MRKT 4503 Week 6 Service Staffing Analysis Example

The Instructor Is the Product: A Staffing Analysis of a Driving School's Hiring, Pay, Scheduling and Support, Read Through the Service-Profit Chain and Emotional Labor

Student Name

Walden University

MRKT 4503: Strategic Services Marketing

Instructor Name

Month Day, Year

The Instructor Is the Product: A Staffing Analysis of a Driving School's Hiring, Pay, Scheduling and Support, Read Through the Service-Profit Chain and Emotional Labor

The Claim

At Steady Wheel Driving School, an instructor sits alone in a car with one learner for an hour. The learner judges the school almost entirely by that hour: whether the instructor arrived on time, stayed calm when the learner stalled at a busy intersection and explained what to practice next. In nearly every sense a buyer notices, the instructor is the service. Heskett et al. (1994) described a service-profit chain in which internal service quality drives employee satisfaction and retention, which drives the value customers receive, which drives their loyalty and the firm's profit. This analysis examines the school's eleven instructors along that chain under four headings: hiring, pay, scheduling and support.

Hiring

The school's current screen asks for two things: a valid state driving instructor license and a clean driving record for the past five years. Both are necessary, but neither predicts what learners' reviews keep mentioning, which is temperament. Of the forty reviews examined in the expectations brief, more than half mention the instructor's manner, and the most common complaints are about impatience and the most common praise is about calm. The school does not ask about temperament at all. A short practice lesson with a staff member playing a nervous learner would test it directly, at the cost of about an hour per candidate.

Pay

Instructors are paid about $24 per lesson delivered, with a guarantee of four paid hours a day on scheduled days, and nothing for cancellations or no-shows beyond the guarantee. Pay by the lesson rewards volume. It encourages instructors to fit in as many lessons as possible and to keep learners booking. It discourages two things the school needs: telling a parent honestly that their teen needs more practice, which can feel like selling, and spending extra minutes after a lesson explaining what to practice, which is unpaid. The gap analysis found that some instructors avoid the readiness conversation for exactly this reason. A small per-package bonus tied to the learner's road-test result, paid whether the learner needed six lessons or eight, would reward honest readiness advice instead of volume.

Scheduling

Scheduling shapes both the instructor's day and the learner's experience. Instructors are scheduled in back-to-back hourly lessons with no buffer for travel between home pickups. When a lesson runs over or traffic is heavy, the next pickup is late, which the blueprint identified as a recurring fail point. Adding a fifteen-minute buffer between home pickups would reduce late arrivals at the cost of roughly one fewer lesson per instructor per day. The school would need to weigh that cost against the reliability gains.

Support and Emotional Labor

Instructors are expected to stay calm with learners who are frightened, distracted or overconfident, sometimes in dangerous moments. Hochschild (1983) called this kind of effort emotional labor: managing one's own feelings to produce a required emotional display as part of the job. Grandey (2000) argued that the strain of emotional labor depends on how employees regulate their emotions, and that surface acting, displaying emotions one does not feel, is more draining than deep acting, actually working to feel the expected emotion. Driving instructors face a particular version of this: they must appear calm while being ready to use the second brake. The school gives no training in managing nervous learners or in handling the instructor's own stress after a near miss. Two of the eleven instructors left last year, and both mentioned burnout.

A short training session on coaching nervous learners, and a regular chance for instructors to talk through difficult lessons with a senior instructor, would support the emotional side of the job at low cost.

Recommendations Ranked

The four recommendations differ in cost. The temperament exercise and the coaching session cost little beyond staff time. The road-test bonus would cost an estimated $20 to $30 per package, depending on its size, and the scheduling buffer is the most expensive, since it reduces the number of lessons each instructor can deliver. That is why the buffer is ranked third, after the changes that cost less and affect learners just as directly. The analysis recommends, in order: a temperament exercise in hiring, a road-test bonus that rewards honest readiness advice, fifteen-minute buffers between home pickups and a coaching session with ongoing peer support. Each addresses a link in the service-profit chain that the school has neglected. Zeithaml et al. (2018) note that service firms often market heavily to customers while neglecting the employees who deliver the service; at a driving school, where the employee is the service, that neglect shows up directly in the reviews.

References

Grandey, A. A. (2000). Emotion regulation in the workplace: A new way to conceptualize emotional labor. Journal of Occupational Health Psychology, 5(1), 95-110. https://doi.org/10.1037/1076-8998.5.1.95

Heskett, J. L., Jones, T. O., Loveman, G. W., Sasser, W. E., & Schlesinger, L. A. (1994). Putting the service-profit chain to work. Harvard Business Review, 72(2), 164-174.

Hochschild, A. R. (1983). The managed heart: Commercialization of human feeling. University of California Press.

Zeithaml, V. A., Bitner, M. J., & Gremler, D. D. (2018). Services marketing: Integrating customer focus across the firm (7th ed.). McGraw-Hill Education.