A Needs Assessment

When planning a needs assessment for any organization, institution, or independent company, accessing information is critical. Informational assets could drive the need and/or methods and approach for training implementation. A key component in accessing information relies in the stakeholder identification. It is essential to consider the perspective of the stakeholder while contemplating the most effective and efficient instructional design direction. For the purpose of this week’s entry, a needs assessment is being conducted for a major food chain named Whole Foods. To better illustrate the process, the following is a hypothetical scenario related to the process.

Whole Foods’ premise is based upon community, diversity, wellness, and environmental awareness. The Regional Training team is seeking external instructional design guidance regarding the customer service training course “How to "WOW" Our Most Important Stakeholder”. The latest sales projections reflect a downward curve for a west coast store that generally would generate revenue over the weekly projections. This downward trend raised concern among the Board of Directors and the Leadership team resulting in the possible need for training.

After meeting with the Regional Training team the following were identified as key Whole Food stakeholders:

• Customers
• Employees
• Philanthropic partners
• Agricultural partners
• Environmentalists

To gain additional insight regarding the store and Whole Foods it had been decided to interview, observe, and research the identified stakeholders and organization. The interviewing method would be conducted through online surveys via the Whole Foods website and at the store front location to provide flexibility in participation. To gauge a better sense of the organizational setting, observations and personal interviews would be scheduled and conducted by the instructional design team to gain an internal perspective. Lastly, training and other supporting materials were provided to understand the vision and mission of the organization better.

To effectively manage the needs assessment stakeholders were asked questions during key phases of the process. The following illustrates the analysis phase, stakeholders, and questions posed.

Whole Foods had managed its advertising of local product and market goods. The community relies on knowing when the newest arrival of produce becomes available because of the high vegetarian and vegan population and restaurant venues catering to the local community. Upon the initial opening of the store location marketing enabled the community to plan for various harvest festivals and understand how to best manage nutritional care. The marketing efforts were primarily promoted by its front line employees upon entering the store or during the time of check out. The Regional Training team identified that this particular location changed over the store educator last fall and training the customer service training courses had taken a backseat to other business and stakeholder impactful events.

In this scenario, the importance of assessment is identified as critical. Without the effort, it would have been challenging to illustrate the stakeholders’ concerns and the root cause. As noted by Noe (2010), “The first step in a successful training effort is to determine that a training need exists through a…needs assessment” (p. 132), and in this case training and other identified areas of improvement were required to continue the Whole Foods’ success story.


Reference

Noe, R. A. (2010). Employee training and development (5th ed.). New York, NY: McGraw Hill.