Good Example Of Essay On Developing People

5.3.2015

Part A: Training and Development
The human resource department of the Coca Cola Company plays an integral role in providing training and development opportunities to its employees. The objective is to train employees for tasks leading to successful business operation and providing them with a detailed understanding of the general business environment. The department aims at keeping people motivated and committed to providing excellent productivity to the organization. They focus on hiring the best people who would help them in maximizing their profits and eventually help them in attaining their business growth in terms of volumes. The department ensures that each and every employee working at Coca Cola is doing their job in the best way and at the same time loves their job so that he is able to give his full commitment to the company.
The Coca Cola Company also has a separate diversity education or training program which aims to limit conflict within the company and maximize its ability to use the differences between associates to its benefit by respecting and valuing diversity. The three famous components of the diversity education program are diversity training, diversity speaker series, and a comprehensive diversity library. In the past years, the diversity program has enabled the Company to stimulate employee engagement, create a work environment which especially leverages diversity among employees and stimulates productivity and efficiency regardless of the differences. In addition, the Coca Cola Company has an additional supplier diversity training which serves the purpose of creating a “pool of suppliers” that incorporates women- and minority-owned businesses. Through these various measures, the Company ensures that ideas are rapidly generated, innovation is always present, and execution is efficient and close to perfect; the individual components promote commitment, culture, communication, and consumption (“Diversity, Education and Training”).
The Coca Cola Company’s satellite programs, which are slightly smaller in both scope audiences, provide training and development opportunities to specific regions. The Coca Cola Beverages KO Trainee Program, based in Pakistan, for instance, aims to prepare potential employees for “management level roles”, enabling people to foresee a structured career that falls under Supply Chain, Sales and relevant services, marketing, information technology, human resource management, legal, audit, and external affairs. The program, like other training programs offered by the Company, gives employees the chance to take part in rotations so that they can get an idea about different aspects of the Company and gain diverse experiences.
As part of the training and development program, participants are typically required to take part in an annual performance review system which includes mid-year and end-of-year career-oriented discussions between the participants themselves; these discussions are helpful because they permit employees to discuss their goals and aims, and how they can easily achieve them - a necessary step, therefore, is devising a detailed plan which would enable them to meet their goals effectively. Many of these discussions are with managers, who, along with the associates, ensure that the training is benefitting the associates optimally and that the full training is completed within a year so that the associates can learn about an expansive set of skills and capabilities which would ultimately make them efficient and thus benefit them and the Company. In addition to these career-based discussions, the Coca Cola Company also encourages its employees to acquire higher education; to aid this process, the Company offers different levels of reimbursement to undergraduate and graduate students at accredited educational institutions.
Managers are responsible, to a large extent, for ensuring their employees’ development and to aid in structuring their employees’ career path. Managers must, to achieve this purpose, encourage, support, address and remove any hindrances or obstacles, and provide relevant resources to their employees. This can be achieved by regularly meeting employees and discussing their goals and objectives, providing constructive criticism and useful feedback to help them overcome their drawbacks and weaknesses, helping them in setting realistic goals timeframes, and helping them in troubleshooting existing and potential problems or obstacles (“Helping Employees Develop Professionally”).
In other words, it is typically required of managers to “understand, act, and explore”. Understanding implies making employees realize their goals and what achieving them would mean, or what impact they would have on their lives; this is a form of motivation for employees that makes them realize their potential and how their contributions could impact their lives and the Company as well. The “act” part deals with encouraging employees to pursue development and training opportunities offered by the Company, and to support and bolster their professional and personal growth; this includes several services such as career counseling, courses on fiscal management, communications, leadership, and other domains of professional development. In addition to these forms of support, managers can also evaluate their staff regularly, and guide them to analyze growth and development. The “explore” part, which is the last component, gives employees, especially those who are about to join or are going to join soon, provides people with a broad overview of the company and helps them “get started” (“Employee Career Development”).
Mentoring is an essential component of training and development in the Coca Cola Company. The main target audience of such mentoring programs is young people or the youth. One program in London, for instance, young people aged 14 to 19 years; the program requires a staff member, the mentor, to meet with a young person weekly and discuss his or her goals, current school work, future career objectives and plans, and a self-evaluation of their personal potential (“Coca Cola’s Youth Mentoring”). According to the Coca Cola Company, mentoring positively impacts the lives of young individuals by making their realize their potential and capabilities, and motivating them to work on their growth, development, career goals and plans, so that they may succeed later on in life. Other examples of mentoring programs include the Spelman Coca Cola Leadership Mentoring Program, the coca Cola and Spelman Intergenerational Leadership Mentoring Program, and the Coca Cola Valued Youth Program. Each of these programs addresses a separate issue; for instance the major issue underscored and addressed by IDRA or the Coca Cola Valued Youth Program is the high dropout rate among young students and it aims to prevent dropout by “cross-age” tutoring (“IDRA”).

Part B: Employee Orientation and Socialization

The process of recruiting new employees requires a plan and organization since new employees are required to have adequate training to ensure that they will survive in and benefit the Company. The primary aim of any organization is to hire people who are talented, and who will contribute to the aims of the organization. The first step in onboarding a new hire or employee is to foresee and plan ahead. Most people apply for jobs based on the “employee brand” or image which you create to attract people are most well-suited to job. To impart all the positive aspects of working in your organization, you must impart all the in-depth information regarding your company, the work environment, the work culture and ethics, and the aims and objectives of the company before the hiring process. This could be in the form of orientation sessions or employee handbooks which provide all the relevant information regarding the company. A lot of time it has been seen that organizations invests in their corporate documentary which aims at showing all the aspects of the organization. The key areas are highlighted with some employees give their feedback of the organization to those who are about to join the company. The purpose of this corporate documentary is just to ensure that those who are joining the organization have a fair idea about what the organization’s purpose is and what it aims to do in future.
After the employees are hired, it is important to make them feel comfortable and settle in the workplace. Several measures can be taken to ensure that the new recruits are at ease, such as informing existing employees to make the new recruits feel at ease, showing them around, configuring their new company email accounts, setting up their desks and providing them with required materials, and letting them know where the cafeteria, restrooms, recreational facilities, and other essential places are located. After providing the generic information and work facilities, the process is individualized, whereby the process is tailored according to the new recruit in question; this is done by providing mentoring and training sessions to help each new recruit to identify his or her strengths and maximize them to benefit themselves and the company. Lastly, the plan must be followed through and the employee’s performance regularly monitored and regulated to ensure that the performance is consistent and that there is apparent growth, both professional and personal. Developing excellent lines of communication between employees and between employees and managers is also an essential step. Thus the first step is orientation, which is followed by socialization. The latter aims to reduce any anxiety that a new employee might have, thereby integrating the employee into the company so that he or she can quickly become productive by working diligently and enjoying his or her work at the same time. Other domains which require orientation and socialization include team membership, employee development, corporate culture and its impact on employees and productivity, compensation and employee benefits, and implementation of the company’s rules and regulations.

Part C: Case Incident – Johnson Manufacturing

The root cause of the problem in the case scenario entitled “Johnson Manufacturing” was that Ben, who gave the presentation to the managers, did not relate the theories to the work of the managers, or did not help delineate how the management and motivational theories could be used by managers to enhance one of the primary aims of the manufacturing company, i.e. increasing productivity. The managers, failing to relate Ben’s mundane presentation with their work, thus find it tedious to listen to him speaking.
In order to address and solve the problem of high staff turnover in the company, Ben should explain to the managers how they can use the theories he described in the presentation to retain employees. The most important aspect of the solution to high turnover would be that the managers carefully and cautiously select or hire employees who fit perfectly, or whose interests, capabilities, and goals align with that of the company; these recruits should fit well overall, including in terms of culture. The managers must also analyze all the aspects of the potential candidates’ characters such as their performance in a team, their leadership qualities, their composure, and their values among other aspects. In order to retain current employees and reduce turnover, managers must genuinely invest in their employees by providing them with a good compensation, training, and development opportunities. They must also motivate them and interact with them closely to discuss their ideas and troubleshoot any problems that they might be facing in the workplace. Supervisors must therefore be taught all of these skills so that people who join and are trained sustain their interest in the company, their values, and their drive to work, as a consequence of which the turnover rate would be automatically reduced.
Ben should make his presentation more interesting. In order for a greater audience to attend his information session, stay and listen, and give positive reviews, Ben should keep his session light, instead of making it content-intensive, so that more people can understand and retain the crux of his message instead of getting puzzled by complex theories and examples, which they cannot relate to; the audience should ideally be able to relate the theories Ben mentions to their daily work, and realize how these theories can be effectively applied to impact the productivity rate of the company. He can even use techniques such as role playing to better depict behavioral models and employee-manager dynamics in the company which can eventually impact the workers’ efficiency and the company’s manufacturing capacity. Ben must use interactive training activities, games, and question and answer sessions to engage the audience, and support each point of him with credible examples so that the managers can relate to them and understand it quickly. This will ensure that Ben’s audience is interested in his training session and does not find it monotonous or irrelevant. Moreover, the audience will also enjoy the session along with remembering it for their reference.

Works Cited

"Coca Cola's Youth Mentoring & Coaching Program." Coca-Cola Great Britain. The Coca Cola
Company. Web. <http://www.coca-cola.co.uk/community/coca-cola-mentoring.html>.
"Diversity Education & Training." The Coca-Cola Company. Web.
<http://www.coca-colacompany.com/our-company/diversity/diversity-education-training#TCCC>.
"Employee Career Development." University of Washington. Web.
<http://www.washington.edu/admin/hr/pod/leaders/ee-careerdev/>.
"Employee Training - The Coca-Cola Company." The Coca-Cola Company. Web.
<http://www.coca-colacompany.com/stories/associate-training>.
"Helping Employees Develop Professionally." Berkeley HR. University of Berkeley. Web.
<http://hrweb.berkeley.edu/toolkits/managers-supervisors/helping-employees-develop>.
"IDRA - Coca-Cola Valued Youth Progam." Coca-Cola Valued Youth Progam. IDRA. Web
<http://www.idra.org/Coca-Cola_Valued_Youth_Program.html/>.