Business Finance Homework Help

Question 1

One day, Dave Palm, the director of training at LensCrafters, got a call suggesting that top executives were looking to improve the company’s bottom line, and couldn’t find enough tangible evidence that the company’s training programs were producing a measurable return on the company’s investment. Top management at this optical retailer understood that employee training was important, but they wanted to know what evidence was available to show that there was in fact a payoff to the organization from the money being spent on training. The phone conversation ended with a challenge, “What are you going to do about this?” If you were the director of training in this situation, what types of measures would you like to have available before you respond to top management? That is, what types of evidence do you think management would find convincing that training was having a positive impact on the organization? Why did you pick the measures that you did? How would you go about collecting the data for the measures you have selected?

Question 2

Suppose you have been asked to design a program intended to train airline flight attendant trainees in emergency evacuation procedures. You are now designing the evaluation study to show that the flight attendants understand the procedures and use them on the job. Which data collection methods do you think would be the most useful in providing this evidence? How might the type of learning outcome affect your choice of measuring learning? Support your choices.

Question 3

Research designs involving control groups require that some employees receive training while others do not. This apparent partiality can be problematic if training improves some employees’ performance and not others. If the improved performance leads to promotions, raises, or improved well being, is it fair to train some employees and not others just for the purpose of evaluation? What are some of the issues that could be raised as a result of this practice?