Approaches to measure the effectiveness of any human resources training program
Summary – Any human resource training program can be measured for its effectiveness based on the
various models in the market. Common approaches are to measure on the following four parameters -
Reaction, Learning, behavior and result. Measuring the effectiveness of any such program is very important
as it lays the future pavement for other such programs.
Responsibility of any human resource department in an organization is to develop present work force in
terms of quality and quantity of out put and to achieve this, various practices are in use like staff surveys
and human resource training. This article is about the various methods to improve over the employee
relation and to increase the productivity level of any human resource present in the organization. Human
resource training and employee relations can be optimized basically in three phases. However this is not
mandatory and depends over the need of training.
Before going to finalize some training for your employees you must understand the bottlenecks your
employee face every day and what are the core areas of improvements your employees need to get trained.
To do this help of staff surveys can be taken and this method is the proven best and is in use for years. In
any staff surveys a questionnaire is prepared in which different types of questions are asked from the
employees. Some of the questions are opening ended while other may be objective and subjective also.
Many organisations do not include the practice sessions in their training programs and these results in low
effectiveness of the training program. Many human resource training program cover technical skill sets and
it is very important to have a practical demo on implementation of the same without proper practice
employees get confused in applying theoretical knowledge gained in any human resource training program.
Therefore it is very important to incorporate few practice sessions in any such training program.
Just giving any human resources training is not enough there must be a process to evaluate the effectiveness
of training program is also very much required. Measuring the effectiveness of training programs gives a
realistic idea of how effective the training program really has been for the employees. There are many
models in the market to evaluate the effectiveness of any such program. Broadly any such training program
can be evaluated on the following four measures - Reaction, Learning, behavior and result.
Reaction of the employees is very important factor and data on the reaction to any human resources training
can be gathered by doing staff surveys. This step is also known as step measure of customer satisfaction i.e.
what employees feel after the training and how much motivated they actually feel. In learning phase it is
measured that how effectively any training program has improved or changed competency of the
employees in terms of positive attitude change, improved knowledge and/or increase in skills as a result of
attending the program.
While behavior change is the most important thing to measure and this is the direct indicator about the
implementation of any skilled gained by the training program. In this phase Human resource manager tries
to identify that how much successfully an employee can implement the training program in the daily work
procedures. This particular step is also helpful in increasing the employee relations also.
In the final result phase overall information on the above te phases in combined in order to make a
comprehensive report on the effectiveness of any such training program. Some direct indicators like The
various metrics it includes could be increase in production, decline in costs, reduction in employee
turnover, higher profits and better employee relations are also in use to measure the final effectiveness of
any such program.