Best Buy... Best Job

Customer-centricity. Thats the new strategic focus that Brad Anderson, CEO of Best Buy, is betting on to keep the company from becoming a retailing casualty like Woolworth or Kmart. What is customer-centricity? Simply, its figuring out which customers are the most profitable and doing whatever it take to please them so they want to come back often and spend money. As the biggest consumer electronics retailer in the United State, Best Buy has a lot at stake. And its 100,000 plus employees will play a crucial role in this new approach, which shifts the focus from pushing gadgets to catering to employees on broad? Well, the way its always treated its employees undoubtedly is a good start!

At Best Buy, People are the Engines that Drive Our Success. Thats the upfront and central phrase on the companys Web-based career center. And to Best Buy, its not just an empty slogan. The company has tried to create an environment in which employees, wherever they are, have numerous opportunities to learn, work, play and achieve. One way they do that is by providing facts and figures to employees on everything from new technology to industry changes to company actions. At store meetings or on the intranet, employees can get the information they need to do their jobs and to do them well. But thats not all the company does for its employees.

Like many other companies, Best Buy struggled to meet the demands of its businesshow to do things better, faster and cheaper than its competitorswith an increasing stressed out workforce. Its culture had always rewarded long hours and sacrifice. For instance, one manager used a plaque to recognize the employee who turns on the lights in the morning and turns them off at night. However, that approach was taking its toll on employees. Instead of trying another work-life balance program, Best Buy decided to experiment with the very concept of work, which all too long had been tied to the amount of time spent at work. Thousands of Best Buy employees now work under a ROWE (results-oriented work environment), which means they work when and where they like, as long as they get the job done. Managers have had to learn to not be control freaks and hourly workers have been empowered to do their jobs the best way they know how. As ROWE has been implemented, entire department would join at once. These work groups would find different ways to keep the flexibility from turning into chaos. For instance, one team got pagers to make sure someone was always available for emergencies. Others realized that they needed only one regular weekly or monthly staff meeting and eliminated all other unproductive ones.

Another change Best Buy has made is to its employee incentive program. Again, the CEO Brad Anderson initiated this change, in this case, to help the company retain its best and brightest managers and executives. He wanted to know why the company didnt have an innovative incentive program to foster our innovative culture. Anderson was particularly interested in giving these employees incentive choices, an approach that many companies stay away from because of the associated communication and administrative burdens. But employee incentive program experts says that providing choice is a great way to recruit and retain employees and is important for workforce management because it recognizes that employees are in different places in their lives and have different needs. After experimenting with different plans, the company introduced its incentive plan on September 30, 2005, offering participants four choices with varying levels of performance payouts. So far, as a recent survey showed, employees seem to feel good about the change. But now it seems that employees are about to face another changethis time to a customer-centricity focus and are likely to see the way they work change also.

Motivation

Requirements:

Explain the advantages and disadvantages of Best Buys different employee programs using: 1.1. Maslows hierarchy of needs 1.2. Reinforcement theory 1.3. Expectancy theory