Human Resource Development: Benefits for Employees and Organization

This essay delves into the realm of Human Resource Development (HRD), elucidating its core functions and significance within an organizational framework. It underscores the pivotal role of the HR department, extending beyond mere recruitment and selection to encompass a comprehensive involvement across various organizational levels. The essay meticulously outlines the diverse functions of HRD, its impact on employee development, and the strategies HR managers employ to foster employee growth, providing real-world examples to illustrate key concepts. Furthermore, the essay explores the benefits of employee development programs, such as enhanced job satisfaction, improved efficiency, and reduced attrition, while also highlighting the potential consequences of neglecting such initiatives. It also references the Kirkpatrick's staff development model as a tool for measuring training effectiveness.

Human Resource Development
“What is Human Resource Development (HRD)? How can Human Resource managers
ensure that employee development is beneficial to the organization? Provide examples where
appropriate.”

Table of Contents
Introduction.......................................................................................................................3
The Discussion...................................................................................................................4

Introduction
The research essay is presented with the aim of bringing about general aware ness of
functions and importance of Human Resource Department in an organization. Out of all
important functions in the organization, human resources department is crucial to efficient
functioning of the business. While HRD is mostly attributed to employee recruitments,
selection and handling employee exits. It is in fact involvement at all levels to various other
functions. The essay shall portray different functions of human resources department, its
importance as well as describe its influence on employee development function in the
organization. It shall cover ways in which human resource managers impact the employee
development in the business environment with examples.

The Discussion
Human Resource Department is the body of human resource professionals who follow human
resource management in the organization. Human resource management is a tactical and
intelligible approach to managing the organization’s most valued resource – its employees.
The organization cannot accomplish its business objectives without combined support from
HRD. HRD has long been attributed to just the function of ‘personnel management’ i.e.
managing people in the company. As of today, with increasing complexity of business
environment, policies, market paradigms etc., this image has rapidly evolved into a much
larger field. Human resource department is an active professional activity involved with
attending the theoretical and practical practices of dealing with organizational workforce.
A human resource management includes various functions of any organization. One of the
most vital one is to understand the staffing requirement, choose to hire or choose to work
with contractors, recruitments, provide proper training, ensuring employee satisfaction,
employee efficiency, set performance parameters and responsibility metrics, ensuring that the
practices abide by law, manage the employee benefits and compensation, handle employee
records, create and apply employee policies.
So, in short, human resource development is the set of activities carried out in an
organizational setup, designed by the organization itself. It provides its members or
employees opportunities to learn key skills and perform efficiently for their current and future
assignments. HRD process involves developmental activities to bring about expertise in an
employee through organizational development, training and development etc. It extends
across human resource management, quality improvement as well as occupational progress (.
Main functions of human resource development are –
a. Training and Development – these are set of activities conducted by the human
resource professional to improve the skill level, knowledge and attitude of employees
in organization. Training entails providing employees with necessary knowledge and
skill development opportunities, focusing simultaneously on making the employee
ready for future job responsibilities that could come on him by improving his
capabilities. Example – when an employee joins the organization, an orientation
programme is held which familiarizes the new entrant to the organizational
environment and warms him up in terms of setting their expectations right on what is
required of them. Once they become proficient in their job roles, with further

development programmes prepare them by advancing their skills and make them
ready for next level (Lahap et al., 2015)
b. Organizational Development – It is an important procedure of increasing the efficacy
of the company alongside the welfare of its employees. This is done with assistance of
planned interventions combined with science of behavioural science. Member
participation packages needing necessary alterations in work anticipation, reportage,
techniques and incentive methods are directed at cultivating an effective organization.
The HRD professionals act as catalysts in this process. They advise the line manager
through consultations, various strategies that could be employed to bring about the
change, when necessary they also involve themselves directly. Example – when a new
incentive policy is introduced in the organization, HRD team works closely with
managers to smooth out teething issues
c. Occupational progress – An employee joining an organization carries ambitions to
progress in his career and the HRD professionals are supposed to help them achieve
this goal. Example – Leadership workshops carried out by HR team to prepare the
next level managers in the organization
It is important for human resource managers to ensure that the employee development
activities are beneficial for the organization. Some of the reasons of employee development
could be:
a Performance appraisals point out that there is a gap between required and achieved
level of performance
b As part of the total professional development program
c To benchmark the development position at every level of a performance improvement
program (Almeida, 2014)
d Succession planning which would prepare the employee for the next level
e To test a new system
f Specific requirements of training
Employee development programmes could be around:
a. Communication improvement skills
b. Customer service skills
c. Quality initiatives
d. Safety training
e. Ethics awareness program
f. Respecting diversity

g. Policies and regulations
h. Improvement of human relations at workplace
Ensuring that these are beneficial are vital as they help achieve:
a. Increased job satisfaction
b. Improvement in employee morale
c. Enhance motivation in employees (Gagne and Howard, 2016)
d. Improvement in efficiency standards eventually leading to financial gains for the
business (Nda and Fard, 2013)
e. Improved capacity in adapting to changing technologies or processes (Jehanzeb and
Bashir, 2013)
f. Influence innovation in building products, tactical plans etc.
g. Reduced employee attritions (Reio Jr., 2013)
h. Positive brand image
i. Enhanced capability in risk management such as sexual harassment, diversity disputes
etc.
In absence of efforts to ensure that the employee development has achieved the goals mapped
out could be quite harmful for the organization. Employees could feel demotivated, feel
stagnated in their current job role, look out for jobs, may exhibit deteriorated morale and
attitude to their tasks, enter conflicts frequently and create a negative atmosphere. It would
also be difficult to plan for future as there would not be people with right skills to take new
challenges (Cummings and Worley, 2014). Bringing in new talent all the time involves
revenue and is time consuming as they would need time to settle down in their profile and
start giving results (Lewis and Donaldson-Feilder, 2014).
A popular model that is followed by human resource development team is the Kirkpatrick’s
staff development model. Developed in 1950s, it still finds its way to today’s modern
organizational culture when it comes to employee development initiatives.

source - https://www.slideshare.net/BizLib/measuring-effectiveness-and-impact-092514h
The model is rampantly used to measure effectiveness of employee training, objectively. As
per the figure, there are four levels namely, reaction, learning, behavior and results (Mellor et
al., 2017). In the first level, it is important to observe and record the reaction to the
development program by trainees. Then it is important to measure the learning by the
trainees. This could be done by matching the learning objectives to the achievements. By
observing and recording how the trainees applied the knowledge practically are pointers to
the behavioral learning. It is important to note that, in absence of seeing application of
knowledge necessarily does not point out that the trainee didn’t learn the concept, it could
also be owing to other reasons that the trainee is not able to apply the knowledge practically,
reasons need to be sought for this. The final level is the result – if the outcomes sought for
setting up the development programme were finally achieved and how it helped the
organization (Moldovan, 2016).

Conclusion
The essay was presented to find out what human resource development is and how the human
resource managers ensure that the employee development measures undertaken are beneficial
to the organization. The essay has briefly outlines what human resource management is and
what are the functions of human resource development – what are its chief functions. In order
to find out if the employee development program is beneficial it has presented the expected
outcomes of a good program set up by the professionals in HRD. The essay also sheds light
on one of the popular models – the Kirkpatrick’s model of staff development which is an
effective way to find out the efficacy of the employee development programme of any nature.

References
Books
Cummings, T.G. and Worley, C.G., 2014. Organization development and change. Cengage
learning.
Journals
Mellor, P., Gregoric, C., Atkinson, L.M. and Greenhill, J.A., 2017. A Critical Review of
Transition-to-Professional-Practice Programs: Applying a Standard Model of
Evaluation. Journal of Nursing Regulation, 8(2), pp.23-30.
Moldovan, L., 2016. Training outcome evaluation model. Procedia Technology, 22, pp.1184-
1190.
Jehanzeb, K. and Bashir, N.A., 2013. Training and development program and its benefits to
employee and organization: A conceptual study. European Journal of business and
management, 5(2).
Reio Jr, T.G., 2013. Human Resource Development and Employee Engagement: Examining
the Connection between Employee Turnover Intentions Brad Shuck and Devon Twyford
University of Louisville Angie Shuck, MS.
Lewis, R. and Donaldson-Feilder, E., 2014. Managing for Sustainable Employee
Development. WINNING IDEAS., p.25.
Nda, M.M. and Fard, R.Y., 2013. The impact of employee training and development on
employee productivity. Global Journal of Commerce and Management Perspective, 2(6),
pp.91-93.
Lahap, J., Ibrahim, S.Z., Said, N.M., Azmi, A. and Syuhirdy, M.N., 2015. Training and
Development Program as a Source of Improving Employee Job Performance.
Gagné, M. and Howard, J., 2016. 5. A motivational model of employee attachment to an
organization. Handbook of Employee Commitment, p.59.
Almeida, R.L.D., 2014. How training evaluation can be used to potentiate employee
development in an organization (Doctoral dissertation, NSBE-UNL).