Question

Instructions: Read the Grand View Grocers Corporation case below.

Grand View Grocers Corporation, headquartered in Clewiston, Florida, is among the nation’s top grocery chain companies, with over $34 billion in revenue. It operates and owns approximately 1,500 grocery stores in 10 states and will be expanding operatons to Washington, D.C. in the near future.

Grand View Grocer’s Corporation’s operating strategy distinguishes it from other grocery chain companies. Each grocery store has a Training and Development Methods manager that allows decisions to be made locally, close to the client. This also makes Grand View Grocer Corporation’s service more responsive, reliable, and empathetic to its customers.

Recently, Grand View Grocers Corporation has identified a that there is an increase in the annual turnover rate for cashiers nationwide. The increase was found in newly hired cashiers, so it was determined that on-the-job training was ineffective.

Under the direction of the store manager, cashiers perform a variety of tasks, including:

*Receive payment by cash, check, credit cards, vouchers, or automatic debits.

*Issue receipts, refunds, credits, or change due to customers.

*Count money in cash drawers at the beginning of shifts to ensure that amounts are correct and that there is adequate change.

*Greet customers entering establishments.

*Maintain clean and orderly checkout areas.

*Establish or identify prices of goods, services or admission, and tabulate bills using calculators, cash registers, or optical price scanners.

*Issue cashier’s checks, money orders, mailing stamps, and redeem food stamps and coupons.

*Resolve customer complaints.

*Answer customers' questions, and provide information on procedures or policies.

*Cash checks for customers.

*Weigh items sold by weight in order to determine prices.

*Calculate total payments received during a time period, and reconcile this with total sales.

*Compute and record totals of transactions.

*Sell lotto tickets and other items to customers.

*Keep periodic balance sheets of amounts and numbers of transactions.

*Bag, box, wrap, or gift-wrap merchandise, when needed.

*Sort, count, and wrap currency and coins.

*Process returns and exchanges.

*Request information or assistance using paging systems.

*Stock shelves, and mark prices on shelves and items, when needed.

*Compile and maintain non-monetary reports and records.

Essential cashier functions include the following:

Perform for or Working Directly with the Public -- Performing for people or dealing directly with the public. This includes serving customers in restaurants and stores, and receiving clients or guests.

Establish and Maintain Interpersonal Relationships -- Developing constructive and cooperative working relationships with others, and maintaining them over time.

Get Information -- Observing, receiving, and otherwise obtaining information from all relevant sources.

Identify Objects, Actions, and Events -- Identifying information by categorizing, estimating, recognizing differences or similarities, and detecting changes in circumstances or events.

Process Information -- Compiling, coding, categorizing, calculating, tabulating, auditing, or verifying information or data.

Describe in 350- to 525- words the training method or combination of training methods that you would recommend for training.

Justify in 350- to 525- words your choice of method(s).

Answer 1

For the current role of cashiers I would use a combination of training methods rather than having a single method.

The following would be the specifications of the training module for the cashiers:

1. There would be multiple modules consisting of the job responsibilities as refresher courses and at the same time, the new market conditions and additional job related things that they must be doing in the near future would be the other modules.
2. The key areas that the multi module training program would be focussing on would be, customer relationship training, system and data maintenance training, documentation and accounting module
3. The training intervention would be preferably on job and alongside there would be a mentor/coach allotted to the cashiers who are experts in the field preferably store managers and functional experts. For the system related modules, they would be having simulation based modules. Only during the non rush-hours there would be offline training and update sessions with respect to the progress made on their training and the productivity improvement they have achieved over the past week.

The incentives associated with the productivity improvement would be translated into incentivising the cashiers to take up the training modules. The weekly update on the productivity improvement and the progress in their training would inturn make them competitive in nature. While coming to why such distribution has been done with respect to the modules, essentially if we look at the job of the cashiers, it’s a round the clock job and they would lose out on precious working hours if the training is done on an offline basis. The simulations would definitely help understand the process but the on job training would be the one that is standing out, as they would be continuing their task and at the same time, the result is right in front on them to experience and therefore the distribution of the modules to not stress them out and at the same time not losing out on their time as well.