Learning organizations are dedicated to providing their workforce with leading careers where employees can flourish vigorously. Currently, I am not working in any professional environment, but I would prefer to work for a learning organization as it provides an opportunity for career growth. Nestle is one of the learning organizations where employees have a chance to grow and progress in their careers while relishing a competitive compensation package in an endearing environment.
SWOT Analysis
I have taken Nestle as a learning organization for SWOT analysis that contains strengths, weaknesses, threats, and opportunities.
Strength
A much-diversified company, Nestle is running its operations in various markets as well as segments of those markets. It has the advantage of serving in different segments and has a strong relationship with other potent brands like Coca-Cola. Nestle is already using modern ways and methods for manufacturing high-quality products. Due to having strong research and development competencies, it has great power to raise. Nestle has an advantage over rivals due to its geographic existence and distribution channels. Nestle helps the workforce develop literacy skills as they send employees to a foreign country to learn about consumer tastes and market trends. Line managers provide feedback and do proper assessments once a year.
Weaknesses
There are some well-familiar brands of Nestle that make the most portion of sales. The company may face a vulnerable situation due to the slight change in consumer purchase preferences. A company is greatly reliant on advertising in order to shape the opinion of consumers, which results in a high marketing cost. Nestle is expanding into mature markets and might face tough competition.
Nestle does not have enough competitive units as it is not providing innovative products as fast as other competitors. Nestle is not focusing on consumer research and has a gap in a few areas.
Opportunities
Nestle has greater opportunity to work in emerging consumer markets as well as in international markets. They have an opportunity for the development of advanced and innovative distribution channels. They might expand their supply chain process through backward integration in order to gain control over the processes. Due to a strong and powerful research and development workforce, it has the ability to lead new products in the future. Nestle has planned to launch new KitKat chocolate but with a smaller amount of sugar. There will be a great demand for this product in the United States due to sugar-related diseases like diabetes. They have a chance to expand in online retail that will provide new and modern distribution channel. Nestle is empowering young people with skills that are necessary for working in the workplace by taking initiatives through training programs and apprenticeships.
Threats
Nowadays, people are becoming more health conscious, and Nestle has most of the chocolate-related products. It might be possible for the company to face a decline in sales of chocolate in the coming years. It might be possible for Nestle to face a rise in prices of raw materials that leads to loss of capital or a decrease in sales of products. The company can face threats from other rivals and new entrants in markets along with a change in technologies.
Strategies For Minimizing Threats And Maximizing Opportunities
Following are the strategies that will be helpful to minimize the threats and maximize the opportunities:
Nestle must keep in mind certain traits of personality and knowledge to recruit the workforce for a company. Employees must be flexible to learn, understand and incorporate the opinions of others. They should build intangible and unmatched capabilities that can provide a competitive advantage over others (Serrat, 2017).
The organization should design such programs and activities that can motivate employees to things about sales, production, and marketing. Educational institutes should also promote and design a learning culture that can enhance, build as well and develop their understanding, which ultimately benefits the companies (Huda et al., 2017).
The company should make better compensation plans for employees to promote and encourage their capabilities for work. Consequently, employees will consider their own company and will work for it devotedly.
The organization should make plans to capture market share by introducing the new product in those segments where the market is not saturated. It can use the blue ocean strategy for this purpose where a company can make a first mover advantage. By this, employees can learn to target untouched areas of the market.
Nestle should make products by keeping in mind the usage of the product and changing shoppers’ preferences and tastes. It is possible that Nestle will make strategies to uncover various areas of consumer research.
Plan
This plan will be executed well with the assistance and collaboration of human resources and the research and development department.
The human resource department should follow a process where employees have various qualities such as realism, hard work, and dynamism. They must emphasize and promote training programs as they hire a workforce that is freshly graduated with no experience.
A responsive and reactive research department will allow the company to manufacture innovative plus pioneering products that benefit the company to improve its competitive position. A flexible in-house department would be necessary to enable this process. Over time, practices are changing, and processes become outdated. There is a need to introduce evolving procedures that are more productive for a company(Manuti et al., 2015). However, these processes and methods should be safe enough for employees working in this environment.
Social media platforms and other research tools can be used to uncover consumer preferences and purchasing habits. This will be appropriate and less costly for the organization to discover consumer demands. In this way, the company will be able to tailor this information to the manufacturing of products, and feedback will be more effective due to greater interaction. Thus, employees can enhance their competencies in a learning organization, which will be helpful for personal career growth as well as organizational growth.
References
Huda, M., Sabani, N., Shahrill, M., Jasmi, K. A., Basiron, B., & Mustari, M. I. (2017). Empowering Learning Culture as Student Identity Construction in Higher Education. In Student Culture and Identity in Higher Education (pp. 160-179). IGI Global.
Manuti, A., Pastore, S., Scardigno, A. F., Giancaspro, M. L., & Morciano, D. (2015). Formal and informal learning in the workplace: a research review. International journal of training and development, 19(1), 1-17.
Serrat, O. (2017). Building a learning organization. In Knowledge Solutions (pp. 57-67). Springer, Singapore.
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