Rethinking the Practice of Workplace Learning and Development: Utilizing ‘Knowledge, Connections and Conversation’ in Organizations

Mark Cole, Camden & Islington NHS Foundation Trust, UK

International Journal of HRD Practice, Policy and Research 2017, Vol 2 No 1: 7-19
doi: 10.22324/ijhrdppr.2.102

Against the backdrop of a concern that traditional notions of ‘training’ continue to influence workplace learning and development practice in many organizations, this paper contributes an alternative perspective as a means of engendering change and enhanced performance amongst individuals and across organizations. In discussing the relationships between organizational effectiveness, organization development and learning and development it constructs a ‘foundation for improvement’ based on three elements: knowledge, connections and conversation. Drawing on illustrative accounts of current L&D practice from one NHS Trust in the UK, the paper develops what this altered practice of development in a workplace context might look like. Thus, both a vision and a practice agenda, in terms of working differently with people in organizations, are outlined and provide a basis for how fellow practitioners might question and rethink their own L&D practice.

Key Words: training, L&D, organization development, workplace, practice agenda

Introduction

Charles Handy has argued that organizational effectiveness (OE) is constructed from over sixty interacting factors (Handy, 1993: 15), including systems and structures, motivation and leadership. This is compounded by the fact that OE is somewhat imprecisely defined, despite being an active business term for some time. Indeed there exist at least four models attempting to consider it, in respect to analysis and understanding in this regard (Ashraf & Abd Kadir, 2012). Nevertheless, it is patently an area of focus for many organizations in the current economic climate — and is seen to be a significant way by which firms attain a competitive advantage, particularly where they themselves (and the context in which they work) are complex systems (Right Management, 2010). At least one research study suggests that their “… results highlight the importance of both human resources and employee-oriented processes in explaining and promoting effectiveness” (Ostroff & Schmitt, 1993).

In this article, the relationship between OE, workforce development and organization development (OD) is explored in a contemporary context, with the aim of espousing a new way of working in an organizational context in order to support systems to work better. The paper seeks to question the dichotomous view of learning and development and OD — but does so from a perspective that is critical of the traditional view of training as a means of engendering change and enhanced performance amongst individuals and across organizations. It explores alternative accounts of practice drawn from the author’s experience leading and managing learning and development (L&D) in the UK’s national health service; primarily within the Camden & Islington (C&I) NHS Foundation Trust1. The paper seeks to contribute insight into what this altered practice of development in an organizing context might look like — and how fellow practitioners might rethink their own work from this specific perspective.

Background

The twentieth century saw three notions constellate in terms of human organizing, namely bureaucracy, Taylorism and Fordism. While ‘bureaucracy’ has, as a term, acquired negative connotations over time, Max Weber offers a more balanced and sanguine assessment of this organizational form, noting that, through the observance of agreed process and procedure, the possibility of human bias is attenuated (Weber, 1978). Such an organizational model is mirrored by the practice of Taylorism, which encapsulates the notion that oversight is essential in terms of getting the most out of a workforce (Taylor, 1911/1967). The productive arrangements that grew out of that managerialist philosophy are ordinarily described as Fordism, as realized through the introduction of production lines initially in respect to car manufacture in the US (Dassbach, 1991).

All three of these approaches assume an anti-humanist stance: the worker is merely an input to a system, rather than a free acting human agent. Indeed, it is perhaps not insignificant that Taylor started in engineering before moving into the science of management. One of his key early achievements was in the area of the interchangeability of machine parts (Paxton, 2011). His philosophy of scientific management generated a discourse where those working in manufacture could be seen as human capital. As the singer Morrissey said of the rhythm section of the band The Smiths, they were merely “lawnmower parts” (Bret, 2004: 242). Taylor made it possible to think of people in the workplace in this way.

Clearly, it is possible to periodize these linked practices as arising at the back of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries, although it is equally reasonable to say that they were present — to a greater or lesser extent — in manufactory and statecraft prior to this time. Moreover, they persist today, in some quarters, particularly in respect to our global economy: the sweat shops where inexpensive clothing is stitched together are no doubt subject to intense oversight and a productive imperative — and, closer to home, the warehouse of one of the UK’s major high street sports retailers has been compared to a Victorian workhouse (Hipwell, 2016).

However, despite these supposed aberrations, we are allegedly now occupying a post-Taylorist, post-Fordist world, where notions such as holacracy (broadly and notionally speaking a system of organizational governance in which authority and decision-making are distributed across self-organizing teams rather than being vested in a management hierarchy) hold sway in terms of the way in which business seeks to organize itself (Bernstein et al., 2016). And so the question forces itself to the foreground: to what extent are our traditional notions of workplace learning and development merely reflections of those early industrial approaches — and was traditional training in such a setting ever truly meaningful, in enhancing the performance of the people and the companies where they worked?

Training in the Workplace

The way in which training is planned, prepared, delivered and evaluated continues to bear decidedly industrial hallmarks. The process encompasses training needs analysis (TNA), the definition of content and delivery methods, and evaluation, with the TNA potentially running at three levels: organization, task, and person (Tannenbaum & Yukl, 1992: 401-403). Notionally, the TNA is intimately related to the strategy and declared objectives of the business, which presupposes the existence of the sort of sophisticated workforce planning that exists more in word than in deed. Theoretically, the training programmes that are designed address some sort of deficit, particularly in respect to specific individuals or groups of individuals, viz occupational categories or teams.

The very word ‘training’ — which learning and development struggles to slough off in a business context — has clear connotations: a sports person trains, for example, which often involves repeatedly doing something in order to improve the execution of it. There seems to be something innately repetitive about the idea of ‘training’, which links it to notions of drilling. In some areas of thought, this links to ideas of “dressage” (Jackson & Carter, 1998) and the creation of ‘docile bodies’ (Foucault, 1991) in and through practice in the workplace. And it remains the case — certainly in settings where organizations are heavily regulated, such as health care — that a great deal of what is described as training involves that which carries a statutory or regulatory imperative, with little regard given to whether these experiences are educational, let alone meaningful in day to day practice.

Until quite recently, the C&I NHS Foundation Trust maintained a list of over 50 mandatory training topics. If a newly qualified nurse had complied with this list to the letter, it would have involved more than 15 days away from the workplace in their first year of appointment.

In the traditional notion of workplace learning and development, there is an assumed skills gap which invariably resides in an individual — or a collective of such individuals, who are seeking to deliver a defined outcome. This is supposedly exposed through some sort of skills gap analysis often buried in the wearisome bureaucracy of traditional performance appraisal, a practice that is increasingly being critically interrogated and found wanting (Cappelli & Tavis, 2016). At an organization wide level, these gaps are notionally unearthed through the training needs analysis, an exercise that is meant to derive from a range of data sources, not least the annual business planning cycle, and which tends to attempt a delicate balance between the empirical and the straightforwardly fictional. Indeed, it is suggested that:

it is interesting to note that whereas most training researchers believe and espouse that training-needs analysis is the most important phase in training, this phase remains largely an art rather than a science (Salas & Cannon‑Bowers, 2001: 477).

The imprecision — and, indeed, the illusions around the applicability of a TNA — is partly explained by the fact that, in most instances, it is a supply- rather than a demand-led exercise, which is to say, the assessment of what training might be required at a range of levels in an organization is invariably undertaken by the very people who will deliver the training that is identified as being needed (Chiu et al., 1999). The data sources used to concoct the TNA include workforce plans, personal development plans, and — very often — questionnaires or interview with members of the workforce. Philosophically, what is interesting here is the effacement of the individual in favour of an act of aggregation, where only those needs that are shared by what is judged to be a significant proportion of the workforce (or members of a particular team that has been targeted in this respect) are given value and priority.

The TNA, of course, is just the start of it: the needs identified must then be met and that sees a response in terms of formal training. In 2015, organizations were still predominantly offering on the job training and formalized training as the key methods of meeting learning need (Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development, 2015: 9). At the same time, given the high levels of employee and organizational time consumed by such activities, the measurement of effectiveness of those interventions is patchy. The Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development suggest that:
One in seven do not evaluate the majority of their L&D initiatives — over a third limit their evaluations to the satisfaction of those that take part. One in five assesses the transfer of learning into the workplace and a small minority evaluate the wider impact on the business or society. (Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development, 2015: 4).

Interestingly, the measurement of informal learning is invariably conducted through the prism of organizational goals, while that of formal training is undertaken within its own terms, vis a vis assessing whether a course achieved the objectives that were set for it (Clarke, 2004).

The Foundations of Improvement

Work undertaken in 2015-16 by the Learning & Organizational Development Team (L&OD) at C&I NHS Foundation Trust in terms of producing an organizational development (OD) strategy helped develop a detailed appreciation of what the individual and organizational needs were in terms of enhancing performance and effectiveness. The diagnostic exercise that offered the foundation for strategic thinking consisted of three phases: semi-structured interviews with the senior leadership team (namely, executive directors plus their deputies and all associate directors, along with professional heads); a thematic analysis of the notes from those conversations, leading to the production of a schedule of issues to be addressed; and facilitated discussions within teams across around 10% of the workforce.

This diagnostic work was followed by a series of what were called “innovation green housing” events, wherein staff from across the Trust were invited to self-nominate to attend a facilitated event drawing on a specific methodology designed to release creativity and focus on the generation of responses to identified issues (?What If!, 2002). The foundation of this work was the reworked materials from the wider workforce consultation. This was used by the innovation greenhouse attendees to identify issues of concern and to surface exciting ideas to address them, regardless of how outlandish or impractical they might seem. In this regard, the events seek to suspend the normal (and normative) rules and behaviours that apply in the organizational context. There is an extent to which this — and other similar ‘techniques of release’ — resonate with Bakhtin’s notion of the carnival, a time when people are momentarily unrestrained by the ties that bind them on a quotidian basis (Boje et al., 2003). Organizations neglect such carnivalesque experiences at their peril, as they offer a massive opportunity for staff to speak truth to power and give voice to things, such as innovations, that they might otherwise censor in the midst of the normative corporate culture.

Despite the richness and depth of detail that these data offered and the comprehensive strategy that it came to underpin, at root it seemed apparent to those of us who had been involved so intimately in this work that it was founded on three simple elements:

Knowledge needs to flow freely and pool where it is required;
Connections are critical to making organizations work well, in light of their systemic natures; and
Conversation is the key way to support both the flow of knowledge and the essential connectivity of people.

Delivering on these three essential elements of organizational effectiveness — knowledge, connections and conversation (KCC) — is patently the responsibility of the whole workforce (and crucially of the manager, for whom this focus should be primary in terms of their day to day practice with the people in the workplace), although certain functions within the organization will be charged with supporting and directing interventions that facilitate this. But doing this meaningfully suggests a new way of working in our companies, one where the silo like notions of workforce development, business education, continuing professional development, business analysis, continuous improvement and organization development are transcended. Ultimately, then, any organizational function charged with work around development needs to orient its activity around the notion of KCC. However, it also requires something of a rethink around how current functions, oftentimes discrete, occasionally combined, sometimes felt to be coterminous, support the ambition to meet these specific contextual needs.

Introduction

Background

Training in the Workplace

The Foundations of Improvement

Volume 2, Number 1