Extra Credit
Luckily one of Jonathan’s best friends back home works for a WalMart, as does his father. His dad has been employed at Wal-Mart since my
friend was born over 20 years ago. While we didn’t actually travel to a WalMart to talk to an associate, we feel that gained the knowledge necessary to
make a recommendation based on the Job Design Model based on the
conversation with Marc’s (Jonathan’s friend) dad, who is an assistant store
manager. We first asked Marc’s dad if he was happy working at Wal-Mart
after all of these years. He replied by saying that Wal-Mart has enabled him
to seek out promotions over the years, but most importantly, it has given him
a means to take care of his family. The next question was after all these
years if he still looks forward to going to work in the morning or if it has
become a boring routine. He said that it is hard not to get bored going to the
same place and doing the same type of work but he said he likes the people
that he works with so that eases the boredom of being at work. Based on
these couple answers, we think that his store should consider combining
people into work teams because it would increase interaction and possibly
ease some of the monotony of a normal workday. Marc’s dad could pursue
this on many levels of his store’s operations. For instance, have a work team
that rotates to different jobs during the day, sales people moving around to
different departments (electronics moving over to athletic equipment). Teams
of two or three people could work together, so that there is constant
interaction between employees over the course of the day. This could
possibly help employees forget about doing the same type of job everyday
because their colleagues are with them all day to take their mind off of it.