The HRD Advisory Committee

The HRD Advisory Committee One way to continuously reflect the needs of employees and assist in prioritizing needs is to establish an HRD advisory committee. The role of this committee is to meet regularly and review needs assessment and evaluation data and offer advice on the type and content of HRD programs to be offered. The advisory committee should be composed of members from a cross-section of the organization. This provides different perspectives on HRD needs and can create a broader level of support from all parts of the organization.The organization should also recognize those employees who volunteer their time to serve on advisory and other committees. This includes the recognition that meeting time may take employees away from their normal job responsibilities.

An example of this comes from a General Motors plant in Lansing, Michigan. A press operation (called the blanker area) was selected for study because this area was experiencing major changes in technology and was not meeting company goals for production level or cost. A needs analysis team formed, consisting of three training specialists (one from the United Auto Workers union), a supervisor, plus two hourly employees. This team identified symptoms and likely causes of the problems in this area, planned, collected, and analyzed data concerning these issues, and then reported their results back to the leaders and employees in the area. Nine solutions were ultimately recommended, consisting of both training solutions (e.g., train all production workers in statistical process control, or SPC) and nontraining solutions (e.g., color code the dies for each press). The solution that had the greatest impact was training the workers in SPC. These courses were already available by in-house trainers, so the cost was minimal. As stated by the two hourly workers on the team: “The results were improved quality and a 30 percent reduction in scrap rate. The value was a sav- ings of $502,825 in the first year. The benefits were the financial savings and workers’ pride of ownership for the improvements.”This is certainly a posi- tive example of how a number of the things recommended in this chapter were utilized to rectify a performance problem in a large organization.