Why should Employee Skills and Abilities be Developed

What is employee development? Employee development is a kind of connection, continuous effort on the part of an employee and the organization for which employee works to upgrade the employee's knowledge, skills, and abilities. Successful employee development need to find a balance between an individual's career needs, goals and the organization's need in order to get work done and achieve company goals. Employee development programs make positive contributions to organizational performance. A company with highly skilled employees and supervisor and achieve more than those company lack of developed and stillness employees. Why Should Employee Skills and Abilities Be Developed? Most of the research hold the same belief that employee development programs make positive contributions to organizational performance. Compared with training new staffs and retaining an employee saves the organization a great deal of money. One mean of retention is to provide opportunities to employees’ and develop new skills. In research conducted to assess what retained employees, development was one of the top three retention items. Thus we can understand the importance of employee development to a successful organization. The follow two articles will discuss about company through what kind of method to develop employees’ skill and knowledge. Journal one: Corporate intranets: how can they give a new meaning to training and development? By Keithe Denton Introduction According to a report form BMF, large companies have increased their investment on training employees. This increase compared with year 2004 (2005,2004) is 4 percent, 2005 $1,424 per employee. But here comes a question such large money put into IT does it really help the groups to training and develop their employees? And this does really use properly? Rethinking the purpose of IT Peter Drucker who is the most famous person in management area, he believed that information technology has almost no impaction on management decision-making. His viewpoint comes from the way that organizations use the corporate intranet technology. Most companies use intranet just as an electronic library. In fact, intranet can do more that. It can help the employees to see whether their behavior, decision and activities match the need of group objectives. Intranet also can display a clear picture about where the organization is headed and how it is doing to the group members. It can cut the gab between management expectation and performance through display the information on employees’ Desktop PCs. Intranet provide the company’s objectives to employees in order to achieve it. Matching theory to reality Normally, when an organization put their assumption into practice they meet the problem. That is the assumptions cannot execute well by employees. This happened because human resource managers lack the awareness of employees’ sentiments and do not how to collect information from them and give feedback. Even through almost companies have information collect and feedback system to solve this problem but it seems not work as well as the intranet does. Intranet collect information and give feedback, even under a fast-changing business conditions. Intranet can provide information to decision makers what things are going on within the group. And also can give a big picture of what are the strategic goals, whether they achieved. Through intranet technology top levels can easily control the changes and improve the performance of the employees. Real-time Feedback Intranet can collect data from time to time, even minute by minute compared with traditional system. Intranet can also avoid some after-fact information. Intranet not only sharing information but also provide useful and rapid feedback to group members. This can help them focus on the company strategic objectives. Personalized performance feedback Intranet technology makes it easier for organization to launch their strategy plan. And help the employee to know that is important of the plan and make the employee easy understand what they are headed and how they are doing. Conclusion At present, intranet technology is just designed as an electronic library but actually it can do more than that. Intranet can provide real-time feedback to mangers and employees. It will make managers especially human recourse managers easier to implement training and development programs. Intranet also can tell what is important of today’s task time by time. Journal two: Developing local talent in international subsidiaries: the importance of trust and respect in Toyota By Phallapa Petison and Lalit M. Johri Thainization Philosophy Toyota is known as the world wide motor manufacture in order to achieve its global market strategic goal and meet the international product standards. Toyota wants to transfer its first overseas subsidiary Toyota Motor Thailand (TMT) into Thais employee managed subsidiary from Japanese managed. However to accomplish this task Toyota faces several challenges in the process of deepening the role of Thai employees. And training and develop the potential employees. Challenge 1: Local employee did not trust promotion decision made by Japanese managers Thai employees did not trust the one who promoted by Japanese because they thought those who promoted and work closely with Japanese may got some special favor. This kind of promotion is fairness Solution: TMT can set a vote commit that all members are Thai employees. They can vote the candidates and decide who will be promoted in order to avoid the influence of Japanese managers. Challenge 2: Thai employees were dissatisfied with the job rotation TMT in order to training and develop their potential management candidates, it has a job rotation program to help them enlarge their skills and knowledge. But Thai employees often did not understand the purpose and refuse it. Solution: TMT should explain the purpose clearly to their employees. And sent experienced managers to share, guide and help newly promoted managers gain self confidence. Challenge 3: Thai employees refused to accept promotion When TMT tried to promote potential Thai employees they refused. Because they had worked at the bottom management level for a long time and lack of confidence. They also afraid of making wrong decisions and may be earn less than before Solution Before promotion candidates TMT current supervisor can provide several tasks to train them. And discuss with candidates about the overtime payment. After that current supervisor can continue to help the newly promoted managers until they can fully handle the management. Challenge 4: Japanese managers lacked confidence in competence of Thai managers In TMT, Japanese managers did not think that Thai managers can handle the task. Normally they refused to transfer full power and kept onto the final decision making authority. Solution TMT settled a process, put Japanese and Thai colleagues together to solve problem in order to develop team trust. Second, both examined how long it took for Japanese expatriates to perform those tasks to establish benchmarks for Thai managers. Third, the tasks were divided between Thai and Japanese colleagues in order to avoid overlap. Fourth, Japanese provided OJT training to their Thai counterparts in order to help them to perform the assigned tasks. Challenge 5: Newly promoted Thai managers misused their power A few newly promoted Thai managers misused their power and caused dissatisfaction and conflict between both Thai and Japanese team members. Solution Japanese supervisor should keep an eye an newly promoted Thai managers, this should not too closely nor too loosely, guidance only given when mistake were made and misbehavior, conflicts accrued. Critique thinking on two articles From journal one the another discussed about the information technology in employee development. The writer shows us a new way in employee development that is information technology used by companies. In the article the writer discussed about how well information technology works under fast-changing business condition. But I think the writer should not only limit to only one method. At present the IT or the intranet technology really help organization manage the staffs behavior and activities and offer them online training program in order to upgrade their skill and knowledge result in get company’s work done efficiently and effectively. I think the author can discuss some other methods or technology that helpful in employee development, like employee data base system or humanity management. I have a doubt, if the employees gave the wrong feedback or the company’s employees come from different culture backgrounds does the intranet still work well as it expected or something wrong with their mental does information technology can still provide some solutions? On journal two the writer talk about the humanity management in Toyota Motor Thailand (TMT) that help Toyota to achieve their global market goal. TMT current supervisor constantly coaching the new promoted Thai managers and gave guidance when mistake were made, disbehavior and conflict accrued. The TMT supervisor will transfer the full power until the Thai manager gain confidence and can fully operate the task. TMT’s humanity employee development program really did well in promoting potential staffs and upgrade employees’ skill and knowledge. But beyond the humanity I think the author can discuss more about TMT employee development such as job analyze, career design. Maybe he can also introduce some information technology that influence employee development in his article. Suggestion: No matter what kind of method that the authors discussed or the organization used to help them implement good employee development programs. One important point must be always remembered that is employee development final purpose is service for the organization’s missions and goals. For human resource managers or some researchers should not only use one mean to achieve goals. Job analyzes career design, job rotation and staff loyalty development or innovation management methods all these can be used as a tool to help company upgrade employees’ skill and knowledge. Conclusion After learned these two articles I got a clear vision on employee development that is organization use different kinds of methods to help their staffs upgrade their skill and knowledge. Compared training new employees with retaining and develop the old ones corporation not only save their time but also keep their competition advantages. When their competitors spend time and money on training new employees those companies with highly skilled and developed staffs have already come of the red time or less profit time. These loyalty, skillful and knowledge staffs than retain before can accomplish the task efficiently and effectively. Corporation like BMW, Benz, Apple, Google, Microsoft, they are not only use information technology to help managers design suitable development programs for employees but also have some humanity management methods to adjust their mental problem. And through innovation management create friendly work atmosphere build vertical and horizontal communication. Those companies combine different kinds of method together in order to create their unique company culture resulting in get their strategic goals or mission done by the skillful and knowledgeable employees.

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