IOP 490 Week 4 Capstone Intervention and Evaluation Plan Example

A Ninety-Day Landing Plan for New Agents: Intervention Design and Evaluation

[Student Name]

University of Phoenix

IOP/490: Capstone Project

Week 4 Assignment

[Instructor Name]

[Date]

The student, utility call center, plan and figures are composites written for a model paper; research findings come from the sources listed.

The analysis in Week 3 showed that nearly half of first-year quits at the center happen in the first month on live calls, when job demands jump and support falls away. This proposal designs an intervention to soften that transition and an evaluation that will show whether it reduces early turnover.

Why One Change Is Not Enough

Week 3 found several forces acting at once in the first live month: harder calls, fewer helpers, worse shifts and early pressure on speed. A single fix, such as a longer training class, would leave the other forces untouched. Longer classroom time might even sharpen the shock, since agents would spend more weeks in polite role plays before meeting real callers. The plan therefore bundles several modest changes that act on the same window, and the evaluation tracks each change's delivery so that leaders can later drop any piece that adds cost without adding retention.

Goals

The plan has one business goal and three psychological goals. The business goal is to raise ninety-day retention of new agents from 67 percent to at least 80 percent and twelve-month retention from 52 percent to at least 65 percent within a year. The psychological goals follow the three adjustment indicators summarized in Week 2: newcomers should report clearer expectations, more confidence handling calls and a stronger sense of belonging by their tenth week.

Component One: A Graduated Transition

Instead of moving from the classroom straight to every call type, new agents spend their first two weeks live on billing questions, address changes and payment arrangements under set limits. In weeks three and four they add outage calls, and only in week five do they take disconnection calls. The goal is to replace one large shock with smaller, manageable steps, aimed squarely at the exit spike that Week 3 found right after classroom training.

Component Two: A Seated Peer Guide

Each newcomer is seated beside a peer guide, an agent from a recent class who has passed ninety days and volunteers for the role. Guides receive four hours of preparation, a small monthly stipend and relief from one hour of calls per day during the first month. They answer quick questions, model calm handling of difficult callers and introduce newcomers to others on the floor.

Allen (2006) found that socialization tactics emphasizing a fixed sequence of learning experiences and support from experienced insiders were related to greater embeddedness among newcomers, which in turn related to lower turnover. A peer guide builds both the sequence and the insider links that newcomers lack.

Component Three: Protected Schedules

For ninety days, newcomers work a day-shift block with their training class and their own team lead, rather than filling evenings and weekends. Workforce planning estimates that the center can cover evenings by rotating experienced agents one extra evening every five weeks, with a shift differential the union contract already provides.

Component Four: Delayed Handle Time Coaching

New agents receive coaching on accuracy, empathy and use of the knowledge base during their first twelve weeks; handle time targets begin in week thirteen. Team leads will still review calls but will not issue warnings on handle time before then.

A Low-Cost Addition: A Strengths-Focused First Day

Week 2's review described a field experiment in which newcomers who spent part of their first day reflecting on and sharing their personal strengths were more likely to stay. Tanisha adds a ninety-minute session in the first training week in which new agents describe a time they helped someone through a hard moment and how they might bring that skill to callers.

Evidence From Orientation Research

Klein and Weaver (2000) evaluated a voluntary orientation program for new employees and found that attendees reported more knowledge of the organization's goals, values, history and people and greater commitment to the organization than those who did not attend. The study supports the idea that structured early experiences shape how newcomers understand and attach to an employer, though it also shows that effects depend on what the program actually teaches.

Implementation

The training manager owns the graduated call routing, the workforce planning lead owns schedules, Tanisha coordinates peer guides and the HR analyst collects data. The center's union representative reviewed the schedule change and agreed to a one-year pilot. The estimated cost is about $46,000 a year, mostly guide stipends and relief time, compared with roughly $9,000 per early departure.

If the plan keeps only six more agents a year past ninety days, it pays for itself.

Evaluation Design

Kraiger et al. (1993) argued that training outcomes should be measured in several forms, including changes in knowledge, skills and attitudes, rather than reactions alone. Tanisha's plan measures reactions through a short survey, learning and attitudes through pulse items on role clarity, confidence and belonging at weeks four, ten and sixteen and results through retention and quality scores.

Random assignment of individual newcomers would be unfair and impractical on a shared floor. Grant and Wall (2009) argued that quasi-experiments, when designed carefully, can provide strong evidence in organizations, especially when researchers use staggered introductions, multiple comparison groups and repeated measures. Tanisha proposes a staggered launch: the first two monthly classes receive the landing plan while the next two classes begin under current practice and receive it later, and every class is set beside the class hired in that calendar month a year earlier. Retention will be tracked with survival curves by class.

Risks and How the Plan Handles Them

Three risks stand out. Summer outage season could flood the queues and tempt supervisors to route every call type to newcomers; the plan therefore names the operations manager as the person who must approve any exception, and each exception is logged. Peer guides could tire of the role or feel underpaid, so guides serve one class at a time and can step down at any point. Experienced agents could resent extra evening shifts; the schedule change is reviewed with the union every quarter, and the pilot can be paused if complaints rise. Writing these risks down now keeps the pilot honest when pressure arrives.

Process Checks

To know whether the plan was delivered, the HR analyst will track whether each newcomer was seated beside a guide, whether call routing followed the schedule and whether any newcomer received an early handle time warning.

Ethics

Participation in pulse surveys is voluntary and confidential, with results reported only for groups. No newcomer is denied the plan permanently; delayed classes receive it within two months.

Conclusion

The Ninety-Day Landing turns the analysis into four targeted changes and a modest addition, each tied to local evidence and research. A staggered evaluation with retention, adjustment and process measures will let leaders see whether the plan works and why.

References

Allen, D. G. (2006). Do organizational socialization tactics influence newcomer embeddedness and turnover? Journal of Management, 32(2), 237-256. https://doi.org/10.1177/0149206305280103

Grant, A. M., & Wall, T. D. (2009). The neglected science and art of quasi-experimentation: Why-to, when-to, and how-to advice for organizational researchers. Organizational Research Methods, 12(4), 653-686. https://doi.org/10.1177/1094428108320737

Klein, H. J., & Weaver, N. A. (2000). The effectiveness of an organizational-level orientation training program in the socialization of new hires. Personnel Psychology, 53(1), 47-66. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1744-6570.2000.tb00193.x

Kraiger, K., Ford, J. K., & Salas, E. (1993). Application of cognitive, skill-based, and affective theories of learning outcomes to new methods of training evaluation. Journal of Applied Psychology, 78(2), 311-328. https://doi.org/10.1037/0021-9010.78.2.311