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Human Resource Development Opportunity and Program Development: A Case of Toyota Limited

Introduction

Human Resource Development (HRD) refers to a framework of enabling employees develop competent organizational and personal skills, knowledge and relevant abilities (Bratton & Gold, 2017). This framework is among the most significant opportunities made available to both employees and their employer (Bratton & Gold, 2017). The capacity and encouragement to keep developing such skills enable employers to easily retain and motivate employees. Good performing organizations treasure Human Resource Development as they cover all the aforementioned bases (Bratton & Gold, 2017). The most recommended option is the need to develop and provide internal training sessions both with the internal staff and a paid consultant to a facilitator. Internal employee development has a number of advantages. Performance management refers to the process of providing support and enabling a firm’s employees to work in a way that allows the corporation to efficiently and effectively meet its immediate needs (Fay & Pamela, 2017). Managers are in a better position to communicate with their employees while giving a verified feedback on their performance regimes (Fay & Pamela, 2017). This paper seeks to develop a performance management program as the current HRD opportunity for Toyota limited.

Overview of the subject company:

Toyota Japan’s largest automobile firm. Creation of more innovative motors and provision of quality advertisements has greatly expanded this company’s network by generating billions of auto consumers globally. This is a multinational car manufacturer whose headquarters are located in Toyota, achi. Japan. On an international scale, Toyota’s employee’s sum up to 300,374. It maintains a third position on the scale of the world’s car production market and the 9^th largest company in the world on revenue producing basis (Monden 2011). It holds a successful background as the third world largest car producer with a first position in Japan. This is because Toyota motors are widely known for their high fuel efficiency in the global market. The organization meets its economic responsibilities to its shareholders by being a profitable and sustainable organization following its corporate strategy that seeks to establish a long-term investment at the lowest price without compromising the company’s production of quality products (Monden 2011). This is an attractive strategic management policy that has rendered Toyota a leading company within the auto industry.

It is important for Toyota to take up performance management as human resource development opportunity in developing a superior workforce to enable individual and organizational employees to accomplish their work goals. Human resource development is important in sharpening the workforce in their services towards providing quality and adequate facilities to their esteemed customers. The organization needs to provide diverse opportunities for both employee development and human resource management, both within and beyond their workplace (Bratton & Gold, 2017). This strategy is essential even as employees become senior organizational personnel.

Assessment of the Human Resource Development opportunity

Performance management is a key aspect in any production industry. However, on most occasions, it has been criticized for poor productivity as compared to the rest of other industries. Particular organizations consider to prepare performance management plans with a goal of ensuring continuous improvement (Chiarini & Vagnoni, 2015). Organizations with an effective performance management plan experience an increased productivity level as well as higher levels of employee attainment and motivation.

As a human resource development opportunity at Toyota, performance management will seek to assess the efficiency level of employees on basis of competency and behavior (Bratton & Gold, 2017). The opportunity will enable employees to better understand their roles and expectations. Enhancing performance management will empower all workers to operate under a common goal of providing quality and satisfactory customer services. The opportunity will present employees with better training sessions on strategies of providing highly dependable services to clients. Trainings mold employees into a competitive workforce whose work is of high quality. Quality work and services is the backbone of any business operation.

As a leading company in Japan, Toyota should successfully approach and sell goods and services to its immediate clients under an efficient work management regime. Performance management as a HRD opportunity has the capacity to help employees align their systems and resources to meet the firm’s strategic objectives. HRD is a dashboard that provides early warnings regarding any potential issue. It will allow the managers monitor their employees and understand where to make effective adjustments to ensure that the business is on the proper track. The opportunity will create room for evaluating the quality, flexibility, dependability and speed f operation of their employees (Chiarini & Vagnoni, 2015).

Collectively, the opportunity will require employers to involve their employees in all planning stages of any project of the firm. This will go a long way in filling communication gaps within the firm while enhancing efficiency. The human resource development opportunity makes the process of monitoring employee progress to be more efficient. Just as business revision plans is important for any business’ success, determining the performance level of employees is necessary. The opportunity provides a base that ensures all assigned tasks are properly completed within the required time frame and under a manageable budget. It points out any performance shortcomings and allows the managers to take up relevant corrective actions. Human Resource Development cuts across all available opportunities of employee career development, employee training sessions, mentoring, key employee identification, performance management and development (Bratton & Gold, 2017), coaching, succession planning, tuition assistance as well as organizational development.

Design of the HRD plan

A Proposed Performance Management System at Toyota, retrieved from: https://goo.gl/images/ykVug5

As evident in the figure above, performance management plan as a Human Resource Development opportunity will cover 6 core performance principles of; performance objectives and standards, performance appraisal processes, managing underperformance and discipline, reward and remuneration strategy, and development plans and learning and development activities.

The performance management as a human resource development opportunity is an important objective for the firm. The policies aligning with operational and performance management enhances an all-round development of employees. The opportunity will provide the management with diverse tools to instill the appropriate and desirable qualities into employees with need to ensure that the job is well done. It ensures that employees are given appropriate experiences that enhance their personal and professional growth and development. It is an opportunity that boosts and improves any business.

As seen in the above figure, the performance management opportunity will take into consideration the factor of employee management (Buckingham & Goodall, 2015). It creates a platform where the company can readily handle the issues of underperformance and discipline to ensure that they are purely working with a disciplined and dedicated workforce. Employees and staffs within Toyota Corporation are important for the success of the current business operations. The opportunity will create a platform for measuring the level of performance attained by the team. The opportunity will provide strategies that can possibly enable the management team to decide upon relevant changes that need to be introduced for improving the general performance (Fay & Pamela, 2017). Employee management goes a long way in evaluating and rating employee performance on an individual basis.

Performance management will provide the company with a clearer picture of where they currently stand, they core points of strength and where they need to work on. Through this opportunity, they can focus much more on their weak points and work towards strengthening them. Following this process, the company expectations from employees are analyzed and any performance hindrances communicated. In order to assess the company performance profile, an effective timeline of hitting targets is drafted so that every employee works towards a specific production goal.

The HRD opportunity will equally focus on reward and remuneration of best performing employees as a form of empowering employees to work harder and provide better results. Appreciating the efforts put forth by employees by rewarding them ensures that the level of business performance as well as their level of performance is not compromised. Performance management opportunity will consider rewarding of the available workforce to enhance optimum productivity, performance as well as maximum profitability. Rewarding employees for a job properly done serves as a motivational tool to them. Clearly, performance management is an effective opportunity that will help both employees and Toyota as a firm achieve their annual financial goals.

Performance management creates a base of aligning appropriate performance objectives and standards. The performance regime of the managerial body correlates to the firm’s core objectives. By continuously evaluating the performance management system, the company analyzes all challenges and drawbacks facing its employees, and which are associated with sales and production processes. The opportunity requires the management body to plan and introduce new methods that can help achieve the organizational objective of improving employee performance. The core performance objectives depend on how efficiently employees are trained and motivated to ensure all operational activities are conducted.

The opportunity will create a chance of introducing performance appraisals. Effective appraisals are a segment of performance management with significant impacts on employee engagement levels as well as staff morale. The two can readily enhance an employer’s brand through providing support to retain the key talent within any business. It will be a company policy to issue performance reviews of all employees while providing them with relevant feedback that they require to improve their job performance. After reviewing performances, appraisal will provide a better opportunity for recognizing and rewarding employees so that they feel valued in their places of work. Just as it is essential to high note the weaknesses and shortcomings presented by employees, it is important to commend them on their positive progress and points of strength.

The firm should seek to adopt a more diverse performance appraisal process for enhancing flexibility to improve performance management. Being a competent company that readily manufactures and sells high quality and reliable motor products across the globe, the company upholds two main factors: quality and reliability. In order to boost its production activities, Toyota’s management should seek to continually introduce more flexible plans that can enable the firm to readily improve its sales (Monden, 2011). Flexibility can be offered in terms of add-on to the facilities, services, and employee motivation. Prioritizing employees can improve the level of performance of a company because they form the company’s backbone.

Implementation strategies

Implementation of the employee performance management opportunity will be achieved through staff motivation. As a strategy, this take readily boosts performance management. For instance, it will be very important for the management to provide its employees with adequate resources for improving performance level, while introducing immediate corrective steps to enable them improve on their points of weakness. Employees assigned to the research and development department are required to research on more engaging employee-employee building sessions to ensure that they learn from each other. Employees find it much easier to relate and work with colleagues under limited supervision. They focus on weak points by emulating the strategies employed by their colleagues in enhancing work efficacy until they can readily put it in practice.

The focus on employee reward and remuneration can be introduced at Toyota through a number of strategies. The management must also adopt and further implement greater financial goals (Monden, 2011). This keeps the entire staff motivated. For example, by introducing performance oriented tasks to the employees, the management is in a better position to evaluate performance quality and reward the most performing candidates. Toyota can further introduce an impressive pay structure as recognition method. The strategy should be introduced mainly to encourage the employees to work much better and smarter to improve the level of productivity in the firm (Feldman, 2002). In most cases, the employees who have not been rewarded will take up the challenge and seek to work smarter so that he/she appears on the top performers list and earn a rewards during the following rewards session. Implementation of this stance creates a healthy and competitive work culture among the workforce while at the same time improving production and efficiency.

The HRD opportunity can also be implemented by introducing employee training sessions. Employee training creates great flexibility during operation as it addresses the weakness in their workplace skills. Introducing a training program as a strategy of embracing the performance management opportunity at Toyota will allow the workforce to readily strengthen the skills that they require to improve in performance. Such development programs raise employees to a greater level to that they can have better and improves knowledge and operational skills. Robust trainings ensure that employees have a consistent knowledge background, and are aware of the procedures and expectations within the company. The procedure leads to increased productivity and a greater adherence to quality standards and performance. Trainings can also improve performance by increasing innovations in new strategies and products.

Introducing team building sessions is a strategy towards corporate development that has been introduced in most firms, it is important for acquiring group skills on performance, improving productivity, performance and increasing motivation. During the session, employees can readily improve their work morale and leadership skills, allocate barriers that thwart their creativity level and hinder continuity, improve processes and procedures, identify potential points of weaknesses and strengths with a collective goal of improving organizational productivity. Implementation of team building sessions creates better grounds for improving performance as it taps on their hidden potential. Such programs are essential in providing powerful and upbeat team experiences that enable corporations to effectively compete at all corporate levels by working as true team players.

Delivery

Delivery of the performance management plan will adopt a number of strategies. The board of directors will meet all employees and their managers for purposes of discussing the program and firm expectations as a strategy towards achieving the objectives of the plan. Here, the directors must focus on the importance of employee feedback on the proposed plan for purposes of identifying areas of weaknesses while helping to foster ownership of duties. All staff should be notified of the proposed changes through emails and written notifications. The committee should be open to changes on basis of employee input and the perspectives put forward by employees which could possibly lead to a more-effective plan. Managers are allowed to make any relevant modifications basing on the feedbacks provided by employees. If all parties are in agreement with the proposed strategies, they should be aligned in all departments to act as constant reminders to employees during their journey of operation.

The operational values in Toyota are manifested through delivery of outstanding services and products to its markets as well as anticipating different consumer needs. It strives at improving people’s lives driven by entrepreneurial spirit, customer focus, resourcefulness and creativity. The company can only improve on its current operations by focusing on wellbeing and productivity level of their employees. Performance management opportunity provides Toyota with a better platform of ensuring that all objective are met and employee satisfaction achieved as well. This corporate strategy should be adopted by Toyota to push the potentiality of the auto industry towards global gains. After the HR fully reviews the possible changes, the managers and employees should sign the final plan and send to the HR for approval.

Method of evaluation

The main operational variables for performance evaluation include profitability and sales volume. The extent to which Toyota achieves its sales volume as predicted during planning and the changes in sales volume as compared to immediate competitors determine the accuracy of firm performance (Markgraf & Bert, 2018). The overall market performance is an essential indicator as it influences profitability level. Toyota can use market performance in ranking the sales volume. Moreover, employee satisfaction is a key indicator of a long-term success. An evaluation of performance with regards to employee satisfaction highpoints points of weaknesses and strengths in the overall farm activities. The quality of services and productivity level attained by Toyota can be used in evaluating the efficacy of the employees who operate in the firm. Employee satisfaction is at the heart of any superior company performance (Markgraf & Bert, 2018). If employees display quality characteristics and improved performance regimes, then it is obvious that the performance management as a human resource development opportunity was properly taken up and implemented.

Two main indicators of a firm’s internal performance are employees’ job satisfaction and the level of training. The efficacy and impact of the performance management systems at Toyota includes the capacity of the firm to offer high services to its clientele. Managers evaluate the level of employee job satisfaction by determining the major changes across an average length of service (Markgraf & Bert, 2018). Such metrics can be used in assessing and evaluating the efficacy of the performance management plan.  Aside from the numerical factors like profit margin, Toyota can possibly evaluate the firm’s performance purely on financial terms. Improved financial benefits means that the firm’s performance management strategies are highly effective (Markgraf & Bert, 2018).

Performance management is a crucial human resource development in any operational firm.it enables the firm to attract a larger percentage of customers while retaining a highly competitive staff. Through the strategy, the firm can constantly raise its sales performance and reach out to greater levels of performance. Performance management opportunity and relevant objectives are an essential factor that directly impact on the success of any business operational activities. In this process, the Toyota management team can easily assess its strengths and weaknesses with a goal of improving the challenges into greater opportunities. The study also provides an overview of the implementation, delivery and evaluation procedures of the HRD opportunity. The performance of employees and client expectations have also been captured as a goal towards realizing greater productivity. All the highlighted principles are steered towards improving the quality of services proposed to be rendered to the firm’s clients. These performance management plan should be communicated across all departments to ensure every employee is well acquainted with the information.