Policies for managing the training and development function: lessons from the federal government.

The administration of employee training resources is guided, in part, by laws and regulations. This is exemplified in the case studied here of federal employee training. After reviewing the literature on the use of human resources development (HRD) policies, the policy framework that guides the administration and delivery of training to the federal workforce is described in terms of role requirements for various members of the HRD federal workforce, as well as in terms of specific policies across a variety of HRD practice areas. The practical effects and implications of using policy for HRD practice are considered. A generic list of HRD policies applicable to any employment setting, derived from the federal examples, is provided. Future research directions are identified.

For most employers in the United States, the legal framework governing employee training and development has a limited and indirect influence on training practices. (1) For example, specific mandated training is often industry-specific, overtime pay for time spent in training applies to nonexempt employees only, and high hurdles must be overcome to establish negligence in training. Thus, for most private employers, even though the legal framework for HRD is important and binding, the actual effects that framework has on training practices are generally narrow and circumscribed. The same cannot be said for the legal framework for training that applies to the largest employer in the United States--the federal government. For U.S. government agencies, the HRD legal framework is much more extensive, comprehensive, and integrated. (2) In order to understand the complete system of laws and regulations that define the field of HRD in the United States, it is essential to understand the legal framework for training in the federal government.

The purpose of this article is to outline and describe the framework for training that is composed of laws, regulations, executive orders, memoranda, and directives authorizing and directing HRD operations for federal employees. These various laws and directives will be treated as policies governing the administration and provision of training for federal employees issued by the top decision-making body of the respective organization. Here, of course, the top decision-making body is the Congress of the United States, along with the executive bodies authorized to act in managing federal workers. Considered as policies, the laws, regulations, and so on affecting HRD will be called the "training policy framework."

As will be developed, policies are a means for governing an organization, and the first section of this article reviews the literature on the use of HRD policies to manage training and development functions in general. Next, the basic operating structure for training federal employees is described. Third, the key policies that constitute the federal training policy framework are identified. The fourth section translates federal practices into a series of propositions for how policies can be applied and used in training administration and management by any organization. In addition, a generic list of employee training policies will be proposed that can apply to any organization. Implications of this analysis for future research are noted.

Policies Regarding Employee Training and Development

Just as organizations may have policies for employees' ethical behavior, customer service, or information security, so may they have policies focusing on employee training and development. Regardless of any specific focus, policies are promulgated by management to establish priorities and performance guidelines in specific operating domains. "Policy" is used here in a broad and generic sense to refer to a statement of goals, standards, and procedures that is expressed and adopted by the leadership of an organization because it represents the leadership's desired outcomes on an ongoing basis in a specific domain. (3) Understood as such, policies serve to direct the actions of managers and employees alike, functioning like standing orders for the members of the organization to help guide their decisions and activities on a day-to-day basis. Multiple policies may be issued for any given domain. For example, in the customer service domain, there may be separate policies about satisfaction warranties, product returns, or responding to customer complaints. Further, policies may be issued incrementally and periodically on an issue-by-issue basis. When taken together at any point in time, the set of policies for any given domain of operations can be described as a policy framework.

Beer and colleagues at the Harvard Business School were among the first to make the case that general managers can govern the human resources management (HRM) function of their organizations by establishing policies that best direct HRM activities to support the achievement of certain desired HR outcomes. (4) The researchers referred to those desired outcomes as the "four Cs" of organizational commitment, workforce competence, and congruence with organizational goals through cost-effective solutions. Organizational leaders govern the HR function through the policies they establish, and organization members can be held accountable for complying with those policies.

Beer et al. also identified four operational domains for which HR policies could be established: employee involvement, employee flow, rewards, and job design. (McGregor suggested this variant on HRM policy domains: employment, compensation, staffing structure, and career management and training. (5)) Of particular interest here is Beer's et al. "employee flow" domain, which encompasses the movement of talent into, through, and from the organization. The two primary methods for affecting flow are employee selection and employee development (i.e., training). In spite of its apparent importance, Beer et al. observed that the training process is often unplanned, fragmented, and not linked to organizational goals. As they put it, "The challenge ... is to stimulate and guide an essentially individual development process in a way that is consistent with corporate needs".

Spector conducted the first extensive study of the use of policies in managing the training function. (6) His review of the literature available at that time produced 44 potential areas in which HRD policies might exist (see Appendix 1 for the list). The resulting survey was sent to a national sample of 1,000 randomly selected subscribers to Training Magazine, and 163 usable surveys were returned. While respondents indicated widespread agreement that there should be HRD policies in 35 of the 44 potential domains, there was only one domain--tuition assistance plans--in which HRD policies actually existed in written form on a consistent basis (93%). Otherwise, Spector found the absence of written HRD policies to be the rule.

Nadler and Wiggs identified the management implications of HRD policies. (7) For them, HRD policies both provided training guidance to managers and served to legitimate training-related actions and decisions. To have these characteristics, though, training policies should be directly tied to organizational goals and strategy, approved by the board of directors, and written and communicated to employees. Since a danger in using policies is that they may be applied uncritically and without discretion, Nadler and Wiggs recommended that policy statements should permit judgment and discretion in their application. They suggested that there should be policies on HRD's mission as well as the authority of HRD personnel to perform various administrative tasks, including "conducting ongoing training needs assessments." Most recently, Gilley, Eggland and Gilley (8) recommended that HRD policies be established for things like release time for learning, the relationship between HRD and performance management systems, and partnering with line personnel.

In spite of the arguable importance of policies as a basis for managing the HRD function in organizations, there are no recent studies that actually catalog HRD policies in use in specific employment settings. Keyword searches in ABI/Inform, EBSCO, and Social Sciences Abstracts in January 2003 produced no studies dealing specifically with the use of HRD policies in training administration. Without an established base of research or a model of HRD policies, a case study approach that identifies the policies of a noteworthy exemplar is recommended as a way to generate theory and research. (9) In this context, Dunlop described the civil service as one type of internal labor market that is characterized by HR policies that "are ordinarily minutely prescribed by centralized regulation, which is administered in turn by special procedures." (10) One employer exemplar for policy case analysis is the federal government. As will be shown below, there is an extensive policy framework that governs the training practices in this setting.

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