Senior management of a large consulting firm is concerned about a growing decline in the organization’s weekly number of billable hours. Ideally, the organization expects each professional employee to spend at least 40 hours per week on work. The file P08_21.xlsx contains the work hours reported by a random sample of employees in a typical week.
a. Find a 95% confidence interval for the mean number of hours worked by the company’s employees in a typical week.
b. Find a 95% confidence interval for the standard deviation of the number of hours worked by the company’s employees in a typical week.
c. Given the target range of 40 to 60 hours of work per week, should senior management be concerned about the number of hours their employees are currently devoting to work? Explain how the answers to both parts a and b help to answer this question.