Reasons for Undertaking a Needs Assessment

Discuss about the Evaluation of Entrepreneurship Policy.

Organizations conduct needs assessment activities in different departments to help them identify existing gaps. Consequently, it is from the identified gaps that human resource personnel can design appropriate training and development programs (Mirzanti, et al. 2017). A needs assessment involves a systematic process that organizations apply when they want to respond to available gaps and needs available between the current conditions as well as the desirable conditions. Management must measure the discrepancy occurring between the current conditions and what management seeks to achieve. Objective of this paper is four fold. The first section explains the reason for undertaking a needs assessment. The second section explains and justifies the method selected to conduct the needs assessment. The third section conducts an evaluation of the needed assessment process in order to determine whether training is necessary. The fourth section examines possible outcomes in case the needs assessment is not properly planned or conducted.

Atlassian Corporation Plc operates as an Australian Company with its headquarters at Sydney. Currently, the company specializes in designing and selling of three groups of products – for planning, tracking & support, for collaborating & chatting, and coding, building & and shipping. For example, the first category of products includes Jira software, Jira service desk, Jira Core, and Statuspace. The second category of products covers confluence, Trello, Stride, and Hipchat. The third category of products includes the Bitbucket, Sourcetree, and Bamboo.

Every organization has varying reasons forces management to initiate an assessment of employee needs. Management can find an opportunity to update their employees concerning improvements in processes, rolling out of a new software or equipment, or trying to respond to some of the changes that management have made to policies or laws. Just in the same way, an organization might consider implementing software or making updates to operational processes, management can only become successful if employees become comfortable about the proposed changes. Therefore, training serves an important role only if it manages to address the actual needs within the company. However, in the most cases, training occurs as an afterthought activity. Management tend to consider it after employees have completed a given project. When in reality, they should have considered it as an item in the original plan. Irrespective of the size or the scope, developing of training program must always form the first step in any needs assessment. The following five reasons explain why management of Atlassian should undertake a needs assessment.

The Process of Needs Assessment

The company management might have a perception that the training offered to employees during the induction period was enough to give employees the needed skills. However, the moment a trainer starts to pose some questions concerning the requirements; this might help in uncovering a number of issues (Bulkley, et al. 2017). The training program might therefore, change to ensure it meets the needs of the company. Any training needs assessment ensures that managers ask and respond to a number of basic questions such as who, why, when, how, and what. More importantly, human resource personnel at Atlassian will get the change to respond to some of the questions such as who needs training, who will train them, how will they be trained, what will be used to aid in training, what method is most applicable, and among others.

The last critical element in the evaluation and selection process would involve individuals that will be considered to participate in the program. Management should go ahead and identify key leaders, emerging leaders, and employees from different department as a way of determining the right people to be part of the program (King and Eiser, 2016). These are the kind of people that will play a role in supporting the entire goals and strategies at Atlassian Company. Similar to the above three sections, the company management could go ahead to respond to three questions;

1. Who is the right person to be part of the new program?
2. What are the needed major characteristics and constraints likely to the success of the program?
3. What is the correct number of participants can the program accommodating?

In one way or another, organizations tend to perform a training needs assessment even before they embark on a leadership development program (Dean and Ripley, 2016). He outlines that such assessments range from simple awareness about the leadership development that leaders need to develop to extensive multi-faceted analysis that helps identify the existing gaps that require development and try to define any additions to a development process. a majority of organizations can derive some benefits when they come up with the right and correct method to assess the current needs (Thomas, et al. 2018). Without following this process, it would as well imply that management comes up with guesswork concerning what training and programs that leaders require them to achieve better results in their responsibilities or become prepared to implement the next step during the leadership pipeline.

Therefore, how does management know the company has accurate and complete needs assessment? Whether the company has an external expert performing the needs assessment or an internal team, the company will need to follow the following simple needs assessment process (Murabit, 2012). Even though it is simple, it still covers all the important details that explain how the management will go about it in order to determine if training and/or development is necessary.

Desired Outcomes of Needs Assessment

Full background about the company plays a critical role when assessing the needs for training among employees. It ensure that all concerned managers come up with a report that has a much-needed context (Orakwue and Dorasamy, 2017). Furthermore, it also provided specific recommendations about the culture of the company, its history, and objectives. For example, management will start to think about what Atlassian Company has accomplished in the past and future expected growth. It would be important for the company to understand expected outcome and how they all link to an overall strategy. For example, the company management should understand as to whether all goals relate to leader development, team effectiveness, or performance.

The company could start from asking the question such as how we got where we are. Besides, management will depend on the company vision for the program:

1. What are some of the things that the company need to achieve when the program gets implemented?
2. How does Atlassian Company expect the relationship between the current results and future outcomes?
3. What are some of the external factors does Atlassian Company need to consider.
4. What are possible internal constraints such as timing or budgets that are likely to limit the program during the implementation process?

Understanding the above aspects about Atlassian Company will lay a better foundation to start understanding about the current performance. At this level, management will now need to start focusing on the program (Petrovic, 2009). Any right development opportunity should consider performance improvements and learning objectives for both employees and leaders. The learning objectives should also be accompanied with specific people to participate in the program.

Management should consider levels of the current skills against the needs in order to develop proper training program. The identified gaps that pose some comfortability to employees or show the ability to implement certain skills will help bring out areas of development (Pless and Maak, 2011). As indicated in assessment 1, I managed to identify the need for Atlassian Company to align leadership development program with already identified leadership skills. It is because of this that management could go ahead to design a custom 360-degree competency assessment. The efforts to create a competency assessment will help measure the current awareness concerning behaviours of leaders working in different departments (Sundheim, 2013). This should also be accompanied with other related program content in order to assist leaders bring out their skills. For instance, conducting the needs analysis will help management make decision concerning the needs to focus on to achieve high level of leadership competencies and those of employees (Siegel, 2015).

Management will need to ask a number of questions. For instance, some of the questions might include the following;

1. What is the type of knowledge and skills that participants require for them to become successful in offering high quality services, increased production, as well as developing awareness.
2. What are some of the current gaps in skills and knowledge?
3. How will the company identify and measure actions and behaviours?
4. Does the company need any form of reinforcement in order to achieve a sustainable development? If yes, what type of reinforcement will it be?

Management will need to consider this step as the best time to consider how to evaluate the achievements of the program. Besides, this step should come after management has had stronger understanding of Atlassian background, its culture, goals as well as strategy. For the company to become successful and record positive returns on investment, management should come up with measurable outcomes that relate to overall strategy.

According to the previous assessment, it is apparent that Atlassian Company needed to develop employee as well as leadership development program that would help improve their engagement and retention. This implies that before management comes up with a program, it would be appropriate to identify correct measurable metrics during pre- and post-program evaluation phase. Such a metrics will not just focus on reaction of employees

The performance of employees in any organization always has a direct impact on employees. While some scholars have argued that leaders are born, some have maintained that leaders are made. Assessment of the gaps at Atlassian revealed that its leaders are not born or made. This is because a majority of them still lack the needed leadership skills, styles, and behaviours. Consequently, a majority of employees have become unaware concerning how they could perform their jobs to increase customer satisfaction. Therefore, the reason for conducting a needs assessment is to ensure that management identify appropriate leadership skills, traits and styles (Tripathi and Kohli, 2017). The appropriate leadership style that might assist the leaders includes participative (through consultative, consensus, and democratic) and entrepreneurial.

Currently, Atlassian experiences a gap of offering quality services to customers. Conducting needs assessment will ensure that employees learn and acquire new skills, knowledge, and abilities that positions them to improve quality of services (Dean and Ripley, 2016). When it comes to creation of corporate training programs, human resource personnel must always identify key employees that will undergo the training session. It is by doing this that management in charge of training will customise content of training course to meet the specification of the role or department (Gandossy and Verma, 2009). In order to benefit the bottom line, management need to provide employees with proper skills they need to improve their performance. This will have a positive impact to the company bottom line.

Starting from the project leader that identifies the training need, to a trainer who creates and implements the program, and employees that participate in the same program, everyone involved must spend quality time (Thomas, et al. 2018). The reason to conduct the needs assessment is to ensure that management delivers high returns on money invested in production process (Hinge, 2016). The assessment of the gap at the company revealed that the company has a goal of using software to empower humanity. However, because of lack of proper production, Atlassian still experiences challenges of satisfying customers. Consequently, customers have had to switch to competitors (Waldman and Balven, 2015). Therefore, the reason for the needs assessment is to make employees understand production processes that would translate into proper production.

When the leaders gain communication skills, this will go a long way in ensuring that they also understand how to communicate to their employees. Any form of poor communication between the leaders and employees in software development has been found to be one cause of poor service delivery of production (Robbins and Judge, 2009). Therefore, the objective of the training program is to ensure that the leaders understand most appropriate methods of communicating to their employees. The program will give leaders communication skills such as decision-making, democratic leadership, and consultation at a team level (Jerome, 2013). For instance, the program seeks to empower all leaders in charge of software development, sells department, and marketing the skills to communicate and bring everyone in change.

While leaders at the company have been found not to understand the best way to coach and give directions to their employees, the objective of the training program is to ensure that such leaders acquire coaching skills (Andersson, Jackson and Russell, 2013). Even though some leaders at the company might find that coaching is easy, some leaders still have trouble of directing their employees in the right direction (Gregory, Harris, Armenakis and Shook, 2009). Most importantly, the current program seeks to give leaders coaching skills such as showing empathy, remaining curious, recognizing the strengths of others, taking in what they hear, reflecting with curiosity, and reflecting with accuracy.

The training and development program aims at assisting leaders develop their leadership skills. In case managers want to achieve mutual benefits with their employees and the company, they need to learn the best way they can involve others (Cianci and Gambrel, 2003). The program will make leaders gain motivational skills, consensus skills, democratic skills, and consultation skills.

The Job Instruction Training (JIT) method will be used in the delivery of the training and development program. As Clark, (2010) underscore, the JIT method would be effective in this context as it largely emphasizes on the development of skills alongside advancing other procedural and factual knowledge objectives. The training and development will therefore, adopt four steps of the JIT process, which include preparation, presentation, testing and following up.

Preparation is the first step of the JIP training methods, which consists of planning out the training program. Werner & DeSimone (2011) notes that the preparation helps the trainees to see the completely training process through the trainees’ eyes. In this case, the preparation would entail outlining the training objectives for imparting the communication skills, coaching and motivation skills, so that it is known from the outset the competencies that the training should produce.

The second stage of the JIT training method is presentation. Werner & DeSimone, (2011) point out that this stage involves four activities which including telling and showing where the trainer provides an overview of the training concept and shows the trainees its different aspects. The trainer then demonstrates how the concept is executed and explains the rationale of why it is done in a particular way, focusing on the key learning outcome.

Trying out of the next step in the JIT learning process. Clark, (2010) argues that this stage provides a transition for the trainees from observing and listening to actually doing. The trainer would let the trainee implement the communication strategies and coaching skills as learnt during the training. In this stage, it is essential for the trainer to consider any errors as the function of the training process rather than the learning ability of the trainee. The trainer questions the trainee about their actions and them on the correct procedures and practices.

Following up is the final stage of the learning process of the JIT method. Clark, (2010) notes that at this stage the trainer is checks on the trainees work; in this case, it would mean their learnt communication competence and motivation strategies, in order to ascertain their progress and proficiency.

There are several key factors that must be taken into consideration for the effective delivery of this training program. For one, as Werner & DeSimone, (2011) suggests the trainee will need to consider the goals of each training components; namely communication skills, coaching skills and employee motivation. They will need to break down the goals further to cover the sub components under each subject which will be covered in each session.

 The trainees also need to establish the time schedule that is allocated for the training and acquire the training material and resources that are available for the training. The training material and resources should be developed based on the learning needs of the trainees and should also be relevant to the objectives of the training program. (Werner & DeSimone, 2011)

The second most important consideration to make is the instructional methods to be employed. Given that the training will be undergoing various JIT stages, it will be essential that the trainee uses a mixture of instructional methods during the actual training. For instance, the actual trainings, which is the presentation stage of the JIT method should be conducted through classroom training using resources such as the whiteboard, overhead projector and power point presentation. The trying out stage of the training program should entail interactive methods such as demonstration, role play and participant control where the trainees are provided with case scenarios through which they are required to implement what they have learnt. (Werner & DeSimone, 2011) 

Finally, as Werner & DeSimone, (2011) note the trainee will need to evaluate the whole training process to ascertain whether the objectives were realized. This will be done at the follow-up stage of the JIT method and may entail getting feedback from the trainee a month after the training. This will not just be essential for gaining feedback but for also devising ways improving the training program.

In order to evaluate the effectiveness of the training and development program and its delivery, management will consider it effective to source information from several sources. The first source might be the outcome from the competency tests that will be tested on all trainees who will have gone through the training session. The test will take place at the end of the training session. The second source will be from the feedback provided by trainees. The feedback will be in the form of face-to-face interview in order to understand their levels of confidence at the end of the training (Saunders, Thornhill,  and Lewis, 2009). The third source of information will also be from the trainers concerning several training programs or individuals that have managed to go through training difficulties. Therefore, in order to support the evaluation process, management will provide interviews on face-to-to face. The process will help measure the reactions of trainees as well as trainers during post-training session.

Conclusion

The training program seeks to focus on training of leaders in charge of employees in different departments. The trainings targets human resource managers, supervisors, product designers, and sales and marketing.  The three major goals for the training program is to give leaders communication skills, motivational skills, and coaching skills. Besides, the evaluation of the success of the program will be through analysis of information collected from the trainees following post-training session.

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