To what extent do you think PJ has demonstrated good planning and decision-making in coming up with this training solution? Has she overlooked any aspects of the planning process?

 

 Case - Planning for effective training PJ looked over her planning for the training initiative one more time before sending it off to the head of HR for approval. She wanted to make sure that she had made decisions that would result in successful outcomes. She had been careful at every stage of planning. When the line managers had raised the issue of increased customer complaints and decreased sales figures and suggested that frontline staff lacked sales skills, she conducted a thorough analysis of the problem. Firstly, she interviewed the line managers to get a detailed overview of the issues they were observing. She then ran focus groups with a range of frontline staff to get their input into what they saw as the key issues. In these focus groups, she learned that frontline staff thought they were having to deal with more unhappy customers because staff cuts on each shift meant that there was often not enough staff to help customers, resulting in much longer wait times. Added to this, there were continued supply chain issues and stock unavailability which also annoyed customers. By the time staff were able to help individual customers, they were already feeling frustrated with the level of service and were increasingly unhappy with delays in supply. 

According to frontline staff, this was a major factor in the difficult interactions and loss of sales. She reported this finding back to the frontline managers, suggesting that there were multiple factors impacting the situation, some of which were outside the remit of training. Having taken all of this into consideration, she did however find that it would be helpful for frontline staff to have some support through training on how to manage difficult customer interactions. PJ decided to use the training budget provided by management to bring in an external training company. Her research showed that there were many providers of this type of training in the market but she settled on 'Best Fit Training Solutions', a company that offered to work with her to design bespoke training to suit the company's specific needs and the learning needs of their staff. Working with PJ, they wrote achievable learning outcomes that would directly address the challenges described by the line managers and frontline staff and agreed on a facilitation style that took into consideration the fact that the frontline staff had varying levels of experience - some had been with the company for quite a few years, while other were new to the company. In fact, they made plans to use the more experienced staff to assist with providing feedback on activities. They decided to offer the half-day training session twice so that they could work with the availability of as many of the frontline staff as possible, working around the demands of the roster. The sessions would take place in a SPRING/2H training room that had been set up to simulate the work environment and the training focused on having the frontline staff practice new skills, while getting feedback from peers and trainers. PJ was sure she had addressed all of the requirements for successful training and pressed 'send' feeling hopeful for a good outcome