Whole Foods - Needs Analysis

Once again, the "real world" strikes out and touches a class I am in. I applied for a regional training position a couple days ago in Seattle with Whole Foods. So, it only seems natural to orient towards this organization for my hypothetical needs analysis. 

Whole Foods lists an impressive set of core values, and as instructed by Noe (2013) the organization is always a good starting point. I need to clearly understand the direction, values, and mission of Whole Foods to better understand their training needs. Whole Foods is all about customer wellness through natural and organic foods. They do this through a phenomenal store experience as well as community support and education. 

There are, of course, many departments to a company as large as whole foods, there is a logistics, HR, sales, buyers, retail, marketing and the list goes on. I would like to focus my attention on the retail team and what training program may aid the company through this avenue. In approaching this team specifically, it is important to seek the input of key stakeholders (Noe, 2013). In this case, that would be retail management at the corporate level, as well as at the retail level. I have also learned that representation from category buyers as well as from vendors (manufacturers) would also be helpful in training a grocery retail team. 

Once these stake holders are in place it becomes necessary to now understand the target trainees and we approach this, according to Noe, through a Person Analysis. This process will show us who needs training, and in this case we may find it to be newly hired employees, recently promoted employees or low performing team members...or a combination of any of these or possibly other variables. 

With the target now identified, we begin the next phase of this analysis by focusing our attention on what performance level these individuals need to be at, and where they are coming from. This can be done with the aid of the key stakeholders listed above and using any number of performance improvement techniques. During this performance gap discovery phase, it would important to obtain any and all documentation that could be used as a measurement medium. Having data from before a training effort certainly helps in validation post-training. 

In this example, I believe a combination of interviews and focus groups would be the best approach to a company like Whole Foods. I have actually worked with Whole Foods in the past, as a national account manager selling into their stores from the vendor side of the business. They have a very personal approach to business and face to face meetings are far more of a normality that video calls or phone calls. They also frequently like to meet in the cafe area of one of their stores. Conducting casual interviews would allow for an open safe dialog about the true training needs and not mask them behind a more official meeting environment. The focus groups are another effort to accomplish the same things, but by allowing different key stakeholders to bounce ideas off one another and allow the conversation to gain some speed. 

Through the proper people, having safe conversations, we can assess the business needs and determine the current performance and end goal for performance. By doing this carefully and methodically a proper course of action can be laid out allowing for the objectives of the business to be met. 

Reference 

Noe, R. A. (2013). Employee training and development (6th ed.). New York, NY: McGraw Hill.