Custom «Comparing Lowes and Home Depot » Essay Paper Sample

Home Depot Company is the largest home improvement retailer in the world and was founded in 1978, in Atlanta Georgia. It offers a variety of goods and services and serves three main customer groups: "Professional customers", "do-it for your self customers" and "do-it for me customers". A typical store at the depot stocks about 50,000 items of different colors and size. The main groups of products stored at the Depot include building materials, hardware and seasonal, lumber plumbing, paint, and wall coverings. To create a balance for the national products that the depot offers, it has created a strategic association with the various vendor partners to only market products that are only offered by the depot. According to Baker, H.K & Powell (2005), the company operates a total of 1800 stores that include 1649 stores, 84 Home depot stores located in seven Canadian provinces, 50 EXPO design centers, three HD Landscape Supply stores and one Flour store in the United States, ten stores in Mexico and seven in Puertarico. It also has about 280,000 employees (p. 51).

Lowe's Company, Inc is a group of home improvement stores based in United States that was founded in 1946 in North Carolina. It is made up of more than 1,710 stores in the U.S and 20 in Canada and serves over 14 million customers every week. This is the second largest chain in the world after Home Depot. The company is organized into divisions, regions, district sand individual stores and each store can employ between 80 to 400 people depending on its sales volume and of course the size.

According to Cushman & King (2001), communication is a very essential tool in business. Understanding your bosses' mode of communication is equally useful. To create good organizational culture, employees should be able to pass information among themselves rather than fear one another (p. 119). Research das shown that through contact communication, employees can open up to one another and therefore understand how fallow workmates behave and therefore understand how to relate to them although there might be veracious modes of communication, a successful company should utilize the fastest and reliable mode to keep up with growing change. Knowing how people communicate within an organization is also important for networking. At the current time, technology has evolved and therefore brought about various modes of communication like the use of email, phones as opposed to post mails that were used before (Baker & Powell, 2005, p. 57). The best mode of communication however face to face because you can clarify points where you feel you haven't understood. This proposal is aimed and comparing Lowe's and Home Depot in terms of their style of communication and select which seems to be the best.

In order to understand the effectiveness of the communication styles used by these two companies, several questions have to be answered. These include:

1. What is the relationship between employees and the bosses?

2. What is the performance of each employee?

3. How is the relationship between the company and its customers?

You have to understand the relationship between the employees and the bosses since this will reflect on whether they are free with one another or there is some fear or tension between them. Is there is some tension or fear, then definitely the company's mode of communication is not effective. However, you should be able to differentiate between fear and respect. This will be observed through the organizational culture of both companies (Cushman & King, 2001, p. 120).

Employee performance will also be looked into to understand the effective of each company's communication style. If there performance is above average, then communication style will be considered effective. On the other hand if the performance of individual employees is below average then it will be considered ineffective.

According to Baker & Powell (2005), the consumer loyalty is also a key determinant of the effectiveness of each company's communication style. The number of customers each company will also be looked at (p. 226). If more customers buy goods and services from either company, then it will be considered to have effective communication skills. There is no way a customer can come back for your services if you do not deal with him/her is the right way.

The manner in which problems are solved will also be considered. Differences do occur in almost every organization. However, it is how best you deal with these differences that matter. More important, you should not allow the same mistake or difference between either employees or employers repeat themselves (Baker & Powell, 2005, p. 228).

In order to get the best answers for these questions, ten employees from each company and 5 managers will be interviewed to get views from each side and therefore avoid being biased. This will be aimed to understand how the employees feel about their bosses and how employers feel about their employees. The human resource manager is one of the best employees to consult on issues regarding the conduct of each employer. They will be contacted in each case to understand the organizational culture at each company. In addition, the customer care office will be examined to understand their personal relations skills and how they deal with customer complaints whenever they occur.

I will begin by addressing the history of both companies and tracing their progress ever since they were formed. The current performance will also be looked into an interview of both employees and managers done to understand hat they have to say about one another. The customers will then also be interview to understand how they feel about the company. In addition, the human resource manager will also be interviewed to pay more information.

As stated before communication is a very vital tool in any business. This definitely determines the organizational culture and in the long run the success of the company. The best company is also that which listens to the problems of employees and the customers at large.