Training and Consultation
Smiths Inc. requested training and consultation services and was awarded a contract to work on a new software development project. The firm requires all employees and managers to participate in the training and consultation program. The company is a small business based in California, USA. It has 200 employees and 10 managers. The company needs to train its employees to increase customer satisfaction and profitability.
Required Key Elements for Training
The firm needs to have particular skills by training its employees in a manner that they will work towards improving customer satisfaction. The first requirement in training is assessing the needs of the firm. As a training consultant, there is a need to understand the firm’s past, present, and future goals. The assessment can be conducted through internal surveys, interviews, and research. The primary need for the appraisal is to correctly identify the employees that need extensive training and the skills they need to learn. After realizing the training needs, there is a need to align them with firm initiatives. A curriculum needs to be created to address the firm’s problems and support its business goals. Through this model, employees will be in a position to understand the training. The training program needs to be creative for employees to perceive it as valuable and effective. Creativity will ensure that the training content is relevant to the training program and that the employees are engaged in the program. Creativity will help in presenting the training content effectively and on a timely basis (Dhar, 2015). For the training to be effective and successful, there are minimum skills that every employee should have.
All employees should have excellent communication skills. They must be able to listen and understand the needs of a customer. An employee should always understand the various needs of a customer and the options that serve as a suggestion for them (Dhar, 2015). Employees must be able to disseminate information about products and services to the customer, considering that customers lack technical knowledge about products and services.
The employees should be well versed in the features of the products and services provided by the firm. If employees are not aware of particular information about a product or service, they should swiftly connect the customer to another employee who is well-versed in the particular product segment. Through this, a customer will develop trust, and it will prevent future frustrations.
The employees should have etiquette and patient. They should not be rude to both customers and fellow employees. Some concerns raised by customers may take longer than expected to be resolved, but employees should be patient and maintain their cool and explain to the customers about the problem and what is being done to solve it. However, it should be done politely with the utmost clarity (Dhar, 2015).
Potential challenges
The primary way of ensuring that a firm its goals is by ensuring that its use in pursuit of the goals is being used properly. For organizational performance to be achieved, there must be the engagement of employees since employee productivity is directly connected to the outcomes as well as the performance of individual business units. However, challenges may be experienced in pursuit of organizational performance.
Employee absenteeism is a significant problem that might hinder the organization. Employee absenteeism rate is the number of days an organization experiences productivity loss when employees do not show up as a result of unauthorized leave—absenteeism results in more problems such as increasing costs and loss of morale among other employees. As a result, productivity and the entire success of the whole firm are adversely affected. Whenever an employee is absent, the colleagues are forced to pick up the slack. This means that some tasks may take longer to be completed, which may reduce customer satisfaction hence losing some clients. Agent scheduling can be done to handle absenteeism but puts the firm in a position that it is unable to maintain a particular level of productivity.
Organizational performance management can be hindered by incompetence. Competence for using the performance management system is required for ensuring the smooth implementation of an effective method. The managers are required to have skills for defining strategic objectives, the critical competencies, and performance indicators. Whenever a manager cannot define the performance measures corresponding to the Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) or even giving, taking feedbacks, and conducting appraisals, they may cost the organization a lot of resources (Alatailat, Elrehail, & Emeagwali, 2019). However, the training program will develop several job holders’ competence, and distinctive emphasis will be put on building behavioral scopes of performance.
The organization may experience cost-cutting challenges in organizational performance management. Most small businesses run on tight budgets, which makes it a challenge to reduce additional costs. There is a need to cost-cut, especially in dealing with redundancy and costs related to staffing. It is also challenging to tie cost discipline to growth strategies since this is a small business, and there is a need to eliminate wastes, introduce technology and implement best practices, which can be very expensive (Alatailat, Elrehail, & Emeagwali, 2019).
The identification of the right benchmarks and their sources is also a problem. Benchmarking is an instrumental tool for firms as it improves how business is conducted. It provides context on performance and helps in pinpointing new practices. However, identifying the right benchmarks can be a challenge because there is a need for financial resources necessary for carrying out benchmarking activities. The data for benchmarking may not be available and may not be in one central position hence making it hard. These challenges in benchmarking lead to missed opportunities for providing context and comparisons for business decision making and organizational performance management.
Effects of detecting organizational gaps
Organizational gaps are paramount in identifying the factors hindering the organization from reaching its potential. They are the gaps existing between the organization’s present performance and the anticipated performance or goal performance. There is a need to cover these gaps for the business to achieve its goals. These gaps can be internal gaps, skill gaps, external gaps, customer gaps, and market gaps, among others (“Bridging Organizational Governance Gaps,” 2013).
The detection and elimination of organizational gaps are paramount for the business for it to achieve success. Considering this is a small business, there is a need to maintain customers by eliminating all kinds of gaps that can help focus the firm’s efforts on productive activities and make informed decisions. By identifying gaps, the firm will allocate limited resources and design efficient budgetary plans by considering its primary concerns. This small IT business and there is need to engage low budget activities by focusing on priorities (Ceci et al., 2016). Most IT projects are expensive, but gap identification can help in identifying the activities that are duplicated and cost the organization money. Through this, the firm will save time to focus on other profitable projects.
Gap identification not only reduces costs and time but promotes customer satisfaction. Identification of service quality gaps identifies the gaps between customer expectations and the current customer experiences that may result in customer dissatisfaction (Ceci et al., 2016). Smiths Inc. has several projects, and it may be experiencing service quality gaps particular lack of delivery of products on time, and reduced quality of products. However, through the identification of the service quality gaps, the firm is able to improve its operations to ensure customer satisfaction, which will translate to customer loyalty and enhanced brand and profits.
Training strategy
Effective training requires several factors to be identified. The first process is the identification of needs, which will help in choosing the best training requirements. There is a need to identify skill gaps that are hindering the organization from achieving organizational performance. The analysis will help in identifying the weaknesses and strengths of the firm and how the training can help in reducing the weaknesses and capitalizing on the strengths. Consequently, the training should be disintegrated into categories. These categories will reflect the ideal situation and promote the business to achieve its long term goals. After assessing and prioritizing the training needs, there will be a need for securing a type of training that will be used and how it will be provided.
Training Agendas
Prior to the training, there will be outlining of training agendas. The first agenda will be managing change. The training should educate and have practical advice for managing change. The training will allocate time for the trainees to practice in analyzing change management situations, prepare plans, implement actions, and overcome obstacles while they monitor progress.
Also, the next training agenda is decision making. The employees will be educated on how to identify issues, generate alternatives, make decisions and communicate them to others working in the organization/ The training agenda will also comprise evaluation of case studies, which will help Smith’s Inc. employees refine decisions and choose the best alternative paths.
Problem-solving is also one of the training agendas to be addressed. The trainees need to be trained on how to think strategically when solving business problems. They should be able to eliminate counterproductive thinking practices. Trainees should be able to carry out self-assessment activities to determine their current ability to frame issues effectively and finding solutions. They should also learn how to gather information about arising issues and determine expectations.
Instructional Strategies
After an analysis of Smith’s Inc., a competitive training strategy has been developed. The instructional strategies to be used are seminars, peer learning and leaderboards, and training feedbacks.
Distinctive seminars should be held for managers and junior employees. Managers will be trained in effective leadership skills and how to promote positive behaviors through positive reinforcement. Managers should help employees in handling some situations and help them in decision making. They should always encourage and motivate them to foster improved productivity. Also, seminars for junior employees will be conducted to discuss the current issues they face and ways of generating solutions ((Dunn et al., 2011). Through this, employees will be educated on various strategies of decision making and problem-solving.
Peer learning will also be very effective in trainees’ employees. The employees handle most of the organization’s tasks. No one knows the organization’s practices more than then, and any lessons they create will be relatable. They are well informed of the business’s problems and some of the alternative problems. Peer learning fosters discussions between colleagues; hence common problems are discussed fostering an effective problem-solving culture.
The training should also engage in practical activities to make interesting. The training should not be boring because most trainees may not learn anything (Dunn et al., 2011). Instead of only providing theoretical information, practical or case scenarios can be used to engage the trainees. As a result, their performances will be better because they will have handles real-life issues.
Feedback from the employees will also be encouraged to improve the training program. The feedbacks will help in focusing on the training objectives and handling any arising issues. It will also ensure that the employees are happy with the training and are motivated to participate (Alfiyah & Riyanto, 2019). The feedback will foster improved productivity because everyone will work towards maximizing their performance, which will translate to overall organizational productivity.
Return on Investment
The aforementioned instructional strategies will help Smith’s get its return on investment. The primary purpose of the training program was to improve organizational performance and promote customer satisfaction. Through this, the employees will be knowledgeable about the best decision-making strategies whenever they face challenges. They will also enhance their communication skills hence reducing conflicts and slowdowns that may lead to reduced performance. Also, the employees will be able to engage in effective problem-solving strategies that may lead to hiccups during projects. Lastly, the employees will be able to manage change, especially when shifting from one project to another or when adopting a new organizational culture. As a result, employee satisfaction will be increased hence reducing absenteeism and employee turnover. In the long run, the organization will reduce unnecessary costs, such as training and unnecessary outsourcing (Dhar, 2015). This will later translate to improved employee productivity, and organizational performance hence fostering customer satisfaction and increased profits.
References
Alatailat, M., Elrehail, H., & Emeagwali, O. L. (2019). High performance work practices, organizational performance and strategic thinking. International Journal of Organizational Analysis.
Alfiyah¹, N., & Riyanto, S. (2019). The Effect of Compensation, Work Environment and Training on Employees’ Performance of Politeknik LP3I Jakarta. Work, 2, 49.
Bridging Organizational Governance Gaps. (2013).
Ceci, F., Masciarelli, F., & Prencipe, A. (2016). Changes in Organizational Architecture: Aspiration Levels, Performance Gaps and Organizational Change. International Journalof Innovation and Technology Management, 13(01), 1650002.
Dhar, R. L. (2015). Service quality and the training of employees: The mediating role of organizational commitment. Tourism Management, 46, 419-430.
Dunn, R., Ingham, J., & Deckinger, L. (2011). Effects Of Matching And Mismatching Corporate Employees Perceptual Preferences And Instructional Strategies On Training Achievement And Attitudes. Journal of Applied Business Research (JABR), 11(3), 30.