BUSI 750 Week 5 Discussion Board Forum 3 Example

Discussion Board Forum 3: Thread and Two Replies

BUSI 750 Managing Human Resources, Discussion Board Forum 3 (thread and two replies)

Thread by [Student Name]

The prompt, the veterinary group and the classmates are composites standing in for the course's own; the books and the published research are real; the week, points and readings follow Liberty's public course guide for BUSI 750, which posts the forum's own instructions inside the course.

Our veterinary hospital group employs about 210 credentialed veterinary technicians across 14 hospitals. In exit interviews, nearly every departing technician says some version of the same thing: they love the animals and the work, but they cannot build a life on the pay or see where the job leads. The median technician leaves us after about five years, often for human health care or for work outside medicine entirely. Our retention problem is, in an important sense, a calling problem.

Hardy's third chapter provides the starting point. Having traced how the Reformers restored dignity to ordinary occupations, Hardy (1990) turns to the practical question of how a person should choose a career. His answer weighs two things together: the gifts a person has been given and the needs of the neighbors those gifts can serve. A technician who is good with frightened animals and anxious owners, who can place a catheter in a cat's vein and calm a family deciding about euthanasia, has made exactly the kind of choice he describes. Research supports the value of such choices. Duffy and Dik (2013), reviewing a decade of studies, found that a sense of calling is consistently linked with job satisfaction, commitment to one's career and a sense of meaning in life, though they caution that most of the evidence is correlational.

The difficulty is that a calling can be used against the people who have one. Bunderson and Thompson (2009), studying zookeepers, found that those with a strong sense of calling identified deeply with their work and found broad meaning in it. They also found that these keepers saw the work as a moral duty and were more willing to give up pay, personal time and comfort for it. A calling, in their phrase, is a double-edged sword, and the edge that cuts the worker is the one an employer is tempted to sharpen. Our pay structure quietly assumes that technicians will accept less because they love the work.

A Christian view of calling should forbid that assumption. If Hardy is right that a calling is a way of serving neighbors with one's gifts, then the employer is also called to serve the people who work for it, not to collect their devotion at a discount. Keller and Alsdorf (2012) make a related point when they argue that work has dignity because people bear God's image; the dignity belongs to the worker, not only to the task. An organization that benefits from its employees' sense of calling therefore takes on an obligation to make that calling sustainable.

Career development is the most practical way to meet that obligation. I am proposing a four-step technician ladder for our group. Technician I is the entry credential. Technician II requires two years and demonstrated competence in a defined skill set, such as anesthesia monitoring or dental radiography. Technician III requires a Veterinary Technician Specialist credential in an area such as emergency and critical care, which we would fund. Technician IV is a lead or teaching role responsible for training newer technicians. Each step would bring a defined pay increase, and veterinarians would be expected to delegate the tasks that credential holders are qualified to perform, so the work itself grows with the title. The ladder answers both of Hardy's questions: it develops the technician's gifts and widens the service those gifts provide. We will know it works if the median tenure rises and if exit interviews stop citing a lack of a future.

Reply to Hannah

Hannah, your thread on teacher retention in your district describes the same pattern I see in veterinary medicine: people who entered the work as a calling and leave because the calling no longer pays the rent. Your proposal for a mentor-teacher stipend is a good step, and the research supports it, because it rewards experienced teachers for the skill they have built and gives newer teachers a reason to picture a long career in the district rather than a few hard years before leaving. Bunderson and Thompson (2009) would warn, though, that districts can come to rely on teachers' sense of duty to fill gaps, such as unpaid coverage of classes and after-school supervision. Does your district track how many unpaid hours its teachers absorb? If so, reducing that number might do as much for retention as the stipend, and it would show teachers that the district is not treating their devotion as free labor.

Reply to Isaac

Isaac, your description of the pastoral staff at your church, who work long weeks for modest salaries because they feel called, raises the hardest version of this question. I agree with you that a pastor's sacrifice can be a faithful choice, and Hardy (1990) would not want us to turn every calling into a market transaction. Duffy and Dik (2013) also note that living out a calling, not merely having one, is what links it to well-being. I wonder whether your church has asked its staff whether they are living out their calling or simply enduring it. A confidential annual conversation about workload, family time and development could help the board distinguish sacrifice the staff choose from sacrifice the church has quietly come to expect, and the answer might change how the board sets salaries and sabbatical policy.

References

Bunderson, J. S., & Thompson, J. A. (2009). The call of the wild: Zookeepers, callings, and the double-edged sword of deeply meaningful work. Administrative Science Quarterly, 54(1), 32-57. https://doi.org/10.2189/asqu.2009.54.1.32

Duffy, R. D., & Dik, B. J. (2013). Research on calling: What have we learned and where are we going? Journal of Vocational Behavior, 83(3), 428-436. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jvb.2013.06.006

Hardy, L. (1990). The fabric of this world: Inquiries into calling, career choice, and the design of human work. Eerdmans.

Keller, T., & Alsdorf, K. L. (2012). Every good endeavor: Connecting your work to God's work. Dutton.