Social issues in HRM:
Training and development
Training and development
Addressing the Social Issues of Organizations Today
Training and developing dedicated workers in a competitive workforce is among one of the top social concerns in Human Resource Management today. Forbes reports, "more than 2/3 of HR managers state talent and leadership gaps have become the top business challenge" and "45% of business leaders believe that newly graduated college students do not have the entry level skills they need to start work without training" (Bersin, 2013). The Conference Board Survey of CEO's found, "Human Capital is the #1 challenge on the minds of CEO's" (Bersin, 2013).
Globalization has had far-reaching effects in business (Dias, 2011). How people choose to act, behave, and live has changed. Just after the turn of the 20th century, companies used Frederick Taylor’s principles of scientific management to train workers. Bloomsburg Businessweek, Rick Wartzman, noted up until WWII, managers trained employees to analyze tasks by breaking them down into “individual, unskilled operations that could then be learned quite quickly” (2011). Today though, following Ulrich’s model, the role of HR is no longer merely a functional area. Employee training and development is defined as "the process of helping employees develop their personal and organization skills, knowledge, and abilities" (Dias, 2011). HR has become a partnership in charge of developing talent needed in the future.
Talent in an organization is derived from the skills employees possess but the range of skills that employees need, have not necessarily been provided by traditional educational systems. In the 2013 EIU/SHRM Foundation survey, executives reported, the “current disconnect between the skills fostered by education” and those needed, “will represent a very considerable obstacle in the coming years” (Challenges). Skills are an essential component of success. The OECD secretary-general, Angel Gurria stated, “What individuals know and can do has a profound impact on the competitiveness, productivity and social cohesion of their countries. But most importantly it has an impact on the quality of their lives, on their achievements and self-fulfillment’ (2011). Organizations "collaborating with policymakers" to redesign curricula that meets the "technical and vocational skills" needed for employment, "can change the skills of the workforce in the future" (Challenges).
America’s current education system cannot be blamed solely for the lack of workforce skills. Gallup’s latest "142-country study on the global workforce", found only "13 percent of workers worldwide" being “engaged,” meaning "psychologically committed" to their jobs; They report, the bulk of the working population -63 percent -are “not engaged,” indicating that they lack motivation" (Challenges). Furthermore, The Wall Street Journal stated the American workforce is “more easily distracted than ever”, after discovering “the average attention span-the amount of time a person can stay focused on a single task, filtering out distractions -in North America dropped from 12 seconds in 2000 to 8 seconds in 2015, thanks in large part to smartphones, on-demand entertainment and social media infiltrating people’s lives” (Kolodny, 2016).
Roles change in accordance to the changing global environment; As the economy continues to grow, the definition of work will continue to evolve. With change, "demographic, technological, and societal shifts" are evident (Challenges). As the "composition of the workforce changes, the motivations, expectations, and skills needed” also change (Challenges). Bloomberg reputed that training workers in the 21st century is much more complicated, referring to workers not having the desire to learn the other knowledge, skills, and functions of the company, considering the work outside his or her discipline as excess baggage (Wartzman, 2011). One scholarly report indicated, “with the process of economic globalization, the flexibility of the organization structure tends to be enhanced, challenging the stability of the employment relationship; To meet this instability, employees turn from the pursuit of lifetime employment to the pursuit of lifelong employability” (Ling Qing & Shen, 2014).
Employee satisfaction is derived from hygiene and motivation factors. Money is a "hygiene" factor in employment, "so once [companies] meet the competitive market for salaries, [they] must provide other incentives to attract top people,” contends Bersin (2013). These incentives include "career opportunities, culture, benefits, work environment, and a mission people believe in" (Bersin, 2013). Companies need to create a program that is flexible, “one to fit the person rather than the bureaucratic convenience or tradition”; It needs to do two things at once: “provide people with highly specialized knowledge and ensure that they don’t lose sight of how their specialty fits with an array of other specialties to meet the overall mission and objectives of the business” (Wartzman, 2011). Bersin recommends finding more supply, "harvesting" new technical talent, and "candidate relationship management” to meet these satisfactions (2013). Ultimately, a business leader’s prime concern should be employee satisfaction, as it translates into effects that inevitably lead to a company's success and increased profitability.
Companies seeking competency and commitment in order to maximize profits need to retain engaged workers who fit well with the company and who possess and are willing to share highly specialized knowledge. Forbes reported the "ability to innovate is driven primarily by the technical skills and capabilities of its workforce" (Bersin, 2013). To meet the current demands of society, a much more complex training program that develops skills, which affect the employee’s job directly, must be developed. A company must routinely assess the company’s needs and be current in regards to the performance of the overall industry. Assessing needs is the first step in developing a framework to provide training to employees, to increase engagement and maximize performance (Dias, 2011).
Technical, quality, professional, team, managerial, safety, skill, and soft skills trainings should continuously be available and updated, starting on the worker’s first day on the job. Making knowledge available to the entire organization is key to possessing competitive advantage. Wall Street reported some companies are integrating “microlearning apps and websites to deliver training to workers in bite-size lessons” because “learning through spaced repetition” is more effective than cramming a lot of content into one long training session (Kolodny, 2016). Furthermore, microlearning allows employees to complete training using a short digital session at their convenience to learn new “accounting software or factory equipment, or how to manage conflict and motivate teams” (Kolodny, 2016). No matter what style or mode used, knowledge sharing should be the goal.
With knowledge sharing the goal, budget, audience, and content development are essential in framework development. Wartzman endorsed that “by designing courses of sufficient depth and breadth, building in both theory and practice, and tailoring programs to individuals-is difficult and expensive” but concedes, “there’s no better way to make your business take off" (2011).
Equipping the future workforce with the necessary skills to "bridge the labor-market gap" (Challenges) has become so important the New York Times reported President Obama signed a bipartisan bill hoping to “expand opportunity” for more workers by ensuring they have “access to the training and skills they need” to compete in the workforce (Joachim, 2014). The federal job training program will provide money to cities and states for retraining workers who are looking for work, or who are looking for better work, to earn a higher income, reported Joachim (2014).
Agreeing with the New York Times, The Washington Post announced due to a huge skill gap, Walmart, Home Depot, The Shopping Network, and other non-profit groups are launching a training and credential program that will be led by the nonprofit arm of the National Retail Federation trade group (D'Innocenzio, 2017), The program will include training in sales and inventory basics, customer service and technology use. The article indicated, "32% of all first jobs" are in retail and more and more job openings are “becoming available in retail” (D'Innocenzio, 2017). She described the skills needed in entry-level retail which include how to balance a cash drawer, checking for counterfeit currency, understanding how stores and online sites work together, using up-to-date handhelds to check inventory, and how to solve customer-service issues. It’s “quantitative”, “service-oriented”, and it’s “all about the innovation of technology” (D'Innocenzio, 2017). Measuring training effectiveness, D'Innocenzio expressed the NRF Foundation would evaluate 6-10 companies later this year to assess if participants “get jobs faster, stay longer, and get raises faster” (2017).
Constant evaluation of employees and organizational goals result in increased commitment and satisfaction. Performance management has become a modern tool to increase knowledge and productivity. Globalization has impacted organizational design and has contributed numerous social concerns, changing the way workers behave and perform in organizations today. Training workers has become priority, as Dias reports, "41 percent of employees at companies with poor training planned to leave within the year" (Dias, 2011). Providing training by teaching multiple skills in a short amount of time, increases satisfaction, closes gaps in the industries, and relates to what society identifies to.
References
Bersin, J. (2013, April 5). Why H.R. Managers Need to Think like Economists Forbes. Retrieved from http://www.forbes.com/sites/joshbersin/2013/04/05/can-hr-managers-think-like-economists/#2064b4597aee.
Challenges for human resource management and global business strategy. Economist Intelligence Unit Limited. Retrieved from http://futurehrtrends.eiu.com/report-2014/challenges-human-resource-management/.
D'Innocenzio, Anne. (2017, Jan. 14). Retail group launches training for entry-level job seekers. The Washington Post. Retrieved from https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/technology/retail-group-launches-training-for-entry-level-job-seekers/2017/01/14/9d5fc1da-da94-11e6-a0e6-d502d6751bc8_story.html?utm_term=.328a1705d939.
Dias, L. (2011). Human resource management. Saylor.org/books. ISBN 13: 978-1-4533194-3-7. Downloaded Jan. 9, 2014 from https://open.umn.edu/opentextbooks/BookDetail.aspx?bookId=71
Gurria, Angel. (2011, July 11). Skills for the 21 century: from lifetime employment to lifetime employability. Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. Vienna, Austria. Retrieved from http://www.oecd.org/employment/skillsforthe21centuryfromlifetimeemploymenttolifetimeemployability.htm.
Joachim, David, S. (2014, July 22). Obama signs new job-training law. The New York Times. Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/23/us/obama-signs-new-job-training-law.html.
Kolodny, L. (2016, March 13). The Latest Approach to Employee Training. The Wall Street Journal. Retrieved from http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-latest-approach-to-employee-training-1457921560.
Ling, L., Qing, T., & Shen, P., (2014) Can training promote employee organizational commitment? The effect of employability and expectation value. 5(2), 162-186. Nankai Business Review International. Retrieved from http://dx.doi.org/10.1108/NBRI-09-2013-0034
Wartzman, Rick. (2011, Nov. 18). Why Training Employees Is Always a High-Wire Act. Bloomberg. Retrieved from https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2011-11-18/why-training-employees-is-always-a-high-wire-act.
Social issues in HRM: Training and development
Amy Nichole Harmon
Sienna Heights University
Human Resource Management
Professor Stephen Ball
March 2, 2017
Globalization has had far-reaching effects in business (Dias, 2011). How people choose to act, behave, and live has changed. Just after the turn of the 20th century, companies used Frederick Taylor’s principles of scientific management to train workers. Bloomsburg Businessweek, Rick Wartzman, noted up until WWII, managers trained employees to analyze tasks by breaking them down into “individual, unskilled operations that could then be learned quite quickly” (2011). Today though, following Ulrich’s model, the role of HR is no longer merely a functional area. Employee training and development is defined as "the process of helping employees develop their personal and organization skills, knowledge, and abilities" (Dias, 2011). HR has become a partnership in charge of developing talent needed in the future.
Talent in an organization is derived from the skills employees possess but the range of skills that employees need, have not necessarily been provided by traditional educational systems. In the 2013 EIU/SHRM Foundation survey, executives reported, the “current disconnect between the skills fostered by education” and those needed, “will represent a very considerable obstacle in the coming years” (Challenges). Skills are an essential component of success. The OECD secretary-general, Angel Gurria stated, “What individuals know and can do has a profound impact on the competitiveness, productivity and social cohesion of their countries. But most importantly it has an impact on the quality of their lives, on their achievements and self-fulfillment’ (2011). Organizations "collaborating with policymakers" to redesign curricula that meets the "technical and vocational skills" needed for employment, "can change the skills of the workforce in the future" (Challenges).
America’s current education system cannot be blamed solely for the lack of workforce skills. Gallup’s latest "142-country study on the global workforce", found only "13 percent of workers worldwide" being “engaged,” meaning "psychologically committed" to their jobs; They report, the bulk of the working population -63 percent -are “not engaged,” indicating that they lack motivation" (Challenges). Furthermore, The Wall Street Journal stated the American workforce is “more easily distracted than ever”, after discovering “the average attention span-the amount of time a person can stay focused on a single task, filtering out distractions -in North America dropped from 12 seconds in 2000 to 8 seconds in 2015, thanks in large part to smartphones, on-demand entertainment and social media infiltrating people’s lives” (Kolodny, 2016).
Roles change in accordance to the changing global environment; As the economy continues to grow, the definition of work will continue to evolve. With change, "demographic, technological, and societal shifts" are evident (Challenges). As the "composition of the workforce changes, the motivations, expectations, and skills needed” also change (Challenges). Bloomberg reputed that training workers in the 21st century is much more complicated, referring to workers not having the desire to learn the other knowledge, skills, and functions of the company, considering the work outside his or her discipline as excess baggage (Wartzman, 2011). One scholarly report indicated, “with the process of economic globalization, the flexibility of the organization structure tends to be enhanced, challenging the stability of the employment relationship; To meet this instability, employees turn from the pursuit of lifetime employment to the pursuit of lifelong employability” (Ling Qing & Shen, 2014).
Employee satisfaction is derived from hygiene and motivation factors. Money is a "hygiene" factor in employment, "so once [companies] meet the competitive market for salaries, [they] must provide other incentives to attract top people,” contends Bersin (2013). These incentives include "career opportunities, culture, benefits, work environment, and a mission people believe in" (Bersin, 2013). Companies need to create a program that is flexible, “one to fit the person rather than the bureaucratic convenience or tradition”; It needs to do two things at once: “provide people with highly specialized knowledge and ensure that they don’t lose sight of how their specialty fits with an array of other specialties to meet the overall mission and objectives of the business” (Wartzman, 2011). Bersin recommends finding more supply, "harvesting" new technical talent, and "candidate relationship management” to meet these satisfactions (2013). Ultimately, a business leader’s prime concern should be employee satisfaction, as it translates into effects that inevitably lead to a company's success and increased profitability.
Companies seeking competency and commitment in order to maximize profits need to retain engaged workers who fit well with the company and who possess and are willing to share highly specialized knowledge. Forbes reported the "ability to innovate is driven primarily by the technical skills and capabilities of its workforce" (Bersin, 2013). To meet the current demands of society, a much more complex training program that develops skills, which affect the employee’s job directly, must be developed. A company must routinely assess the company’s needs and be current in regards to the performance of the overall industry. Assessing needs is the first step in developing a framework to provide training to employees, to increase engagement and maximize performance (Dias, 2011).
Technical, quality, professional, team, managerial, safety, skill, and soft skills trainings should continuously be available and updated, starting on the worker’s first day on the job. Making knowledge available to the entire organization is key to possessing competitive advantage. Wall Street reported some companies are integrating “microlearning apps and websites to deliver training to workers in bite-size lessons” because “learning through spaced repetition” is more effective than cramming a lot of content into one long training session (Kolodny, 2016). Furthermore, microlearning allows employees to complete training using a short digital session at their convenience to learn new “accounting software or factory equipment, or how to manage conflict and motivate teams” (Kolodny, 2016). No matter what style or mode used, knowledge sharing should be the goal.
With knowledge sharing the goal, budget, audience, and content development are essential in framework development. Wartzman endorsed that “by designing courses of sufficient depth and breadth, building in both theory and practice, and tailoring programs to individuals-is difficult and expensive” but concedes, “there’s no better way to make your business take off" (2011).
Equipping the future workforce with the necessary skills to "bridge the labor-market gap" (Challenges) has become so important the New York Times reported President Obama signed a bipartisan bill hoping to “expand opportunity” for more workers by ensuring they have “access to the training and skills they need” to compete in the workforce (Joachim, 2014). The federal job training program will provide money to cities and states for retraining workers who are looking for work, or who are looking for better work, to earn a higher income, reported Joachim (2014).
Agreeing with the New York Times, The Washington Post announced due to a huge skill gap, Walmart, Home Depot, The Shopping Network, and other non-profit groups are launching a training and credential program that will be led by the nonprofit arm of the National Retail Federation trade group (D'Innocenzio, 2017), The program will include training in sales and inventory basics, customer service and technology use. The article indicated, "32% of all first jobs" are in retail and more and more job openings are “becoming available in retail” (D'Innocenzio, 2017). She described the skills needed in entry-level retail which include how to balance a cash drawer, checking for counterfeit currency, understanding how stores and online sites work together, using up-to-date handhelds to check inventory, and how to solve customer-service issues. It’s “quantitative”, “service-oriented”, and it’s “all about the innovation of technology” (D'Innocenzio, 2017). Measuring training effectiveness, D'Innocenzio expressed the NRF Foundation would evaluate 6-10 companies later this year to assess if participants “get jobs faster, stay longer, and get raises faster” (2017).
Constant evaluation of employees and organizational goals result in increased commitment and satisfaction. Performance management has become a modern tool to increase knowledge and productivity. Globalization has impacted organizational design and has contributed numerous social concerns, changing the way workers behave and perform in organizations today. Training workers has become priority, as Dias reports, "41 percent of employees at companies with poor training planned to leave within the year" (Dias, 2011). Providing training by teaching multiple skills in a short amount of time, increases satisfaction, closes gaps in the industries, and relates to what society identifies to.
References
Bersin, J. (2013, April 5). Why H.R. Managers Need to Think like Economists Forbes. Retrieved from http://www.forbes.com/sites/joshbersin/2013/04/05/can-hr-managers-think-like-economists/#2064b4597aee.
Challenges for human resource management and global business strategy. Economist Intelligence Unit Limited. Retrieved from http://futurehrtrends.eiu.com/report-2014/challenges-human-resource-management/.
D'Innocenzio, Anne. (2017, Jan. 14). Retail group launches training for entry-level job seekers. The Washington Post. Retrieved from https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/technology/retail-group-launches-training-for-entry-level-job-seekers/2017/01/14/9d5fc1da-da94-11e6-a0e6-d502d6751bc8_story.html?utm_term=.328a1705d939.
Dias, L. (2011). Human resource management. Saylor.org/books. ISBN 13: 978-1-4533194-3-7. Downloaded Jan. 9, 2014 from https://open.umn.edu/opentextbooks/BookDetail.aspx?bookId=71
Gurria, Angel. (2011, July 11). Skills for the 21 century: from lifetime employment to lifetime employability. Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. Vienna, Austria. Retrieved from http://www.oecd.org/employment/skillsforthe21centuryfromlifetimeemploymenttolifetimeemployability.htm.
Joachim, David, S. (2014, July 22). Obama signs new job-training law. The New York Times. Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/23/us/obama-signs-new-job-training-law.html.
Kolodny, L. (2016, March 13). The Latest Approach to Employee Training. The Wall Street Journal. Retrieved from http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-latest-approach-to-employee-training-1457921560.
Ling, L., Qing, T., & Shen, P., (2014) Can training promote employee organizational commitment? The effect of employability and expectation value. 5(2), 162-186. Nankai Business Review International. Retrieved from http://dx.doi.org/10.1108/NBRI-09-2013-0034
Wartzman, Rick. (2011, Nov. 18). Why Training Employees Is Always a High-Wire Act. Bloomberg. Retrieved from https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2011-11-18/why-training-employees-is-always-a-high-wire-act.
Social issues in HRM: Training and development
Amy Nichole Harmon
Sienna Heights University
Human Resource Management
Professor Stephen Ball
March 2, 2017