HRES2201: Reflective Assignment on Workplace Discrimination

This reflective assignment analyzes a workplace incident experienced by a service employee in a fast-food restaurant. The assignment details a conflict involving religious discrimination from a coworker, highlighting the negative impact on the employee's morale and work performance. It discusses the effects on the workplace, the importance of employee rights, including privacy, a harassment-free environment, reasonable accommodation, and fair pay. The assignment emphasizes the need for respectful communication and the role of human resource management in resolving disputes. It recommends providing fair wages and incentives, prioritizing employee wellbeing, and improving communication to enhance job satisfaction and prevent future incidents. The author reflects on their learning experience and the importance of establishing good relationships with human resource management within a company.

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Reflective assignment

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I was working in a fast food store as a service employee where everyone was welcoming since I
was new to the work and place. Being a new employee, I was enthusiastic, but on the first day, I
had a conflict with one of my employees in the store. She discriminated against me by my
religion as I belong to Bengali culture. I felt insulted and was embarrassed too to face such
arrogant behavior. I had a bad, humiliating experience on the first day of my job. Many of the
other employees were also offended seeing her behavior this may affect to the moral of the
employees. Since we all know that working together brings moral and efficiency to work, and
also it helps the company to build its goodwill.
Effects on the workplace
The first day of my job did not go well, and I was not in a state of mind to cover the work with
that same anxiety. I was feeling low. She kept on dominating the entire day, and I felt to quit the
job, but I did not. People should not criticize anybody to make them under confident regarding
anything new they do. What she did had a bad impact on other employees too, and one of the
employees complained to the manager about her rude behavior, she had been suspended for
3days. Due to this incident, many of the co-workers lost moral because one should have respect
for others while working in the same platform. Respecting each other will increase the working
ability among the employees which will help to recover the losses and increase the productivity
in any business concern (Abel, & Obeten, 2015).
Employee rights
In every company there must possess some rights to employees which have been discussed
below in following points;
Privacy Right: Rights regarding protection for personal possession are considered as private
right such as employee locker, briefcase, purses (Albrecht, Bakker, Gruman, Macey, & Saks,
2015). The company has to give authentication of protecting their private possessions. Email on
company computer with the email address is not considered as private right, and therefore it
needs to be followed by the employees
Harassment Free Work Place: The workplace of the employee should be soothing and free
from harassment such as gender discrimination, race color religion origin discrimination, age and

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disability discrimination (Cao, & Kim, 2015). An employee should not be harassed relating to
the disability of the work that will make the worker inefficient to his work.
Reasonable accommodation: the employee should be given a reasonable accommodation such
as a lifting limit for a warehouse worker with a back injury or ramps for an employee who
requires a wheelchair, this will make an inactive employee active (Collings, Wood, & Szamosi,
2018).
Fair pay or proper incentives: Federal law obligates employees to pay workers for the hours
they have worked (Namin, 2017). The Fair Labor Standard Act also sets minimum wages for the
employees if an employee is not paid for the time he has worked he or she can use against the
company for unpaid wages.
Recommendations
Recommendation regarding employee rights in a business concern is to motivate the troops by
providing reasonable wages and incentives which will help the employees to adapt the
environment with positive emotion. People will encourage to grow and develop the organization
with more efforts by undertaking the task beyond their boundaries. Since psychology plays a
vital role as an element to understand the effects of human resource management, it is to
recommend that employees wellbeing should be taken care of, as the physical and mental peace
of mind is needed to focus and perform the work. Another recommendation regarding employee
right is communication which is a key element of an employee’s job satisfaction since
communication encourages a fairly working environment it also gives them the opportunity to
develop new competencies.
Incident recurrence
There are two methods of analyzing the interventions process that is the qualitative and
quantitative method. Through qualitative method, interventions can be prevented by conducting
interviews to know about the employee’s interest and also by conducting questionnaire data
employees workability is measured. Knowledge about the intervention process by these to
methodologies is analyzed, its strength and weaknesses, as well as potentials for mixed-method
evaluation methodologies, are discussed later. The use of receiving feedback from the employees
on a weekly or monthly basis will help in measuring the effects of an intervention (Rashid, Rani,

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Yusuf, & Shaari, 2015). The incident might occur again if there is a communication gap
between the employees or there is a lack of accessible personal protection equipment.
It can be concluded that within an organization there are several issues on which disputes may
arise between employer and employee, so it is the human resource management who control and
sort things out among them in an effective manner. The paper reflects my work and learning
experience that I have gathered while working in a fast food restaurant. My experience says
developing the good public relation with HRM to a great extent may establish a good
relationship with the company itself.

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References
Abel, E. E., & Obeten, E. (2015). Restaurant Customer Self-Ordering System: A Solution to
Reduce Customer/Guest Waiting Time at the Point of Sale. International Journal of
Computer Applications, 111(11).
Albrecht, S. L., Bakker, A. B., Gruman, J. A., Macey, W. H., & Saks, A. M. (2015). Employee
engagement, human resource management practices and competitive advantage: An
integrated approach. Journal of Organizational Effectiveness: People and
Performance, 2(1), 7-35.
Cao, Y., & Kim, K. (2015). How do customers perceive service quality in differently structured
fast food restaurants?. Journal of Hospitality Marketing & Management, 24(1), 99-117.
Collings, D. G., Wood, G. T., & Szamosi, L. T. (2018). Human resource management: A critical
approach. In Human Resource Management (pp. 1-23). Routledge.
Namin, A. (2017). Revisiting customers' perception of service quality in fast food
restaurants. Journal of Retailing and Consumer Services, 34, 70-81.
Rashid, I. M. A., Rani, M. J. A., Yusuf, B. N. M., & Shaari, M. S. (2015). THE IMPACT OF
SERVICE QUALITY AND CUSTOMER SATISFACTION ON CUSTOMER'S
LOYALTY: EVIDENCE FROM FAST FOOD RESTAURANT OF
MALAYSIA. International Journal of Information, Business, and Management, 7(4),
201.