ENGL 3155-1

2017-2
THE POLICY MEMO

Choose any ONE of the following options below and prepare a 500-word professional memo complete
with relevant and current research that responds to the rhetorical situation outlined.

Learning Goals

In performing and completing this assignment, you should:

 Learn about the “expectation of privacy in the workplace”

 Learn to make clear, useful recommendations based on research
 Learn to use and modify memo structure
 Learn to incorporate properly cited research into memo structure

Option 1: Continuing Education

You have recently been hired by Watkins and Anderson — a marketing consulting firm.

Sarah Watkins, President of the firm has asked you to perform research on, and provide
recommendations regarding, a company policy on continuing education for support staff. Given how
quickly computing and information technologies change, continuing education for staff is a
necessity. Watkins wants some sense of how corporations handle this need.
Your memo, then, will provide a summary, and set of recommendations for how to handle the
continuing education of support staff at Watkins and Anderson.

Before you leaving the office, Watkins offers a series of questions that she has in mind for you to
consider but not necessarily answer. The memo's focus is determined by your interests, research
and recommendations:

 How often do computer common software skills need to be updated?

 Do most corporations handle this training in-house or does staff take courses at local
colleges and universities?
 Can continuing education be handled on-line? What resources are available?
 How much time off of work for training do employees expect? What reasonable
accommodations do we have to make?
 Does the company have to pay for this training? How much? Are scholarships available?
Should staff be charged?
 What is the relationship between job satisfaction and continued training?
 What kinds of continuing education are most effective?
Option 2: Off-Duty Conduct
You have recently been hired by Home Solutions, a home building supply firm. While the firm has
grown tremendously in the last five years, and talk began of going public, the owners have decided
to remain in the private sector.

Steve Jones, President of the firm, has asked you to write a concise, formal memo regarding
monitoring employees' off-duty conduct. The performance of a few recent hires has been
staggeringly poor. Jones wants to know if background research can be performed into employees'
lives outside the firm.

Of course, the idea of monitoring employees' off-duty conduct is extremely sensitive. What Jones
wants is for you to discreetly perform some initial research on the general state of affairs regarding
what (or if) a private company can legally do to find out about employees' private activities. And
once that information is known, what, if anything, the company can do as a result.

Jones, then, wants you to develop a working set of recommendations (that may be modified later)
for management action based on your findings. Jones offers a series of questions to help you along,
but wants you to choose the focus of your memo based on your research, your analysis and,
ultimately, your recommendations.

 Generally, can private companies monitor anything about an employee's private life? Can
we perform research on a potential employee's private life at the time of hiring? What
about after hiring?
 Can private drug use be legally monitored? How?
 Can we find out if an employee is "moonlighting?" Is moonlighting a terminating offense?
 Can we monitor if the employee is somehow involved in union activity?
 Can we find out if an employee has been arrested for activities unrelated to the firm? If so,
what action can we take?
Option 3: Distributing Literature

You have recently been hired by Data Management Consultants — a growing electronic networking
firm.

Anne Smith, President of the firm, is revising the employee manual. The process of rewriting the
manual, and a recent event related to employee conduct, occasions your office visit.

A few weeks ago, Data Management Consultants began displaying "diversity posters" in the office as
part of a workplace diversity campaign. "Five of these posters showed pictures of company
employees above different captions: 'Black,' 'Blonde,' 'Hispanic,' 'Old' and 'Gay.'" "The 'Gay' poster
apparently irked" an employee, a fundamentalist Christian who believes homosexuality violates the
Bible's commandments. Claiming he was duty-bound 'to expose evil when confronted with sin,' the
employee posted several scriptural quotations in large typeface at his work cubicle. These included a
passage from Leviticus which describes male homosexual acts as an 'abomination' punishable by
death."
"The employee's supervisor removed these passages from the cubicle because they violated Data
Management Consultants policy against 'comments or conduct related to a person's race, gender,
religion, disability, age, sexual orientation, or ethnic background that fail to respect the dignity and
feeling[s] of the individual.'"

Smith has asked you to look into the incident and, more importantly, to perform research on a
related, but broader, issue: The distribution and posting of literature (defined broadly and of a
personal nature), messages or religious passages in the workplace. Smith wants you to write a
memo to her that gives your recommendations, based on your research, as to what policies she
should articulate in the employee manual on this issue.