Employee Productivity
Basic Problem Solving Procedure Outline
Our company is a family owned, nationwide grocery store chain. We have stores in 43 different states, but recently our market share has been falling rapidly. After analyzing the symptoms, we realized that we have a severe problem with employee productivity that needs to be solved ASAP.
1. Define the problem
A. The symptoms that we see that indicate the existence of the problem include: long check-out lines, unsatisfied customers, lower sales, falling profits, lack of efficiency, and lack of info structure.
B. This is a relatively big problem that affects the whole company, and is characterized by the 20% market share decrease nationwide.
C. How can our company increase employee productivity over the course of one year?
D. We agreed to use the following definition of productivity.
The quality of being productive is the rate at which goods or services are produced, especially output per unit of labor.
2. Research and Analyze the Problem
A. Productivity.
Through our research we have found that to improve productivity we need to upgrade technology, acquire a better inventory system, improve the retention rate of our employees, design a new training program with emphasis on cross-training our employees. We also need to look into reward programs for productive employees.
B. Training
We decided that to improve training we need to concentrate on cross training the employees, establishing mentor and buddy programs, as well as reinforcement classes.
C. Employee retention
Through research we found out that t ...