The Southwest Airline company is committed to delivering high-quality customer service with friendliness, warmth, and in the spirit of the company. The company is dedicated to customer commitment ensuring their safety is uncompromised, and relationships are fostered on trust. The company conducts employee training to improve their skills and competence in service delivery which contributes to customer satisfaction. The purpose of training is to impart skills that will facilitate the realization of the company objectives, therefore; management at the airline should ensure that training programs emphasize learning.
The administration should formulate the airline’s goals based on the company mission and communicate them clearly throughout the organization. It is essential that expected results are also stated and the procedures for achieving these results specified. This will include specification of tasks, roles, and areas of competence that will facilitate performance measurement (Tracey et al., 2015. The next step will be to develop learning objectives that training programs should aim to achieve and communicate them to the airline employees.
Given the critical nature of aligning training to company objectives, the airline is bound to face challenges that might inhibit their purpose. There is the problem of lack of support from senior management to the company’s training programs. Top level management is responsible for formulating company objectives and approving the allocation of funds; therefore, their support is essential. Also, the risk of misalignment of training goals and organizational objectives causes grave concern. Another challenge is involving middle and operational level managers in aligning training to the overall strategy of the airline.
In designing training programs, all managers at the airline should be included to ensure learning objectives are aligned to the company mission (Clarke & Higgs 2016). Adequate research should be conducted, and a rationale detailing the long-term benefits of aligning training to the achievement of the company’s objectives should be presented to rally the commitment of senior management.
- Clarke, N., & Higgs, M. (2016). How Strategic Focus Relates to The Delivery of Leadership Training and Development. Human Resource Management, 55(4), 541-565.
- Tracey, J. B., Hinkin, T. R., Tran, T. L. B., Emigh, T., Kingra, M., Taylor, J., & Thorek, D. (2015). A Field Study of New Employee Training Programs: Industry Practices and Strategic Insights. Cornell Hospitality Quarterly, 56(4), 345-354.
