Create a Report for Marks and Spencer (m&s) on the Importance of Recruiting Staff with the Correct Employability and Personal Skills to Ensure Their Employment Retention.

M2- Create a report for Marks and Spencer (M&S) on the importance of recruiting staff with the correct employability and personal skills to ensure their employment retention.

The human resources department in M&S look at a variety of skills and attributes that the applicants can use when working for M&S to help improve their performance. The key skills required by the candidate would be their range of employability and personal skills in which they can use to help better their personal performance for the business. As well as the different types of skills that are portrayed by the candidate, their academic qualifications also matter.

Employability skills

Employability skills are when the employees are able to gain initial employment and obtaining new skills if needed to help fulfill their duties through a range of skills, abilities and attributes.

• Communication is having the ability to speak to others either verbally, physically or in written form, this helps key communication skills between the employee and the customers. This is an important skill to ensure that as a customer service manager you get along with their employees, to listen to any improvements that could be made to better everyone's performance and help understand the different tasks that could be asked to be done. Also good communication allows a relationship to build with the manager and their employees as well as a relationship between the employee and the customers as good communication skills would be required to ensure they sell products in order to help encouraging the customers to return. The advantage of communication for M&S would be it allows information such as new deals, promotions, new trends, offers to be passed through the employees to ensure they have the right information in order to keep the production of the store sufficient in order to keep loyal customers and attract potential customers to help increase profit.  However a disadvantage of communication could be misleading information may be received either verbally or in a written form which could affect the position of a customer service manager as they weren’t able to provide the right information to their employees. Also if there’s miscommunication between the customer service manager and customers this could lead to customers not using services provided by M&S reducing their income profit.
• Team work is having the ability to work in a team to ensure duties are fulfilled to their best ability. This would be important as a customer service manager in M&S as working in a team is a major key to ensure that the business succeeds. This is also important as working as a team would ensure that all the different tasks would be fulfilled and by working in a team this highlights how the employees and employers are able to work with each other effectively. If they perform good as a team this will be reflected during their work ethic and would make the customers feel more welcomed. An advantage of team work is that if employees don’t understand their responsibility fully they are able to ask fellow colleagues or even the manager for help leading to good team work to help complete the task effectively. This means that a strong secure relationship would build between all the team members and they will be willing to help each other if a problem was to occur. Nevertheless during team work there could be dispute between a few employees which could reflect on their work as they may not complete their duty to its full context, for example due to not being able to work in team a certain area in the food hall in M&S may not be tidied nicely which could dis-encourage customers to use M&S, as customers could believe the employees don’t care about the way the store looks.
• Leadership skill is when the manager has the initiative to plan ahead and how to motivate themselves and the employees. This is important because good leadership skills will ensure all jobs get done effectively and efficiently as well as providing the best customer service available to the customers to encourage them to buy more products and services to help increase the stores profit. Also good leadership skill will allow the manager to be up to date on the new trends which they can incorporate into their products to make sure they appeal to the customers. Leadership skills also help a relationship be built between the manager and the employees. An advantage of leadership skills as a customer service manager would be that they have the authority to plan ahead in orders to plan strategies to help benefit the store to help increase the profit. Also having leadership skill means that they are able to lead a strong department as they are able to control their employees.
• Decision making is being able to take charge and make important decisions that will affect the business in the short and long term. This is important as a candidate when wanting to work for M&S since there are many decision to be made such as; who to recruit, what new trends can be used,  what feedback can be given to the employees, what improvements can be made to increase the customer base and profit etc. The HR department would be looking for someone has strong decision making and are not indecisive as this means that decision would be made more quickly and efficiently without having to wait for a long period of time to make a choice, which could lead to slowing the production of the store as a customer service manager as most decision are made by them.  An advantage of decision making is that that they will be the decisions made would be beneficial for everyone and the decisions would be thought out well to ensure they will have a positive impact in the long and short term. However a negative impact of decision making could be the could abuse their power as a leader and only make decisions that would help improve their position in the department by making them  manager of other departments too this could lead to conflict between the manager and employees.

Personal skills

Personal skills are natural talents that each individual have that are personal traits but can be developed and exercised through different experiences and practices.

• Critical thinking is being able to analysis and evaluates an issue to make a reasoned judgement that is logical and well thought out. The importance of this skill for M&S would be if a problem occurred as a customer service manager they would be able to think about the pros and cons to make a clear judgement that will be effective in a positive way for all the stakeholders such as the employees, customers, local community, suppliers to make sure they are not harmed. Therefore this is an important skill as the manager has to be able to do critical thinking to solve a problem with the best solution to benefit the store. An advantage critical thinking is similar to decision making as they would come solution that would be beneficial for all different stakeholders if a problem was to occur. Nevertheless a disadvantage of critical thinking could be they could come up with the wrong solution would could be seen as bias by their employees’ or customers which could lead to more conflict leading to disengagement of employees and customers with the store due to the solution made by the manager.
• Flexibility is the willingness to modification or compromise.  Flexibility is an important skill to require as this means that as a customer service manager they are available to change shifts around in order to make them suitable for their employees to ensure they arrive at work in time. By making modification to the shifts will also motivate the employees as they will be motivated to come to work as their work schedule has been made for suitable times for them. Also flexibility is important for M&S because as a customer service manager they have to be able to cover their own employee’s shifts if they are unable to attend or go to other stores if they need a cover for their customer service manager therefore being flexible with time is important. An advantage of flexibility is as a customer service manager they can do overtime and would be getting paid extra for the overtime therefore in the long run they would be earning a higher salary. Nevertheless a disadvantage of flexibility could be the manager may not be able to compromise or change shifts as it could lead to a short in number of staffs therefore this could lead to a dispute with employees or if the manager has to cover someone’s shift they may not be able to make it due to personal reasons. Thus, it is difficult to always be flexible with a time schedule.
• Multi-tasking is having the ability to do more than one task as the same time for example, dealing with an employee matter as well as sorting out a customer’s problems. This is important for M&S because having a candidate who has the ability to multi task is significant as they will be able to deal with many situations at once and ensure they all get fulfilled efficiently. Also with time and practice they will be able to complete the tasks quicker and sufficiently in order to complete more tasks. This is important as it means that all the duties that would need to be done during the day can all be fulfilled without having to rush them as well as completing their day to day duty they can also handle any other problems that may occur during the day such as a customer complaint or a spillage of foods etc. An advantage of multi tasking like mentioned earlier is more duties are able to get completed throughout the day and new duties can also be handled without having to stress or worry. Also by being able to multi task they can resolve any problems that may occur within the day to ensure it doesn’t happen again. However by multi tasking this could lead to doing the job too quickly to make sure it is completed leading to the job not getting done properly, or by having too many jobs could lead to forgetting to do certain tasks or duties that are important.
• Organisational and planning skills, this is having the ability to plan ahead and organise anything that needs to be done. By being organised this is beneficial for M&S because this means that as a manager they have the ability to make sure everything is organised accurately to ensure nothing goes wrong as they will know the in and out of everyone’s responsibility and it will be clear to them, their employees and other department managers what they believe should be the end result of the stores revenue. This also links with having planning skills as this means that the manager s able to plan ahead of time to ensure that the store doesn’t full into any problems such as liquidation. By planning this allows the manager to give themselves enough time before they have to complete the tasks they have set out for themselves to complete by a certain time frame. An advantage of this would be this provides a clear understanding and plan of what the manager believes they should be achieving and by when which could lead to an increased motivation by all employees to help work towards the end goal. However a disadvantage could when planning if a calculation goes wrong this could mess up the end objective for the business which means planning is time consuming and if they are unable to be organised or met their end objective which was planned this could de-motivate the employees.

Development of the skills

There are many ways a customer service manager can develop the skills mentioned above. For example if the customer service manager finds it hard to make decisions then they can go ask other managers from a different department for advice on what they believe would be the right the solution. By asking for another opinion this helps develop their critical thinking and decision making skill as they would receive another opinion to ensure they have made the right decision or what the right decision would be in order for it to benefit the stakeholders who could be affected. Another employability skill that could be developed could be team work. This skill can developed through a variety of ways in order to gain full employment for instance they could hold certain events or training that required the employees and employers to work in teams in order to build a stronger relationship. By strengthening the team work of the department this reflects on their work ethic as the employees will be more welcoming and will be motivating other employees to do as well by helping each other to fulfil a task. In order to develop personal skills such as multi-tasking this comes with experience, for example at the beginning of the job role the customer service manager may only be able to do 2 tasks at the same time however within 4 months of the job they may be able to do 6 different tasks at one. The different amount of tasks a person can complete is due to time management therefore as a customer service manager they have to be flexible with their time in order to multi task and complete all their duties by the end of work hours.