Learn how to manage effectively;Employees need quick and effect ive access to learning,
says Francis Shennan
The Herald (United Kingdom)
 
Two of the most disturbing pieces of research on the anagement and development of people to emerge this year were published by the 110,000-strong Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development.

The first, Voices from the Boardroom, suggested that chief executives are ignorant about human resource management and the links between good people management practices and improved bottom-line performance.

The second, How do People Learn?, showed that the rise of e-learning and the heightened emphasis on knowledge meant organisations needed to know more about how people actually learn at work. Put the two together and you have a formula for making your mind turn over the resulting potential for wasted opportunities.

We would tend to assume that chief executives would understand people management and that people managers understand how their staff learn. Apparently we have assumed wrongly.

John Purcell, professor of human resource management at the University of Bath, and David Guest, professor of organisational psychology and human resource management at King's College, London, have been investigating the link between people management and business performance. Their Voices from the Boardroom involved in-depth interviews with 48 board-level managers from 16 organisations in both the public and private sectors.

The study also showed that people management practices have a bigger impact on the bottom line than research and development. The CIPD's report, How do People Learn?, suggests what organisations can do to make the most of their training and development budgets.

''Organisations are willing to invest in new technologies in the hope that training costs will go down and workplace learning will be enhanced,'' said Martyn Sloman, CIPD's adviser on training and development and author of The E-Learning Revolution. ''But to achieve real success we would urge training professionals to develop new learning processes and in particular ones intended to kindle interest in self-directed learning.

''We also need to move away from the emphasis on training and place more on building learning into our everyday working lives. And the focus should be on the learner, not the trainer.''

The report calls for a new ''blended'' approach, including alancing face-to-face and electronic learning, encouraging informal and collaborative special-interest groups, and better mixes of learning methods, such as conventional instruction along with self-directed, experience-based and group learning.

''Human capital is the key asset for competitive advantage,'' said Sloman. ''And human capital is based on employees' knowledge and ability to learn. Time is now the scarce resource in the organisation.

''Add to this the speed at which organisations need to make decisions and respond to change, and it is clear that employees need constant access to learning, delivered quickly, efficiently and in line with their own preferences and styles.''

The research, which was undertaken by the Cambridge programme for Industry, argues that theories of learning should be used to help organisations develop unique approaches that take into account the distinctive environment in which they operate.

The conclusion is that there is no single approach which can offer an effective solution to learning in today's competitive environment. Companies need to experiment and mix traditional methods with newer online solutions, with the results of such experiments rigorously monitored.