What learning techniques do these companies share? How are they different?

What are the learning techniques which you believe make them effective.

Compare and contrast these techniques with the ones currently in use at your workplace. What recommendations could you make to your present manager to improve employee learning?

PROFILES:

Costco - Many executives think shareholders are best served if they do all they can to hold down costs, including the costs of labor. Costco’s approach is different, in terms employees are treated. Sinegal says, “Paying high wages – absolutely makes good business sense. Most people agree that we’re the lowest cost provider. Yet we pay the highest wages. So it must mean we get better productivity. It’s axiomatic in our business – you get what you pay for.”

UPS – Service providers are trained to perform their tasks over and over again without wasted effort. There are five habits while driving so make everything efficient especially while delivering packages, being observed or evaluated by their supervisors they effectively get rewarded with t-shirts, free lunches, and the like. UPS give its supervisor’s personal digital assistants (PDAs) to use in road evaluations or sometimes they ride along to observe if the service provider is following procedures and adhering to our health and safety policies.

JC Penney – In an effort to cut down unscheduled absenteeism, JC Penney implemented a program that is staffed by a team of employees to work on this problem. If an employee is sick and cannot come to work for more than three days, the employees must call Penney’s Power Line team. The team determines the type of benefit, if any, the employee can receive. The team notifies the leader of the department where the employee works and sends the employee the necessary forms to complete. The Power Line team follows up with absent employees until they return to work. The Power Line team also discovered that only a third of all absences were related to an illness. The rest of the times absences were related to having to be somewhere else or the individual just didn’t feel like going to work. They also found that authoritarian leaders who make employees feel it’s “their way or the highway” created more absences than leaders who make employees feel important.

Steelcase Inc. – Team members are cross-trained, as time permits, during their regular shifts. Often team members stay after their shifts to watch how other employees perform certain operations. When Steelcase’s leaders decided to create teams and empower its employees, it realized that barriers between workers and leaders would have to be removed. As a result, only customers now have reserved parking spaces. Whenever new equipment is needed, a team of employees who are responsible for running the equipment make the decision about what to buy and how it should be installed on the shop floor. Steel case’s workers are 45 percent more productive than its competitors, turning a customer’s order into a finished product in three days instead of three weeks, thus reducing costs. Team of employees working with suppliers have cut raw material inventory by half.