The Korea Ginseng Corporation (KGC) is one of the leading companies in the world health food market. It specializes in red ginseng-an herbal supplement often used to strengthen the immune system and ward off stress and disease. During the past decade, the company has grown rapidly due to increasing global

interest in health and also owes its success to the company's dedicated local employees.

As KGC's business has thrived, the amount of information that the employees need to know has grown. The dissemination rate, however, has not kept pace with the growth of the company. This lack of understanding about the company caused communication problems between business units and made each unit a silo.

When a Korean current affairs TV program raised a question about the high price of KGC's product compared with its competitors, many KGC employees found themselves subject to questions from their acquaintances about the issue and red ginseng more broadly. The company's leadership immediately realized it needed to address this lack of understanding on the part of employees.

KGC felt strongly about the necessity to train its people, so its human resource development (HRD) department created a taskforce to collect core organizational knowledge and business information and then disseminate it to employees. To identify the issues and core knowledge that was necessary to impart, HRD managers thoroughly reviewed the company's yearly and long-term business plans, performance evaluation index of each department, and other internal documents. From reviewing these documents, the HRD managers listed keywords from seven business units covering product/brand information, the food sanitation act, the manufacturing process, and other business-related issues. They then sent the keywords to each business unit to ask consent to share their business issues and knowledge with every company employee.

After getting each department head's approval, HRD finalized a core knowledge list of 101 keywords. Next the HRD managers selected internal subject-matter experts (SMEs) on each issue and worked with them to write scripts around each keyword. The manuscripts were uploaded to the knowledge management system and then disseminated to employees.

Short video clips based on the manuscripts were developed by HRD in coordination with the SMEs, and then made available to employees. Printed manuscripts also were distributed to each team so that people could refer to the information in that format. But despite all these efforts, employees weren't taking advantage of the learning resources and materials.

Questions

1. Why did KGC decide to design a training program, and what were its objectives? Do you think a training program was necessary? Explain your answer.

2. Describe how KGC designed the training program and the program itself. What are some of the strengths and weaknesses of the process and the program?

3. Why do you think that employees at KGC were not taking advantage of the learning resources

and materials?

4. What else could KGC do so that employees will take advantage of and refer to the learning resources and materials? What would make the training program more effective?

Answer rating: 100% (QA)

1 KGC decided to design a training program in order to address the lack of understanding on the part ... View the full answer