Food Lion Employee Training

Grocery chain stores have improved enormously throughout the years, not only in their appearance, but in the quality of products and service provided from employees. One specific grocery store, Food Lion, has not put much effort into improving either one of these fundamental aspects. This being said Food Lion is not doing as good as it would be if they put further effort into improving the quality of service provided. Food Lion happens to not have the best reputation and an improvement in employee training would certainly help the grocery store not only with its reputation but with improvement in the business aspect. An abundant number of experts could easily argue that employee training does not directly affect the grocery stores’ financials

Bapna, Langer, Mehra, Gnal and Gupta discovered that, “Our rich employee level panel set affords us the opportunity to link formal training with performance at the individual employee level. Using a dynamic panel model, we identify a significant positive impact of training on employee performance. A unit increase in training is linked to a 2.14% increase in an employee’s performance” (2013). With the employee performance being above average the sales are most likely also receiving a positive outcome and this is due to a higher level of employee training. An example of a grocery chain store that is currently outdoing Food Lion is Publix. As Allaway, Huddleston, Whipple and Ellinger stated, “Publix is the largest employee-owned supermarket chain in the USA, and, according to a 2007 IBM study, was rated “best in class” and had a “customer advocacy” rating” (2011). Publix has clearly made a positive name for itself by excelling in the grocery industry and providing the best customer service possible. Publix has an excessive number of consistent customers and this has caused it to be one of the highest recognized grocery stores, even further recognized than Food Lion. At Publix, the employee training is much more extensive than it is at Food

The training itself is mostly computer-based, therefore there is not much hands-on training which is fundamental to actually learn how to handle situations when on the job. Wallen and Mulloy reported that “Well designed computer based training can be cost effective, and can be an effective training tool. However, despite this increase in the use of computers to deliver training, less is known about the effectiveness of various computer based training methods than is known about other forms of training. The lack of empirically based guidelines has left training designers with insufficient direction for designing online training” (2005). Computer-based training can be cheaper than hands-on training and experts do not have concrete evidence that computer-based training is as effective. Having computer based training can also means that generally employees do not learn everything they should since they are not required to show skills or practice them in order to get the training done so the employees could not even be fit for that specific job. Kuo- Hao, Li-Chen, Chien-Hui (2002) explained that there are studies that show that the utilization of technology can be difficult for older adults since they are not used to this kind of machinery. This is just one of the problems computer-based training brings. The employees usually learn mechanisms as they progress and there are not many high skilled workers to