Communication Barriers Discussion 5

Communication Barriers Discussion 5

For this first week of your course project, you are the quality manager for a company and have been asked to visit a local store, make observations, and report your findings. This store should be one that you can find additional information on from secondary research as well as a company website. Download the observation form, and use for this stage of the assignment.
You may need to make adjustments to the observation form for data observed. You will need to plan out what you are observing as well as allow for independent observation. The information will be a mix of qualitative and quantitative data.

Visit a local establishment of a store, restaurant, or coffee shop, etc. Document the observations that you see in the following areas:

Customer interactions with service/sales staff (time, friendliness, etc.)

You will want to observe for 30 minutes at least and track the following:

Time of service for each customer.

How many customers in 30 minutes.

You will want to take note of customer satisfaction. (label them, according to researcher opinion, into three categories (Happy, Content, Angry)

Environment of establishment (cleanliness, sounds, smells, etc.).

Employee interactions (teamwork, helpfulness, production).

Anything else that you might observe.

In your report:

Summarize your observations in a final 1-2 page report and answer the following questions:

How does this quality approach you observed impact competitive advantages?

What recommendations would you make for improvement based on findings?

You must proofread your paper. But do not strictly rely on your computer’s spell-checker and grammar-checker; failure to do so indicates a lack of effort on your part and you can expect your grade to suffer accordingly. Papers with numerous misspelled words and grammatical mistakes will be penalized. Read over your paper – in silence and then aloud – before handing it in and make corrections as necessary. Often it is advantageous to have a friend proofread your paper for obvious errors. Handwritten corrections are preferable to uncorrected mistakes.

Use a standard 10 to 12 point (10 to 12 characters per inch) typeface. Smaller or compressed type and papers with small margins or single-spacing are hard to read. It is better to let your essay run over the recommended number of pages than to try to compress it into fewer pages.

Likewise, large type, large margins, large indentations, triple-spacing, increased leading (space between lines), increased kerning (space between letters), and any other such attempts at “padding” to increase the length of a paper are unacceptable, wasteful of trees, and will not fool your professor.

The paper must be neatly formatted, double-spaced with a one-inch margin on the top, bottom, and sides of each page. When submitting hard copy, be sure to use white paper and print out using dark ink. If it is hard to read your essay, it will also be hard to follow your argument.