Human resource management practices at Wegmans

Training

One topic that might be a good one for Wegmans is how the Affordable Care Act will affect the employees of the company. This is an issue that is going to affect the company, and we need to be able to communicate to the employees what will happen with them, and what their obligations are under the new law. There are a number of different ways to train employees on this subject, but the best is the in-house classroom. There is a risk with online training that some employees might not be very computer-savvy and would therefore not be able to complete the training. Mentoring and other forms of one-on-one training would be too cumbersome for a task such as this, and this is not a special skill that needs to be learned. A classroom setting is appropriate given the nature of the material to the learned, the way that it facilitates questions and interaction and the way that that the company can communicate its plans affordably and effectively.

If this topic is covered to a group of 18 employees, there are many strengths. Training is facilitated, but so are the other factors that make training effective. For example, having a set time and place to learn allows for expectations of learning to be formed. Further, repeating this exercise throughout the company will allow the trainers to develop excellent processes and resources. Also, the classroom setting can result in feedback that the HR department can use to improve on the training program for next time. The message can be communicated effectively to a large number of people in a short amount of time, something that will help the company to meet its objectives as well (Bouloutian, 2009).

From the company's perspective, it seems that this training task is daunting, so it is important that the company can train large groups at the same time in order to deliver this information to all employees within a month or two. The company should do a needs assessment in order to determine what the key takeaways from the seminar. This will help develop the best curriculum where the material that is presented is the most valuable data, and if the company can achieve its basic goals with the seminar, it can avoid too much confusion and dealing with individuals, which would be costlier.

However, that is a downside to using the in-house classroom is that some employees might have specific issues that they will want to address. These could even be of a personal nature. Thus, the people giving the classroom presentation might not have the time or the ability to deal with the questions that individual employees have -- they can only address the topic of the ACA in the most general sense. This is the limitation of the in-house classroom, and as a result if there are too many people with questions about individual issues, the company might have to spend a lot of money helping its HR people deal with individuals anyway; the classroom setting might not even save it much money.