New Employees Train With Seasoned Employees example essay topic

Critical Thinking Styles and Forces of Influence A major problem facing retailers today is employee retention. Lowe's Home Improvement Centers are no exception to this problem. Every aspect of a store's operation is measured as a percentage against sales. As a new store struggling to capture market share, we were continually at the maximum amount allowed by corporate standards for our payroll. The store manager was continually juggling the employee hours in an attempt to keep the payroll to sales percentages in check. Frequently, this meant that we would enter peak sales hours with a skeleton crew of employees to provide the high level of customer satisfaction demanded by Lowe's.

Management's viewpoint was that they were doing what was required to keep operating costs down. Employees saw this cost cutting initiative as abusive and requiring far more productivity than they should have to provide. It became obvious that cost cutting has major implications when associated with increased worker productivity. Retail suffers horrendous turnover. Our store was experiencing about a 70% turnover rate in the first year since opening our doors. Most of this turnover rate was voluntary.

New employees go through a training program, and on the job training. During this time, job satisfaction seemed high. After training, and a period of time on the job, most employees would enter a period where they became comfortable in their jobs. It was sometime during this stage that a high percentage of employees seemed to become less satisfied in their work and soon thereafter made the decision to leave Lowe's employment. The management team at the store spent a great deal of time analyzing the situation and made it the focus of discussion at a number of staff meetings. We determined that an employee went through several stages during the time they are employed by Lowe's.

First there is an entry stage where a person learns the store operations, what is normal during the course of a day, and what the expectations were surrounding the job they perform. During this period, employees were challenged, but expectations for performance were relatively low. Next, there is the period where the person becomes settled in. This may be a short period or long, depending on the employee, but is characterized by some stability in terms of ones life in the job. Not a lot of new information is learned by employees about the job or organization during this period.

For many employees, this was a period in which dissatisfaction seemed to set in. Employees that had started strong in providing customer service began to lose the enthusiasm they had initially displayed. As time went on, these employees lapsed into a third recognizable period. This final period was marked by increased disinterest and withdrawal preceding voluntary or involuntary turnover. For many, it manifested in behavioral issues such as absenteeism or tardiness for work. Both actions resulted in involuntary separation from Lowe's employment after only two or three incidents.

Knowing that management would tolerate neither of these incidents was no deterrent to employees once they entered this stage either. We tried to find common denominators for what was causing this anomaly. It was manifest primarily in the ranks of the hourly wage employees. The hardest hit area of the store was consistently the night stocking team.

They had a good manager, and he worked right alongside the team. This was a critical area to store operations, and when the number of team members was down, the remaining crew had to work that much harder to unload trucks, and sometimes the merchandise did not get properly stocked. When employees were asked why they were leaving, a variety of reasons were given, for example, a desire to return to school, or the scheduled work hours were not flexible enough for individual situations such as attendance at church. Reasons were seldom because the employee felt too much was expected of them, even though grumblings to that effect were more and more frequently overheard in the employee break room. The management team discussed whether turnover was a serious problem.

There were a number of questions we tried to answer. How many employees are leaving? This was how we determined that during our first year of operation, 70 percent of the employees had been replaced. Why were they leaving? Briefings with the employees as they out processed gave us no clearly defined reasons. The reasons seemed as varied as the number of employees who were leaving.

Did we want them to leave? While it was true that some losses made the organization stronger, most employees were for the most part a strong and vital part of the Lowe's team and they would be missed if not hard to replace. What does it cost to replace them? Again, this question had nearly as many answers as employees that needed to be replaced. Fortunately, costs were kept down because few from the management ranks were leaving the store's employ. Turnovers were still costing the store because of a number of factors.

Hourly employees are primarily trained on the job, but the primary cost associated with this training is an elevated payroll budget because new employees train with seasoned employees until they are capable of operating on their own. This is a relatively short period for most employees, but there is also a certain amount of initial training that occurs in a classroom setting, or through use of on-line resources available through the company intranet. During these scheduled training times, new employee wages are paid and additional coverage is provided for on the sales floor of the store. Additionally, until an employee is comfortable and confident in performance of duties, there is a potential for costs associated with customer dissatisfaction or lost sales. Employee turnaround was indeed affecting the bottom line numbers for the store. We had to find a way to get the turnaround to a lower percentage.

Work began on developing a comprehensive retention plan. One of the first steps was to routinely assess job satisfaction. We could not wait until an employee was on the way out the door to another job before we tried to find what drove him or her away. We needed to make the gathering and assessment of the data part of the common knowledge of the organization. The managers all agreed, they had to be prepared to make changes based on the findings as well. If it were perceived by employees that no action was being taken, this would only add to the anger and cynicism of the employees.

Strangely, as the Loss Prevention Manager for the store, I was viewed by the management team as being one of them, but to the rank and file employees I was separate from the store management team. This worked to my advantage. Employees would tell me things that they would not tell the store manager or assistant managers. Some of the things they told me took the managers by surprise. Employees viewed the assistant store managers as aloof.

The common theme was that the assistant store managers did nothing but run around the store with their Spectra link phone (inter-store communications for managers) glued to their ears, barking orders at employees, but never doing anything to solve problems. Another common complaint stemmed from Lowe's training program. New hires were given initial training, and thrown into the fray as soon as possible, and employees felt that after the initial training period no emphasis was placed on continued training. Lowe's provides a complete array of training materials, including books, pamphlets, video tapes, and even on-line resources through the company intranet. Employees are required to complete specific training at certain intervals, but most of it is to be completed on an individual basis and in our store it was expected this would be done on breaks and before or after scheduled work hours.

Full time, hourly employees are strictly limited to 40-hour work weeks, and they were generally scheduled for 40 hours, so employees assumed they were expected to complete the training on their own time. This is not necessarily what managers expected. Frankly, most of them never thought about it when they made the schedules for their zones. Employees voiced a desire for more enrichment training in a classroom environment during scheduled shifts. Another successful tactic involved managers working in different zones from their normal area of responsibility in the store. This proved very enlightening for most of the team.

As an example, while working with the night stocking crew, most managers discovered that there was a lot more to do than they thought, and when they levied tasks such as painting and cleaning to be accomplished by the night crew, it added to an already overburdened staff. They also discovered that the night manager was indeed an incredibly hard working and dedicated individual, but his employees saw that as a way to get over. Since the manager was working side-by side with the crew, he didn't have all of them in his sight all the time. Some employees even found time to catch a quick nap from time to time (as witnessed on security cameras). Probably the most significant finding from the information gathering was that there was a general lack of communication and a great deal of misunderstanding about what the role of management truly is. One of the common questions from employees was: "Why doesn't my manager just do some actual work?

" Now that managers are aware of this perception, we need to educate the employees that management is a kind of work. Just as programs need architecture and design, functional groups of people need organizing principles. Having a person picked to handle this work can reduce the amount of time spent trying to decide how to make decisions, and can free other people up to do the work they " re best at. They need to be made aware that it is useful to have a manager. A manager can dramatically improve employee performance, both as an individual and as a member of a team, or a manager can get in the way and keep employees from working. In the Lowe's environment, managers are particularly useful at keeping obstructions from corporate management and disgruntled customers from coming between employees and their work.

They are also the knowledge base in what will always be a large structure with high employee turnover rates. This program is still in early stages of development, but it looks promising for minimizing turnover by providing better employee training and education at all levels, and effective recognition and promotion strategies. One Lowe's store should see huge benefits in terms of both employee loyalty and productivity and the company's bottom line through improved management practices.