Peer Feedback Questions
- Whose draft are you responding to?
- Does the author identify a specific person in the To: line in the memo? Do they follow the appropriate memo format as in the sample WP #3?
- How thorough is the author’s discussion of the common ground held between the audience and author? Why?
- How effectively does the author identify an exigency and discuss it is as a shared problem for the author and the audience (and larger organization)? Why?
- What evidence best supports the author’s case and why?
- Does the author anticipate and discuss the audience’s likely response to the exigency and solution? How effectively do they do so?
- How effectively does the author link the benefits of their proposed resolution to the goals of the author, audience, and the larger organization (the ripple effect)? Why?
- What areas could be better explained, more fully developed, or improved, and why?
- What should the author prioritize for revision when they revise and why?
The two articles that are Grace Henderson and Aubrey Patrick answer the above questions separately.
WP #3 Rogerian Argument: Self Evaluation
- What was difficult about writing WP #3 and why?
- What are the specific strengths of your WP #3 and why?
- What could be improved in your WP #3 and why?
- What constraints did you face in writing WP #3 and how did you “adapt to your audience” as a result?
- What specific revisions did you make to your WP #3, and why?
- __(Name of Colleague)_ gave me the best feedback because _________. When I revised, I changed _______ because ___________.
- Will you mail your WP #3 memo to its intended audience? Why or why not?
Read WP#3 to answer the above questions separately.
To: Tiger Shaw, CEO of US Ski and Snowboard
From: Grace Henderson
Date: May 21, 2020
RE: Equal Funding for all US Ski and Snowboard Athletes
Over the past few seasons of being on the US Ski Team I can’t help but express my opinions on the equality of distribution of athlete funding between the teams. Between the programs of Alpine, Freeski, and Snowboard; the funding is very unequally distributed.
The first issue I would like to recognize is the fact that US Ski and Snowboard is a non-profit foundation. Most people do not know this and assume that this foundation is government funded like most other countries like; Switzerland, Norway, Spain, New Zealand, Australia, Canada, and pretty much every other country. I think the fact that we are not government funded puts our team at a disadvantage towards the rest of the competing countries. These other countries have the ability to train and compete without worrying about if they can even afford to travel to the next competition. Their countries provide them with salaries, cars, and extensive social media exposure. This puts our foundation at a disadvantage.
But some of the teams within the foundation get much more of the small amount of funding we do get from donors and sponsors. The Alpine program gets the most funding by far, but why? The Alpine program is put on a pedestal; travel costs, training camps, and everyday needs are covered by the foundation. Meanwhile, the Freeski and Snowboard teams are barely receiving enough money to attend these mandatory training camps. We are losing money by attending these camps, pushing ourselves to be the best so we can perform for our country at a global level. Yet, losing so much money to do so.
Someone on the Freeski team who wins 2-3 XGames medals per year only gets $5,000 dollars a year. While someone on the Alpine team gets funded $50,000 for not even having a podium result. I know you recognize this but I hope you can understand how frustrating this is to these higher level athletes.
For most of us, this is our full time job, our main source of income. Which basically means that if we don’t have a good season, don’t podium, or don’t have the right sponsors. We are at a negative profit for competing for our country. Which for people on the lower levels of the team, such as myself, are getting below $1,000 dollars per year and with my few podiums this season and multiple flights to Europe and back, I am barely breaking even every season.
This distribution system needs to change. In the 2018 Winter Olympics the Alpine team had a total of 3 medals. The Snowboard team had a total of 7 medals. While the Freeski team had a total of 5 medals. So again I ask how is it fair that the two teams bringing in the most medals are being funded by 5 times less?
This winter when we had a discussion about this topic, I understood when you said that it is out of your control. That the donors are old, rich, white men, who have no idea about the new Olympic Freeski and Snowboard disciplines. It makes sense that they are directing their donations to the Alpine team because that is the sport they know and love. But you need to do something that doesn’t allow this. There needs to be a rule put in place that all donations to the team will be spread equally amongst the teams. If these teams are continued to be funded unfairly these athletes will have no choice but to quit because they can no longer fund themselves.
With someone in your position, you need to advocate for these teams. Spread the word that we need funding. Let the people of the United States of America know that the Ski and Snowboard programs are a non-profit and not government funded organization. We need their support to continue to produce success.
Team USA is one of the strongest in the world. With some of the highest medal counts at almost every Olympics. Imagine how much better the Freeski and Snowboard teams would be if we had even more opportunities and funding to train to be the best team in the world. If we don’t make some changes soon enough, there will be no Freeski and Snowboard athletes left to represent this country.
To: Danielle Lucey
From: Aubrey Patrick
Date: May 19, 2020
RE: Recycling Club Community Efforts
It has become an obvious concern that our stream of funding has significantly decreased over the last couple of months as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. As a result, the club has seized all of its plans for larger future projects including; recycling bins in all public parks, the town-wide yard sale, the 5k for Earth Day, and the large-scale clean-up of what used to be the skate park and public pool into a town garden.
With a growing restlessness of both the members of the club, including myself, I think it is time to break away from focusing on larger scale projects and organize a few small town-wide events that all members of the community can partake in while remaining safe and maintaining social distancing practices. This will restore the momentum that the club has recently lost on making consistent public appearances and bring the whole community together to do some good during this difficult time.
The two events that I want to propose are “Plant a Plant Day” and a “5k Cleanup Walk Week”. “Plant a Plant Day” will comprise of the club putting together simple baskets comprising of a planter pot, soil, and a package of flower seeds for delivery to doorsteps with planting instructions and a positive environmental message. The “5k Cleanup Walk Week” will be a week promoted by the club to walk a 5k with your family in your neighborhood and pick up as much trash as you can along the way. At the end of the week, community members who participated will place their trash at the end of their driveways for pickup from club members, and the family with the most trash pickup will receive a price.
In order to reduce club spending on these projects, as I know that funding is tight and efforts are in place to reduce spending as much as possible, I am proposing that “Plant a Plant Day” can be promoted by our social media page as a “Secret Santa” type of event in which community members submit a Google Form containing the information of another friend within the community to deliver a basket to and even customize a message. The cost of purchasing a basket will be $16 to cover the entire cost of its contents, and the club will have members volunteer to help with both assembly and drop off on the day of.
The “5k Cleanup Walk Week” will not involve as much logistics and planning, just social media promotion, organizing volunteers for trash pickup, and coming up with a small prize for the “winner”. This can be done at a very small expense for the club, as the prize can be a simple $20 basket of environmentally friendly products, and I feel this event is sure to attract a lot of participation.
Due to the extra time that most club members have on their hands at this time, I think that we can get the “Plant a Plant” day organized to take place on May 31st, which will give us a week for promotion and collecting the list of orders, and then four days to go to the store and purchase all of the supplies and assemble the baskets.
After that event, as it is a pretty quick turnaround, I think we should take a few weeks before beginning to promote the “5k Cleanup Walk Week”. This will give us some more time to work out logistics for this event and not overwhelm the community with social media posts. We can plan this weeklong event to take place on the last full week of June, June 21st to June 27th and go around for trash pickup and prize delivery on the 28th.
I think these two events are crucial to bringing the club back into the public eye to show that we are not seizing small efforts to create change during this time. It will also bring the community outside and closer together to create a stronger environmental awareness into the summer, where we will hopefully begin to tackle some of our larger projects.
Running Head: MEMO 1
MEMO 2
Memo
Name
Institution
To: Mary Lee, Life Coach
From:
Date:
Re: Balancing between professional and personal life
In the last several months, I have been having issues balancing my personal and professional life. I have been working most of the time during the day and sometimes it extends into the night. By the time I am done I am usually very tired and in need of some good sleep. The sequence has been repeating itself and I find that I have not been able to spend time with my family and friends. In fact, I hardly have time for myself. This has been so exhausting and I feel like I am drowning from its weight. This is not a personal problem as I am aware that many other people are going through the same thing. However, the degree to which we are affected by this problem varies from one person to the other. As a life coach, you understand my problem well and what I should do about it. I believe that this problem can be solved by planning carefully and being prepared always.
Work-life balance is a real struggle and this is brought about by various causes. There are so many demands both at work and at home. There are deadlines to meet, meetings to attend, and family to accommodate. All these for one person and it becomes very difficult. Although I try to evaluate what I have to gain from whatever I do and if the price is worth paying, it is not easy to say no to these demands. Sometimes one just falls sick but they cannot call in sick because of the insecurities at the workplace. At this time I become unproductive but I still have to do my best and even though I try to accept the situation in order to ensure that I hold my energy, sometimes I just lose it (Dumas and Sanchez-Burks, 2015).
Some of my relationships are quite unsupportive. Family members and friends are always complaining that I hardly have any time for them. I feel so guilty whenever someone says this to me. Despite working so hard at work, I hardly have someone appreciate me or tell me that I have done a good job. Nobody seems to care about all the sacrifices I make. There are a lot of expectations to meet and communication to do and to think that people would understand my situation feels like I am asking too much from them (Agarwal and Lenka, 2015).
My babysitter quit a month ago and things have turned from bad to worse ever since. I have not been able to get a replacement and I have to take the baby to a care center which also consumes a lot of time. I think I have been so overwhelmed by issues that it is even difficult to think of a simple solution to a problem. Even a small problem turns out to be a very big issue and I have been trying to meditate but I always get distracted. I feel like meditation time is just a waste of a good time (Agarwal and Lenka, 2015).
I have issues with confidence and I am not very good at communicating. This has made me not be able to talk to my bosses at work or friends about the crisis that I am going through. I understand that a problem shared is half –solved but I have been having this doubt about whether anyone will understand. I would not want anyone to think that I am exaggerating. This has left me so stressed and the fact that I try to stay busy to avoid this stress only makes the situation worse (Dumas and Sanchez-Burks, 2015).
Today’s working has become so demanding and although they say that work and personal life are supposed to be complements of each other, this is proving easy said than done. Work is eating up most of our time and this leaves us with very little time to spend with families and friends. The expectations of families and friends are massive and most of the time we cannot meet all of them. This is not to say that we are not trying. There is so much trying but often we are overwhelmed. The frustrations that come with realizing that we cannot achieve this balance are even worse; we end up blaming ourselves and being withdrawn from the people we love because we feel that they will not understand.
However, it seems that all hope is not lost. Companies are beginning to become aware of this pressure and they are making efforts to help employees balance work and personal life. The main aim of this is not only to make the employees happy but also more productive. This is because balancing between work and personal life is so exhausting that it has been noted to cause a significant reduction in the productivity of employees. Employees are now being allowed to have more free time because working overtime is being scrapped off by many companies. Companies are also trying as much as possible not to exert unnecessary pressure on the employees. It is now upon the employees to do their part to ensure that they achieve a healthy balance between their work and their personal lives (Zheng et al, 2016).
Proper planning and preparation is a great solution for this. As employees with a lot of duties to attend to it is always good to ensure that we manage our time well. This can be done by knowing when to work and when to play. It is always good to draw the line between home and work in order to ensure a healthy transition between the two lives. Setting priorities and sticking by the order will always ensure that we do not have misplaced priorities. Also, having a schedule and sticking by it is just as healthy. Procrastination is a thief of time and if we learned to get things done without waiting to rush the last minute we could achieve a lot. Eliminating disturbance and focusing only on what is important will enhance creativity (Zheng et al, 2016).
The other thing we need to learn to do is to mark our boundaries; identify the common crossovers between personal and professional life and only make those crossovers when necessary. Be mindful of health because as much as working is important, your health is just as important. We could also protect our passion by treating ourselves to a break once in a while. It is important to learn to say no and although it may sound rude, you may realize just how much it can save you. Cut off all things that are not important (Dumas and Sanchez-Burks, 2015).
Social media is a great invention but the fact that it can sometimes be problematic is something that we cannot dispute. Learning how to handle your social media is a perfect score. If possible, have different accounts for your personal and professional lives. Be clear and draw lines on how you handle personal and professional data. Have a schedule for being active online and stick by it. This way you can avoid being a victim of social media eating up most of your important time (Zheng et al, 2016).
Working from home is a good option to achieve a balance between personal life and work but it is unfortunately not always an easy course. To be able to successfully work from home, set your time well, and work for hours that are realistic and do not let your work hours eat up your personal life. Dressing for work even when you are working from home will help you achieve a successful transition from home to work. Take breaks as if you were at work. you do not have to work throughout just because you are working from home; health is important. Avoid getting distracted by house tasks and remember to reward yourself at the end of the day (Zheng et al, 2016).
Balancing childcare with work is the most important yet difficult skill anyone could learn. Having a more flexible schedule will help you a great deal as a parent. Consider other childcare options like someone looking after your children while you work. When working from home, find something to entertain your children to prevent them from distracting you. Consider being in the same room with the kids so you can monitor them closely (Agarwal and Lenka, 2015).
Balancing between work and personal life is a challenge that most employees face. this is caused by the many demands and expectations both at work and at home. People try a lot to achieve this balance but it is not always easy. All hope is however not lost since most companies are assisting employees to achieve this balance. Employees, on the other hand, can achieve this balance by proper planning of their time and always being prepared. Time management, creating boundaries and sticking to them, working from home, balancing childcare with work, and learning how to handle social media are some of the ways that can help us as employees to achieve a balance between personal and professional life.
References
Agarwal, S., & Lenka, U. (2015). Study on work-life balance of women entrepreneurs–review and research agenda. Industrial and Commercial Training. Retrieved from
https://www.emerald.com/insight/content/doi/10.1108/ICT-01-2015-0006/full/html?journalCode=ict
Dumas, T. L., & Sanchez-Burks, J. (2015). The professional, the personal, and the ideal worker: Pressures and objectives shaping the boundary between life domains. The Academy of Management Annals, 9(1), 803-843. Retrieved from
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/19416520.2015.1028810
Zheng, C., Kashi, K., Fan, D., Molineux, J., & Ee, M. S. (2016). Impact of individual coping strategies and organisational work–life balance programmes on Australian employee well-being. The International Journal of Human Resource Management, 27(5), 501-526. Retrieved from
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/09585192.2015.1020447
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