All discussion board assignments must include an original post in response to the discussion question and at least one-post in response to another student’s original post. All posts must be substantial, significant and thoughtful (not just “I agree”!) and you must include at least 2 (2) citations and appropriate references from relevant academically sound sources and only one reference of the two can be the text book. Citations and references must adhere to the latest APA format. Academically appropriate sources are peer reviewed journals, text books, conference proceedings, dissertations etc.They are NOT Forbes.com, Business Week, Wikipedia etc.

REMEMBER, this is a five point assignment and will be graded as such. Make sure that you provide appropriate detail and academic support for your arguments on discussion assignments as they represent 30% of your overall grade. In other words, this is an important part of your coursework so spend appropriate time and effort on them!

1. Describe at least three ways that factors in the external environment can influence employee behavior. If you were an HRD professional…
2. Explain the role that trainability plays in the effectiveness of an HRD program or intervention. Briefly describe the options available to assess the trainability of employees.

May you please respond to the student post?

1. Describe at least three ways that factors in the external environment can influence employee behavior. If you were an HRD professional…

Many factors in the external environment can influence employee behavior. Some of these factors may include; the economy, actions of a competing company, and outcomes that result from employee behavior (Werner, 2017, p. 40). In the military, there are multiple factors to consider in personnel retention, one of those factors is the state of the economy. Penelis and Huff (2014), demonstrated economic downturns and its effect on retention. Further, they were able to predict weak economic periods and use that to predict higher retention rates in that same period, which enables leaders in the Navy to adjust personnel policies as needed. Another factor that influences employee behavior is the actions of a competing company. For example, if another company is a larger pay and benefits package to its employees, then this may hurt the retention of other companies. This leads to the final external influence for this discussion, which includes personal outcomes. How is the employer’s pay and awards process relative to other companies in the same industry? If people in a company do not feel valued by their employer then they will become demotivated to perform at a certain level, thus hurting, or at least not reaching optimal performance for that company.

Company downsizing is never an ideal situation. An HRD professional may do a couple of things to aid in the hopefully successful downsizing. First, what does “successful downsizing” mean? For the sake of discussion, success would be the company avoids bankruptcy. Downsizing and layoffs have a negative connotation, so it will be important to effectively manage the company’s public image. The best way to do this is to be honest with the public and stakeholders, while not abandoning (former) employees. One way is to provide job placement services or even pay for additional training for employees who are let go. This is one way a company can keep faith with its employees who stay with the company. Another thing the company could do is to only let go of a certain percentage of underperforming employees. I think these two approaches could assist in the success of a company downsizing.

2. Explain the role that trainability plays in the effectiveness of an HRD program or intervention. Briefly describe the options available to assess the trainability of employees.

Trainability refers to the readiness of an individual to learn which includes; motivation, ability, and perceptions of the work environment (Werner, 2017, p. 77). Think of motivation in terms of incentive. If the purpose of training is to learn a new skill which leads to future promotion, then that could be a strong incentive. Ability could refer to an individual’s aptitude to learn something new, or it could also refer to an inability to attend training for any reason. The work environment refers to the support employees have for learning within the work environment; that is the climate of the workplace. Is the climate supportive or non-supportive of employee’s continuing education and training?

Some of the options available to assess the trainability of employees is to conduct surveys for certain relevant abilities and personal attributes. Also taking the time to determine an employee’s motivation for a training program would be helpful to assess their trainability. To use a personal anecdote, recently I was in San Antonio with a handful of individuals in my career field and we met with a team of psychologists where we conducted in-depth group discussions and completed individual surveys. The purpose was to determine certain skills and attitudes to recruit the right people for the career field. The goal is to recruit the right people and hopefully see a reduced failure rate of personnel in training and eventually save the Air Force money. One of the biggest factors we all agreed on was the trainability of people; in addition to aptitude, they needed to have intangibles like internal motivation and drive, self-confidence, courage, and humbleness. All these factors are relevant when determining the trainability of employees.

References

Pinelis, J. K., & Huff, J. M. (2014). The economy and enlisted retention in the navy. Retrieved from https://www.cna.org/CNA_files/PDF/DRM-2014-U-00730…

Werner, J. M. (2017). Human resource development: Talent development. Boston: Cengage Learning.

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