Hello again!
It is never easy for employees in retail industries to really follow the organizational values and culture. This week I and the PR team focused more on bringing employees closer to the organization and understanding corporate values and following them, because most of them are aware but something is lacking behind. It is always the best thing to take care of things affecting the company that are closer to you before taking care of those that are far.
According to (Nelson and Kanso 2008, in their book ‘effective leadership in a crisis’), “company’s organizational culture is a key component to the company’s reputation.”
As a team, we decided it is best if we all know who we are as a company, what we can do, then turn our failures into success. David Ogilvy once said “hire people, who are better than you are, then leave them to get on with it. Look for people who will aim for the remarkable, who will not settle for the routine.”
Not that the team leader was going to fire some staffs. He was going to make sure that he instills corporate values in them, because values like teamwork were a lot more like an individual thing. We came up with a scheme to train employees on customer service and re-shuffle staff on annual basis to keep them on their toes. We wanted something that will make employees enjoy their work at the same time increasing productivity.
Well, so far so good. Most of the employees at retail outlets are students who failed junior high or high school and therefore have no knowledge at all about corporate culture or customer service. They settle for routines but this was the best thing we did for them as we noticed improvement during the training sessions. We managed to erase from many the African mentality of, “please leave if you don’t want to buy, other customers will come.”
This was not an easy task, not at all. It was not just about training employees, I was asked to design name tags for employees, their positions and get their names right (they did not have name tags before, my supervisor encouraged me to give in any recommendation and if they like, they will take it.)
1 comment:
It is very true that most employees in retail industry are those who did not make it far in their academic journey, especially in Botswana. The employees get very little training to be able to work by the counter or run chores around the stores, and are not trained on the most important issues involved in customer service. I have made an observation that in most of companies involved in retail industry do not usually take an initiative to develop those employees but would rather keep firing and hiring. It was very good of the company to offer some training to develop their customer service habits.
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