Interclean Benchmarking

In today's world of fast paced business, nothing less than 100 percent success is accepted. Companies and organizations thrive on consistency and profitability. A classic tool that has proven successful for most companies has been benchmarking. Basically, benchmarking is the modeling of similar successes in similar or different industries and applying them to a company's specific situation. Generic benchmarking is finding best practices or solutions to a company's own problems through outside industries or seemingly non-related companies. This paper highlights five of those issues and focuses on how other companies have implemented plans to handle those issues. The issues facing InterClean highlighted in this analysis are, Retaining Employees, Career and Training Development, Human Resource Philosophy, Management of Restructuring Process and Motivation. InterClean benchmarking was conducted to evaluate how other companies had handled similar situations. Ten companies were evaluated from the home health care industry, technology industry, oil industry, retail industry, and telecom industry. The ten companies evaluated were AT&T, BP Amoco, Starbucks, Home Depot, Genetech, Whirlpool, Luxoltica, Logica CMG, Dow Corning, and Minimed Inc. Evaluation of these companies showed several concepts used in handling the issues. As part of this analysis, this paper will discuss how the companies used these concepts.

Retaining Employees

Every company experiences employee turnover but their main objective is to ensure that their top performers want to stay with the organization and that employees whose performance is minimal are encouraged or forced to leave. After the acquisition of EnviroTech and the implementation of a new sales model, Interclean must recognize the importance of retaining employees through this transition phase. Interclean can create a successful training and learning program to help retain employees and minimize voluntary turnover due to changes. The loss of employees can be costly. Replacing workers are expensive, and new employees need time to learn their jobs. Interclean can develop an effective human resource management team to support the organization through possible high turnover (Noe, Hollenbeck, Gerhert, & Wright, 2003).

Home Depot provides experience to high employee turnover ratios. Recently Home Depot was faced with similar issues. Employees were constantly leaving the company and Home Depot was struggling to retain them. It was costing the company hundreds of thousands of dollars to retrain new employees and give them time to learn their jobs. Chief Executive Officer Robert Nardelli changed the focus of the company by hiring Executive Director of Human Resources, Dennis Donovan. Donovan changed the face of the company through redeveloping their training programs to better serve their employees. With new development programs Donovan was able to reduce the attrition rate of full-times employees (Fredman, 2003). This is a learning process for InterClean but with the right learning and training programs, they can successfully build their business and become a major competitor in the cleaning industry.

Employee involvement gives Interclean another opportunity to reduce employee turnover. Dow Corning is a primary example of employee involvement. Dow Corning was always a top performing industry but they suffered from market pressures and economic changes. They were forced to initiate rounds of layoffs and other cost-saving moves. This led to creating a new business strategy which involved management teams meeting together to discuss different strategic outlooks. They were in constant communication with human resource management. Through these meeting with human resources they were able to identify the gaps and were able to fill them with internal job postings. This gave employees the opportunity to job share and continuous learning possibilities. People of Dow Corning were excited about these new ideas and made them feel like they have a part of making the company a success (www.dowcorning.com). Interclean can develop a similar approach by involving their employees with their new vision. This creates organizational commitment and minimizes any possible voluntary turnover.

Another effective approach to retaining employees is through feedback. Feedback from surveys can help Interclean's senior leadership team and human resource management ease the merging process with EnviroTech. BP-Amoco avoided employee turnover by using feedback methods during their newly found joint venture. "BP-Amoco was able to target their communications with staff more effectively and to ensure that employees were fully committed to the company," (Human Resource Management International Digest, 2004). Employee feedback can provide Interclean with employee commitment and employees will feel like they are contributing to the success of the company.

Career and Training Development

Organizations are constantly learning and therefore they must become learning organizations. Interclean wants to implement a new sales model and to develop this approach they need to establish learning and training programs. A systematic approach to the training and development process in Interclean will be an investment worth their time. Human resource management must know how to transform the new sales model into their improved business processes. "The first thing general managers should know about training and development is that the success of their company's instructional programs is dependent upon an approach that considers a number of interacting components," (Dreher & Dougherty, 2001).

AT&T is a company that deals with mergers and acquisitions frequently. AT&T can provide Interclean with benchmarking strategies to fully support their acquisition of EnviroTech. One of the issues AT&T realized through this process is "the unique connection between human resources and learning," (Whitney, 2006). AT&T implemented their own training programs to give their employees the opportunity to learn new sales techniques. Human resource took a strategic approach to develop their new learning management system (Whitney, 2006). Interclean can create a learning and training development system that will support the employees of Interclean and EnviroTech.

Lucottica shares the same issues as Interclean as well. Lucottica methods of training were envisioned "through the combination of internal communications, associate interaction, training and recognition programs, the mission, vision, and values were continually used to focus and energize the organization," (The Year in Review, 2004). Through this process, Luxottica is focusing their attention