Case Study
Atkinson Generation
Atkinson Generation (AG) is a leading distributor of engines and equipment. The company has main dealer status with Watson Engines, the UK’s principle producer of power engines. There are 35 staff based at its location in Banbury, Oxfordshire.
After several years of profitable trading, the company has, for the past two years, been faced with a significant loss. There is a sense of ‘lack of direction’ and a need to change quickly and dramatically in order to survive. A recent meeting with Watson Engines has presented AG with a stark choice: it had to ‘shape up or ship out’. As the dealer status with Watson Engines accounted for 80% of its business, managers at AG realized that radical changes were needed. A shared purpose and vision, combined with training that met a nationally recognized benchmark, was required.
The four AG managers attend a series of workshops organized by a local chamber of commerce, where they could share experiences and learn from other companies. They were the able to produce a strategic plan incorporating key performance indicators and a breakdown of the skills necessary for its delivery. More important would be the style of managing change and the provision of learning opportunities for all staff to meet their desires. As indicated by the Managing Director John Atkinson: ’I fundamentally believe that everyone at AG should be able to identify what they need to learn and get on and do it.’
The following were considered to be key elements:
Source: Bratton, J & Gold, J, 2009. Human Resource Management, Theory and Practice. 4th ed. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Tasks
a) How can appraisal be utilized to identify individual learning needs, and how can the company ensure that such needs link to the strategic plan and key performance indicators?
b) What are the skills required by ‘learning managers’? What training do such managers need?
c) What are the requirements for effective two-way communication?
d) What help can be provided for this small company regarding benchmarking, qualifications for its workforce and finance for its training?
Atkinson Generation is a leading engines and equipment distributor. The organization has key dealer status with leading organizations of power engine known as Watson Engine. No matter if an organization is a global leader or a small organization, every organization requires to maintain and sustain themselves through employee motivation and training needs fulfillment. This report has been addressed on AG (Atkinson Generation) to focus on 4 key elements that have been identified by the organization. The scope of this paper lies in studying the learning needs through appraisal use, skills needed for learning manager, effective two way communication requirements and benefits for benchmarking, qualification and finances related to workforces and their training.
This report provides several recommendations to the company such as using appraisal to motivate employees. This will help them understand why they need to be individually trained and the relevance of their training needs.
Performance appraisal, general feedback of employees and understanding the requirement for training and development are crucial for organizations in the 21st century. Organizations such as AG, need to understand the way in which learning needs are identifies and related or linked with organizational strategy and key performance indicators.
After year of profitable trading, AG has faced essential losses especially because of the missing direction sense of the company and a requirement of implementing change in a quick and dramatic manner to make the company survive competition (Hatim, 2015). As per the case study, the organization requires to focus on developing an appraisal system oriented on learning and development, making managers learners, communicating through a two way process and organization should look at supporting advisory service with regard to training and development national benchmarking, investment in qualification and support. This paper addresses these issues and tries to find the benefit behind them that AG will gain through their implementation.
Performance appraisals or reviews from employees are essential tools for initiatives to develop employees. Performance appraisals help in identifying the top performers of the company in order to make sure that pay raise and promotions result in maximum productive delivery. Reviews from employees also can help in revealing areas of potential weaknesses and improvements within the workforce that can help in identifying learning needs or training needs of workforces (Parmenter, 2015). By using appraisal, AG can benefit from the following roles in recognizing its learning needs-
Trends of Company and department: Results of employee appraisal, taken collectively, can be sued to spot trends in performance across the whole organization and even within specific departments. This helps organizations to finely tune their learning programs for current employees to address these concern related areas (Greenaway et al. 2015). Identifying issues in the company and across the department as well as addressing them in its initial stages can help in preventing workforce from becoming stagnated.
Training new hires: The first appraisal of performance in new hires can result in shedding some light over new recruits operational effectiveness and programs of training. The performance of new employees during their initial year over job is impacted through a mix of personal features and the thoroughness of personal characteristics mixture and the first year training programs thoroughness (Smith, 2015). If employee reviews in the initial year of training reveals that the employee is struggling in a particular place, then AG can consider to place more focus on that area within training programs for newly hired individuals
Individual learning needs: Additionally to reviewing problems across the organization, appraisals can shed light over the areas of required improvement within employees at individual level. Managers can select to work in a direct manner with employees in order to help them address their individual blinded regions.
Feedback of employees: Appraisal systems for collaborative employees helps them and the managers to work collectively and set goals by monitoring progress towards the aim and the required improvement based areas. In a system to review, the true goal should be to motivate growth and honesty in employees and allow them to speak up about their individual areas where they feel learning is needed.
Part of performance management lies in setting of goals with team members. This can be done at AG through a formalized appraisal process. The essential factor here lies in ensuring that the goals are set in a manner that aligns them to strategy of the department which in turn is aligned with organization’s overall strategy. This follows a general adage within management that illustrates what can be measured can be done (Pulakos et al. 2015). If goals around a specific outcome are set then the chances of that outcome taking place is much high especially because AG would have committed itself to results management and measurement. When goal of an employees is defined with regard to organizational key performance indicators then it helps in ensuring that what employees are doing at AG, is properly aligned with organizational goals. This is the essential relationship between performance of employee and success of organizations.
(How individual needs are linked to KPI through organizational strategy)
(Bratton and Gold, 2009)
In order to ensure that activities as mentioned are aligned with the strategy of AG, the company needs to focus on what employees are doing actually. This is done through management of performance (Jamali 2015). Through application of the principle of key performance indicators to goals and performance of employees, AG can create a direct connection between all of the essential factors of success that have been derived from the complete strategy.
The consequence is that team members will actually do what they need to be doing and that the measurements to determine how properly they are doing their work is clearly connected to success of an organization. Individual goal needs to have at the least one linked performance indicator. Difference between weekly percentages in handling complaints resulting in customer satisfaction versus unsatisfied clients is possible through team member KPI.
“Learning managers” are those individual of a learning organization that help in facilitation of learning for their team members and continuously believe in transforming themselves as well as their organization. Such managers have employees training and development at the core of their philosophy with an overall aim to gain competitive position for the firm they are working for (Pinto and Chheda 2015). Learning and making others learn is a key responsibility and requires motivated and highly skilled people or managers to take care of it. Therefore, there are specifically essential skills that learning managers need to maintain and these are described below:
A training managers training needs or learning needs are also brought forward and managed by using the tool to analyze their training need. These managers also require consistent training in order to ensure the trainer is fruitful in delivering learning and knowledge to others.
There are various reasons due to which 2 way communication is regarded essential. These reasons are inclusive of dynamic process, direction implementation, satisfaction of job, giving feedback, creating democratic environment, enhancing relationships as well as accuracy in terms of understanding and interpreting the message (Serafini, 2015). In two way communication message reaches the listener and the listener replies to the sender. After message is received, there is feedback for the sender. This is a dynamic approach which makes communication not only complete but also effective. AG as an organization needs to adopt a two way communication process that helps in enhancing effectiveness.
Managers at distinct levels within an organization need to advise, inform and instruct over several problems. Adequate understanding of these messages and clarification in future is possible only when two way communication is present (Ali et al. 2015). This dual communication at AG will act as bridge that connects the destination and the source. Satisfaction of Job is also gained through effective two way communication. Managers can exchange data on their specific issue through a dual communication method. Issues faced by AG subordinates can be reached to the top management through feedback and reviews. This allows for better enhancement of communication process by furthering the organization into becoming effective learning organization.
Within the management’s bottom up approach, employers get chances to deliver feedback and take part within the process of decision making (Meijering et al. 2015). This makes activity to be completed in a proper way. In a process for two way communication, AG will be possible to gain feedback from the subordinates as well as the managers with regard to different job aspects if and as needed. AG will further be able to create a democratic environment wherein employees are free to tell of their needs and suggestions.
Benchmarking, qualification and investing in training are some recommendations that should be offered to AG considering its issues related to its workforce (Nugent and Lindburg, 2015).
Benchmarking-
There is no set methodology for benchmarking. The following is a 12 stage benchmarking methodology that has been developed for AG and are provided as below:
Why invest in learning and development to ensure workforce qualification? There are wide variety of benefits from investments made on gaining workforce qualification. As a learning organization, AG requires to raise their aspirations for a skilled workforce demonstrated through achievements in qualifications. Business benefits from this perspective, on the other hand are inclusive of quality in service, enhanced marketability, workers retention and enhanced safety. Training presents a key opportunity for expanding the knowledge base of every employee but most employers find training and development opportunities are expensive. However training and development based investment results in providing benefits not only to an individual employee but also the entire organization. The benefits are as follows (ZakareviÄÂius and ŽuperkienÄ—, 2015):
Performance management within organizations is essential and this will offer further benefit to AG organization under investigation in this paper. Through performance management, organizations are able to convert their workforce into learning organizations which believe in consistent training and development. Training in turn offers diverse benefits such as satisfied and motivated employees. These satisfied employees learning needs are tackled through performance assessment and needs analysis that helps in ensuring the employees are aligned with the organizational goals and objectives (Gustavssen and Stahl, 2015). Several critical additions were gained in knowledge through an attempt made in this assignment.
The skills for learner managers was a new learning that I gained. The training needs of these managers was also an essential addition to my knowledge as I did not know how essential consistent knowledge development is from the perspective of learner manager.
Investing in developing employees and managers is an essential necessity that AG should not sideline.-
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