Nordstrom

The Policies, Practices, and Measurement Systems utilized by Nordstrom seem very unique. It is not the basic 40 hour work week for sales personnel at Nordstrom. They have the breakdown of sales per hour, which essentially is how efficient each worker is being. This is a good way to see how productive sales people are, but the total hours recorded, and the total hours actually worked is sometimes skewed for the sake of making good numbers. Using this system of SPH, I believe that the sales clerks have a to walk a fine line in regards to getting this SPH number as high as possible. On one hand, the clerks want to work full time and get the most pay, but If they work too many hours, they might not get the extra incentives for a high SPH. If the sales clerks work a little bit at a time, their low hourly wage plus incentives might not make up for the full time paycheck. If I were in this situation, I would keep the hours extremely low at first to get the highest SPH, then after some getting a reputation up, I would distinctively choose certain hours during the week to work which would slowly get me more hours, and keep the SPH high as well. Then, as soon as I see a drop in my SPH, I would go back to lowering my hours again. The practice of this SPH would have to be constantly changing each week.

The additional elements of the management team also contributed to Nordstrom's success. Having the company policy where promoting only comes from within gave the employees a better outlook when thinking about their future with Nordstrom. This helped motivate employees to work harder, and to keep looking ahead. Also, the structure of Nordstrom's bussiness was a good design for profit. The top management had less control over operations, but each individual operation was relatively free to make their own decisions. A complement to the environment that Norstrom had, was the way they set up the customer service all star awards. When setting this up, they produced a competitive environment making the employees strive for this goal of being and all star.

I guess the SPH didn't turn out to be the best method overall. The way SHP was set up actually did implicitly encourage employees to work off the clock. This was realized by the local unions, and Nordstrom was attacked. But lesson learned is to pay your employees for the hours that they work. And if that doesn't work, you can always just hire someone and put them on a salary. This way, you can work them like crazy and get around all of these "by hour" statistics. I personally am on salary and work far beyond 40 hours a week, but that's just how the cookie crumbles.