ABP COVID-19 CASE STUDY

The ABP class was quite interesting today. We were given a case to analyze before coming to class. It was a draft case written by Dr. Yetunde Anibaba herself, COVID Dilemma at Intex.

Intex was a manufacturing company with a 400-member workforce, including Nigerians and expatriates (about 3%). The Intex workforce could be described as aging and semi-literate, especially as the majority of them were factory workers and had worked for the organization for several years. The health insurance plan for the local staff was 200,000 naira, while the international health insurance plan for expatriate staff covers up to 1,200,000 Naira or more, in this case, the expatriates typically occupied accommodation provided by Intex on its premises, and the organization was responsible for everything that had to do with their care and well-being.

Doyin Intex’s HR manager had received three requests in the space of 1 month, the Senior Nursing Officer had written to Doyin requesting a refund process since COVID-19 treatment is not under our regular insurance cover.

The impact of COVID-19 on daily lives and businesses globally cannot be overemphasized, the main objective of Doyin Intex’s HR manager, was to ensure that operations of Intex were not impacted and profitability is maintained in the organization. The HR manager needs to decide whether to approve the refund or not? While considering the implications, he asks himself the following questions; What if more people came up with their own requests? What if they contracted COVID-19 at work and their families were then infected, would they bear that cost too? If he didn’t approve it, how might the rest of the workforce react? These worries can be categorized into three main criteria: Cost Implication, Moral Justification, and Employee Morale considering the rumors circulating amongst the union.

At this point, Dr. Yetunde Anibaba warned us about making cognitive bias decisions, I could remember she had mentioned this in a previous class. What is cognitive bias? “A cognitive bias is a systematic pattern of deviation from norm or rationality in judgment. Individuals create their own “subjective reality” from their perception of the input. An individual’s construction of reality, not the objective input, may dictate their behavior in the world” – Wikipedia.

Furthermore, she referred to cognitive load, she was quite fast, and to catch up with her, I looked up what cognitive load means on Wikipedia; “cognitive load refers to the used amount of working memory resources, which lead to my discovery of “cognitive load theory”. Cognitive Load Theory says that because short-term memory is limited, learning experiences should be designed to reduce working memory ‘load’ in order to promote schema acquisition. It was created in 1998 by psychologist John Sweller, and the School of Education at New South Wales University published a study delving into the theory in August of 2017.

It was a very insightful session today, learning how to deal with bias in decision-making. She mentioned a few methods of removing bias like seeking multiple perceptive and asking the 5 whys questions.