ASSIGNMENT | Fashion and Safety at Bloomingdale’s

Instructions:

The answers to each Case Study must be 3 pages and completed in current APA formatting. Your response must be written in essay form, including an introduction, body, and conclusion. Your Case Study response must be supported by at least 2 scholarly, peer-reviewed articles and the course textbook. These sources must have been published within the last 5 years.

Fashion and Safety at Bloomingdale’s

Bloomingdale’s is a chain of luxury department stores owned by Macy’s with more than 10,000 employees in 12 states. Founded in 1872, Bloomingdale’s has been considered a destination store to find the latest in fashion design. Although retail is a safe job compared to manufacturing, there are still numerous ways that employees can get hurt on the job. For example, employees can be injured by falling off ladders while changing displays, incorrectly using boxcutters to open packages, or not following correct procedures cleaning up broken glass on the retail floor when customers drop merchandise or knock it off of display shelves. Bloomingdale’s wants to reduce safety claims to lower costs by improving employee knowledge of safe practices, providing consistent safety training across departments and stores, and encouraging employees to call out their peers’ safe and unsafe work behaviors and practices.

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Bloomingdale’s currently uses a combination of approaches for increasing employees’ safety awareness, including posting safety messages in break areas, providing classroom training, and holding pre-shift meetings. But Bloomingdale’s doesn’t believe employees are getting a consistent safety message and it doesn’t know whether they understand safety practices and how to apply them while they are working.

Bloomingdale’s is looking for a training approach that (1) can be completed by employees during their work hours without taking them off of the retail floor, (2) appeals to a diverse, multigenerational workforce, (3) is flexible enough so that it can be customized to address the unique safety challenges that stores and departments have, and (4) provides a way to measure employee learning and link their learning back to business goals.

Sources: Based on “About US” from www.bloomingdales.com, accessed April 15, 2018; “Axonify Case Study: Bloomingdale’s Saves Millions by Investing in Associate Knowledge-Building” (2016) from http://resources.axonify.com/case-studies/bloomingdale-s-case-study, accessed April 14, 2018.

Questions

1. How would you conduct a needs assessment to help choose a training method and identify the types of safety knowledge and skills that employees need? Who would be involved in your needs assessment?
2. What training method do you recommend for Bloomingdale’s? Explain the method and how it meets Bloomingdale’s expectations for safety training.
3. What evaluation outcomes should Bloomingdale’s measure to determine the effectiveness of your proposed training method? How would you demonstrate that the training helps the business?