Training and Motivating Employees

¶ … Motivation The author of this report is asked to assess and review what happened with a training need and opportunity at Gator University as well as offer some feedback about motivation and learning theories as they compare to the class text. The case study at the onset is a situation where some Executive Assistants kept pestering the tech people because they were not trained on how to do queries.

A need to do some training was done but the results were less than stellar and the Vice President was less than pleased with the overall results. Finally, there will be discussion about customer service skills, the ability to process system requests and overall technology knowledge as compared to some selected chapters in the class text.

Analysis Before getting into the nuts and bolts of what could have and should have been done better, it needs to be identified how things played out because that is part and parcel of what went wrong with the training endeavor. First of all, the root problem was that some of the Executive Assistants (EA's) kept bothering the technical people about how to do things like queries.

Of course, the technical people had their own duties to take into account and teaching the executive assistants how to do queries and such is probably not budgeted anywhere in their time schedules. As such, a necessary and dutiful training needs analysis (TNA) was undertaken and it became clear that the executive assistants needed to be trained (or refreshed) on a number of things (Dresden, 2015).

As it turns out, the attendance rate for the query training (at least from the seniors) was quite high but the other sessions and the rest of the rank and file basically blew off the training if the case study text is to be taken at face value. In terms of training needs analysis, the person in charge of concocting the training seemed to have the proper trainings lined up. The problem, of course, was that not enough people attended the trainings.

This would also certainly fall at the feet of the Vice President or whomever would have or should have been called to mandate attendance at the training sessions. To be sure, perhaps the training sessions timing and length could have been tweaks if 12 hours of training (three half days would probably be about that much) was too much and/or it could have been spaced out.

However, the executive assistants clearly needed to be there and the person doing the training did not have the authority or the power to mandate that people be there. It should have been a mandatory training and anybody who could not show up for one or more training sessions should have been allowed to do a make-up session later. The only other alternative would be an online or self-paced training but technical subjects should not generally be taught this way (Dresden, 2015).

Regardless, the proper buy-in and involvement from the EA manager(s) and the VP was clearly not in place and this is the primary reason the training failed (Burroughs, 2015). In regards to the other buzzwords and terms involved here, there is obviously a problem with actual organizational performance due to the EA's not being fully or properly trained and there is also obviously an organizational performance gap (OGP) between the EA's and the tech people that are bailing them out.

The proper planning and scheduling should be put in place so that the AOP becomes the EOP, with the latter being the expected organizational performance. The Vice President may be peeved that performance is not where it could or should be, but the people who needed the training did not show up for the training. The EA's may or may not know or care that their reliance on the tech people is a drain on the organization. However, it IS a drain and that needs to be fixed (Dresden, 2015).

Textbook Analysis As noted in the introduction, this section is supposed to involve the correlation of three general topics with the class text. The three topics in question are customer service skills, ability to process systems requests and technology knowledge. These are the topics that will be taught to the people in the class. The author of this report has been charged with taking five points from the book and correlating those five points to the three main items that are being taught by the Gator University trainer.

The first major thing that will be covered is understanding the strategic planning process its components and their relationships as covered on the second chapter of the class text. Indeed, the customer service strategy, the system request strategy and technical knowledge strategy of a firm are all tied to its overall strategy.

As such, the students that learn from the class need to be made to understand that they need to learn the information well, use the information well and apply the information well because of just how important that all is to the company's overall strategy and potential outcomes. The second outcome is also found in the second chapter and that is the function of outsourcing training.

The people that work for Gator need to understand that some knowledge that they really need to know will not come from inside from the university but rather from the outside (Blanchard & Thacker, 1999). At a higher level, the third point talks about the "value and importance of understanding theory." A good trainer will know the proper training theories and how to use them. As explained by the text, any good theory to follow will do three major things.

Those things will include that it explains the facts as simply as possible, it predicts future events and it provides information on what can be done to prevent undesirable things from happening. Further, a theory is an abstract thing but it can and should be applied to real-world learning situations. Using the executive assistant scenario at the beginning of the class text, there were so many things that went wrong with the training scenario described.

Either the people were allowed to skip the meeting on their own or their managers gave them an out. Regardless, there was not a person in authority that gave the authority to the teacher to be ultimately paid attention to and honored and that is going to undermine any training. The trainer from that first scenario should have immediately retorted that he cannot teach people if they do not show up and a lot of people chose not to show up for various reasons.

Perhaps the trainer did not have the proper discussions with the.