assignment on Joyful Bakers Company

Needs Assessment in Joyful Bakers Company

Needs Assessment in Joyful Bakers Company

Introduction of the Problem/Issue

It is important for every organization to conduct training and development programs so as to ensure the employees and managers are well equipped with the necessary skills to perform their job effectively and efficiently. Surprisingly, the success of a training and development program cannot be realized if a need assessment is not done. Therefore, a needs assessment is crucial in designing a training and development program because it is the backbone for the entire training program (Ho et al., 2018). For the past few months, we have been experiencing lots of challenges with the employees in our company. Most of them have registered high levels of job dissatisfaction, and therefore, they are performing poorly. As a result, we have realized sever accidents within the work premises. For incident, within last week two of our employees sustained major injuries while operating the baking machines. Therefore, the management came up with a committee to ascertain the deficiency in the performance of the employees.

The Need Assessment

While conducting the needs assessment, it is important to analyze the three areas of the organization. The three levels of analysis include organizational analysis, individual/person analysis, and task analysis. Analyzing these three parts will help us understand how to align the organizational goals to the training program. Also, the analysis would help us come up with the right people for the training program. Lastly, it would help focus on the relevant tasks and skills during the training.

Organizational analysis is done to align the training program to the business goals. It is pointless to invest in an employee training program every year without aligning the program to the organizational goals. It is impossible to ascertain whether the training is needed without knowing the organizational goals (Tourani et al., 2020). Therefore, we need to understand the organizational goals before venturing into the training program.

At Joyful Bakers, our main goal is to provide the best products to our clients to enhance their customer experience. Additionally, we aim to ensure our employees are safe and secure from any hazards. Therefore, with a competent, healthy, and safe workforce, maximizing a positive customer experience is possible. From the analysis, it is evident that the employees are not safe since some are prone to machine accidents. Therefore, we need to conduct a refresher training to help the employees understand how to operate these machines. We also need to train employees on the importance of wearing their protective gear at all times, especially in the production department.

An individual analysis is crucial because it helps understand how employees perform their jobs. It makes it easier to determine the difference between the actual and expected results, which forms the basis of the training need (Hyasat et., 2022). From this analysis, it was evident that most employees were lagging behind on how to operate the new baking machine, especially the new employees. Some employees were also negligent in wearing their protective gear, especially when operating the machines. As a result, they got hurt in the process. Therefore, we would train the entire production department because they were the most affected individuals in terms of operating the new baking machine.

Task analysis evaluates the skills and knowledge required to perform specific jobs and tasks. Therefore, it is easier to ascertain the training needs from the gaps revealed from the task analysis. While assessing how different jobs are done, we identified that most of the employees in the production department were not aware of how to operate the new machine effectively. Also, some of them were not equipped that the protective gear forms part of the requirement for this particular task. Therefore, we would conduct training that focuses on the technical skills and knowledge in this area of operation.

Methods of Conducting the Assessment

We would use data collection methods such as questionnaires, interviews, and observations for the assessment.

Questionnaires

Questionnaires would be anonymous-oriented to allow each person to give his or her ideas without the fear of being identified. Therefore, we decided to administer questionnaires with fifteen open-ended questions to all the employees to ascertain their job satisfaction level. Examples of the questions in the questionnaire include:

· Describe five things you dislike about your job

· What aspects of the organization do you think should be improved?

· Using three sentences, explain your relationship with your boss

· Explain three reasons why you think you need this training program

Interviews

We would also conduct face-to-face interviews with the departmental heads to gauge the needs of their subordinates and their specific needs. These interview questions would be processed in an open-ended format to allow the managers to give detailed answers about their feelings towards the questions asked. Some of these interview questions are:

· What don’t you like about your managerial job position?

· Describe five things that despise you about the employees you are managing

· Who are the employees that you would recommend for training, and why?

Observation

To ascertain the different needs of the employees, managers, and other aspects of the organization, it is important to observe and pay keen attention to specific areas. Therefore we decided to divide the team members into smaller groups and assign each other specific areas to be observed. We decided to observe how different employees perform their jobs using the machines, how they interact with their colleagues and superiors, and how the managers relate to their subordinates. After that, we would report the outcome of the observation process.

References

Ho, S., Pattyn, V., Broucker, B., & Crompvoets, J. (2018). Needs assessment in land administration: The potential of the nominal group technique. Land, 7(3), 87.

Hyasat, A. S., Al-Weshah, A., & Kakeesh, D. F. (2022). Training Needs Assessment for Small Businesses: The Case of the Hospitality Industry in Jordan. GeoJournal of Tourism and Geosites, 40(1), 20-29.

Tourani, S., Malmoon, Z., Zaboli, R., Jafari, M., & Nemati, A. (2020). Training needs assessment of nursing managers for achieving university health coverage. Journal of Education and Health Promotion, 9.