Retail Sales Performance Management Essay

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Organizational Behavior

Job Description

An effective job description performs many functions -- attracting the right people, holding existing employees accountable to defined standards, and helping management structure the organization more effectively (Florentine, 2015). The job description for the sales associate needs to be aligned with the overall corporate objectives in order to be at its most effective. The overall objectives appear to be the simultaneous goals of increasing sales and increasing service. These are not necessarily mutually exclusive, because higher levels of service often result in more sales, but in retail the two can be mutually exclusive. Such a situation would arise in the case of the pushy salesperson more interesting in making a commission that meeting the needs of the customer. A job description should describe the position, and its role within the organization, not just a set list of tasks. The qualifications should actually align with the skills and attributes needed to perform the role effectively.

A sales associate plays a critical role in the store. The sales associate is the main point of contact with the customer and thus is the face of the organization. It is essential that the sales associate delivers the highest standard of service possible -- service is our calling card. We firmly believe that happy customers are going to be repeat customers, and this makes meeting customer needs essential. The sales associate will be responsible for greeting the customer, answering their questions, and for providing advice. Specific tasks will include ringing up sales, and interacting with customers on a near constant basis.

The key attributes that we look for in a sales associate are a dedication to customer service, excellent communication skills, trustworthiness, an ability to handle cash and credit transactions, a high level of product knowledge and a high energy level. Sales associates will be measured on customer satisfaction, on product knowledge, on attitude, and on sales. This represents a blend of subjective and objective measures, which reflects that sales associates not only need to generate results, but they need to impress people as well.

Organizational Behavior Modification Plan

There are four behaviors that are most important to the sales associate position. The first is attentiveness to the customer. This involves several facets -- ensuring that the sales reps are in communication with the customers, listening to customer needs, ensuring that they have access to change rooms, and ensuring that the staff are available to answer customer questions. The sales associates need to be able to do these things without complaint or any negativity. The second behavior is to have excellent communications skills -- in particular listening, advising and selling. These behaviors are required of the position, and the sales associate needs to know how and when to use them. A third behavior is hard work. This trait is important. When the sales associate is on the retail floor, they are there work towards meeting the customers' needs. The company receives complaints daily about associates who are inattentive, unavailable or otherwise distracted, and it is important that such incidents are eliminated. The fourth behavior is that the sales associate needs to be diligent in acquiring knowledge about the products. The sales associates should be able to dispense information and advice to customers -- this is part of the value-added service that our high-end store offers.

An organizational behavior modification program can ensure that these are the behavioral attributes demonstrated by our staff. An organizational behavioral modification plan is a plan to ensure that behaviors are aligned with the needs of the organization (Redmon, Mawhinney & Thomas, 2001). At this point, following the downsizing of a few years ago, there is the risk that behaviors of sales associates are not as closely aligned with the needs of the organization as management might prefer. Thus, a plan needs to be put into place to bring about that alignment.

Training is a key element of the plan. New sales associates will need to be indoctrinated with a comprehensive training program to shows them what is required of one of or sales reps. Moreover, the existing sales associates should also receive remedial training to ensure that they are aware of the standards the company expects to uphold. Further, this training should involve an element of benchmarking. Because a lot of the sales associate role involves soft skills that are difficult to quantify, the best way to ensure that the reps know what is expected of them is if they can see it for themselves.

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This might require the use of videos or scenario presentations, but having benchmarks is going to be important to sales associates understanding what the service levels we expect actually look like.

The company will also need to communicate to employees about the performance standard and their performance. . Regular performance reviews are one means, but they are usually only performance quarterly or semi-annually. The reality is that feedback should be organized, but more frequent, in order to correct behavior quickly. However, output results in sales and service can vary daily, so a balance must be struck between measures that are both timely and meaningful. SO in addition to performance reviews, management should provide information feedback to the sales associates, to ensure that there is a clear flow of communication and that any undesirable behavior can be corrected as quickly as possible.

The plan will benefit the organization because it will more closely align the role of the sales associate with the objectives of the organization. The strategy is to win repeat customers with excellent customer service, so if the staff are trained and motivated to deliver exceptional service then they will be able to help the organization to meet its objectives.

Measurements

There are basically two components to measurement -- inputs and outputs. Ideally, the organization will be able to measure both. Outputs in those are fairly easy to measure objectively -- sales and customer satisfaction are the big ones. But inputs, and subjective soft skills measurements are more difficult. Yet, they are critical -- if sales are below expectations, it is important for management to understand why, and soft skills affect so many aspects of the organization (Adler, 2015). Personality tests can provide some indication as to what types of soft skills a candidate might have. Interviewers can be trained to identify specific soft skills, but in that type of setting it is difficult to evaluated such things effectively. Still, if effective measures for things like listening, communications and work ethic can be identified, the company will be in better shape (Heckman & Kautz, 2012). Customer satisfaction scores and sales will definitely be used, but as both are output measure they have to be balanced by a variety input measures, even if those end up being subjective.

The performance management system will reflect the challenges associated with measuring soft skills. It will inevitably be weighted towards measurable outcomes. However, another measure can be how well the sales associate adheres to the best practices. In order to improve the overall performance of the sales associates, they will be benchmarked against the top performers. This can be done in checklist format to identify the degree to which the candidate meets expectations with respect to the benchmarks. Even if the objective measures are used in the course of the formal performance evaluation, the subjective measures will shine line on the causal factors that underlie performance. It is possible, once there are evaluations from hundreds of employees and evaluation periods, that the company will be able to accurately identify the types of performance that are correlated with outcome success. Gathering and processing this data will help managers to understand the inputs that contribute to the desired outputs.

It is important to think creatively, and use the data that the company has. For example, extensive customer data is recorded. If a customer deals with a sales associate, and then returns for another purchase, that is a positive thing, but if that customer never returns it is a negative thing. Over a large enough sample size, such a metric should be useful and would help identify situations where a rep is getting a lot of sales, but mostly to customers who never come back, which might indicate a hard sell approach that works in the short run but ultimately drives the customer somewhere else.

Ethical and Legal Issues

The first issue of legal caution is that a company is recommended to use objective measures only in the performance evaluation. This is an important defense, as it allows the company to demonstrate that an employee has been terminated for cause, which helps defend against discrimination in the workplace. Objective measures are a defense against that major legal issue. Further, there are difficulties implementing subjective measures because it opens the door for bias, which even when it is not a legal issue is often an ethical issue. Subjective measures should only be used to diagnose underlying factors, and used as part of the remedial organizational.....

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