Why training is necessary in the workplace

Businesses today want to get more and more involved with training their employees, but may not actually be thinking about the training that is really needed.  Are they thinking about who should be involved in the training?  What strategy would be most appropriate for their purpose?  Do they even know what their training objectives are?  There is so much involved in training that sometimes it is completely forgotten about in the need just to have training. 

I am reminded of a current training implementation that is occurring in my current place of work.  There have been for some time a demand for some type of structured training to be put together for our incoming new hires.  So being put under the pressure from directors and voiced concerns, a training program was put together.  At the moment it is currently be rolled out for the first time and it is clearly lacking a strategic thought process.  The first major flaw is the lack of appropriate people involved in the training.  No higher level managers have had any say in the training or are apart of giving the training.  There was one person designated to do the training and it is quickly becoming too much for them to handle.  With this being the case, current employees are being asked to take part as trainers and having to rapidly learn the program.  The second major flaw is the objectives for the department as a whole are not clear.  There have been goals laid out for the employee, but they could appear to be more of a timeline than goals to be achieved.  They need to figure out how the program is going to be beneficial for the employee and ultimately for the department.

Emotions play a big role in the workplace.  They are something a majority of people believe shouldn’t be brought into the workplace, but after all we are humans and not robots.  I try to keep all of my negative emotions separate from what it is I do at work, but I like to work with people who are objective to allowing their emotions occasionally play a role.  Those who choose to block out all emotions come off less sympathetic and understanding of what might be going on with their fellow peers. 

The role looks play in an organization and their practices to me coincide with emotions and how they make up a company’s culture.  I have never been apart of a company whose culture was as strong as the retail company I recently left.  It was clear the type of look they wanted and the personalities their employees to have.  Everything was extremely predictable and although they were in the process of still trying to figure out their product’s identity, the company’s culture was well established.  A company’s culture plays such a strong role, because once you get sucked into it, it rules the way you conduct business.  It becomes very hard to implement ideas of your own or form opinions that are not influenced by the culture. 

We have spent sometime over the past couple of weeks understanding evalutaions.  Last week I wrote about how the articles made me start to think about how important evaluations actually are to many things.  This week the articles opened my eyes to the importance of not just having an evaluation but having a well desgined evaluation. 

When you think about, almost anyone can just put together an evaluation.  And typically they do, just because most of the time it’s sometype of requirement.  This is usually done by most who do not appreciate or understand the value of an evaluation.  As we have learned in the reading there is much more to designing an evaluation then what most recognize.  If the time is taken to consider all the points of evaluation design, we better our chances of them being effective.

Some of the elements involved in evalutation design deal with choosing the appropriate type of evaluation.  There can be so many different types, and all dependent on the situation.  There is a reasoning process behind evaluation that helps us put together an apppropriate design.   

Having a well desgined evaluation produces results, which ultimately can help with resistance to evaluation.  If we can educate others on how to develop evaluations and prove them to be effective, then a need for them can evolve.  Once a context is created for your evaluations, a better strategy can be formed. 

While reading all of the articles for this week, I couldn’t help but think about the value of evaluations.   They play a very important role in so many different fields and can hold such strong meaning.  They can help someone re-evaluate their work, access how someone is progressing at their job, or assist in redesigning programs of various natures. 

 I started thinking during my reading of what evalutations have ment to me over time.  At first I resorted to the obvious nature of evaluations, which is in the workforce.  We are constantly being evaluated at work and if we’re not, then we probably should be.  Evaluations in the workplace help determine our learning progression, give us an idea of our strengths and weaknesses, and lead our development in a direction of improvement.  They allow us as workers to gain a different perspective of our work habit than our own.  Although we may not do our own evaluations in our careers, and may not always agree with the evaluators comments, we have to understand the beneficial factor of evaluating, 

Then the next thing that came to mind concerning evaluations, was just the small but constant evaluations we make on our everyday lives.  Are we doing the right with our lives?  Am I at the right job?  Should this be my major?  We are constantly asking ourselves questions and evaluating our personal moves almost everyday.  We all have our own way of evaluating the choices we make throughout life, and what we typically ask ourselves isn’t too far off from what an evaluator may ask of a trainer’s program. 

The articles we read this week all in some form or fashion stressed the important use of evalutaions.  They have been in use for quite some time now and if done correctly can be very effective.  It is vital to create and complete an evaluation in a very developed and unbiased manner.  As discussed in parts of the articles, bad evaluations and evaluators can create unnessesary conflict.  However, if executed correctly can almost always produce positive outcomes.