Xiaohao's Knowledge on Innovation: Human Resource Investment Is Not About Spending But Creating Opportunities for Learning

Critical Facotors of Innovative Organisations No. 7

Usually, when we think about investing in people, our immediate thoughts are about training and development. While these are essential, they cannot be seen as the ends to a cause. Often, it is this misplaced emphasis that is the source of frustration for many Human Resource practitioners.

Ends Versus Means

In the 'ends' mentality, people are just sent for training and development, and it is expected that results will follow without considering what could have happened after the learning interventions. When this section of the value creation process has been truncated, Human Resource practitioners lost the mechanism to translate the learning individuals may have gained at these training and development events into human productivity at the workplace. In this space, lt is a challenge to separate the benefits of these investments from the financial results of the overall performance of the organisation. There are consequences with such a difficulty. It includes management assigning lower priorities to people development and seeking avenues with seemingly less dubious and more direct impact to productivity, like outsourcing or reconfiguration of the labour-machine mix, to improve the organisation. These will severely constraint the roles human will play in creativity and innovation in the organisation, which could lead to the decline of a nation.

Unlike the 'ends' mentality, the 'means' perspective recognises that the true value of training and development is in their transference at the workplace. There are follow-throughs that practitioners recognise as important and they put these into practice and build them into their corporate policies and governance structure to facilitate the actual transference of knowledge, skills and attitudes into creative ideas, innovations and entrepreneurial activities at the workplace. These are the financially accountable results of training and development.

Creating Opportunities for Learning

Some follow-throughs include:

Creating opportunities for people to interact with those who have successfully used the skills, practice what they have learnt, give them a sense of contribution, and make the skill become second nature to them.

Exposing the people to different roles so that they experience innovation from different perspectives. In doing so, they obtain a better appreciation of the roles and functions of innovation.

Taking the routine and mundane work out of people so that this could translated into spare time for them to look at the future instead of overly focus in dealing with the past in the 'now' space.

Giving people the freedom to experiment and space make errors and mistakes so that true learning could happen.

Innovative Organisations See the Larger Picture

Highly innovative organisations are capable of differentiating the larger picture of creating opportunities for the transference of learning from spending money mindlessly. They appreciate the full extent of the value creation process for investing in people and the amount of work involved, many which is beyond the scope of training and development, and the responsibilities of the trainers. They have avoided the zero-sum game of making the trainers the scapegoats for learning failures and went beyond managing the superficial aurora of learning successes.

Here is an interesting video that talk about giving people the opportunities to use their learned abilities: