Nestle’s Team-based training

The modern corporate world is fiercely competitive, with various companies and organizations vying for market share. Massive firms are making every effort to maintain their market-leading positions. This is accomplished through a combination of hard work and contrast training and team development, all of which are essential to a company’s market success. The focus of the current study is a discussion of Nestle’s team-based training strategy. Thesis: Team training at Nestle is an important component of the process of tam development and progress, but it is also accompanied by some cultural and personal challenges. The company Nestlé believes that it is vital to provide people with the opportunities for life-long learning and development. All the employees are called upon and tasked to improve their skills in a fast-changing business world. One of the major reasons, why the company uses team-based approach to training is the belief that offering opportunities for development, can not only enrich staff as a company, but also make employees individually more autonomous, confident, and, in turn, more employable, able to move simultaneously in the same direction to reach the same goals. Enhancing this righteous circle is the decisive goal of Nestle training efforts at different levels, achieved with the help of thousands of training programs, run every year.

Nestle, as a company that is engaged in both, production and realization of products, focuses in two types of training, task skills and process skills development (N/a, 2004). Both are very important for the company, as each is forwarded for the development of different types of skills of employees individually and as a group. However, there are certain potential issues, related to this training method (N/a, 2004).

Issues, related to team-based approach in training at Nestle and ways of their resolution

Conflict of interests

Since team-based approach empathizes training of employees in teams in order to develop their skills of team collaboration for the achievement of unique organizational goals, conflict of interest among employees is one of the potential training issues. It may become real obstacle in team training, when people may not find common language in the process of training. Information about the necessity to share responsibilities and fulfill tasks may be perceived in different ways by different people, therefore common goal of training is not achieved. Nestlé tries to resolve this issue through implementing strategies for conflict resolution, which presuppose organization meetings, where employees, whose interests and views have been crossed, may find common ground. This will help avoid future conflicts and involvement of other staff members.

Difficulties in making decisions

Taking into account that team teaching deals with teaching teams and people to work together and make joint decisions that will, difficulties in decision-making may pose additional issue on the managers of Nestle. The reason is that members may be strictly adhering to their positions in the process decision making or making repeated arguments instead of introducing new information. Since Nestle HR managers understand that reaching unity in teams is an essential part of team training, difficulties in decision making are resolved through surveys and personal conversations with each employee, involved in the issue. This will help find out the core of the problem and consider opinion of each employee so that to consider it in the process of training. Employees pass the survey and tell what skills they lack in order to be able to work in teams. HRs use their answers to incorporate necessary information in the team training program to develop either task or process skills of the personnel.

Cultural differences

Nestle is the company that works internationally, therefore it has people from different cultures and minorities in its staff. Although, multiculturalism may have positive influence on the process of communication, it may also pose additional difficulties in the process of team training. People may have differences in views, based on cultural diversity (Briggs, 2007). In this respect, the only thing that Nestle can do in order to resolve the issue, is to create the team training program that would match the values and peculiarities of each culture, the representatives of which work in their staff. In addition, Nestle tries to include the point of the necessity to be tolerant to each other, so that employees may develop their task and issue skills altogether (Briggs, 2007).

Lack of creativity and participation

This issue is one of the most frequent, as the process of training requires participation and creativity from the employees; however, they often are not active in the completion of tasks and are unable to generate fresh ideas and perspectives (Wexley and Latham, 2001). In order to face with the issue and resolve it effectively, Nestle HR managers conduct anonymous interviews with each team member and prepare questionnaires. It is done to know the opinion of each employee about the training program, reasons of his inactive behavior, task or process skills that he needs to develop or improve, but was unable to do during the training.

Conclusion

Team-based training is an effective and popular approach, used by the managers at Nestle with the aim to develop task and process skills of its employees and make them increase effectiveness of their work, which will have direct positive influence on the work of the whole organization. However, in the process of training, managers face with certain issues, such as conflict of interests, cultural differences, difficulties in making decisions and lack of creativity and activity of employees. These issues are resolved by implementation of surveys and interviews with employees as well as development of the sense of tolerance among team members.

References

Briggs G. E., Johnston W. A. (2007). Team Training. Orlando, FL: Naval Training Device Center

N/a (2004) “Training is a never-ending process at Nestlé: Company relies heavily on its own people rather than professional instructors”, Human Resource Management International Digest, 12 (6): pp.27-29, https://doi.org/10.1108/09670730410555765

Wexley K. N., Latham G. P. (2001). Developing and training human resources in organizations. (2nd edition). New York: Harper Collins