Analysis of a Checker at Safeway PDF

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This is the final essay/project in the class, where you use industrial psychology to analyze a specific position at an occupation and determine how to make it more run more efficiently....

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Dyquisto 1 Devin Dyquisto PSY 361 29 November 2018 Analysis of a Checker at Safeway A. Description For my analysis paper I decided to cover the organization of Safeway. I chose this organization because it is the organization that I currently work at, and because for my research I was able to interview someone on the inside (my former boss [she just quit] and an employee with the job I’m covering). To go more specific on my analysis, I focused on being a checker/cashier at Safeway. In order to get data for this part of the project, I interviewed one of my coworkers, a checker at Safeway named Daniel, and I interviewed my former boss and former service operation manager [adjacent (technically she was the service operation manager when the main one had the day off)] Rachel. I also have my own observations from working at the Safeway on Woodstock for almost a year and a half now. There were multiple symptoms that the two of them could come up with being problems at Safeway. The first that came to mind was high turnover. Checkers at Safeway do not usually stay for too long. There are of course exceptions, but a majority of the checkers are constantly changing. In my own observations, there is usually a new checker every week or two, and about as often, an old checker quits their job. Both also agreed that lack of managerial assistance was a major issue. Managers aren’t always there to help employees do what needs to be done. Whether this is running the frontend efficiently (few people in lines) or helping when called (response time). Management also does not help the checkers get acclimatized to their job when they are new employees (I will dive

Dyquisto 2 further into this in the training section). The final point brought up by Daniel was he feels like checkers aren’t often or even ever heard. This can be best described by the constant lack of employees at the store. Understaffing is a major issue, and sometimes arises complaints from customers. Checkers often complain to management and the higher-ups within the store to have more help during the day, but the call for help is mostly ignored. This lack of hearing could also be present when checkers ask for their scheduled breaks at the two-hour mark. Daniel mentioned how many times he has gone to break late by more than twenty minutes even when he mentioned to the management that his break was coming up and that they should have someone ready to cover him while he’s gone. B. Diagnosis and Prescription 1. Job Analysis: Diagnosis and Prescription O*NET describes the checker/cashier as having five main tasks (as well as twenty-four other secondary tasks). They: receive payment, answer customer questions, help find products for customers, give customers receipts/change, and greet customers. Checkers have certain KSAOs that they need to do. They need to know how to properly service a customer. This can include but is not limited to servicing their needs. They need the skills that come with a service orientation in order to help said customers. This includes active listening and social perceptiveness. They need to have the ability to speak and listen in order to fulfill their skills. And generally, they need to be okay with working with people all day. Observation is one of the key ways new checkers learn how to do their job properly. This part of the organization is fine. Checkers at Safeway understand how to do their job and do their job at an adequate level. One issue could potentially be internal equity. The job of a checker is a (for the most part) minimum wage paying job. The feeling of fairness of pay might be unfelt by most

Dyquisto 3 employees because they all make the same amount of money for differing amounts of work. This could lead to one of the problems I mentioned earlier: high turnover. In order to solve this problem, incentives could potentially be added if a checker is doing a fantastic job (will expand on in the next section). An unfair balance of pay to effort ratio can lead to people leaving the job for a new, less work intensive or higher paying job. Compensable factors can also be an issue when dealing with pay. The working conditions at Safeway are sometimes more stressful than necessary. As Daniel mentioned and I relayed earlier, one of the main issues he has is not being heard, which when you breakdown is mainly an issue to him because of understaffing. With an understaffed workforce, the compensable factor of working conditions goes significantly lower compared to what it should be normally. This can be fixed with a solution of proper staffing. In order to properly staff the store, budget cuts would most likely need to be made somewhere else. This could potentially be done on the hours of higher earning employees. As I mentioned earlier, not all checkers make the same amount (minimum wage). Some have been at the store for longer or have worked in the field in general longer. These people are making the most money. These people also work the most hours. With a system restructure of hour distribution, there can be more staff available at one time. This also would apply to managerial hours. At times there are two or three managers at the frontend compared to two or three checkers. Being higher up on the pay ladder, managers make more money. If only a manger or two were working at one time, then there could be more checkers (because they make less money) on the floor at once. This system of putting more on less managers could lead to further problems, but it might also solve the issue that calls for more assistance. 2. Criterion Measurement and Performance Appraisal: Diagnosis and Prescription

Dyquisto 4 According to Rachel, the former service operation manager (adjacent), there is no system of performance appraisals for individual checkers, but there is a store appraisal and managerial appraisal approximately yearly. One of the main reasons for performance appraisals is for developmental purposes. Employees cannot prove to management that they are in fact performing better than their pay grade unless there is a proper performance appraisal system in place. The rating source should come from managers because we do not have to deal with the issue of the manager and employee working in different locations. Both the manager and checkers work in the frontend (or at least the frontend manager and even sometimes the store director) allowing for plenty of view of the employee. Performance appraisals are especially important because of what I mentioned earlier. Solving the problem of internal equity could be resolved with pay incentives leading to less turnover. If there are incentives provided with higher quality work, then a checker cannot feel like they are performing too well for the amount of pay they are receiving. Instead, they will receive pay bonuses if they are in fact going above and beyond in their performance. This could be interpreted in multiple different ways. Since above and beyond is an unknown factor, we will break it down into a couple of definable terms. If an employee receives a positive customer rating, this can be assessed as something above and beyond, leading to an incentive. Customers can be a relevant source of performance information according to the rating source slide on customers. Currently there is no system to reward people for a positive survey from the customers (technically there is, but it is not implemented). But we want to avoid checkers badgering customers for surveys because that is something that could possibly irritate the customer and have them not comeback to the store. The best way to determine positive performance would be to use an absolute appraisal scale. If we judge based on a pre-established criterion, then the checkers know what they are being judged against. If the

Dyquisto 5 checkers know what they’re being judged against, this allows them to know where to adjust their performance. If they are performing highly on the checking speed, but lower on customer service/interaction, then they know that they need to improve their relations with the customers. But the main reason I think that an absolute appraisal scale is better than a relative appraisal scale is because then we are not pitting employees against each other. Competition can potentially lead to higher results, but it could also lead to higher turnover, and that is the current problem we’re trying to fix. Adding undue stressors to a job is something we would want to avoid. Competition amongst employees could lead to undue stress when we only want to insert bi-weekly performance appraisals in order to develop the work staff. 3. Selection: Diagnosis and Prescription The current process for being a checker at Safeway is “anyone with a pulse” according to Rachel. This selection process (or rather lack thereof) is something to feeds into having high turnover at the job. The store constantly needs to hire new checkers to replace the old-new checkers that quit because the selection process is non-existent. While this is one of the smaller steps in dealing with the main problem (I believe that we can fix the system around the other parts over being too narrow with the selection), it does contribute to the problem. One solution here would be to give out a personality test specifically looking for one of the big five personality type, extraversion. Extraversion includes being sociable which is a good predictor of performance for sales. Hiring the wrong type of people to work as checkers will inevitably lead to turnover. The selection process needs to be a little stricter than just everyone. This is why I think a personality assessment would be rather helpful to include before handing out the job. Another factor we might want to look for is the adaptability personality construct. Being able to adjust to new situations is important for any job dealing with people. We would want the

Dyquisto 6 checkers to be able to handle any variety of situations that may come up. If their personality construct is not one that blends with being adaptable, then they are more likely to fail and thus will want to quit, leading to our issue of high turnover. This second personality construct also deals with our problem of lack of management assistance. An adaptable employee can most likely figure out how to handle a situation on their own, or if they cannot, they will adjust better to the situation, stalling enough for a manager to come help. While we are not directly dealing with the lack of management assistance problem, we are addressing the symptom and taking the proverbial medicine to temper its effects. 4. Training: Diagnosis and Prescription. Currently the training for a checker at Safeway is limited to minimal training. The standard is four hours on a computer, then the management throws the new employee onto the floor and into the action. This style of on the job training is usually quickly abandoned and the new employee is left to fend for themselves. This current system forces the new employee into a situation where they are unsure of what to do when faced with a new situation and thus, they need to call for management assistance often. This is an issue when one of our symptoms we mentioned earlier is the lack of management assistance. The new employee being thrust into an unknown situation will more than likely create undue stress and could lead to our symptom of high turnover. But we can fix this if we fix the training system. I purpose a machine simulator style of training. With this style of training, we can throw the new employee into a situation that reflects the job they are going to have to perform, but with a controllable aspect. This is the best way to teach new employees on how to deal with potentially scary and unknown situations. If our new employee is properly trained in this manner, then when they actually start working the real job with uncontrollable factors in play, they will be more likely to handle the situations

Dyquisto 7 correctly. This system of training could be a short run through which replaces the on the job training aspect that is already in place. The controllable situations we throw the new employee into within our machine simulator training style can help our new employee if and when they face similar problematic situations on the job. This is why I believe that while selection is important, for this job if we have a proper training method, then poor selection processes/availability selection will matter less. This training method would most likely last a couple of days at the most. Within this time frame we could go over all of the potential uncontrollable situations in a controllable environment with help present at all times. C. Action I would implement my suggestions through an overhaul of the scheduling system, an addition of bi-weekly performance meetings, and a simulation training course. The main issues found through my observations and interviews were that of turnover rates, lack of management assistance, and the feeling of not being heard. With an overhaul of the current scheduling system, there would be more help at any given time, leading to a less stressful work environment. This less stressful work environment would hopefully lead to less turnover as checkers would have less reason to be unhappy with their job because of the addition of too much work to pay. This would also help a lot with the issue of employees feeling like their voices are not being heard when they complain about too little assistance. There would of course be issues, one being that in order to have more people on the job at once to calm the busyness down, higher paid checkers and managers would have to get their hours cut. Essentially, we’d be using the money saved from giving higher paid people less to have more workforce on the daily. This would run into issues against the people we are removing hours from. It is very possible that with the cut in work, these people would have to find a second job, or could end up leaving the company

Dyquisto 8 altogether. The latter seems less likely since they would still most likely be making more money working for us than working solely at a new job, but the added stress of a second job would be an unfortunate side-effect of trying to solve one of our main problems. An addition of bi-weekly performance checks would allow for us to implement an incentives system. This is my main plan for dealing with turnover. Fairness will be dealt with as checkers can earn additional money/rewards for higher performance. This gives reason for employees to work hard every shift and for them to not want to leave their jobs. With a system in place that provides rewards for good work, the feeling of satisfaction within an employee should be higher after they receive a positive review. A challenge here could be that this system also creates high turnover potentially for those that score low on the performance appraisal. Those that do not perform well might want to leave/quit because they now having negative associations with the job and feelings of judgement from their superiors/peers. It is also possible that we could run into the issue of division in the breakroom over who performed the best versus who performed poorly. This system could introduce a competitive aspect into the workplace which can have both good and bad outcomes. It would be good if the competition made employees want to perform better in order to win at the competition, but it could also be bad if the competition cast on by fellow employees made some people feel bad about themselves. The reoccurring issue with performance appraisals seems to be potential negative affect. It is impossible to tell whether or not this would be true for all employees or even a fair number of poorly performing employees. The last addition of a simulation training course deals with the problem of little to no training being given currently. While on the job training is a style of training, it once again causes high turnover to just throw employees out into the real-world situation when they are not

Dyquisto 9 properly equipped to handle it. Poor management assistance will not be an issue (or symptom) if the checkers are already properly trained to handle situations by the time they hit the floor. Rowdy customers can be the hardest part of the job, especially for newer employees who do not know how to handle the situation because it was not talked about in their limited training time. My solution is to lengthen that training time and make it slightly more intensive, but in a controlled environment. The main problem with on the job training is that the environment in which the new employee is thrown is an unknown uncontrollable potential catastrophe waiting to happen. Some customers are rowdier than others and if that type of abrasive personality meets up with a newer employee who doesn’t know how to solve all/any of the problems stated by the rowdier customer, then we run into an issue where once again negative affect is felt by the employee leading to a possible scenario where they do not return to work. In a job simulation course, a rowdy customer with an unknown situation can be applied in a controlled environment for the new employee to deal with. Now, if the new employee does not handle the situation immediately the best way possible (leading to rowdier responses), an intervention can be added to help out the new worker. The biggest issue with this however is the money. A job simulation course would be a more expensive method of training over just having the employee start working right away and training them on the job. While the employee would be better trained with our new method/system, the additional cost might be too much for the organization to want to provide. Additional costs here include hours for training the new employee and a manager to oversee the new employee, confederates to enact a controlled chaotic situation, and not having the new employee on the job immediately and instead having to pay someone else to work a shift that could have been spent on the job training the new employee.

Dyquisto 10

Checklist for Paper Check each item below and sign. Did you:

_X_ Follow the proper structure of the paper, using the appropriate headings AND subheadings as described in the instructions?

_X_ Apply specific concepts, theories, etc. from the book and from the lectures?

_X_ Italicize key concepts and theories?

_X_ Number the pages?

_X_ Check to be sure that the paper is the appropriate length? (3000-4500 words). How many words are in your paper? _______3042________ words.

_X_ Use your own words in the paper?

____Devin Dyquisto____ Student Printed Name...