Assignment Requirements
Good old Fred Knott, the training consultant, has asked for your help again with his client BINZ, Inc. looking back on your needs analysis, design, and proposed implementation of training, now help Fred plan for the evaluation of the training for the Customer Service department/employees.
Will you evaluate/how will you evaluate:
• Trainee Reactions? (What will you do with that information?)
• Learning?
• Behavior?
• Results and/or ROI?
Be sure to thoroughly explain any tools, measures, or analyses you would use (examples and visual aids are encouraged, please remember to cite sources if necessary). Remember, you do not need to report on the outcome of the evaluations; this is a proposal for HOW you plan to evaluate the training.
Check completeness, clarity, originality, interest, grammar, spelling, and punctuation.
HRA340 AVP Module 2:
Needs Analysis Scenario
Scenario:
Fred Knott (The Training Consultant)
Wilma (The COO, part owner of the company)
Barney (HR director, part owner of the company)
In this scenario, Fred Knott, a training consultant, is working with executives at “BINZ, Inc.” a manufacturing organization that makes plastic containers, to determine training needs. Pay close attention to the interaction between Fred and the executives at BINZ to determine what types of analyses are occurring or will occur. Think about what types of questions you would ask if you were in Fred’s position to better understand the situation and determine which needs are training needs and which issues probably wouldn’t be solved by training.
Fred meets with Wilma and Barney:
Fred: Thanks for inviting me here today. I understand you have some specific business goals and objectives that are not being met. Let’s talk about what’s going on.
Wilma: Fred, thanks for joining us. We’re concerned about a few things. As you know, our main business is making different types of plastic containers. We started out as a small, family-run business and we’ve just had a ton of growth in the last year through winning some big contracts. And now, production is not meeting expectations on the factory floor. Our projections were to produce 10,000 total units on average per day this month, and we’re only reaching about 6,000 of our various products. Not reaching our production goals just isn’t cost effective for us.
Barney: And too many of the units we produce are not passing our quality standards. We have a very specific quality assurance checklist, and our waste is at about 4 to 5% — that may not sound like much, but that’s 250-300 containers we end up throwing away because of defects. I mean, we expect some of these issues; part of it is just growing pains. We’re glad business is picking up, but we aren’t used to this pace and with things being so busy, we just haven’t had time to address training and development very much. But we’re willing, and I know we’ve got to do better, especially with all the hiring we’ve done lately.
Wilma: Customer service is a problem, too. We have a pretty small staff and they’ve had a hard time keeping up with our retail customers calling in with questions, billing issues, and complaints. I’m afraid we’ll start losing customers if our service levels don’t improve.
Barney: And Fred, we’ve got to do something about the sales department. Our sales associates work mostly on commission with a small base salary, and we’ve had a lot of turnover. Many people say they are leaving because they can’t make enough money under our commission structure.
Fred: Hmm, sounds like we’ve all got a lot to think about. I’d like to know more about each of these situations before we get down to business.
Explanation: In this initial meeting, Fred Knott, the training consultant is conducting a preliminary needs analysis. He is beginning to understand a little bit about “BINZ, Inc.” on an organizational level; that is, what the company’s strategy and goals are, and how training (if any) has been handled in the past. But he’s going to need more information, both on a person or employee level and on a task level. If you were in Fred’s position, what steps would you take to better understand the situation? What questions would you want to ask?
Meeting continues:
Barney: What do you think Fred? Can you train our people up and make them better performers?
Fred: Well, I’m going to do my best. But I’d be dishonest if I said training is always the answer. Sometimes no amount of training will help, because knowing how to do things is not the problem. Let’s look a little closer at each of the issues you brought up to see what else might be going on.
Barney: Anything we can do to help.
Fred: I’d like to look over the job descriptions for your line workers on the factory floor, as well as for your customer service reps and sales associates. And it would be really helpful to talk with some of your employees in each department; maybe a mix of people who have been here since the early days and some newer employees as well.
Wilma: No problem, we’ve got you set up to meet with some of our employees later today.
Fred: Great, thanks. Now here are some questions you may be able to help me with. Let’s talk about manufacturing first: you said you’re only producing 6,000 of your various types of containers instead of 10,000. Are there specific product lines that are coming up shorter than others?
Wilma: Now that you mention it, one of our biggest shortfalls is producing our “Stackable/Rackable” Bins. That product has are so many different parts, and it’s available in so many different dye cuts and colors…and the machinery is all pretty new to us. For a while we were offering bonus pay for people to work that line because nobody wanted to do it, and the main machine kept breaking down. Ugh! I don’t have the exact numbers in front of me, but that’s where a large percentage of our defective product comes from.
Fred: Good to know. Now, what about Customer Service…sounds like the number of calls has changed considerably as you have grown as a company. Can you tell me how the department is structured?
Barney: Sure. We’ve got 5 customer service reps and a manager up there. Each of them handle – oh, probably about 100-150 calls on a typical 7 hour shift. And that number is going up. We’d like to hire more reps, but it’s just not in the budget right now.
Fred: Okay. And all the reps are trained to be able to respond to every customer issue?
Barney: Well, like I said, there hasn’t been a lot of time for formal training. Now, Mary – she’s the owner’s daughter – she’s our customer service manager. Mary’s been with us since the very beginning. She takes calls, and she’s also there to advise the newer reps if they have questions. And we have all our product specs and procedure manuals online for every rep, so they should be able to look up an answer to any question they encounter.
Fred: What do the reps do if they need to ask Mary something and she’s on another call?
Barney: Umm…yeah…that’s a good question.
Fred: Here’s something else to consider: are your customers able to access the product specs and things like billing procedures through your website? I mean, that way, if they have a quick question, they don’t have to call customer service…
Barney: You know…that’s not a bad idea!
Fred: Okay…well, let’s discuss that further when the time comes. So on to the sales associates. Have they always been paid primarily on commission?
Wilma: Yes, ever since the early days. Of course, back when we started, it was mostly family members and friends doing this part time. Most of them didn’t have any formal sales training or experience. Now that we’ve got some bigger contracts, we’ve started to hire a more professional sales force.
Fred: And have you conducted any formal sales trainings?
Wilma: A few. One of the things that we can see we need is some basic sales training to bring some of our original employees up to speed on how to sell. And on the other hand, the newer people are already good at sales, but they don’t know as much about our products or our industry.
Fred: This is all good information. I’m looking forward to meeting with your employees to get their perspectives.
Explanation: Fred has gotten some additional information about the challenges at “BINZ, Inc.”. Some of the challenges might best be addressed by training, and some are probably not training-related. It may also be that the issues will be best solved by a combination of training and non-training solutions.
You will have the opportunity to provide your own insights into the sales and customer service issues in your Training Projects for this and future modules.
To give you a good start, here are some preliminary recommendations on the production issue at BINZ that Fred might propose:
- First, spend the majority of time training on the problematic Stackable/Rackable Bins machinery; that seems to be the biggest issue on the factory floor.
- Second, since it seems that BINZ employees are reluctant to work with that product line, pay special attention to ensuring employees will be receptive to that training. Make sure that training in particular is really engaging and practical.
- Also, when talking with production employees, get a clear understanding of why no one wants to work that line.
o Is safety an issue?
o Do employees get rewarded based on units produced, and see a drop in their pay when the machine breaks down?
o One solution might be job rotation so that everyone has to take their turn on that product line, but no one is stuck with it permanently.
- Last, consider having designated employees available to troubleshoot the machinery in case of breakdown. If the machine often breaks down for a specific reason, the manufacturer may be able to offer some training on how to address the issue quickly and efficiently.
Of course it is impossible to find the right solution without a better understanding of the jobs at this organization and more information from the people on the ground, which is why Fred will review job descriptions and meet with incumbent employees; this person and task analysis is really the same as job analysis which should be performed for selection, compensation, performance evaluation, training, and virtually any HR-related function.
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