Memo

Executive Summary

This report discusses the steps that Microsoft can undertake to increase the efficacy and usefulness of its employees. The implementation of the highlighted steps would enhance their efficacy that, in turn, would increase the company’s profitability and share of the market. A survey of both the current and former employees regarding employee inefficiencies at Microsoft led to the conclusion that the five steps should be undertaken. Such include planning, delivering, controlling, analyzing, and developing.

Introduction

Topic/Purpose.This report is a study focused on Microsoft Corporation. It analyzes how the company should enhance the efficiency and effectiveness of its employees. The purpose of improving these parameters is to advance the employee productivity that would consequently increase the company’s profitability, alongside its share of the market.

Background. Microsoft Corporation is a multinational technology firm, which has its headquarters in Redmond, Washington. It creates, produces, licenses, supports, as well as sells consumer electronics, alongside personal computers, computer software, and services (Cassidy and Robert 32). The Microsoft firm has experienced dwindling profitability as a result of the employee inefficiencies. Consequently, it has led to a significant loss of the market share, which is not a good thing for the company (Cassidy and Robert 32). As such, it requires establishing ways to boost the morale of the employees to increase their efficiency.

Scope.

The report begins with the findings from the research done on the available resources and the survey conducted on Microsoft employees in an attempt to establish the kind of inefficiencies in the company. This is followed by a recommendation of a five-step strategy that the firm could utilize to tackle the inefficiencies. Finally, the report concludes by summarizing the key points highlighted.

Discussion of the Research

The report is based on the information gathered from the available resources, mostly journals of management and a survey conducted on staff to inquire the employee inefficiencies and how they can be improved.

Findings

According to the survey, most employees claim that they have been complaining regarding bureaucracy alongside management of the Microsoft for a while. They explained Microsoft’s problems in details. Accordingly, there is gross inefficiency in the company. They claim that it has exceedingly little or nothing being undertaken to make it superior. It has minuscule windows of the real development of products preceded by long stabilization period. Further, program managers push time-consuming activities such as scenario validation. For such activities, they push them even for two months, after which they produce collateral that is bound to be futile in six months because everything is prone to revolutionize.

Further on, employees at the company do a lot of talking with little coordination. Because the company has a performance review system, which values the contributions of an individual over team work, every person wants to make an impact on everything. In other words, every individual wants to voice suggestions and opinions, in addition to driving them into execution. Consequently, this results in mutually exclusive ideas leading to defective products. According to several employees, they were frustrated by the fact that the random suggestions come from intuition, rather than actual data, facts or scenarios. Therefore, this illustrates how disengaged the workers are from the actual world.

Concerning management, most of the employees claimed that each product group at the company is managed divergently. Apparently, the disgruntled employees do not stand for the only description of the reality, but the grievances including inadequate coordination, poor middle management, and bureaucracy came up every time from the current and former employees.

These aspects lead to immense employee inefficiencies. As such, something has to be done to increase the morale of the employees that, in turn would increase their efficiency as well as profitability and market share of the company.,

Recommendations

Microsoft Corporation should realize that maximizing the potential of its employees is the key to success in both the good and bad times. An effective employee model will aid it to transcend merely weathering the current recession recovery to thriving in the new economy (Cassidy and Robert 40). The firm’s numerous vendor workforce optimization strategies avail tools of evaluations alongside analyzes but lack the capacity to control as well as manage all the processes from a centralized location. Moreover, they miss the capability to integrate seamlessly skills into the conventional logic, deliver end-to-end analyzes of the career paths of the employees, or optimize both back and front office performance. Thus, after a thorough research into literature and based on the identified inefficiencies from the survey, five steps to increase the efficiency of the employees were established. Such included planning, delivering, controlling, analyzing and developing.

Step 1: Planning

Not all channels of communication are equal, nor do they need similar sets of skills for a successful client interaction. Thus, an excellent model of employee effectiveness at Microsoft should recognize this fact, in addition to being able to forecast as well as schedule workers, based on real trends across email, voice, social media, text, chat and work items to aid the corporation to plan, alongside optimize staffing across a multiplicity of channels. As such, with the appropriate worker communicating through the proper channels of communication, these tools make sure that resources remain aligned by connecting schedules with training, development plans, and skills (Bhatti and Tahir 116). Further, an excellent model also would include tight integration with routing to make sure that the workers only receive work items or customer interactions that they have had training on, or those that are within their expertise field. Thus, an expert in phone support should neither be suddenly needed to interact with clients via Facebook, for instance, nor should customer service representatives find themselves fielding questions regarding products they have yet to receive training on.

Step 2: Delivering

By assessing the skills level of the employees from their first day to the last day of working for the company, an excellent model of employee effectiveness avails workers with a development path via persistent monitoring, as well as coaching. Further, through centralized skill development training, a leading-edge solution can automatically induce workforce management scheduling updates, in addition to the routine strategies and training programs to make sure that the tasks and interaction with the customers are assigned to the employees best capable of tackling them (Bhatti and Tahir 120). As such, Microsoft would be able to retain such employees who exhibit the uppermost potential to become as well as remain engaged.

Step 3: Controlling

Once Microsoft has put a plan in position, in addition to defining key indicators of performance, a good model of employee effectiveness will make sure that it is meeting service level agreements (SLAs). Through offering a centralized perception of employee/agent and team performance metrics, the most innovative software will allow it to establish, monitor, and recognize the behavior of the employees, and to undertake an immediate corrective action in actual time at both the individual and team levels in case they are not meeting the identified SLAs (Bhatti and Tahir 126). As such, the company can even leverage these tools to offer workers with scorecards to monitor their individual progress as it relates to the particular objectives to which they have been given.

Step 4: Analyzing

Recognizing the skills individual workers have or lack is vital for routing clients to the appropriate service representatives. Additionally, successfully establishing alongside addressing any gaps in their skills can make the divergence between a client having a positive experience or leaving for a rival. Succinctly, by availing a wealth of tools of analysis that taking advantage of the external and internal data, Microsoft can determine skill gaps in both individual and team workers. Furthermore, it can institute benchmarks for best practices and implement interactive tests, assess quality scores from screen captures and contacts that have been recorded, and perform client feedback surveys and correlate these to acquire a 360-degree perception of the performance of the employees (Bhatti and Tahir 129). Conceivably, through feeding information into a single universal skills repository, such tools can be utilized to establish the employees that are outstanding at their work, alongside those that need additional training or coaching support.

Step 5: Developing

Once the best employee practices and skill gaps have been established, Microsoft can address these areas by animatedly creating, setting up as well as managing client-designed training, alongside coaching programs at the most expedient times; given the work schedules of the workers, devoid of influencing the levels of service. As such, delivering tools that assist supervisors, trainers, employees, and schedulers to monitor the progress of the workers can guarantee acquiescence with training plans, including scheduled classroom, alongside eLearning training, and assist in enhancing career paths and morale (Bhatti and Tahir 133).

In view of the steps above, Microsoft would be able to flourish amidst increasing rivalry, alongside volatile markets by breaking down silos, in addition to making information available to all people who require it. The steps can be said to be skill-centric as hey optimize the workforce and centralizing the management of the employee competency requirements, together with gaps, regulates costs by scheduling training, which addresses the gaps, and seamlessly updates skills as well as competency in the standard rules for individual workers' programming (Bhatti and Tahir 134). By helping the Corporation to develop the required employee talent, the five steps enhance the customer experience through precisely pairing the skills of the employees with the needs of the clients to attain better results in business.

Conclusion

This report is a study focused on Microsoft Corporation analyzing how the company should enhance the efficiency and effectiveness of its employees. The Microsoft Company has experienced dwindling profitability as a result of the employee inefficiencies. Consequently, it has led to a significant loss of the market share, which is not a good thing for the company. In light of this, five steps have been identified that would help it achieve employee efficiencythat include planning, delivering, controlling, analyzing and developing. These measures would allow the company to flourish amidst increasing rivalry, alongside volatile markets by breaking down silos, in addition to making information available to all people who require it. By aiding Microsoft to develop the needed workforce talent, the highlighted steps enhance the customer experience through precisely pairing the skills of the employees with the needs of the clients to attain better results in business. As such, the Corporation should put the steps into consideration to increase the efficiency of its employees, which would, in turn, lead to enhanced profitability and a greater share of the market.

Works Cited

Bhatti, Komal Khalid, and Tahir Masood Qureshi. "Impact of employee participation on job satisfaction, employee commitment and employee productivity." International Review of Business Research Papers 3.2 (2007): 54-68.

Cassidy, Carlene, and Robert Kreitner. Supervision: Setting People Up for Success. Mason, OH: South-Western Cengage Learning, 2009. Print.