Ravi Verghese, sales director at the continuously growing rehabilitation and medical equipment company (PRME), faces a new challenge posed by the company’s CEO—increase sales of a new business sector, PRMESport, by 10% by the end of the year. In order to achieve this goal, Ravi needs to not only motivate employees, but start with critically analyzing the company, its policies, and its employees.
II. Critical incidents
Critical Incident #1: Introduction of new product line, PRMESport Introduction of a new product line will always put a new stressor on employees; even more so when that involves more territory and an increase in workload. To make things even more complicated, PRME is tasked with training sales associates …show more content…
However, those results take time and it requires a decent amount of planning and management (Ware, 2003). An important step in implementation of an enterprise system is training of employees. For employees like Tom, who is in his mid 50’s, training on new technology might be very frustrating and disheartening. When the new system was introduced, Tom’s productivity flat-lined. This may be a sign that Tom simply did not receive proper training. As noted before, when working with multiple generations, it is important to send communications, including training, in many different forms to properly fit multiple generations and learning styles (“Leading the Four Generations,” …show more content…
Expectancy Theory is a good guideline for motivating a diverse team with specific goals. Expectancy Theory breaks motivation down into three questions: Will my effort lead to high performance? Will performance lead to outcomes? Are those outcomes desirable? (Organizational Behavior, 2014). As mentioned earlier, providing positive feedback and encouraging employees along the way will make them believe their effort is doing something beneficial in the company. Ravi can then connect performance to rewards so that sales teams are motivated by outside factors as well. Most importantly, those rewards should reflect something that employees actually desire. Because Ravi’s team is so diverse, offering various rewards and allowing employees to choose which one best fits their desires and lifestyle would be a good way of ensuring the valence of rewards is a motivator (Organizational Behavior, 2014).
Similarly, the diversity of Ravi’s team creates a training challenge. It is important that Ravi understands differences in generations and learning styles and plans accordingly to ensure every individual understands the message or material at hand. Ravi can also make sure he is approachable by all staff so if and when questions do arise, they feel comfortable coming to him and then feel