What are the strengths and weaknesses of HR approaches

Evaluating the Training Program

• Transfer – refers to applying learning acquired in training to behavior on the job. To assess transfer, evaluators can ask employees about their own post-training behavior or they can ask trainees’ peers and managers about the trainees’ behavior.
• Organizational Results – Organizational results are, of course, outcomes that accrue to a group or the organization as a whole.
• To assess organizational results, we can use basic measures of effectiveness, such as an increase in sales for the whole company or a decrease in turnover, or we can use efficiency measures, which balance benefits with costs.

• Transfer. Transfer, as we have seen, refers to applying learning acquired in training to behavior on the job. To assess transfer, evaluators can ask employees about their own post-training behavior or they can ask trainees’ peers and managers about the trainees’ behavior. In some cases, existing records can be used to examine transfer. For example, if sales training encourages trainees to sell items with both high and low profit margins, the records of employees’ sales can indicate whether their actual sales move in that direction.

• Organizational Results. Organizational results are, of course, outcomes that accrue to a group or the organization as a whole. To assess organizational results, we can use basic measures of effectiveness, such as an increase in sales for the whole company or a decrease in turnover, or we can use efficiency measures, which balance benefits with costs.

Training is a planned effort by a company to help employees learn job-related knowledge, skills, and attitudes.

The vast majority of companies offer training programs, and they come in many shapes and sizes: large group lectures given by an expert; on-the-job training delivered by a supervisor; simulations guided by a computer program; small group projects coordinated by an executive; or on-line discussions with colleagues from around the country.

The common element that defines training is that employees go through a structured experience that helps them to learn something they can use to improve their performance at work.

Training, when designed and delivered properly, can improve the overall effectiveness of an organization in three ways.

First, it can boost employees’ commitment and motivation. Opportunities to learn new skills are important in today’s economy, so employees appreciate learning opportunities offered by training. As a result, companies that offer more training foster employee commitment.

Second, training helps employees perform their work more effectively and efficiently, so the organization is able to function better on a day-to-day basis. If you’ve ever been to a grocery store where the cashier had not been trained to use the cash register efficiently, then you’ve been a victim of poor training (or, if you were really unlucky, it might have been a combination of poor employee selection and poor training

Third, training benefits organizations is by helping them to meet their strategic objectives. It does so by providing employees with the specific knowledge, skills, and attitudes necessary to make strategic initiatives a reality. In other words, by making effective decisions regarding training, companies ensure that the right people have the right skills for achieving the competitive advantage sought by the strategy.

• A cost leadership strategy, including both the Bargain Laborer and Loyal Soldier strategies, requires that employees have knowledge, skills, and attitudes that help reduce costs and improve efficiency. For example, a local restaurant that is trying to compete based on low-cost menu items must have employees who know how to do their work efficiently with little waste

• A differentiation strategy, including both Free Agent and Committed Expert strategies, requires that employees be able to deliver services or make products that are superior to the services or products offered by competitors

David Van Adelsberg and Edward A. Trolley, Running Training Like a Business: Delivering Unmistakable Value (San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler, 1999); National Court Appointed Special Advocate Association, “Tips to Keep Volunteer Training Costs Down,” 2001, retrieved online at http://www.casanet.org on April 4, 2007.

• The first fundamental practice for ensuring learning and transfer is to operate training as a partnership among employees, their managers, and human resource professionals.
• A partnership between HR professionals and employees is critical because these professionals cannot determine employees’ knowledge and skill levels without their help.
• Without the support of management, HR professionals are unlikely to be able to change the actual behavior of employees on the job

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Source: Information from Geary A. Rummler and Alan P. Brache, Improving Performance: How to Manage the White Space on the Organization Chart, 2nd ed. (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1995).

How does an organization determine what training to offer and who should be trained?

This process is called needs assessment, and it occurs in two different ways. First, needs assessments may be done on a regular basis as training programs are planned and budgets are set. This planning process requires a proactive approach to determining training needs and developing training plans. Second, needs assessments may also be done in a reactive fashion in response to requests for particular training programs. The reactive and proactive approaches are described in more detail below.

Proactive Needs Assessment

Proactive needs assessment is a systematic process for determining and prioritizing the training programs to be developed and delivered by an organization. It generally has three distinct steps—organization analysis, task analysis, and person analysis. Each step requires different types of data.

Organization Analysis. Organization analysis requires information about the organization’s strategic goals, environment, resources, and characteristics. With this information, an organization can determine whether certain types of training would be useful for employees and for the organization as a whole. The organization’s strategy is relevant to decisions about training because different strategies require different knowledge, skills, and attitudes on the part of employees.

How to determine Training Needs.

Through a process known as Task analysis is a form of job analysis that involves identifying the tasks performed by trainees and the knowledge and skill necessary to perform the tasks effectively (see Chapter 4). The methods used in task analysis vary depending on the task being analyzed. The most common process used when the task analysis is being done to help design training is the following:

Groups of job incumbents develop lists of the tasks performed.

Human resource professionals group tasks into clusters based on similarity.

Groups of managers generate knowledge and skill statements for each task cluster.

Surveys, given to a new sample of incumbents, verify the task, task cluster, knowledge, and skill lists.

To avoid bias in the data collection, it is generally suggested that multiple panels and multiple assessors be involved.[ Of course, in smaller organizations or for jobs that don’t exist yet, it may be impossible to get information from people already doing the job.

• There are three common variations of task analysis: competency modeling, cognitive task analysis, and team task analysis.
• Competency modeling is similar to task analysis but results in a broader, more worker-focused (as opposed to work-focused) list of training needs. The process was described in Chapter 4. Competency modeling is most frequently used with managerial jobs. One benefit of using a competency model for needs assessment is lower cost, because this type of analysis does not involve determining specific competencies for a particular job.
• Cognitive task analysis examines the goals, decisions, and judgments that employees make on the job. While traditional task analysis focuses on observable tasks and behaviors, cognitive task analysis delves into the thought processes that underlie effective performance of a task. Experts are asked to think out loud while they perform each step of the task.
• Team task analysis involves examining the task and coordination requirements of a group of individuals working together toward a common goal. It is important to use team task analysis in situations where the performance of interest to the organization is largely determined by coordinated efforts.

• The various ways of organizing content and encouraging trainees to learn are referred to as training methods.
• Training methods vary in terms of how active the learner is during training. More passive methods can be useful, but they should seldom be used without the addition of at least one more active method.
• Methods should be selected primarily based on their usefulness in helping achieve the training program’s objectives. Table 9.7 provides a summary of which training methods are generally suited to which training objectives, along with the relative costs of the methods.

Presentation is the primary passive method of instruction. A presentation involves providing content directly to learners in a noninteractive fashion. It is a passive method because learners do little other than read or listen and (hopefully) make sense of the material. The most common type of presentation is a lecture given by an instructor.

• Lectures are an efficient way for many learners to receive the same content and gain the same knowledge. This means that presentations can be useful when the learning objective of training is for trainees to gain knowledge, such as an understanding product features. A disadvantage of presentations is that learners are not given any formal opportunity to test or apply what they are learning.

Discussions represent a more active training method. Discussions increase trainees’ involvement by allowing for two-way communication between trainer and trainees and between trainees. Discussion can help trainees to accomplish several things:

Recognize what they do not know but should know.

Get their questions answered.

Get advice on matters of concern to them.

Share ideas and develop a common perspective.

Learn about one another as people.

Discussions can be used to build knowledge and critical-thinking skill, but they are best used to help improve motivation and change attitudes. Discussions must be facilitated by a trainer in order to allow everyone an opportunity to participate.

• Case Study is an active training method in which trainees discuss, analyze, and solve problems based on real or hypothetical situations. Cases can be used to help teach basic principles and to improve motivation and change attitudes. Generally, however, the primary objective is to develop skill in analysis, communication, and problem solving
• Discovery is an active method that involves presenting trainees with a task that offers rich opportunities to learn new skills. For example, employees might be given access to a new computer program and asked to figure out for themselves how to do their work tasks using the program.
• When trainees engage in role playing, each participant acts out a part in a simulated situation. This active method offers an opportunity for trainees to practice new skills in the training environment. It is most often used to help trainees acquire interpersonal and human relations skills. Role playing typically has three phases:

Development involves preparing and explaining the roles and the situation that will be used in role playing.

Enactment involves the time that trainees take to become familiar with the details of the role and then act them out. Enactment can be done in small groups, with two actors and an observer, or with larger groups, with a small set of actors and the rest of the audience serving as observers. Of course, for skill building to occur, all trainees must have an opportunity to serve as an actor at some point.

Debriefing, in which trainees discuss their experiences, is considered the most important phase of role playing. Discussions should address the connections among the role-playing experience, the desired learning outcomes, and the desired organizational outcomes. Trainers must provide feedback to ensure that trainees learn from the role-playing experience. In other words, trainers must offer constructive criticism to trainees, explaining what they did well and where they need more practice.

• Simulation. Simulations are active methods that reproduce events, processes, and circumstances that occur in the trainee’s job. Participating in a simulation gives trainees the opportunity to experience at least some aspects of their job in a safe and controlled environment and build skills relevant to those aspects of the job. For example, pilots can be trained with mechanical flight simulators. Simulations can also involve role playing with many actors or interactive computer technology. To achieve the greatest benefits, simulations should be designed to replicate as closely as possible both the physical and psychological conditions that exist on the job.
• Behavior modeling works particularly well when the model is someone whom the trainees see as credible and when that model shows both positive and negative examples of the task performance.
• On-the-Job Methods. Training can also occur on the job. Effective training using this method is structured and systematic.

• Training evaluation is the process used to determine the effectiveness of training programs.
• Training effectiveness refers to the extent to which trainees (and their organization) benefit as intended from training.
• The training evaluation process typically involves four steps: (1) determining the purpose of the evaluation, (2) deciding on relevant outcomes, (3) choosing an evaluation design, and (4) collecting and analyzing the data and reporting the results.

Kurt Kraiger, “Decision-Based Evaluation,” in Kurt Kraiger (Ed.), Creating, Implementing, and Managing Effective Training and Development (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2002), pp. 331-376. Used with permission.

The first step in evaluation is to determine the purpose of the evaluation.

Most of the reasons to evaluate training fit into three primary categories: (1) provide feedback to designers and trainers that helps improve the training; (2) provide input for decisions about whether to continue providing or discontinue providing the training; and (3) provide information that can be used to market the training program.

• Training outcomes can be roughly divided into four categories—reactions, learning, transfer, and organizational results
• Reactions. Trainee reactions capture how the trainees felt about training: Did they like it? Did they think it was interesting and useful?
• Learning. As noted earlier, learning is a change that occurs from experience. Learning can involve knowledge, skills, or attitudes, and each of these can be assessed. Knowledge can be assessed with traditional tests, such as multiple-choice, fill-in-the-blank, or open-ended tests.

• Transfer. Transfer, as we have seen, refers to applying learning acquired in training to behavior on the job. To assess transfer, evaluators can ask employees about their own post-training behavior or they can ask trainees’ peers and managers about the trainees’ behavior. In some cases, existing records can be used to examine transfer. For example, if sales training encourages trainees to sell items with both high and low profit margins, the records of employees’ sales can indicate whether their actual sales move in that direction.

• Organizational Results. Organizational results are, of course, outcomes that accrue to a group or the organization as a whole. To assess organizational results, we can use basic measures of effectiveness, such as an increase in sales for the whole company or a decrease in turnover, or we can use efficiency measures, which balance benefits with costs.

The designs most commonly used in organizations are called post-test only designs. This means that training outcomes are measured only at the end of training for the training group. The group is given a survey or test after training, and we examine the results to see if the results are as expected.

• Pre-test and Post-test with Control Group. To provide greater certainty about whether training was effective, evaluators can test employees both at the beginning and at the end of training (to look for change) and can compare trained employees with untrained employees with similar characteristics (to verify that training caused the change).

• Once the purpose, outcomes, and design of evaluation have been specified, the evaluation can be conducted.
• The data collected must be analyzed and reports generated. Depending on the purpose of the evaluation, the reports may be widely disseminated or simply summarized for the trainer.
• It is important to revisit the purpose of the evaluation and make sure that the right people see the report so that the information gained from the evaluation is used as intended.