Outcomes Planning Wheel

Running head: EXTENDING LEARNING WITH THE 6D’S 1

EXTENDING LEARNING WITH THE 6D’S

Week 1 Assignment – Extending Learning with the 6D’s

Student’s Name

Institutional affiliation

In the current age of information and innovation, understanding how to optimize employee performance is crucial for assuring the success of businesses in their respective markets and industries. The process of educating and training personnel is vital because it divides organizations that thrive and remain ahead of their competition from those that fail to keep up with market developments, deteriorate, and are eventually forced to close. Learning in organizations is a crucial approach employed by market leaders (EBSCO Information Services, 2020). By being learning organizations, firms such as Apple, Google, and Emerson ensure that their people have the skills and competencies to innovatively advance their companies' visions toward organizational success in their respective markets and industries. Despite the well-known benefits of employee training, some companies, such as Netflix, are hesitant to educate or train their staff on the skills they need to remain relevant to the company. Nevertheless, in today's age of innovation and information, it is essential to ensure that one's staff are highly skilled and competent for a firm to remain competitive and relevant in its market.

In learning organizations, there are six actions that must be taken to ensure that people are trained and that the training efforts are successful (Hidayat & Budiatma, 2018). The success of learning companies is measured by the effect of their education and training activities on their overall performance and the quality of their output. Successful Learning is shown by an improvement in the quality of employee performance and an increase in the output quality. In contrast, persistently poor performance could indicate that the learning process was ineffective. In a few exceptional instances, such as Netflix's, a non-learning corporation may continue to be successful despite lacking the capacity for expansion. Despite their achievement, their non-learning environment prevents them from reaching their full potential for success. Instead of training and retraining their staff to match the company's increasing competence needs, Netflix terminates people who are no longer a good fit for the organization.

For employee education and training initiatives to result in organizational success, businesses must invest in ensuring that each phase of the learning process is successfully implemented. Considering Emerson's overall success, it is clear that the learning organization owes a substantial portion of its success to its effective learning practices. Six essential phases can be used to summarize the learning methodologies that organizations like Emerson employ. Six Ds denote the six organizational-learning steps. The 6 D's are essential for determining, measuring, examining, implementing, and assessing the performance of a learning organization's efforts.

The first of the six D's is defining the expected business outcomes. Expected business outcomes can range from the services a company intends to offer in a given period to its sales targets for a specific term. In addition, specifying what the organization wants to see after a learning period may be deemed essential for defining the anticipated organizational outcome. At Emerson, for instance, it was clear that leaders placed a high priority on the defining stage since they began communicating the concept of the new finish line early on before moving on to the subsequent steps of educating and training their people. The defining stage is crucial to the learning/training process because it performs two crucial functions. Initially, the definition of the expectation reduces uncertainty.

When employees understand precisely what is expected of them, they are more likely to achieve their objectives without confusion. In addition, it helps employees comprehend the organization's objective and match their activities with it. Employees at Emerson began to repeat the definitions, which helped the concept stay. The defining step should occur whenever the leaders deem it necessary, significantly if the company's vision and goal development. However, Netflix expects staff to use common sense when doing their duties. While the organization aims to hire only qualified and mature workers, leaving company objectives unstated may foster misunderstanding and provide the potential for errors (Goldstein et al., 2017; McCord, 2014).

The second D is the design procedure. In this stage of Learning, the organization designs programs to guarantee that employees learn the essential skills and competencies necessary for the company to fulfill its vision and goals. The design phase consists of numerous substeps. For instance, at this stage, the organization must establish its training requirements, target audience, and anticipated training and development goals. In addition, the organization should specify who will provide the training and how the performance of learning programs will be monitored. At Emerson, it is evident that training and development programs prioritize preparing leaders with vital leadership skills and competencies. If the learning/training processes are to be effective, the design phase must be effectively implemented. However, Netflix employs an alternative technique. According to McCord (2014), the organization selects qualified and capable people. When an employee's abilities are no longer helpful to the firm, the corporation offers a hefty severance package, terminates the person, and searches for a more qualified and highly skilled employee to fill the gap (Zipkin, 2018).

The third D is after the delivery of the application. This third stage is implemented during or following the completion of the learning process. At this step, organizational leaders instruct employees on optimally applying the acquired information and skills to their work-related responsibilities (Hidayat & Budiatma, 2018). Leaders of organizations use a variety of leadership skills to manage and guide people in using their newly acquired abilities on the job. Leaders may issue commands directly or use alternative tactics to convey guidance and direction. Leaders at Emerson guided employees in applying their acquired skills and competencies by providing voice recordings and communicating their expectations. Since Netflix employees are terminated rather than trained, application stage delivery is unavailable (McCord, 2014).

Once the third D is established, it welcomes the fourth D, which depicts the process of promoting learning transfer. At this level, the company makes sure that leaders not only provide directives but also provide the necessary assistance and ensure accountability. Leaders that are hands-on and involved inspire their people to maximize performance. Integral to the fifth D, which is implementing performance support, is facilitating the transfer of Learning. At Emerson, performance assistance includes discussing successes and sessions urging staff to maximize their overall performance. As previously disclosed, Netflix, on the other hand, prefers to pay employees who are no longer regarded as a suitable fit a significant severance package as opposed to educating them. In addition, the corporation terminates the employee instead of training him or her to learn the new skills necessary to continue filling the post (McCord, 2014; Zipkin, 2018).

Documenting the outcomes concludes the process. Documentation of the results enables a corporation to maintain records of the training's outcomes. When the findings are reviewed, management gains additional insight into which techniques were successful and which procedures were unsuccessful. In addition, the procedure ensures that the organization maintains a record that may be referred to in the future by other teams facing comparable learning demands, issues, dilemmas, or learning/training needs (Bhawra, 2019). At Emerson, the documentation phase notified the organization's leaders that omitting the transfer and achievement phases lowered the success rate of the organization's learning initiatives. At Netflix, however, it may be difficult to distinguish what is effective from what is ineffective in increasing their employees' knowledge, ability, and competence. Netflix is an industry-leading employer with a commendable corporate culture and creative potential. However, its failure to be a learning organization, since it never invests in growing staff skills, competencies, and overall development, may harm its growth potential (McCord, 2014).

References

Bhawra, J. (2019). Developing Monitoring and Evaluation Frameworks, by Anne Markiewicz and Ian Patrick.  Canadian Journal of Program Evaluation,  34(1).

EBSCO Information Services. (2020). The Benevolent Society: Learn how one organization achieved learning and development objectives. Retrieved from https://www.ebsco.com/resources/success-story/learn-how-one-organization-achieved-learning-and-development-objectives

Goldstein, H. W., Pulakos, E. D., Semedo, C., & Passmore, J. (2017).  The Wiley Blackwell handbook of the psychology of recruitment, selection and employee retention. John Wiley & Sons.

Hidayat, R., & Budiatma, J. (2018). Education and job training on employee performance.  International journal of social sciences and humanities,  2(1), 171-181.

McCord, P. (2014). How Netflix Reinvented HR. Retrieved from https://hbr.org/2014/01/how-netflix-reinvented-hr

Zipkin, N. (2018). Inside Netflix's Notorious Firing Practices. Retrieved from https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/322424