Health Field Human Resource Management

HCA 5306, Health Field Human Resource Management 1

Course Learning Outcomes for Unit VI Upon completion of this unit, students should be able to:

4. Evaluate performance evaluation processes in health care human resource management. 4.1 Consider the performance management linkage between organizational strategies and results. 4.2 Explain the different types of performance assessments. 4.3 Discuss how to conduct a performance assessment.

5. Summarize learning and development methods for health care organizations.

5.1 Assess the integration of job performance, training, and learning. 5.2 Critique the training process. 5.3 Discuss instructional strategies.

Required Unit Resources Chapter 8: Training and Development in Healthcare Organizations Chapter 9: Performance Management in Healthcare Organizations Unit Lesson The terms training and development are often used interchangeably. Are these the same thing? While they are connected, they are definitely not the same. Think about the purpose of training. How do you define a training need? Conversely, what is the purpose of development? Why is it important to understand these distinctions? Does everyone want to climb to the top of the corporate ladder? Not every employee has the same ambitions. There are many individuals who are content with where they are within the organization. There are certainly others, though, who do want to move up. Understanding employee desires as well as the organization’s needs are important to career planning. Training should be targeted to address a specific need within the organization. If the organization just throws training at an issue, what do you think will happen? More than likely, it will fail. Training needs to be strategically targeted to meet a specified need. If not, the likelihood of the transfer of training will be minimal. Is development really different from training? Can an event be a training for some and development for others? These are great questions! Development is focused on acquisition of knowledge in a longer-term sense. Training is focused on the here and now of what is necessary to do the job. The same event can mean different things to different attendees. There may be some who are there to learn the skills for their current jobs, yet others are there to gain knowledge that can be applied to future positions. Training in operations, policies, and procedures will naturally be different at every organization, but many training topics are universal. Among these universal topics, some form of orientation or onboarding is conducted in almost every organization. Because orientation trainings are so prevalent and the topics that should be included appears obvious, it is easy to forget that these trainings should start with a needs analysis and with careful planning. Organizational training is an important investment. However, many organizations do not take the time and trouble to analyze the benefits of training because it is hard to measure, and it can be difficult to evaluate the usefulness of training in terms of specific return on investment. Why spend so much on something that may or may not benefit the organization? Why is training so highly utilized? Let’s take for example your first few days on a new job. It is quite likely that you spent much of it in training. One of the first things you were trained on was the organizational culture and strategy, a better understanding of what the company is about, and how you will play your role in the organization. It is also quite likely that you were bored in those first few hours or days of training (you can admit it; we are all professionals here). Part of the reason for this may be that the training was broad-based and did not address the information that you

UNIT VI STUDY GUIDE Training and Performance Management in Health Care

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needed to understand your own area of responsibility and your fit (culture) within your work group or department. Everyone is somehow inspired by drives, motives, or desires to fulfill needs of one kind or another. In training and development, we must leverage those motivations to help learning to occur (transfer of knowledge). Everyone’s needs and motivations are different, but quite often the core of what motivates us is easy to define and articulate. Just as we do not all have the same motivations, not everyone learns the same way. So why are so many trainings geared toward one particular learning style such as visual presentations or lectures? It does not matter what you call these different learning styles; what matters is that how information is presented and transferred is varied. However, research has consistently demonstrated that the best trainings include components that are visual, applied, and holistic. That is, training design should include materials for trainees to see, it should be hands on, and it should explain how the information fits into the big picture. Feedback is a gift. Take a second to think about this notion. How can we know if we are on the path to success without feedback? If we are heading in the wrong direction, it is only through feedback that we will be able to change course. This is why it is so important to ensure feedback is provided to employees through the performance appraisal system within the organization. Feedback should be timely and relevant based on the goals and behaviors. This is an important part of a manager’s responsibilities to ensure that employees are getting appropriate feedback to set them up for success. Everyone wants to ensure that their pay is accurate and reflective of the job they perform, and HR needs to ensure that the total rewards infrastructure serves to attract and retain employees. Compensation is important, but also knowing what the benefits package entails is a part of that infrastructure. Performance management is the HR process by which organizational leadership aligns employee performance with the goals of the firm. Managers are responsible for the development, implementation, monitoring, and adjustment of performance measures for employees. This is often not an easy task, especially if there are intangible outcomes of employee performance. Performance evaluation is the means by which management assesses employee contributions. Performance management is also part of the training and development process. There are many ways to look at discrepancies in performance. A good place to start is the organization, to make sure circumstances within the organization are not inadvertently creating a performance gap. A good needs analysis will look at the tasks and knowledge, skills, attitudes, and other (KSAO) required by the job. Job analysis is sometimes referred to as task analysis or operational analysis. Person analysis is a final step where we make sure that the people doing the job are able to perform the tasks and have the required KSAOs. The best reason for performing a needs analysis is to determine what can be solved by training and what cannot. Training is not always the answer but is a good start in the process. If we determine that something in the organization is preventing employees from performing up to expectations, or that the job in question is too complex or labor- intensive for anyone to meet the performance expectations, no amount of training is going to help. This is called a process issue not a person issue. Sometimes the solution is simple (and sometimes not), but it is quite possible that it will not involve training at all. On the other hand, if you determine that nothing organizationally is blocking the way and that a particular skill is required to do the job, but the workers just do not have it, then it is clearly a training need. Now is the time to start down the path of developing, delivering, and evaluating training, or maybe not; there are often alternatives to formal training such as providing job aids, providing more opportunity for practice, or even changing the requirements of the job. So how do we determine if transfer of learning takes place? Donald Kirkpatrick is famous for first theorizing four levels of learning evaluation (Kirkpatrick Partners, n.d.). From a design perspective, consider this: Training can have outcomes on four different levels:

• Reaction: What did trainees think about training? • Learning: What did trainees learn from training? • Behavior: How did trainees change after training? • Results: How will training affect the organization?

In order for the later outcomes to develop, the lower-level ones must first occur, but sometimes training, or the measure of that training, is not designed to support this. Organizations are usually results driven, but evaluating the training based on only one criterion is not effective.

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Reference

Kirkpatrick Partners. (n.d.). The new world Kirkpatrick model. http://www.kirkpatrickpartners.com/Our- Philosophy/The-New-World-Kirkpatrick-Model

Suggested Unit Resources In order to access the following resources, click the links below. Training and performance management in a health care environment can be challenging and different from the typical U.S. workplace. Please review the following article to gather a better foundation through competency-based expertise. The benchmarking of training. (1996). Journal of European Industrial Training, 20(9), VI.

https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/A19005968/AONE?u=oran95108&sid=bookmark- AONE&xid=95109571

Jekiel, C. (2016). Realign your employee performance reviews. Plant Engineering, 70(10), 45.

https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/A477992452/ITBC?u=oran95108&sid=bookmark-ITBC&xid=d35b05b2