An assessment of BRAC’s organizational culture and values training

Abstract

BRAC initiated Organizational Culture and Values (OCV) training to promote values among its staff which would help achieve organization’s objectives. Since 2009, BRAC’s Learning Division has offered training to 10,908 staff and plans to train the rest. Such a training project involving huge cost and time demanded early assessment of its effectiveness. This study aimed to measure the retained knowledge of the trainees on training content, evaluate their attitudes towards the content, and evaluate the implementation of training by branch office staff. Altogether 235 staff from 28 branch offices who received training was compared with 208 staff from same number of offices but without training. The impact of training was distinct in the intervention group. They were more knowledgeable than the control group on the content of training. More respondents in intervention group had more favourable attitudes towards the training content than the control group. The implementation of training was assessed in terms of 21 issues covered in the training. More respondents implemented training for almost all the issues and there was difference found between intervention and control group in implementing some parts of the training. The implementation of the training was directly and indirectly influenced. Besides, non training factors like supervisors’ attitudes, organizational environment and policy, wisdom of staff had significant influence on the implementation of the training. The OCV training might make further efforts to rationalize training content with more convincing examples that might develop stronger values. A supportive environment should be created in the branch offices for implementation of the training content.