Week4 Activity-Evaluation and Performance

What PD happened in our workplaces？
Strategies our organizations have in place to encourage development，change and innovation？

HE Yingying (Helena):

Professional Development in HSBC

People are the key to change and sustainability in a business organization. To be specific, HSBC has to adopt the best strategies of human resources in the corporation to guide the innovation in the ever competitive market. In this regard, HSBC should provide proper formal and informal training for the stuff professional development.

As mentioned in the first session activity, HSBC adopt e-learning system for stuff to gain professional training and authentic training, like seminar, workshop, for stuff to gain practical hard skill. Besides these, HSBC also provides on-the-job coaching and mentoring for the professional development. What’s more, HSBC will send the employee to other placements away from the usual role to experience the different post responsibilities.

According to van Pelt & Vernooy-Gerritsen 1994 professional development model, increasing levels of facilitation for change requiring increasing levels of “energy” from staff with an initial “hump”. In HSBC, the higher the professional level the employee is at, the more energy the employee needs to generate to get development. During the process of professional development, the HSBC will provide opportunities for stuff to get higher level of professional qualification. Once the stuff gets the qualification, he/she will be more professional in this area and get an indirect condition for future promotion. Then the whole corporation is towards an changing and innovational direction.

Waiyan Yanny Sit:

At Rogers, they’re always making improvement to keep up with society and improve customer service. Rogers uses mainly Web based Adobe Flash modules to train it's employees. Employees must pass a quiz at the end of the training in order to complete the course. In most cases, training must be completed before the launch of a new product, procedure or service. To ensure compliance, managers usually have a part of their bonus based on the completion rates of their employees of the online quizzes. 

Managers will also have a one-on-one assessment with each employee monthly to look over his overall stats for the months and areas his can improve on. On top of this, the district manager will visit each store biweekly to make sure the store’s sales, quality of customer service and staff’ product knowledge is adequate. Managers at each store will also have a conference call twice a week to talk about their store’s progress, some of the problems/issues and how they can be solved and about new promotions/policies.


Tang Lu (Theresa):

Professional Development in KFC

According to the thesaurus of the Educational Resources Information Center (ERIC) database, professional development refers to "activities to enhance professional career growth." Such activities may include individual development, continuing education, and inservice education, as well as curriculum writing, peer collaboration, study groups, and peer coaching or mentoring."Fullan (1991) expands the definition to include "the sum total of formal and informal learning experiences throughout one's career from preservice teacher education to retirement"

To be exactly, whether an organization can become a learning organization or not depends on one important feather: not just a factory that brings along profits but also a place to produce "educated" employees. KFC is an organization do not emphasize on employees' previous education background, for in KFC the opportunities of gaining reeducation are countless. Before-work training, continuing education, and other cultivation

Before-work training maybe is not that special from other organization but the continuing education is well worth mentioning. Everyone through this kind of training can get promotion as long as you put an effort to practice what you have learn at work.

And KFC is also care about employees' other development for personal interest which is one of the parts that I recommended with my full heart. KFC will provide time and place for employers to enhance their personal interest and even will held contest to inspire them to continue developing.

Qi Yang (Carol):

IKEA's vision to create a better everyday life for the many people extends to the many co-workers within its own IKEA organization. To cultivate professional development in the organization, it sets up various programs and provides extend opportunities for personal growth. Lifelong learning becomes common in the organization. In previous period, mentoring helped to develop expert growth by promoting an individual’s awareness and refinement of his or her own professional development via providing and recommending structured opportunities for reflection and observation. Recently it set up new strategies for professional development.

For example, IKEA boasts an annual, “Learning & Development” program guide for each of their workers which includes over 45 training opportunities from in-store training, national training and specialized workshops which are intended to help develop job competence, management skills and encourage the career goals and leadership abilities of their staff. Through Learning & Development, IKEA can provide opportunities for both personal and professional development so that the co-workers are equipped to confidently contribute to the realization of IKEA's vision and business objectives with passion and a strong sense of personal commitment. IKEA also offers significant tuition reimbursement for any courses that employees might take that relates to their career endeavors at IKEA. Such as opportunities to expand their professional development by working on one of several expansion projects such as new store build-ups and store re-locations. Co-workers on these teams gain leadership skills, knowledge and experience critical for their next career advancement within IKEA. Furthermore, it provides co-workers with the opportunity for young co-workers to travel for a year and work alongside an experienced mentor in different store locations around the world.

Strategies to encourage change: The sources of IKEA’s successful entry into the furniture retail business were IKEA’s low prices and resilience. The forces that are driving changes in the industry is that IKEA helped shape the postwar household by offering new furniture styles at a very reasonable price. With low costs came a new innovative style and a comfortable atmosphere to shop in. From its beginnings, the company concentrated on continuous cost reduction in a way that elevated it almost to an art form. But later, facing rising prices and a global recession that hit its core markets (new homeowners and middle-class consumers) especially hard, IKEA set out on a new strategic: to offer even lower prices to consumers, while positioning itself for long-term growth. It accomplished this through the simplest of methods: focusing relentlessly on separating “good costs” (productive investments) from “bad costs” (unnecessary expenses). Beside this, setting up food retailer and restaurant, taking sustainability issue into consideration are other strategies to innovate.

When look into leadership factor, it is obvious that the leader played a significant role in the development of IKEA. His focus is not on profit alone, but improving the quality of life of the people. He is seen as a visionary – someone that has forever changed consumer needs and caused a structural shift in the furniture retailing industry altogether. Furthermore, he always remained an integral part of the company’s development. 

Yike Wang (Daisy)

Professional development in Wal-Mart company.

   Wal-Mart came to China in 1996, and as an outstanding corporate citizen, Wal-Mart actively gives back to the community and has donated funds and in-kind support to local charities and welfare organizations. Wal-Mart bring advanced retail know-how to the local markets and by fostering a healthy, competitive environment, they hope to constantly improve their business operations and customer service in order to contribute to the prosperity of the local economy.

  Wal-Mart family believes in local procurement and they recognized that by purchasing quality products, they can offer more job opportunities, support local manufacturing and economic development. They can establish partnership with nearly 20,000 suppliers in China locally. And at Wal-Mart, they can always work with their suppliers to grow together. Because of that, Wal-Mart ranked first across several supplier satisfaction indexes.