Below are the details related to the job description and Person specification required for us to recruit customer service assistant.
Job Description
Post for the job is Customer Service Assistant at out super market retail stores. The duties involve assisting the customers with the goods they want to purchase and helping them in picking the goods. The core responsibility of the Customer Service assistant is to be vigilant on the latest rules and regulation of the sales in the supermarket and should try the best possible effort to increase the business and convince the customers to shop more and more.
Person Specification
A person applying for this job should be very interactive and should have good inter-personal skills. Communication skills need to be very good, with proper command in English language. The style of communication should be polite and kind. Personality wise, good-looking candidates would be preferred, as they can help the brand of the supermarket look better. The selection process should involve testing the convincing ability of a person. Moreover, the person should be having a good idea of selling products with a sound knowledge of products sold by the supermarket. However, education is not a necessary constraint for the job, but the applying candidate should have completed basic education successfully. In addition to that, those candidates could be preferred who are having better grades in English and Mathematics in basic schooling. These are a few important points which need to be considered while recruiting the Customer Service Assistants for our supermarkets (Bowen, 1986).
Read solution of Unit 16 understanding specific needs in HSC
The selection process needs to be compliant with all the legislative norms set down by the Government of England. While recruiting the Customer Service Assistant, we should make sure that there should not be any discrimination based on cast, creed, colour, religion or sex. Legally, the interview should not include objectionable question related to the above mentioned parameters. Moreover, the job offering and the wage setting should be purely based on capability and skills of the potential employee to be recruited. For example, there should not be different wages for males and females doing same amount and kind of work. However, being good-looking could be an asset for a candidate to be hired for the job of Customer Service Assistant, as that would naturally attract the customers to the store and take assistance from them. One more aspect is that the selection process should be very clean and clear, and the interview panel should contain any individual who has any blood relation with the candidate to be interviewed. This is just one additional step that ensures transparency of the process. There should be proper background checking of the candidates for any kind of misbehaviours or criminal records in the past, as that could impact the image of our supermarket chain. Ethically, there should be no discrimination of colour and religion while considering any candidate for the job and everybody should be given equal opportunity so that fairness is maintained. These are the legal and ethical points that needs to be considered while going ahead with the selection process (Carroll, 1999).
Get Unit 4 personal and professional development in HSC Assignment
The stages processes and methods that would be involved in the selection process are enumerated below:
Invitation of Applications
Firstly, the job description and other details need to be notified, in order to get the applicants applying for the job. The application would include all the basic details of an individual, education details of an individuals and the experience declaration.
High-level Screening of Applicants
In our scenario, we are looking to induct 20 Customer Service Assistants for various supermarkets around London. Favourably, we would like to have 40 to 50 applicants to be shortlisted for the personal interview. Thus, this phase is very crucial if we get more than the anticipated number of applications. The prescribed process would have the short-listing of candidates according to the data provided the application forms. The prioritized criteria for short-listing the candidates would be experience, academic record to some extent and a few other random factors. After that, the candidates can be further short-listed by organizing a short interaction of 2 minutes with the candidates where they can be asked to give demonstration of how to interact with a customer while trying to convince the customer for a certain product.
Personal Interview
Personal Interview could be taken for 40 to 50 employees to check their communication skills. The panel would include myself along with a couple of senior store managers. Interpersonal skills, convincing power and personality assessment should be criteria for judging the candidate through the interview (Gerber, 1995).
It is very important for an HR manager to monitor the whole selection process and make sure that the process should go very fair and ethical. One very important aspect is that the candidates to be recruited have to ultimately work under the store managers at real time. So, as an Human Resource manager, it would be very crucial for me to interact with various store managers and ask them the exact expectations they have from the candidates to be recruited. Moreover, the selection process should be very streamlines and I have to make sure there is no discrimination of cast, colour, race, religion or sex. One more aspect to ensure the ethic factor of the process is to have a proper monitoring on the short-listing of candidate applications. Every application that would be rejected by the panel should be marked with a proper reason. It is the responsibility of the head of the process that there should not be any question on ethic factor of the process. At last, I will be included in the panel who would take the final personal interviews of the shortlisted candidates. The personal interview would be very fair and the needs of the store managers would be considered till great extent. These are some of my responsibility as an HR manager of the selection process (Sparrow, 2007).
Get solution of Unit 22 Managing Human Resource Assignment
There are various skills and attribute that are required by somebody to be a good leader. The work ethic is of most importance, as the leader should complete his work with a good ethic and perfection, which drives the people under them to work harder. Leading by example is very important for a leader to motivate the team to work hard. Other attributes are honestly and fairness. Honesty and fairness induces good work culture among the team members. If a leader is fair, the work environment becomes very much relaxed and lot of complexities like job dissatisfaction among the employees can be nullified. Honesty of a leader drives the employees to work in an honest and fair manner as well. Communication skills are also a bit asset to a leader. Whatever direction he wants his employees to follow, need to be communicated very effectively. Character of a leader can tested at the times of crisis and a leader should keep his head cool and calm at the time of any problem. This not only helps in dealing with adverse situations, but also the trust factor rises among the employees for their leader, which in turn improves the work environment. These are a few skills and attributes a good leader need to have (Hughes, 1996).
Leadership and management have a few differences tactically. However, both also go hand in hand, as to be an effective leader, one needs to have good managerial skills. Similarly, being a good leader can contribute to being a very good manager. Manager is more of a professional post than leader. Manager needs to be more tactical and precise as far as the goal of organizations is concerned. Manager works with authority can drive his team-mates in a professional way without being indulging in their work too much. The main concern for a manager is to make sure that each and every entity associated with the team gives perfect output. On the other hand, a leader is more bothered about each the way of performance of the team members apart from the output. A leader too has visionary aspects, as the character of a leader can be better judged at the conditions of crisis. It is the responsibility of a leader to drive his team through at the time of unfavourable conditions. A manager has got sub-ordinates in his team, who work towards a goal and it is the responsibility of a manager to facilitate everything for them, so that they can give maximum output. For a leader, the team-members are followers. They look up to their leader and a leader has a responsibility of leading by example. Thus, leadership and management are somewhat different to each other (Grint, 2002).
Get solution of Unit 15 Managing Business Activities
We have different leadership styles available for a leader for adjusting his approach. A great leader doesn’t stick to a set of plans while leading a team. They adjust according to the conditions. Out of various styles of leadership we would discuss three chief kinds of leaderships. Autocratic leadership, Democratic leadership and Laissez-faire style of leadership. A leader can use the suitable style during the tricky times like redundancy, dismissals, grievances and team building.
Autocratic style includes the leader taking all the decisions on its own without consulting anybody else in the team. However this might seem like a dictator-style leadership, but it has its utility at the conditions where a leader needs to dismiss an employee indulging in unethical stuff. At that time, one needs to be strong in order to hand over the dismissal.
Democratic style includes consulting others while making crucial decisions. Consulting team members before making decisions makes them feel important and increases their confidence. At the tricky times of redundancy and grievances, the decision related to stores which could impact the performance of the stores, it is important to take the view-point of the store managers in consideration. Thus, this type of leadership comes handy at these situations (Denmark, 1977).
Laissez-faire style of leadership includes giving proper freedom to the team members to set their goals and the approach they should follow to achieve the goals. This kind of leadership is very individual friendly, but lot of precautions needs to be taken care. The leader has to keep a track of how the performance is fairing and needs to take necessary action, whenever tis strategy backfires (Goodnight, 2004).
Being as HR Manager, it is important to keep the resources motivated by various means of motivation. Proper salary hike is a very important aspect on this. Salary hike should be kept good every year, whatever can be managed based on the performance of the organization. There should be proper monitoring of the performance evaluation of the employees and perks should be given to those who show good performance through a certain period of time. This not only is a boost to those who perform well, but also motivates other employees to do better. A few more ways are to give small level parties at the store level, if the store does well. This makes the employees believe that the top level hierarchy is very much interested in sharing the happiness. At store levels, we can also distribute gifts at a gathering to the best performers. Talking about the flip side of the coin, it is also important to motivate the staff at adverse conditions. By showing good intent towards problem solution, employees can feel upright and motivated. These are a few strategies that can be followed to keep the staff motivated (Lindner, 1998).
Teamwork is a very important parameter to work upon for any organization. Palms Holiday Park customer service staff also needs to culminate a good team work for the organization to grow faster. For our park, the whole customer service team has been divided into various smaller team. Some have the duty to facilitate the entrance. One team keeps the belongings of the customers safe. Another team is water sports management team. Adding to this we have housekeeping teams and the catering teams. Now, all in all, each and every team has to work properly in order to have a smooth complete functioning of the park. If catering team doesn’t do the business properly, then, it would have a bad impression on the customers. Now, the belongings management team also needs to be quick. Delay in checking and security have caused long queues at the entrance which has caused problems to the customer. This makes a very bad impression of us. Reception team also needs to increase the capacity to hold the tourists in large number, as sometimes we have flooding of customer and all the water parks are full. One more important thing is that we need to identify if a certain team requires more staff and we can transfer the staff from one team to another on demand basis. Interdependency of teams needs top identified clearly and the teams on which other teams depend need to be caution at times. Thus, team work is really important for any organization to successfully move towards its goal (Cohen, 1991).
See All St. Patrick's College Assignment
Dealing with difficult situations have always been a true test for a leader. It is very tricky to direct the team at adverse situations. But, but good vigilance and being calm at head solves the tricky problems. We would analyse the same with a few examples. There might be off seasons for the Palms Holiday Park, when the customers are lesser. In these scenarios a leader needs to be very tough towards the performance evaluation of the staff. The main reason behind this is that, at the off season time, the HR team of Palms Holiday Park identifies the surplus staff and terminates their services, as due to off season, all this surplus staff goes as unwanted expenditure for us. SO, in these conditions the leader has to be very vigilant through the work-around of the team members. Contrary to, this, at the times of peak customer invasion, sometimes small malfunctions result into bigger managerial problems. As a leader, it is very important to deal with these situations, as we have customer all around the world and any kind of malfunctions can spread a wrong word about our Holiday Park. We can take the example of large queues at the park entrance. This was really a problem for the customer in the hot summers, when they are trying to get into the park to get a break from the hot summer, and ultimately they end waiting in a long queue outside the park. We can solve this problem by increasing the number of in entrances and security check points. One more solution suggested for this, is to pre-entrance waiting halls. We can air-conditioned waiting halls before the entrance and only a certain number of customer could be allowed through it. Once the security check and entry of a particular batch is completed, we can send a new batch from there to the entry area. This can solve our problem to a great extent. We can even extend the catering team to the waiting area, so that some catering business also could take place around that area. Now, most importantly, there should be a good security inside the park. The customer service assistants the water park coaches should be trained enough to help in case of causalities. There should be a good ambulance service in case any emergency injuries happen, so that they can be treated as quickly as possible. As a team member, everyone needs to do their best at the time when there are plenty of customer (Stogdill, 1948). Being such a strongly marketed resort, we cannot afford to lose even one point on service catering. Thus, the leader needs to make sure that all the teams work perfectly in synchronization to each other and all the potential threats to the organization of event are taken care well before time. Even if there is some adverse condition, then the leader need to step up with cool head and get the problem solved.
As mentioned in the above sections all the smaller groups need to perform as per the desired agenda in order to execute the organizational goals to perfection. In case of the Palms holiday resort, everything needs to be in synchronization. Suppose, we have a long queue at the entrance of the park. This would not only cause the inconvenience to the customer, but also, it causes lack of coordination among two groups. In this scenario, we might end up with very less customer strength at the water park and resort area initially, which means the services would go under-utilized. After sometime, when the queue gets cleared up at the entrance, we can have the water park overloaded. This would cause insufficient service offered to the customers which would be there in large numbers. At the same time, we can have overloading of customers at the canteens as well. Thus, here in this incident, we can break the synch between multiple teams due to malfunctioning of just one team. Thus, the plans discussed above of dividing the work-force as per the needs at a certain time is a good idea for the Holiday Park management to adapt with. These points certainly contribute towards the proper functioning of customer service activities of the Park (Guzzo, 1995).
In the Palms Holiday Park, we also need to work-out for various business strategy and make plan the monitoring and assessment of the customer support assistants. Having said that, we have 18 permanent employees around the park with 30 employees who are hired temporarily during the peak season. In this condition, one important factor is to have a proper evaluation guidelines set for permanent employees and temporary employees. There should be provision for the temporary employees which perform exceptionally well. The provision should be to appoint them permanently, by which we can increase the work ethic among the temporary employees as well. The assessment system should be fair and equal for all. The challenges in front of the HR team to make the assessment rules fair is that, there is difference in the type of work that all the customer service assistants do. Some might be in the reception and entry. Some might be in catering section and others would be in Water Sports site. For effective evaluation, there should be a rotation policy in place for the customer service assistants, so that each and everyone gets equal opportunity at all places. Another factor is customer feedback. Any individual involved in business has to suffer, if he gets a bad feedback from the customer. Ultimately, the goal is to keep the customer happy, in order to have the business grow. High weightage needs to be given to an individual if he has managed to keep the customer satisfied. On the other hand, if any employee is involved in any kind of misbehaviour with any customer, he needs to be tackled properly or may be terminated from the service. Thirdly, the way any individual behaves in adverse conditions especially when there is a case of emergency involved should be given good points in the evaluation process. The performance of a customer service assistant in keeping the customer happy at the busy time of peak business should also be considered equally important. These are factors that would be involved in planning the assessment of work performance (Mobley, 1979).
In this section, we would discuss the stages and methodology that we will use for the assessment of the customer service assistants for Palms Holiday Park. Those are enumerated below:
Evaluation of individuals
Each and every individual should be evaluated for their performances. First parameter of this evaluation should be adherence to the goals of Palms Holiday Park, i.e., providing maximum satisfaction to the customer and making him feel his money worth. Secondly, the performance at the time of crisis or at the time of peak business also need to be considered for this. Thirdly, any personal appraisal that the individual would have got from the customer should be considered. Any negative feedback from the customer should also be considered as negative point for the evaluation and appropriate action should be taken for it.
Evaluation of teams
Proper evaluation of team should also be done to derive which team has been performing well and the team members should be awarded positive points for that. Also, the contribution of the individual towards the good performance of the team would also be given a proper weightage in this section. Similarly, if an individual has performed exceptionally well, but is not able to contribute to the team, then this would go down as a negative for him. Thus, the team work is of utter importance for the business to perform well.
High-level Evaluation
The ultimate goal of everything is to have a good business environment for the Palms Holiday Park. This evaluation is a high level evaluation which would just evaluate the business perspective of a particular team. If the business grows, then naturally the salary hike and other perks for the individual would be based on that (Eskildsen, 2000).
Based on the three parameters of evaluation, the customer service assistants should be put in certain evaluation levels like Excellent, Good, Average and Unsatisfactory. The further procedures regarding the salary hike and the promotions should be done based on the grades that the individuals get.
The performance evaluation process described above is properly justified by the fact that all three aspects that are associated with an individual being important to an organization are kept in mind. The individual performance is very important, because at the end of the day, it is the individual who is getting evaluated on certain aspects. For this, the most basic thing mentioned here is that the individual should go about his work in a conventional manner. The appreciation that one individual might get straight from the client as part of the feedback could be one very important aspect of evaluation. Another parameter of evaluation is also justified that we keep on pressing over the team work culture at the Palms Holiday Park and our priority is to make the teams perform well. In order to achieve that all the individual customer service assistants would like to contribute towards the team. Third parameter was business level performance. The organization has an ultimate goal to do business. So, it is fair enough to check how actions of an individual could help the business grow. An individual might be performing as per the expectations, also a team might be doing well, but if the business doesn’t grow even after this, the efforts are of no use to the business. Thus, all these three broadly categorized parameters that would be used to evaluate the performance of customer service assistants at Palms Holiday Park are rightly justified.
Click for St. Patrick College Assignment Help
Leadership and team work play a complementary role to each other in a business organization. We might be having various styles of leaderships, but after going through two case-studies we can presume that the style of leadership also need to be adapted according to the demand of the situations. Moreover, team work is also a key component of an organization doing well, because, if an individual performing exceptionally well could contribute to the team effort, his efforts are a waste as far as the goals of an organization is concerned. Thus, we should not only encourage the team work, but also, we can include this aspect while evaluating the performance of an employee, so that the next time every individual should also keep in mind the importance of team work.
No Data Found