Customer Services Job Analysis - Essay Example

Services Job Analysis College: Services Job Analysis The role of human resource managers is to ensure that they have the right workforce that will help in implementing the overall organizational goals. Being the Human resource manager of small retail company, the responsibility of recruitment and selection fall under my work description. Our company prides in providing high quality products and services and is growing rapidly due to increased internet sales. Over the past months customer service department has been unable to fill its openings for customer service representative position. While I recognize that there may be a number of reasons to this problem, I know that there is need to understand the job, work flow, knowledge, skill, experiences and abilities demanded by the position. For any organization, the recruitment of a customer service representative is of paramount significance due to the value such a person holds within an organization. To establish the right person for such a position, it is crucial to conduct a job analysis to establish the needs for such a position. Additionally, a job design would crucial in planning on employee appraisal strategies as part of forming the right person for such a job position. Performance appraisal is another role that human resource managers must engage in to assess their work output and in the process of establishing the need for skill improvement within the workforce. Using parameters to measure the employees’ performance helps managers to increase the work output and to correct any employee faults that may slow the management plans. The right human resource management skills would be essential in choosing the right employee, measuring their performance, and getting them on board the management plan. Job analysis refers to the approaches that human resource managers use to establish the activities that entail a specific job and the various skills that the best candidate must have to fill the position. For a customer service representative, three different approaches can be used to conduct a job analysis (Brannick & Levine, 2002). To begin with, a task oriented approach would be crucial in establish all the work activities that define the customer service work in terms of duties, functions and responsibilities. While this approach is comprehensive and helps to understand the work more efficiently, it ignores the qualities of the right person for the job. Therefore, this approach suffers from redundancy and lacks the necessary ingredient in attracting the right workforce. Secondly, a worker-oriented approach would be crucial in establish the characteristic traits that are essential for the right candidate for the customer service candidate. This approach seeks to establish the skills, experiences, and qualifications demanded by the job. This approach is crucial in establishing the right person for the job but is weak due to its failure to focus of job characteristics (Grant, Berg & Cable, 2014). Therefore, the two approaches are one-sided and seem to ignore important information that is essential in ensuring that the person with the rights skills for the job is selected. A more reasonable approach for the organization would be to use a mixed approach that is both task as well as worker-oriented. The mixed approach is keen to establish both the job demands in terms of the activities, duties, work time and functions that are essential to satisfy the position, as well as the skills and experience that a potential employee needs to possess. For instance, for a customer representative position, the human resource manager would establish the number of customers that the employee should handle, the number of e-mails they should handle as well as the way that the customers should interact with the customers. Besides, this approach would move on to estimate the level of IT skills that such as employee should have as well as their language proficiency (Brannick & Levine, 2002). This way, it is possible to specify the amount of education that the employee should have and the desirable personal traits essential for this job. This approach will help the human resource managers to understand the job better and establish the right qualities of a person who would fit in this position. On this ground, a mixed approach would be preferable in finding a candidate who would perform all the responsibilities, duties, and functions associated with customer service position. While this process is extensive and more time-demanding, it is efficient and will help the organization to get the best candidate for the customer representative position. Therefore, I would recommend that the organization uses a mixed approach in their job analysis to ensure that obtain a well-performing candidate for the position. Job design refers to the techniques that human resource managers use to form the work arrangement with the aim or optimizing performance while considering the abilities of the employees. The job design approaches such as the scientific, job rotation, job enlargement, and motivational work design aim at increasing productivity (Itoh, 2014). However, each approach has its own strengths and weaknesses and the human resource managers must be ready to trade-off between these approaches. For customer representative work position, a scientific design or a motivational work design would be more appropriate. In the scientific job design approach it is crucial to ensure that the employees’ abilities are equal to the task that the job entails (Murphy & Cleveland, 2011). Therefore, this approach seeks to match the skills and experiences of an employee with the job demands. While this approach ensures that there is clarity and high productivity, this method may result in high labor turnover and boredom. For instance, a customer service attendant will feel bored to handle the same task at all the times and hence may leave the company to seek a more engaging work environment. The motivation work design seeks to improve performance by creating job satisfaction through rewards and other motivational incentives. The shortfalls of this approach are that it is expensive for an organization and may be complex to implement (Lockwood, 2012). For instance, motivating a customer service representative would require more money each time there is an increase in productivity. Therefore, it would be recommendable for the human resource management to trade-off between the two approaches to ensure that they configure their work in line with employee’s satisfaction criteria. After job design, it is crucial to define strategies that would attract the right candidates for the customer representative position. One important strategy would be providing a clear job description and employee qualities while advertising for the current position. This will help to discourage the wrong employees from applying for the positions (Kutlu, A. C., Ekmekçioğlu & Kahraman, 2013). For instance, a customer representative position may require a person with a marketing degree, a social personality, and efficient IT skills. Citing these features would eliminate generality and attract the right candidates to apply for the position. The rationale for this strategy is that it would make it easier for the human resource managers to select the best applicant for the work (Virág & Albu, 2014). For a motivational and scientific work design, employee appraisal would a pivotal strategy to ensure that employees fill in the vacant position appropriately. While the selection process seeks to establish the right candidate, it is clear that it is almost impossible to select the perfect candidate for any position. Therefore, employee induction would be crucial in ensuring that employees fit in their position more quickly and perform optimally (Aurel & Irinel, 2009). For instance, a customer representative employee should be trained on how to handle the online customers and the way to associate with other employees. The significance of this strategy is that it improves the candidate’s suitability for the position. Performance appraisal within the human resource managements includes measurement of the employee performance during their course of duty. Measuring the employees performance ensures that the management knows to what extent the employee suits their job position (Shaw, Park & Kim, 2013). It also helps the management to improve performance within its task force as a strategy to attain the target goals. In measuring the employee performance, the managers need to reflect on the job requirements established at the job analysis procedures. One way to measure the customer service representative performance is by evaluating the efficiency with which the employee accomplishes the various tasks (Levine, Ash, Hall & Sistrunk, 2013). To do this, the employer needs to focus on the task-oriented information established during the job analysis stage. For instance, it would be crucial to rate the employee’s interaction with the customers as either high or low as compared to the demands of the job. In this approach, the performance is based on the activities and the extent to which the employee satisfies the basic demands of the job. In this case, I would measure the number of customers that the employee handles each day or the number of customer’s complaints that the customer will tackle every day (Vidal-Salazar, Cordón-Pozo & Ferrón-Vilchez, 2012). This way, I would be able to measure the employee’s performance and support them in attaining the minimum benchmarks. While this approach may be well fitted, its overdependence on little information will result to a weakness while measuring employee’s performance. Alternatively, I would focus on the worker qualities that define the amount of work that they handle each day. In this case, the worker characteristics are directly related with job suitability, in terms of work efficiency (Thürer, Stevenson, Silva & Land, 2013). For instance, I would measure the employees IT skills by considering their typing speed and the social aspects. For a customer representative position, I expect that the right candidate would be able social and well informed with IT. To measure their social perspective, I would consider the way they speak to customers and the way they are able to form close relationships with the company customers. This way I would establish the degree of socialness of the employees. This approach utilizes the information obtain from a worker-oriented job analysis to measure their performance (Catano, 2009). The rationale for using this approach is that it focuses on the customers qualities and evaluates how they match the job position. On the other hand, it is possible to use the information from a worker-oriented and task-oriented job analysis approach to measure the customer service representative’s performance (Mitchell, Obeidat & Bray, 2013). In this approach, I would compare the employees qualities with the job demands to establish the extent to which they match. For instance, I would measure the IT skills of the employees by considering the number of customer e-mails that they reply every day. If the customer’s replies are lower than those described in the job requirements, it would apparent that their IT skills are below the expected worker qualities and training may be essential to improve performance. While using both job demands and worker characteristics may be a tedious process, it is the most extensive, accurate and reliable approach while measuring employee performance (Anca-Ioana, 2013). The accuracy to which the human resource managers measure the worker performance influences the ability to achieve management goals. In conclusion, the human resource management has a duty to perform job design and job analysis while seeking the best employee that will fill the available positions within their organizations. While a job analysis will help managers to define the demands for the customer representative position and establish the desirable qualities for a potential candidate, a job design will help establish the right work structure for the position. However, a greater task lies in designing strategies to attract the right people for their position and to select from a wide range of applications. While advertising a customer representative position, the organizational managers need to state clearly all the job demands as well as the academic and personal characteristics of the job. A clear approach discourages unsuitable candidates and attracts only those who qualify. However, job induction and necessary training is paramount in ensuring that the selected worker perfects their duties and can quickly adapt to their positions. Additionally, the human resource managers need to measure the employee’s work output by evaluating their performance and comparing with the desirable work outputs necessary to meet the organizational goals. The efficiency of employee selection and appraisal programs is directly related to the optimal performance of an organization. References Anca-Ioana, M. (2013). New Approaches Of The Concepts Of Human Resources, Human Resource Management And Strategic Human Resource Management. Annals Of The University Of Oradea, Economic Science Series, 22(1), 1520-1525. Aurel, M., & Irinel, M. (2009). The Audit Of Recruitment, Selection And Integration Of The Human Resources. Annals Of The University Of Oradea, Economic Science Series, 18(4), 354-357. Brannick, M. T., & Levine, E. L. (2002). Job Analysis: Methods, Research, And Applications For Human Resource Management In The New Millennium. Thousand Oaks, Calif. [U.A.: Sage Publ. Catano, V. M. (2009). Recruitment And Selection In Canada. 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