Part 1: Training Program Design

The Training Program-FabricGuru

Training is one of the most effective and constructive strategies for communicating information, expertise and attitudes in a career. In organizations, training should be seen as a technique for transferring knowledge and skills. Training should be a continuous process with a program by sequential steps (starting with the purpose), the participant is able to capture their points, understand the training, demonstrate mastery and further enhance their skills. Training not only improves knowledge acquisition but also values within a business such as satisfaction, teamwork and ownership. Employees are motivated to continue the training over time due to satisfaction, improvement of their skills and personal growth (Celestin & Yufen, 2018). Aspects such as how to set up a good training program, how to deal with supervision, and how to prepare people for promotion all contribute to the success of the training program. Some possible training strategies for small businesses that will improve training outcomes has been addressed in research of (Hurn, 2007)

The purpose of this paper is to design a training program for a small business organization of FabricGuru in all parts including the needs analysis, training design, development and implantation and evaluation as well as give examples of what could have been included to develop the program more thoroughly.

Background of FabricGuru.

FabricGuru is a small business, with over 50 employees now rising to 250. FabricGuru currently has over 160 customers. Some have grown to become lifetime customers. Some businesses only buy what they need and FabricGuru serves as their resource for fabric. The owners wish to grow the company to be more than a catalog/store with good value fabric sales. The owners are willing to explore this idea but need the right people to help with the vision. While this is the Owner’s Plan the team here at FabricGuru will be part of helping to make this happen. In the past two years, this exponential development has taken place and now the once tiny business is struggling. The owner needs assistance with challenges resulting from this exponential growth. The owner is of the view that because of mistreatment by his managers and supervisors, he cannot retain key workers and suppliers. While he is fair and competitive in salaries, it is not sufficient to keep them. All the present nine supervisors were appointed from within and were never professionally trained. The owner thinks that the lack of training costs him money and clients and needs to be immediately remedied. The owner feels the stress of running the business is getting to him and he feels like quitting at any moment. If the employees are properly trained they will be able to get the best out of them and help the business grow.

Needs Analysis

The training need analysis (TNA) is quite important for the success of a business when it seeks to enhance performance using training. It will validate the training plan and determine if it is helpful to determine if a change is needed in the staff or if it is a good fit for the company. If the TNA identifies the areas that training will be helpful, then it is worthwhile and affordable (Rahmana & Sukaya, 2020). There are benefits to implementing training programs for employees. But they come with risks as well. That is why a proper TNA is required. Without proper planning, a company can waste a lot of money training the wrong people. Performing a TNA is the best way to develop a corrective action plan for a company.  Identifying the performance gap, cost benefit of training and the knowledge, skills and attitude of the staff will help to formulate a plan. The TNA will also analyze whether preparation will resolve the challenges within the company or whether employees have the expertise, experience, and mindset required to achieve the mission. If the right TNA is done, a few significant things can be accomplished. Increase financial gains to make sure the time and resources are efficiently invested. The TNA assesses the readiness of the workforce to implement training, assess the training need and the cost and time involved to implement training. It should also determine what type of training is needed for the current needs and assess the level of staff preparedness for training, determine the preparation and performance benchmark. Increase employee enthusiasm for preparation, align the training and training activities with the goals, goals and strategic plan of the company. This can be used as a way to gauge improvement needed. Lastly, the TNA should evaluate the changes required to promote employee development and as the company grows. (Sahoo & Mishra, 2019)

Organizational Analysis

In the FabricsGuru ‘s case, a question-and – answer format will be used to execute the training need analysis (TNA) and the management was interviewed by the top-level management (owner). This approach helps the owner and manager to define in an interview format some of the strengths and limitations in the cooperation. Interviews concentrate on the perception of employees of their training needs and attitudes. The intention is to collect feedback about a group of employees’ perceptions of the topics or actions required to satisfy the training need. Also, involvement in TNA motivates employees to learn ” (Cattell, 2007). Focuses on the strategies of the organization, the resources within the organization, allocating these resources as well as the overall internal environment” is described as a process of organization analysis (Neitzel, 2006). The internal context comprises the analysis of the corporate policies, institutional structures, procedures, process, task design and other factors that help employees achieve the success goals relevant set job related performance expectations. The specialist for the organizational analysis will concentrate more on the management of the business and to ignore the employees. This is the case with questions asked in the interviews in these areas: human resource management, work design, performance, and strategies and practices. Although the performance issues outlined by the company’s owner (manager) were attributed in large part to the managers, it is important to keep in mind that the employee could also play a role. If the analyst organized the interview issues to being more descriptive as well as classified to each group of employees working in the organisation, the company’s training needs analysis may have provided more detailed responses. This indicates that details about the employees, supervisors and the manager of the company will be interviewed. For instance, both managers and employees will be asked questions about their perception (if applicable) of the predominant mission, goals, objectives, and the strategies of the business during the organizational analysis. The organization may not have had a clear mission declaration or aim, but every corporation has a mission statement or objective, even though it is obscured or implicit. Our preliminary research showed that FabricGuru needs more training for the managers to understand the dynamics of giving feedback to an employee, identifying the right process and ensuring the employee understands. And this report will now provide the training in 8 Week Advance Team Leadership Course. Some of the other issues to be included in the organizational analysis of the business are as follows:

Employees working at the FabricGuru.

• What do you understand to be the mission, goals and objectives of the company?
• Do you understand your role in achieving the goals and objectives of this company if there is any?
• Do you think the company addresses all your welfare concerns?
• What dispute resolution mechanism or policy has the company put in place to solve disputes?
• How do you perceive the supervisory team of the company?

Supervisors working at the FabricGuru.

• What dispute resolution mechanism or policy has the company put in place to solve disputes?
• How do you think the employees below perceive you and your fellow supervisor?

Operational Analysis

An operational analysis is carried out to determine the particular needs of the employees of the company to make their performance more productive (Neitzel, 2006). The consultant seems to have covered the main concerns or points of interest with respect to the operations of its supervisors thoroughly with regard to the organizational analysis. The recommended questions below may have been used for the operational analysis by the consultant.

• Do you feel the company has allocated you sufficient resources to efficiently undertake your duties and responsibilities?
• Do you think that the employees you supervise have all the resources they need in order to perform their work efficiently and effectively?
• What do you understand to be the mission, goals and objectives of this company?
• Do you understand your role in achieving the goals and objectives of this company, if there is any?
• What supervisory approach do you apply in supervising the employees under you?
• Do you think that the company has established a reward system and linked it to the goals and objectives?
• What is your role with regard to dealing with the company’s customers?
• How do you perceive the manager (owner) of the company with regard to performing your duties?

The Training Program Design

In the design process, the use of ADDIE may have been beneficial. In the design process, the implementation of ADDIE may have enabled. This specifies how, where, who, when and why the training is taking place and will be a systematic approach to the design and training process . It guarantees that the curriculum is consistent with the learning priorities and is carried out in an effective method. The Blooms Taxonomy will also discuss the various priorities and abilities necessary to reach set goals. These priorities guarantee a learning structure (Putu, 2015). Recall, grasp, submit, evaluate, determine, and create. The Blooms taxonomy is supposed to be used in a hierarchical format and develop one skill on top of the next. “Bloom’s taxonomy is an useful approach for establishing learning objectives as it describes the learning process: you must recall a concept before you can grasp it. You must first grasp a definition in order to apply it. You must have studied it to evaluate a process. You must have performed a detailed evaluation to produce an accurate conclusion “(Burgess, 2017)

Development and Implementation

The focus of progress is on accomplishment of the training objectives. Choosing a strategy or training approach for the training and the facilitating method and presenting instruction can help achieve these objectives. An instructional strategy lists all of the program’s components including the lessons, how they are structured, times, strategies and resources. The training objectives can be structured into stages to achieve the expected results (Beemsen & Parumasur, 2011). The training modules in preparation use the instructional approach to the curriculum design. Blooms Taxonomy used primary verbs dependent upon skill and activity within each objective of learning. Each objective consists of activity to demonstrate the mastery of the course level (Besonen & Ecker, 2004).

Learning Objective

By the end of the training the manager will understand, explain and identify how to give employee feedback in a one on one informal setting.

INSTRUMENT FOR THE EVALUATION OF TRAINING

The two evaluation methods used for the training program are the reaction assessment and the paper and pencil tests. The gathering of information for making decision on the overall performance of the training should be an evaluation. The formative and summative evaluations can be reviewed with stronger emphasis on summative results. The outcomes can be measured using the Kilpatrick four-tier model of training and assessment, responses, learning which includes KSA, behavior and results (Jonny, 2016). Questionnaires, surveys, observations, focus groups and tests will be included as instruments to monitor the effectiveness of training.

Reaction Assessment

The reaction test to be used for evaluating the training will be short 5 questions that will be presented in a 1-5 scale. Then there will be three follow up questions that will be used to ask the trainees. Reaction questionnaires will be used as an indicator of how well the learning will translate to the job (Jasson & Govender, 2017). The goal is to assess how satisfied the overall training is and whether the training can inspire the learner to learn in the future. “Reaction assessment applies to evaluation of activity reactions by participants to the training program” (Jonny, 2016). The intention should be primarily that it would not be useful to acquire other expertise in the determination of learning objectives.

Paper and Pencil Test

Test can be a good means of evaluating the experience and understanding a trainee has learned through the training process. The subject and objective tests will help to define and measure the productivity or effectiveness and make sure that the trainees can pass the given knowledge test (Jasson & Govender, 2017).

Part 2: Evaluation of the training program

The training session was delivered to some extent successfully but it is still somewhat limited in the approach and design. In addition, the level of communication between the squad members was too low, this, perhaps should have been addressed immediately. The team lacks aggression and this combined with lack of self-belief is a massive problem. Challenges we had include internal resistance from managers who are scared of losing staff or of being blamed for the poor performance of their staff. Another challenge was that there were not enough trainers, resulting in a rotation of trainers which leads to the continuity of poor training. After the delivery of the trainings, most trainees are ready to go back to their work. The results showed that 53% of the managers felt more comfortable and confident about providing positive feedback, while only 44% felt more comfortable and confident to give negative feedback. In order to continue receiving better performance from the employees, it is necessary to enhance the way in which managers coach their employees to enable them to receive feedback (Sahoo & Mishra, 2019). There is yet some mismatch in the implementation of the training to the actual situation where they actually work. An effective and system-level approach towards successful implementation of combination of methods for delivering the training is crucial. Over time as managers became more interested in making sure that their employees were comfortable with receiving feedback, in particular regarding performance, the feedback training workshops were given a lot more importance.

They were then expanded to include a variety of different themes and topics, including emotional intelligence, business psychology, and cognitive bias. Further, training in growth mindset was introduced to encourage managers to talk more positively about their employees’ performance and choices. Growth mindset is one of the best tools to increase performance because its a concept which can be defined in different ways depending on the context and the problems in question. A growth mindset can be defined as one that does not primarily focus on personal abilities, but on one’s ability to grow based on a particular set of beliefs and values.

Most of these trainees feel that their managers should be accepting, encouraging and encouraging them by responding to their opinions appropriately rather than just receiving and conveying them without showing any interest in the people in the team. However, when we looked at the feedback from the manager side, the feedback they had mostly comes from peer managers and the system that had been put in place is that of performance appraisal. This system is very elaborate and formal as compared to the one that the employees need. We could not make our case when it came to justifying the need of having performance appraisal in the work environment. Our policy has to be clear as the training part has to be equally informed to the managers and to the trainees. The formal training session given to all employees gives the manager an opportunity to understand and identify that feedback is not only a good word for the performance of employee but also an effective tool for continuous improvement of employee performance.

In term of evaluation techniques, through the trainee’s results on evaluation, it can be observed that the current training program heavily on the testing and required a very high standard of pass/ fail results. While the knowledge benefit can be measured, the management attitudes leave nothing to be determined. The program evaluation seems to have left some of the owner’s and management ‘s questions untouched. Attitudes that impact managers’ behaviors and how the managers treat their employees require performance assessment, oral assessments or job evaluations (Rodgers et al., 2020). This means that managers could assess their staff’s performance and adjust the management styles and pay accordingly. One of the reasons that there are a lot of incompetent managers is because most of them are doing this same thing. They assess their staff performance and adjust their management styles in order to measure the different levels of knowledge and competency they have attained. These kinds of evaluations go further and is carried out outside the formal training systems. For example, an internal one conducted among the employees, which is supposed to keep a close eye on employee’s knowledge and expertise. But that is not an evaluation, it is a collection of conversations among a few. In the future, it is recommended the company can have further evaluation methods used in their training program. In the event of a customer complaint, it would help the organization if managers learned the relevant steps to take to help resolve the dispute. Such courses could be taught by the employees, making it much more relevant and a valuable learning experience for them. This type of training could have become the catalyst for the businesses (Sahoo & Mishra, 2019).