Human Performance Technology (HPT) is a field of practice that focuses on making a change to the work, the worker, or the workplace to improve employee performance on the job and impact business results.

Professionals who do this work (HPT practitioners) come from a variety of disciplines that include behavioral and educational psychology, instructional technology, organizational development and other human resource specialties. What they have in common is a systematic approach to discovering how people in organizations do their work and an interest in determining what can be done to maximize results.

Here are three widely used definitions of HPT. What elements do these definitions have in common? Could HPT processes be beneficial to your organization? To your clients?

Human Performance Technology (HPT) has been described as the systematic and systemic identification and removal of barriers to individual and organizational performance.
- International Society for Performance Improvement

Performance Technology is the systematic process of identifying opportunities for performance improvement, setting performance standards, identifying performance improvement strategies, performing cost/benefit analyses, selecting performance improvement strategies, ensuring integration with existing systems, evaluating the effectiveness of performance improvement strategies, monitoring performance improvement strategies.
- A. Benefit and D.L. Tate

Human Performance Technology is the process of selection, analysis, design, development, implementation and evaluation of programs to most cost-effectively influence human behavior and accomplishment.
- J. Harless

What words resonate for you as you read and compare the definitions? If you made a list of them, which ones share the same meaning?

Typically, the practice of HPT requires these specific steps:

• An analysis of the current situation that describes what is occurring to cause concern about employees’ performance and what the desired performance is
  
• An analysis of the employees’ performance that details how they currently do their work
  
• Specification of the performance issue—problem or opportunity—that describes the gap between the current and desired performance
  
• An identification of the probable cause(s) of the performance issue
  
• Suggested solutions that will close the performance gap
  
• Implementation that includes planning and developing the solution and installing it