Part 1: Reflect on Ethical, Legal, and Political Factors Instructions For this assignment, you will reflect on the ethical, legal, and political factors that ID leaders believe influence the field of

Needs Assessment: Justification for Joe

Joe was stuck. He had been hired because the turnover rate for employees was outrageous. Normally, they would see employees resign and others hired at an 8-10% rate per year. However, they were seeing this turnover rate per month. This was very costly for the company, so they did something unprecedented—they hired a consultant.

Joe had a great reputation for repairing training programs that weren’t working. He had 20+ years of experience in higher education and training. He was ideally suited for this project. It had been a month, and he was no closer to finding out what was going wrong with training than he was when he started. It was very frustrating to him, and he was concerned that he would be dismissed from the project. This company didn't need to throw more money at yet another training solution that didn’t work.

A bit of background about the company and the employees. The Aliant Company employed 5,000 customer service representatives in a small town in Kansas. They were a major employer for the town, third to the regional hospital and a new distribution center for storage goods that had been in business for less than a year. The town had been economically depressed for quite some time. However, thanks to a change in county leadership, employers and employees had been attracted to this part of Kansas due to the low cost of living, low crime, and a slower pace of life.

Before Joe gave up, he decided to give you a call. Although you are new to instructional design, he believed that you could help him. Your knowledge of needs assessment would surely be helpful. He called you on Monday and as soon as you could, you hopped a plane and took a car to smalltown Kansas.

To begin, you asked Joe if human resources had completed exit interviews. If so, would you have access to them? Next, could you interview employees who had completed training less than 30 days ago? Finally, could you interview trainers and managers who trained and managed these customer service representatives on a daily basis? You are in luck! This has already been done for you. You simply need to analyze the data.

#1. Before you begin your analysis: do you see anything about the company or the background that might impact the turnover rate?

You begin to review the comments from the representatives who left the company. These are not employees who were fired or demoted. The exit interviews were only those who had been with the company for more than 30 days and left of their own free will. You reviewed a representative 100 sample of exit interviews, and you noticed that demographic information was very diverse—much like the town demographics. You saw different races, ethnicities, ages, and genders. In fact, you didn’t see many commonalities except that they had left the company.

There were few complaints about the training provided for employees to do their jobs. Employees seemed to like their supervisors and the hours were flexible and on par with other part-time and full-time positions in the area. You saw few complaints (mostly about hourly salary rate), with most employees leaving for other similar positions in town.

#2. Begin to formulate questions that pertain to needs assessment. Keep in mind that an instructional need is only part of what an employee might need for continued employment.

Next, you speak with three of the managers, representing the day, night and weekend shifts. These managers had all been with the company for more than two years and were a part of designing the training materials for new employees. They were at a loss to explain the turnover. This all seemed to start about six months ago when the town began to grow economically. What should have been a win for everyone seemed to be a problem for the Aliant Company. In fact, there had been a small increase in the hourly rate for employees but that did not seem to help.

You think that you see a pattern coming to light and a major factor that might impact the turnover rate. You make an appointment with Joe to discuss your findings.

#3. What information would you offer Joe? In a presentation, explain some of the key factors of needs assessment (from the Brown and Green text and other resources).

#4. Within your presentation, explain what you discovered in your needs assessment and make two or three recommendations to help either alleviate the problem of rapid employee turnover or explain the possible cause.