Answer 1
The strategic goal of Cadet Uniform Service is to deliver exceptional customer service through total quality management, customer satisfaction and employee entrepreneurship. The company uses the slogan of “doing the job right the first time, every time” to create a psychological impact on employees about understanding customer needs, demands and expectations. Since the exceptional quality is linked with high levels of employee motivation and job commitment, the cleaning company aligns its HR functions such as hiring, training & development, employee success and retention, compensation and rewards with its strategic goal of total quality service. For example, the company adopts ‘focused shared hiring’ strategy for selection of customer service representations (CSRs) in which the existing team members extensively evaluate operational / technical skills, qualifications, teamwork commitment, entrepreneurial guts, and desire for quality of potential CSRs. The purpose is to induct right employees for the right job with right commitment to avoid turnovers and ensure high success rates.
Secondly, Cadet uses its Education Centre and Quality Awareness Board for employee trainings to increase quality knowledge and commitment. In addition, the firm also encourages external education and provides financial assistance for such pursuits so that the existing workers could present and share the usage of newly acquired knowledge in efficient use of resources and job success. Error Cause Removal form is used for operational efficiency improvement coupled with use of 47-step checklist to generate customized quality focused program for each customer.
Thirdly, the employee compensation is directly tied to customer satisfaction by offering higher salary and bonuses. Hence, the positive customer feedback and retention would lead to higher monetary income, while the negative translates into opposite consequences. Cadet has developed a culture of shared values and quality focus combined with genuine empowerment at job; therefore, the workers remain highly motivated with phenomenal success rate and thus make very high incomes. Nonetheless, Cadet uses its pay scale as a motivational strategy to maintain quality standards and retention of customers. Finally, the non-monetary incentives such as display of quality awards received by team members for recognition, work flexibility through employee control over work environment and stupendous employee autonomy are offered for accomplishment of strategic objectives.
Answer 2
Cadet motivates its employees through monetary and non-monetary benefits that support one another. The compensation and reward system is design on the basis of customer satisfaction, loyalty and retention rates to enhance average sales volume per employee. In addition, the workers are given substantial autonomy and authority on how to best serve any customer with optimal quality by utilizing company resources (Ahearne, Mathieu and Rapp, 2005). The strategic planners at Cadet stress that the employee empowerment and decision-making authority is a subset of employee entrepreneurship. For instance, the employees are permitted to design their own routes and manage customer accounts to showcase their entrepreneurial guts. The strategies implemented by Cadet have resulted into doubled sales revenue against industry average and subsequently double employee earnings respectively as compared to counterparts in other industries. The aforementioned is an evidence of high level of employee motivation, satisfaction, morale, commitment and trust on employers. The defect, misplacement and loss annual percentage of uniforms is extremely low (less than 1%), which validates the fact that employees have successfully developed a fool proof system based on principles of total quality management. Lastly, the company success also becomes evident from below 7% employee turnovers because employees prefer to stay due to salaries double the industry average.
Answer 3
The first advantage of linking employee compensation with customer satisfaction is that employees portray their peak performance and develop a customized quality approach to meet and exceed work expectations of every customer. In other words, employees emphasize the need of understanding their customers better than their competitors to secure business. Resultantly, the superior quality level creates a positive reputation and enhances goodwill in the market; thus building a competitive advantage due to productive efficiencies, low defect percentage and cost effectiveness. The second benefit is focus on customer retention because every lost customer means a reduction in salary and associated incentives. Employees focus on developing a loyal customer base to secure existing business and to create a positive word-of-mouth for new developments. The third advantage is substantial business development and growth because employees intend to make new customers in anticipation of higher salaries, non-monetary benefits and promotions.
A disadvantage of linking compensation system with customer satisfaction is that the employees may feel pressurized and psychologically burdened due to work pressure and business targets that may affect their performance, customer satisfaction and overall pay scale. Next, if an employee fails to accomplish desired performance goals despite reasonable efforts even then the reward system does not ensure reasonable salaries and pay due to targets issues and failures. Consequently, the above reward system may demoralize employees and thus lead to adverse consequences in difficult markets and working conditions during recession and stagnant economic growth periods.
Answer 4
A critical situation and challenge for Cadet is to ensure new employees demonstrate the same dedication to service and receive the same level of job satisfaction in the face of rapid expansion and increased competition. For this purpose, the author would like to recommend Cadet’s strategic policy-makers to continue their stringent shared hiring and selection practices for induction of exceptionally energetic and bold employees who could accomplish SMART (specific, measurable, attainable, result-oriented and time-bound) goals. Furthermore, the company could align its new workforce with existing experienced workers in a 1:3 ratio (a team of four) i.e. one new employee will work in a team with three existing members so that he or she could grasp quality standards, system requirements, corporate values and performance expectations of both employers and customers. Next, the cleaning business has to develop an extended version of formal training program of 6 – 12 months for newly selected “Trainee Customer Representatives” (TSR) who will be promoted to next level “Customer Services Representatives” (CSR) after depicting the desired job satisfaction, dedication, commitment and performance orientation.
References
Ahearne, Michael; Mathieu, John & Rapp, Adam (2005). To Empower or Not to Empower Your Sales Force? An Empirical Examination of the Influence of Leadership Empowerment Behavior on Customer Satisfaction and Performance. Journal of Applied Psychology, Vol 90 (5), pp. 945-955
