Human resource is considered one of the most essential assets of an organization that defines its overall success. With the current level of market competition, organizations have no other option than to come up with some of the effective management strategies. Human resource management is one of the best management approaches that most successful organizations focus on to improve their production thus creating strong competitive advantage. One of the main human resources management practices is human resource development (HRD), which has been defined as a set of systematic and planned activities designed by a particular organization to create better opportunities for their stakeholders to learn and gain competitive skills to enhance their job output in the future as well currently (McCracken & Wallace, 2000). The main process of HRD involves internal and external training programs, and organizational development, which enhance their expertise development (Ford, 2014). Its main aim is therefore to advance the performance of each individual employee, which then reflects on the overall workforce productivity of the organization. Some of the major HRD functions include training interventions, organizational development and career development.
With focus to training interventions, a HRD function, this paper evaluates the human resources development within Boeing Company. It beings with a brief illustration of the company’s background and context, the organizational structure, including the training interventions as HRD function, illustration of the primary and secondary functions of HRD, how the HRD function benefits the organization, how it identifies the needs of the organization, and how such needs can be used to develop a lasting solution for the organization (Ford, 2014). The paper further illustrates how this HRD function collaborates with other major business functions, and some of the main issues associated with the organization’s HRD function.
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The background and context of the organization
The Boeing Company is one of the largest aircraft manufacturers in the world, focusing on designing, manufacturing and sales of rocket, airplanes, rotorcraft and satellites. The company was first established by William Boeing in July 15, 1916 as ‘’Pacific Aero Products Co’’ (The Boeing Company Forum, 2017). Currently, the company is ranked the second largest defense contractor globally as per the report on revenue generation released in the year 2015 and is considered the largest US exporter in dollars. Besides designing and manufacturing aircrafts, the company has, over the year at the forefront in proving product support and leasing services to its global customers.
Boeing is organized in five primary divisions: Boeing Defense, Space & Security (BDS); Boeing Commercial Airplanes (BCA); Boeing Capital; Engineering, Operations & Technology; and Boeing Shared Services Group (The Boeing Company Forum, 2017). The company’s headquarters are located in Chicago and is led by Dennis Muilenburg, the CEO (The Boeing Company Forum, 2017). Following its effective leadership and management strategies, the company has managed to raise its financial performance. According to a report released by Fortune magazine in 2016, Boeing recorded total sales of $94.6 billion and was ranked 24 th in the fortune 500 list, it was also ranked 30 th on the world’s Most Admired Companies list in 2017, and 61 st on the fortune Global 500 list in the year 2017 (The Boeing Company Forum, 2017). This record is clear indication that the company has been recognized to be one of the best performing and largest in the world as well as within the regional market.
Boeing’s organizational structure
Boeing’s success can be associated to a number of things, with its organizational structure playing a significant role. The company has been focusing on promoting communication, which is a key aspect of its matrix management structure. Within Boeing, most communication lines seem to flow freely within the matrix structure thus allowing the project managers and other teams to be more accountable for their tasks (Boeing, 2017). This has helped in promoting productivity thus market satisfactions, which are key aspects towards a business success. Within its matrix structure, every department in Boeing has a single senior vice president who reports to the company’s president and the CEO, Dennis Muilenburg (Boeing, 2017). The main departments include: communications; Business development and strategy department; finance; public policy; internal governance; engineering, operations & technology department; law department; international relations department; and human resource and administration department.
The company’s structure operation uses specialization technique whereby all individual members of the organization in different units are assigned specific tasks. For instance those within the shared services group are assigned specific tasks, which they accomplish according to the unit’s goals and objectives. Similar thing happens to other units, including executive council, commercial airplanes unit, integrated defense systems unit and others (Boeing, 2017). Specialization helps the HR managers to monitor the talent development of each individual employee based on how well they perform their duties thus being able to make the right and the most effective decisions. Additionally, the company uses a corporate governance whereby its operations are overseen by its board of directors and executive staff who apply integration to run the main operations within the organization. The integration involves all the departments headed by the vice presidents.
Figure 1: Boeing’s organization structure
The company’s HR depart consists of a total of 163,851 employees in 70 countries where it has established its operations. To manage this workforce, the company has established effective HRD functions whereby the high-level HR managers make the most critical decisions hence passing them to the lower-level employees to implement them (Boeing, 2017). The company’s HR department is organized in both hierarchy and horizontal levels. Under hierarchy, the top supervisors make decisions for their junior staffs while under horizontal structure; the organization is subdivided into smaller units, which operate at a similar hierarchy.
Primary and secondary functions of HRD and how they address organization’s needs
Human resource development involves the organization’s effort of acquiring and developing the best talents that would help it improve its competitive advantage and market expansion through quality production and market satisfaction. It is the ultimate need of every organization to meet the needs of the stakeholders including the customers, employees and shareholders. In that case, every HRD function is normally focused on attaining those needs (Arkell, 2008). In relation to Boeing, the company has focused on a number of HRD functions in order to promote its productivity and market performance. Some of the common HRD functions Boeing has concentrated on include training interventions, career development and organization development (Arkell, 2008). Training interventions involves internal and external training of the employees to improve their skills so that they can competitively attaining the organizational goals and objectives. On the other hand, career development involves a progressive process through which each employee undergoes different stages of their career development, facing different issues and acquiring varying benefits (Bardoel et al., 2014). This includes career management and career planning. Organizational development on the other hand involves the process of increasing the organization’s effectiveness in relation to its productivity. Boeing has focused on all of these HRD functions to improve the performance of its workforce so as to deliver quality products and services in the market (Cascio, 2014). This has therefore helped attaining its overall goal of market leadership and profit generation.
How training intervention contributes to the organization
This paper focuses on reviewing and evaluating Boeing’s training interventions as part of its human resources development functions. As indicated above, one of the most effective HRM practices that help organizations attain their goals, especially in development, is training of the employees and other members of the organization (Gal, et al., 2017). As a matter of fact, every individual employee performs well when they have proper skills and talents. Such skills can be acquired through training and education programs. In that case, organizations, like Boeing, are required to enhance their training programs, which help in improving the productivity of the employees’ performance (Arkell, 2008). Training and development within Human resource management is aimed to change and improve the skills, knowledge and attitudes of the employees to fit the goals and needs of the organization.
Training involves providing sufficient skills and knowledge for the employee thus allowing them to execute their duties more effectively (Bardoel, et al., 2014). It also focuses on improving the workforce performance in the future. Within Boeing, employees have been provided with opportunities to attend off-or on-hours courses to improve their skills and knowledge as well as maintaining certification (Cascio, 2014). All Boeing employees are also required to have annual compliance training in a number of areas, including acceptance of business gratitude and computer security (Arkell, 2008). In the recent days, Boeing has undertaken a massive effort to determine the frequency through which employees receive courses and the number of course they should undertake within a particular spurn of time. This has therefore improved the scheduling through which employees successfully complete their trainings. It has also helped in ensuring that all those in need of certain knowledge get equal chances to attend various courses thus ensuring more effective and efficient trainings end enhanced satisfaction of the employees.
Acquiring skills and knowledge on different sectors of operations has helped Boeing’s employees improve their performance. For instance, training on various advanced technologies; such as on ICT technologies have helped the company integrates digital technologies in different departmental levels (Arkell, 2008). As a matter of fact, digital technologies have overtaken most sectors of development whereby the organization with improved digitalized processes are seen to perform well within the market. As an aircraft designer, manufacturer and sales company, Boeing also requires employees with proper knowledge on such digital technologies, which is attained through internal trainings (Arkell, 2008). In additional to ICT trainings, the company focuses on training its employees on other major areas, such compliance, public relations and management all which play a crucial role in promoting the overall productivity of the company.
Boeing training programmes are affordable and deliver quality outcomes to the trainees (Arkell, 2008). Following such trainings, the company has managed improve the interactions and communication between different stakeholders. This is because; some of the training programs within the company are based on communication skills and other diversity management. Employees are taught how interact well with people from different cultural, ethnic or political affiliations (Cascio, 2014). The entire process has improved innovation and creativity within the organization’s workforce something that is highly required to producing and delivering quality and competitive products and services. This therefore helps them to promote positive communication within the organization thus promoting coordination, which is a key factor that contributes to the overall organization performance.
The training on organizational management processes offered to the company’s top and junior managers has helped them acquire proper and competitive decisions making skills, which then reflects on the final outcome of their performance (Sheehan, Garavan & Carbery, 2014). In the contemporary business world, most organizations are facing serious challenges in management, including diversity issues, increased competition and compliance issue not forgetting the issues related to quality and safety assurance. Boeing, as an aircraft manufacturer is not left out from these issues (Arkell, 2008). However, as an effort to avoid such challenges, the company has focused on offering frequent training programmes where different leaders and managers are trained on the major management-related challenges and the best ways of overcoming them. Unlike other multinational organizations still straggling with issues like safety and quality management as well as diversity challenges, the training programmes for the management has helped Boeing overcome these issues thus improving its overall productivity and market dominance.
How HRD helps in identifying the performance needs of an organization
Every organization has its unique needs that it looks forward to achieve at the course of its operations. It is through the satisfaction of such needs that the overall success of an organization determined. Such needs might be based on the human resource, capital resources and other resources, technological, legal compliance, management, communication structures, market needs and others (Rao, 2014). Identifying the actual needs of an organization is not an easy task for most organizational managers. It requires effective strategies, including researches to identify the needs of an organization so as to develop the best and the necessary approaches to certify those needs. There are different ways through which an organization can identify their needs, which include human resource development efforts.
Human resource development, as part of the HRM practices, helps managers to sport out different human resources’ needs of an organization. HRD is normally the second practice within the HR after hiring and recruitment. Hiring and recruitment involves attracting and hiring employees with the talents required to attain the overall goals of an organization (Rao, 2014). In most cases, this initial process fails to meet all the requirements of the organization as intended initially. This is where HRD comes in, to identify those left out needs and provide the necessary interventions. Take the case where a company required a set of employees who could promote the brand image into a saturated market and it ends up with less qualified employees. It might be hard for the HR managers to first identify such talent deficiency at the initial process but while executing various internal training this might be easy to do (Sheehan, Garavan & Carbery, 2014). From this point, it is clear that HRD helps an organization to identify the talent needs within its organizational work force. Boeing, through its regular training programmes has managed to identify some of the talent needs within its workforce (Arkell, 2008). Through its regular training programmes, the company undertakes various tests to measure the skills and capabilities of each individual so as to develop the most effective interventions.
HRD functions also help organization to identify the financial needs required to satisfy the needs of the employees. Every employee is motivated by the benefits he/she gets from the workplace (McCracken & Wallace, 2000). In that case, for the organizational managers to motivate their employees and ensure high performance, they must be in a position of identifying such specific needs and work towards satisfying them. Boeing uses its regular employee survey to identify their employees’ unique needs, which they then use to come up with the compensation and other benefits for their employees. Career and knowledge development is one of the major employees’ needs Boeing has been trying to satisfy through its training intervention programs.
Developing a HRD related solution
After identifying the needs within the organization, HRD functions, such as training interventions, also help in developing reliable solutions. There are various effective processes that an organization must follow to attain positive outcome from its training interventions as part of human resource development.
Identifying and analyzing the needs that require intervention. Identifying the problems or the needs within an organization is a crucial effort towards attaining a high performance workforce and creating maximum productivity of an organization (Duggan, 2017). As a matter of fact, various problems can be eliminated or mitigated by providing effective instructions to the employees that enables them gain new skills and knowledge and learn how to use innovative methods of problem solving. As per the analysis above, it is clear that some of the major needs identified in Boeing include talent deficiency and employees requirements. Training programmes within such an organization can therefore help the management to add more skills to the workforce those promoting their talents, which in return improves the overall productivity.
Conducting the needs assessment to identify what the employees and other stakeholders within an organization expect or need from the training program is the initial step within the HRD solution-based process (Duggan, 2017). This step may involve interviewing the stakeholders involved to identify what they expect or any other research.
Designing the training program by listing the goals and the training objectives. After assessing the actual needs of the trainees and other stakeholders, it is crucial to design a training plan where the main objectives and the strategy through which objectives will be attained is evaluated (Duggan, 2017). In the case where the needs involves improving the talents of the workforce, the objective should clearly point out that and lay down the best plan through which training programmes can be used to improve the talents and skills of the employees. All the training objectives should therefore align with the organizational main strategic goals.
Development of the training materials. Training requires various learning materials such as articles, books and other sources of knowledge (Duggan, 2017). The organization intending to attain solution for their workforce knowledge prepares effective training materials to be used during the lessons and presentations.
Implementing the training intervention. Under this step within the training intervention, the organization must ensure that there is proper leadership sponsorship for the training initiatives. After the training process is over, the organizational management must lay down platforms that help the participants to practice what they have learnt through out (Duggan, 2017). This is an initiative through which the company benefits from the entire process thus seeing its needs satisfied. Under this step, it is essential to monitor the outcomes of the entire process. In this case where the intended outcomes are talent development and improved workforce performance, the management should be able to identify such improvement after the training programs.
HRD training intervention integration or collaboration with other business functions
The benefits of effective training interventions are seen in other major business functions within an organization (Rao, 2014). Similarly, poor human resource development can affect other business operations. In relation to Boeing, the company’s initiatives to train its employees have reflected positively to other functions such as quality and innovation production, successful market processes and in the organizational management. Boeing is known to have one of the best and creative production team responsible of designing and manufacturing some of the best aircrafts and other aviation machineries in the world (Cascio, 2014). This has been created to the highly qualified, determined and disciplined production team. Training programs the company has been undertaking over the years have played a crucial role in developing this team (Rao, 2014). Similarly, the company has developed a successful marketing team with highly qualified sale persons and public relations personnel. Most of the company’s training programs are based on communication skills and inter-cultural skills; both of which helps sale persons to interact with the customers. Technological skills gained through the training programmes have also enabled Boeing’s employees to apply some of the recent advanced technologies such as the internet and digital media to improve their productivity.
It is clear that Boeing’s, like any other organization, effort to train its employees collaborate well with over major business functions such production, marketing and management. In that case, there is a great need for any organization willing to attain market leadership and attain its overall objectives to promote training interventions within its workforces (Sheehan, Garavan & Carbery, 2014). As a matter of fact, training is one of the best HRD that has the ability of improving the quality and level of productivity of an organization. Boeing is a good example of how such interventions have helped it retain its market leadership within the industry and ensure profit maximization of the decades.
Besides training interventions, Boeing has initiated a number of other programmes that have enabled it attain the HR objectives and goals. The company’s HR has developed a new Functional Excellence Program aimed to align all professionals in a way that they communicate the same business language thus promoting the overall results. This program has been directed to create a one-company intervention approach to all the issues facing the organization. Under this program, the company’s top management looks forward to letting all individual members within the organization understand the HR strategies thus working as a team towards implementing them. Teamwork is the key agenda in this case whereby the company has noted the benefits of collaboration and the costs of trying to work separately.
References
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