What PD happens in your workplace? What strategies does your organization have in place to encourage development, change and innovation?
My workplace is a learning centre for university students. It provides various art and cultural education programes to help students re-discover their innate drive to learn.
Professional Development is not important at my workplace. For staff's personal development, the director encourages administrative staff to self-directed their personal development, such as study academic or non-academic courses provided by tertiary institutions. Moreover, staff can participate the centre's own activities like seminar and workshops. However, the director seldom provides direction and systemic training of the centre.
Refer to Shortland-Jones, Alderson, & Baker (2001), the figure below is illustrates the process needed to help change occur.
In this case, lack of vision, action plan and collegiality for staff's development is a larger matter. Although the director is a system thinker and has a good leadership for leading change in an organization, staff will have confusion, frustration and isolation. The director should make an effort to avoid.
On the other hand, the director has a better strategies for the implementation of ICT and website.
At the beginning, the director conduct a meeting to announce the implementation of new technology (vision). Besides the advantages of ICT and new website, he also introduces a simply action plan for the process of change (action plan)and encourages all members give comment to assist "change" (incentives).
Secondly, IT team and the director should take the responsibility to choose, design and maintain the ICT and website (skills and resources). Later on, administrative staff should provide their ideas to adjust and modify the user interface of two system (skills and collegiality). After the ICT and website are launched, administrative staff may respond the instructors and students' suggestion to IT team for further modification (collegiality).
To compare with these two situation, I found that the above six elements (vision, skills, incentives, resources, action plan and collegiality) are important to make change in organization successfully. Otherwise, confusion, anxiety, resistance, frustration, or feeling like you are on a treadmill or isolated will be occurred while change. And lastly, it will lead to failure.
For PD in your organization, I think your director should provide some job related seminars and workshops to staff by inviting professionals in the respective area to give a talk.
ReplyDeleteFor the incentives, there is not enough incentive for front line staff by only providing assistant in their work. I agree what Marco has mentioned in his blog that incentives should include bonus system, money reward, allowance which bring more incentives among staff.
Hi Alec! Thanks for your sharing! I agree that Professional Development is not important not only in your workplace, but also in every company in Hong Kong. Many companies in Hong Kong only concern how much they earn. They ignore the profession and personal development of staffs. If both development are ignored by staffs and employers, it would affect also the efficiency of work. If their working performance are bad, it would be disadvantageous for the whole development of the company.
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