What is Human Performance Improvement?

Simply stated, the sciene and purpose of Human Performance Improvement is to make businesses and organizations of every size and type perform at their highest potential through the wisest investment of resources. There are other definitions, but the reason business, education and industry professionals should care about the Human Performance Improvement is simple, improving results in a structured, accountable way.

Most of the time when there is a performance issue in a company business and HR professionals look to training to solve the issue. The truth is that most of the time training is selected as the solution, when a lack of knowledge or skill is only the cause of problems about 20% of the time. So what we find are companies and organizations investing heavy amounts of dollars into a medium that only has a one in five chance of actually being the proper medicine to stop bleeding.

Human Performance Improvement is the science of truly identifying what is at the base of a performance problem, what is the true cause. Once that true cause is clearly understood the human performance professional looks at many different types of solutions to treat the cause. Through experience and science there have been identified many types of potential causes and solutions to performance problems. But the majorit of them fall under one of the following seven categories.

1) Organizational causes or solutions

Organizational solutions include things like the culture of the organization, having clearly defined values and goals, job design etc. Some times training is chosen to fix a performance problem, and a ton of money is spent, when the solution could have just been as simple as clearly defining the values of the organization.

2) The physical environment

The classic story goes that a company put their call center in a new building and sawtheir accuracy measures drop of nearly 20% from where it had been. "We need training" was the call from management. After millions of dollars were spent and hours of productivity were lost they realized that there was still no improvement. Ends up that the windows let in more light and the glare on the screens were lessening accuracy. The problem was fixed with 50K worth of window changes.

3) Tools

Sometimes it doesn't matter how good your people are, they won't be as good as they could be if they don't have the best tools.

4) Motivation

Much of the time employees know what they are supposed to do, they just don't feel ownership or responsible to do it. Performance and rewards systems are much more effective than simply putting people through training.

5) Skills or knowledge

Obviouslly at times there are appropriate problems that can be solved through training. We just need to make sure that we are doing it at the right time, and not as an automatic trigure we pull whenever there is a performance issue.

6) Inherent ability

At times people just aren't cut out to be a top performer in a certain role. And it doesn't matter how much training you give them they will never be a top performer. Sometimes we try and make fish into birds and it just wasn't meant to work. This is important to know before investing money in a training solution.

7) Process

The performance of employees can often be improved just by putting good processes in place. This was the genious of the assembly line revolution, repeatable measurable processes. Sometimes it isn't the people who are broken, it is their work processes.

Everyhuman resources professional, every learning professional, every learning and development and corporate training professional or organizational development professional should be aware of the principles and practices of Human Performance Improvement if they are truly going to go above delivering effective training and translate their work into sure business results. Learn more about Human Performance Improvement by exploring this website.

Below you can click on the image to see a very good overview paper of what Human Performance Improvement is in more detail. This paper was first published by the Population Leadership Program