satisfy both of these  requirements?

Regards, Phil

 

Report Requirements 
 

•      Your report should be no longer than 3 pages and there is no need to include any visualisations (i.e., Charts and Tables), or Appendices in the Report.

•      Your report must, however, have a cover sheet containing your personal particulars and the Unit details, table of contents, an executive summary, introduction and conclusion.

•      The Charts/Graphics and Tables you create are only to be placed in the Data Analysis file (i.e. the Excel spreadsheet) and not reproduced in the report.

•      Your report is meant to be a stand-alone document. That is, it should be able to be read without looking at the data analysis. To this end, do not refer to the visualisations as “as you can see from Figure 1 etc”. You need to interpret your data analysis visualisations for Phil in the report.

•      Suggested Word formatting for the report: Single‐line spacing; no smaller that 10‐ point font; page margins approx. 25mm, and good use of white space.

•      Set out the report in the same order as in the originating Memorandum from Phil, with each section (question) clearly marked.

•      Use plain language and keep your explanations concise. Avoid the use of technical or statistical jargon. As a guide to the meaning of “Plain Language”, imagine you are explaining your findings to a person without any statistical training (e.g., someone who has not studied this unit). What type of language would you use in that case?

•      Marks will be lost if you use unexplained technical terms, irrelevant material, or have poor presentation/organisation.

•      All Microsoft Excel output associated with each question in the Memorandum is to be placed in the corresponding tab in the file EmployeeTurnover _yourstudentid.xlsx 

 

Data Analysis Instructions/Guidelines 
 

In order to prepare a reply to Phil’s memorandum, you will need to examine and analyse the dataset EmployeeTurnoverSurvey.xlsx thoroughly.

Phil has asked a number of questions and your data analysis output (i.e., your charts/tables/graphs) should be structured such that you answer each question on the separate tab/worksheet provided in your Excel document. There are also extra tabs in EmployeeTurnoverSurvey.xlsx called CI, HT and SS and you should use the various templates contained in these tabs in your “Confidence Interval”, “Hypothesis” and “Sample Size” answers.

In order to effectively answer the questions, your data analysis output needs to be appropriate. Accordingly, you’ll need to establish which of the following techniques are applicable for any given question:

•       Summary Measures (e.g., descriptive statistics, Inc. outlier detection, percentiles).

•       Comparative Summary Measures (i.e., descriptive statistics, outlier detection and percentiles for multiple values of a variable).

•       Suitable tables (such as a frequency distribution) and charts or graphics (such as histograms, box plots, pie charts, bar/column charts, polygons) that will illustrate more clearly, other important features of a variable.

•       Scatter Diagrams (used to visually establish if there is a relationship between two numeric variables).

•       Cross Tabulations (sometimes called contingency tables), used to establish the relationships (dependencies) between two variables (see Additional Materials under Topic 2 – Creating Cross Tabulations in Excel using Pivot Tables).

•       Confidence Intervals. You can assume that a 95% confidence level is appropriate. We use confidence intervals when we have no idea about the population parameter we are investigating. Additionally, we would use confidence intervals if we were asked for an estimate. You should use the relevant Excel templates provided in the dataset and copy them to the applicable question tab.

•       Hypothesis Tests. You can assume that a 5% level of significance is appropriate. We use hypothesis tests when we are testing a claim, a theory or a standard. You should use the relevant Excel templates provided in the dataset and copy them to the applicable question tab.

•       Sample size calculation: You can assume that a 95% confidence level is appropriate. You may include comparisons for 90% and 99% and a recommendation for the appropriate sample size.

•       To answer some questions, you may need to make certain assumptions about the data set we are using. Mention these in your data analysis, where relevant. There is no need to mention this in the report.

Note: There is an appendix at the end of each chapter of the prescribed textbook which describes the basic Excel steps associated with that topic. Chapters 1 to 9 are applicable for this assessment.