The HR manager meets with the director of sales to discuss a significant decline in sales over the past three months. During the meeting, the sales director suggests that the performance drop is likely due to the new sales processing software. He claims that several members of the sales team were never properly trained on the software and that now they are spending valuable time learning the software instead of doing “real work.” In his opinion, the department should go back to the previous system in which order processing (all the “paper work”) was submitted to and completed by a separate processing division. The HR manager has a different theory regarding the low performance. She notes that the department head disclosed to the entire sales department which sales employees had been selected to participate in a “high-potential” program and groomed for future leadership positions in the organization. The department head says he released the information for the sake of transparency. However, the HR manager thinks that the way the disclosure was handled undermined the morale of the department employees who were not deemed high-potential. The sales director admits that interdepartmental cooperation has been at an all-time low since the disclosure. In addition, the high-potential employees missed most of the vendor software training because they were at a high-potential program orientation. The other employees, who were trained by the software vendor, are reluctant to spend time sharing their knowledge with the high-potential employees who missed the training. 

What additional information should the HR director gather when considering the sales director’s request to revert to the old processing system?

1.-Interviews with regular and high-potential sales employees regarding what they think of the new software.

2.-Previous reports regarding the sales director’s skill and effectiveness in decision making and managing policy changes.

3.-Benchmarking data on revenue gains in competing organizations that recently implemented the same software.

4.-Reports regarding the performance improvement and/or cost savings in the organization’s processing division.