Please answer the three questions about the case and also make comments on the group's response below.

Don't make reference or copy from other website and source. Write nearly one page.

How Can We Motivate These Employees?

Question 1: What are the Major Issues in this Situation?

The most obvious major issues in this situation are the high rate of employee turnover and loss of gross revenue. One of the biggest contributors to the first issue of high turnover is the lack of orientation employees receive once they arrive. Janice believes that since her employees come in with a good bit of experience they don’t need to be trained. She is only partially correct. It is always a good idea to orient new employees so that they can learn how things work at that specific company. This orientation could also include helpful training on how to handle the advances of technology in the marketing field. One of the major contributors to the second issue of loss of gross revenue is Janice's leadership style. She often never articulates her goals and expectations to her employees because she believes they already know. There’s nothing wrong with being a friendly boss but it’s also absolutely necessary to make sure your employees know what is expected of them. One problem that likely stimulates both of these issues is the inability of the account executives to communicate marketing objectives and time estimates to team members. This can lead to missed deadlines and unhappy customers, no doubt frustrating employees and losing the company money.

Question 2: How can Janice best address both the productivity and turnover issues?

One of things that can be addressed in terms of turnover issues is that Janice could arrange for the company to absorb the cost of the increase in the insurance premiums. Or, Janice could examine the components of the health insurance plan to see if there are any areas that could be changed or reduced to lower the health care premiums. Adjusting the deductibles, copays, or coverage benefits may allow for a reduction in cost, which then can be passed on to employees. In addition, Janice could review the entire benefit package to see if there are employee benefits that are not being used that could be discontinued, offering savings that could be applied to the health insurance cost.

An incentive training session could be set up for current employees to articulate the importance of productivity and how it translates to monetary gain by clearly showing how their effort is associated to higher profit sharing. As far as new hires go, Janice needs to set up an orientation program that outlays her, the company’s, and the potential clients expectations. Employees should know what their roles and responsibilities are as well as specific parameters around productivity and output. Employees should know what is expected of them in their daily work activities including how many billable hours on average they should produce. Within the orientation sessions there should be a portion that helps to teach and refine new hires skills in technology so that they will be prepared when they transition to their new position. Similar training sessions could also be set up for current employees to help them keep up with the advancement of technologies and help to make sure that programs and systems such as the performance tracking is working properly and efficiently. With that being said, Janice needs to replace the paper time sheets and update computer hardware and software equipment so that performance can be tracked accurately and timely.

Lastly, when a new job is taken on there should be a consistent report or summary from account executives that provides the initial information that team members, graphic designers, and copywriters need to be distributed ensuring that timelines are met and expectations are the same across the departments. Once a project is started, Janice could require each account executive to provide a weekly or bi-weekly project status report for each client (or clients) that they are assigned to.

Another option is that Janice could hire an outside management consultant to do an outside assessment of the company to develop standard operating procedures for all departments and job titles.

Question 3: What should Janice do in this situation? What action(s) will benefit Instant Insight the most?

We think that Janice needs to start off with extinguishing her “extreme friendliness” relationship with her staff and start to mold a different culture at Instant Insight. Although the firm remains to be profitable, it is no longer what it had been in the past. With employee productivity and performance decreasing as well as gross revenue decreasing with employee turnover increasing, Janice can’t settle with being just “profitable”. We think that the best way to deal with the high employee turnover rate is to sit down with her staff (regardless of how experienced they are) and make sure everyone is on the same page as well as understanding Instant Insights culture. Motivating Janice’s staff to be productive and perform can start with her setting goals and incentives for her staff. Communicate better, lead by example, empower your staff, set expectations, and offer advancements are all good ways that Janice can get the most out of her team. Regarding the issue with gross revenue, we think that eliminating the poor communication between the executives and the marketing teams. This will improve profit margins as well as increase customer service. We think that attacking the biggest problems of employee productivity, gross revenue decreasing and employee turnover increasing can benefit Instant Insight the most.