Introduction and background

Write about the Impact of Training on Employee Productivity at Ford Australia.

Employee productivity in any organization is essential for improving the performance of the employees. Through training, the employees can gain new skills, or enhance the existing skills, which might not only help them to gain more job satisfaction but also helps the organization to deliver a better performance. As stated by Nda and Fard (2013), the aim of the training and development programs of the employees of an organization is to build up competencies, like, human, managerial and conceptual skills. As the organizational culture is dynamic and turbulent in nature, the human capital of an organization must keep on updating their skills continuously to sustain in the industry. An effective and efficient workforce is very essential for the success of the organizations and training programs help them to become dynamic to adapt to any turbulent situation in the market. Investing in the training and development program is considered as an investment in human capital, whose return is the knowledge and skills gained (Miner 2015). This is an asset to the companies that helps in improving the overall performance. The automobile manufacturing companies are no different. The industry needs to be evolved as the products are evolving very fast. The automobile technology is developing on a regular basis and they need to be incorporated in the car designs to make it improved. Sustainability is a major issue in the modern world and the automobile industry are working to incorporate the new sustainable techniques into car making (Sierzchula et al. 2012). The knowledge on the technological improvement, its necessity and its application can be gained through training and thus, the car making companies are focusing on providing training to the new and existing employees. The aim of the research study is to evaluate the impact of training and development programs on the employees of Ford, Australia. It will examine how much the training programs are benefitting the employees as well as the company to improve their productivity.

The management of Ford Australia has to make decisions on whether they should arrange training and development programs for the new and the existing employees more frequently. The research study will help the company to identify the training needs of the employees and whether training actually helps in improving the productivity of the employees. Through the study, the benefit of employee training for sustainability of Ford Australia, its impact on the employees, and the particular area where training is required will be explored. This will help Ford to make cost benefit analysis of the training programs, identify the specific training requirement and make plans accordingly.

Management problem

• What is the effect of training employees on the productivity of organisations in the vehicle manufacturing sector?
• What are the main areas of training for employees in the vehicle manufacturing sector?
• What are the barriers to training in the vehicle manufacturing industry?

• To determine the effect of training employees on the productivity of organisations in the manufacturing sector?
• To determine the main areas of training for employees in the vehicle manufacturing sector?
• To determine barriers to training in the vehicle manufacturing industry?

Employee productivity is one of the major factors of success for any organization. The extent of survival of any company in the industry is the performance and profitability, and that majorly depends on the performance of the employees. Many organizational factors affect the employee productivity. Some of those factors are, organizational culture, attitude and skills, training and development programs, career growth opportunities remuneration and benefits, and motivation of the employees (Sageer, Rafat and Agarwal 2012). As stated by Elnaga and Imran (2013), job satisfaction of the employees of a company contributes significantly in increasing their productivity. On the other hand, job satisfaction depends on the above mentioned factors. Thus, all these concepts are interrelated.

Motivation is a very important factor that influences the productivity of employees. It arises from internal as well as external factors. According to Herzberg’s motivation-hygiene theory, there are few elements in an organization that causes job satisfaction, known as the motivation factors, and some causes dissatisfaction, known as hygiene factors (Miner 2015). Sense of achievement, rewards and recognition, decision making power, career growth opportunities, accomplishments and skill enhancement are treated as the motivation factors. On the other hand, salary, benefits, job security, working condition and environment, position in the workplace, vacations work as hygiene factors. Thus, to enhance the employee motivation, the companies need to enhance the job satisfaction factors, which in turn reflect in the productivity (Yusoff, Kian and Idris 2013).

The opportunity of skill enhancement of the employees of a company comes with training and development programs provided by the organization. Training and development programs are essential for every organization to build their human capital. There are several types of training programs for new as well as existing employees. The main two categories of training are on-the-job and off-the-job. New and existing employees are given both types of training based on needs of the company to enhance their productivity. As highlighted by Ashar et al. (2013), as the technologies are improving continuously, the employees of an organization need to be trained to adapt to the new technology and system. Hence, it is the responsibility of the firms to increase the skills of the employees so that their productivity increases, and that can be done through training.

Ferreira and Abbad (2013) state that the organizations perform training needs analysis to identify the specific requirements for training of the employees. The training needs analysis is important to classify the areas which need to be updated. The training and development programs are always arranged based on the requirement else that will not lead to desired outcome. It is a continuous process, which enables the employees to acquire new knowledge and skills and enhance existing skills as per the industry requirement. This helps in increasing their productivity and job satisfaction (Ashar et al. 2013).

Research questions

Tahir et al. (2014) highlighted that lack of awareness about the importance of staff training often results in poor performance of the organizations and even if there are many other factors for improving the performance of the company, the lack of adequate skills and knowledge of the employees often leads to poor productivity of the companies. Hence, investment on the human resources is extremely important for all types of organizations. With the technological advancement, the nature of job is changing in almost all the industries across the world. Only the organizations can contribute in enhancing the knowledge and skills of the employees by educating them. Various types of training, such as, leadership training, managerial training, induction training, management training, soft skill training and technological training are some of the most common trainings that are given to the employees, based on the industry and organizational requirements (Tracey et al. 2015). Thus, it can be said that, training and development programs are an essential factor that have an influence on the employee as well as organizational performance.

Research design refers to the systematic approach that is used by the researchers to conduct a research study in the most logical and scientific manner (Maxwell 2012). This describes the steps for complete synchronization of the elements, data collection, analysis and findings to reach to a plausible outcome.

The research study aims to examine the impact of the training programs on the productivity of the employees of Ford Australia. Hence, it can be said that the study will investigate the outcomes of the training programs in Ford. In order to conduct the research on this subject, the researcher will adopt the explanatory research design. Under this design, the researcher will be connecting the ideas and findings to assess how the training and development programs organized by Ford Australia influences the productivity of the employees as well as that of the organization. It mainly deals with explaining the causal relationship between the variables of the research phenomenon, unlike exploratory research. Exploratory research provides a general insight about the research phenomenon and a small sample size is considered for data collection (van Wyk 2012). On the other hand, explanatory research is more specific. It addresses a particular aspect of the subject to explain the causal relationship (Harrison III 2013). This feature is required for the given research. Hence, explanatory research design will be applied in this study.

Research objectives

Under the explanatory research design, the researcher will be applying both the qualitative and quantitative research design. Quantitative research design helps to get the outcome through the application of statistical tools, while qualitative analysis is based on interpretation skills of the researcher against relevant theories. Under quantitative study, correlational design research will be adopted. This study will be beneficial to find out if the two variables, impact of training programs and productivity of the employees in Ford Australia are related or not. Statistical tools will be applied to conduct the correlational study. Qualitative approach will be applied to add the humanitarian aspects in the findings (Maxwell 2012). In the giver research, the researcher will conduct a survey on the employees of Ford Australia to find out their perspectives about the benefits they derived from the training programs. Interviews will also be conducted to gather qualitative data. The researcher will conduct interviews on some of the managers of Ford Australia to get the data on their perspectives about the benefits of training programs. Both the research types will be used so that, the outcomes of the quantitative study can be validated with the findings from qualitative analysis.

Primary and secondary data will be used for the study. Primary data is the one that is collected directly from the field of study and secondary data is the one that is collected from various published sources, such as, official websites, books, journals, magazines, online publications, newspaper articles, and annual reports of the companies. The researcher will collect primary data through survey and interviews. The survey will collect the data on the employee’s insights about the training programs. The interviews will get the data on how the managers perceive the cost and benefits of the organization for the welfare of the organization (Scott and Garner 2013). On the other hand, secondary data will be collected from the annual reports of Ford Australia on the company’s expenditure on the training programs and performance statistics.

Both data types will be considered to conduct an in-depth study of the research topic. Primary data is helpful in gathering the specific information regarding the research topic from the people who are directly associated. This is a direct observation from research field. On the other hand, secondary data helps in validating and/or supporting the findings from the primary data analysis (McDaniel and Gates 2013). In the given research, the researcher will inspect the amount of money spent by Ford for the training and development purpose, year on year, and the change in the performance or productivity data from the production level. This will help in assessing the findings from the primary data analysis.

Literature review

Reliability of data refers to the internal consistency of the data (Melchers and Beck 2018). The reliability of the quantitative primary data will be checked by applying reliability statistics, measured through Cronbach’s alpha. Secondary data will be collected from authentic annual reports of the company, which will make the data reliable.

For the quantitative analysis, research hypothesis will be used. This is used when a predictive outcome is tested on the basis of the observations, by using statistical tools. The research hypotheses for the given study are as follows.

H0 (null hypothesis): Training programs have no impact on the productivity of the employees of Ford Australia.

H1 (Alternative hypothesis): Training programs have significant and positive impact on the productivity of the employees of Ford Australia.

Hypotheses help in conducting the study towards a specific direction. The predictive outcome will be examined on the basis of the research variables (). For the given study, training program is the independent variable (IV) and employee productivity is the dependent variable (DV). Quality of trainers is considered as the control variable (CV), which will be kept same throughout the investigation. The causal relationship between the independent and dependent variables will be tested using various statistical tools.

The qualitative analytical approach will be applied on the response data and secondary data to address the following questions.

• What is the benefit of training programs?
• How the training programs impact the employee productivity at Ford Australia?
• What is effect of training programs on the organization performance?

The themes for the analysis will be derived from the research questions and will be used for qualitative analysis. The researcher will apply the interpretation skills on the interview responses and secondary data to answer the research questions (Jamshed 2014).

The researcher will collect primary data through a survey and interviews. Survey method is helpful in collecting data on many questions within a short time and at lesser cost. A large sample will be drawn from the population using simple random sampling. This type of probability sampling reduces the sampling error and biasness in the data (Levy and Lemeshow 2013). A set of 10 close ended questions on the research topic will be made, with demographic and subject related questions. The responses of the survey will be collected through a five point rating scale, such as, Likert scale, where 1 refers to strongly disagree and 5 refers to strongly agree.

Interview method will be adopted by the researcher to collect qualitative primary data to assess the perspectives of the managers regarding the training programs and quality of performance of the employees. To conduct the interview, 3 managers of Ford Australia will be selected using convenience, non-probability sampling. This is helpful in choosing a small sample size with a specific objective. 5 open ended questions will be kept for interview.

Research design

Quantitative as well as qualitative data analysis methods will be applied by the researcher for analyzing the data. The survey responses from the employees will be converted into numeric values to apply the statistical methods on it. Reliability statistic, descriptive analysis, correlation and regression will be applied on it find out the implications and relationship between the variables. The interview responses will be analyzed using thematic analysis approach under qualitative analysis. The secondary data will also be analyzed under thematic approach to compare the results with primary data analysis.  

Rigorous data analysis can be ensured by testing the hypothesis by applying various methods. Using both the qualitative and quantitative data analysis is itself a rigorous process of data analysis. The results are tested using different types of analytical methods and based on the findings, the conclusion about accepting and rejecting the hypothesis is made (Zikmund et al. 2013).

There will be some ethical issues and considerations that need to be fulfilled by the researcher while conducting the research. Firstly, informed consent should be taken from the participants before the data collection. They should well aware about the research study, its expected outcome and its implications. Secondly, none of the respondents should be forced to participate in the survey or interview process. None of them should be bribed or threatened for this purpose. They should voluntarily and willingly participate. Thirdly, the respondents should be informed that the data will remain strictly confidential and will be used only for educational purpose. This will never be used for commercial purpose. While dealing with human participants in a research, the above ethical considerations should be maintained.

Time and budget is the limitation of the research study. Since this is an educational research, the allotted budget is only AU $4000 and the allotted time is 12 weeks. Hence, much in-depth study might not be possible within limited time and budget. Apart from that, there is no scope for addressing other variables that can affect the productivity of the employees, such as, technology, training programs for specific needs, budget, rewards and bonus programs etc. due to the time and budget constraint of the research. Hence, the management of Ford Australia should undertake further researches for considering the impact of other factors on the employee performance.

	Week
Task	1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8	9	10	11	12
Making a strategy
Making a framework
Primary data collection
Conducting survey
Conducting interview
Secondary data collection
Data analysis
Presenting the findings and discussion
Providing the conclusion
Research report submission

Table 1: Time frame for the research study

Items	Amount (AUD)
Arranging equipment	1000.00
Visit to library for literature study	500.00
Making the questionnaire using Google form	–
Visit to Ford Australia office for survey	500.00
Circulating the questionnaire through emails	–
Installing SPSS	500.00
Collecting secondary data sources	500.00
Miscellaneous expenses (For eg. Purchasing of a book, journal or annual report of Bank of Ireland, cost of print out, subscription charges, etc.)	1000.00
Total	4000.00

Table 2: Budget plan for the research study

References

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