As I had never written a formal report, this assignment was a new writing challenge for me. I thoroughly enjoyed exploring a topic that had real-life implications from my current workplace, C Market Coffee. This report allowed me to address concerns about employee burnout in a formal manner; and since I have been employed there for over three years now, the research portion for this assignment was fairly simple as I am highly familiar with the café’s operations and was able to gather the information I needed from my co-workers. However, one thing I underestimated was the survey portion of my research—I found it quite difficult to build an efficient survey that would help me gather the information I needed. Admittingly, I struggled a lot with finding questions that would avoid the negative yet still address employee burnout. I quickly realized that my own experience as a staff member should not dictate how the questions were asked because that could make a participant reflect on personal issues; instead, I simply needed to set a clear objective for each survey in order to avoid asking any aimless or inappropriate questions.
Another challenge I faced—and am still facing—is in my data section. More specifically, I need to find how to interpret the data I collected in an effective manner, and make sure I consider all the factors that could potentially limit the validity of my proposed solutions. With that being said, I plan to include more data about the success of compensation practices and the retention strategies used by other companies with hopes of increasing the persuasiveness of my report. This is particularly important because C Market Coffee is a small business with a limited budget, meaning that the more expensive, long-term recommendations have to be presented to be most beneficial to the company.
Similar to the previous units, this peer review process was helpful—and perhaps the most interesting. For this unit, I was assigned to peer review Matilda’s “A Casual Analysis and Feasibility Report on Attracting Customers to The Kings Arms.” Learning about the “You” writing attitude in an earlier assignment made me become a lot more conscious about how I deliver my feedback; this is a writing style I have come to genuinely enjoy and I hope those who receive my peer reviews are positively benefiting from this new writing style as well.
I found the peer review I received from Ethan was very helpful and he definitely pointed out errors that I otherwise would not have noticed such as missing elements in my existing graphs or lacking statement sentences that would clarify the purpose of each section. I have only edited the introduction section of my formal report in accordance with Ethan’s feedback so far, but I am looking forward to implementing more of his peer review into my work and finalizing my report.