Training

Like the one time popular television comedy, “Everybody Loves Raymond,” many companies seem to love training. They proudly support in-house training departments to demonstrate their commitment to this aspect of employee improvement. True enough, many companies do provide effective training. However, far too often the real training within a company is provided “OTJ” - that is, “on the job.”

Employees learn a lot about their jobs and corporate expectations from other employees, co-workers, etc. Arguably, OTJ training is the only way to convey the experiential component of the job. Sometimes this experience is obtained from previous employment. It is often convenient to acquire an employee that “already knows the ropes,” or to use a more modern metaphor, “is plug and play.” However, some companies such as automobile dealerships actually prefer their new employees to be inexperienced in sales because it is easier to train unskilled (yet otherwise qualified) applicants rather than to “retrain” experienced employees. These companies reason that behavior change requires more effort than behavior acquisition, and in some ways this perspective is valid.

Learning is a daily objective for employees as they are subjected to a constant barrage of updates, changes, directives, goals, challenges, staff reductions, cutbacks and reorganizations, etc., all requiring significant adaptation to new working conditions. The efficiency in which managers can implement these changes directly affects corporate success. Therefore, training should be evaluated by its direct, positive financial benefit to the company.

In spite of the general attractiveness, complexity and ubiquity of (digital) slide presentations, this training modality remains largely ineffective as a training modality, as a result of confusing a “presentation” with methods and accountability of “training.” Even the most elaborately produced and entertaining digital slide presentation will constitute ineffective training unless the presenter requires participants to demonstrate their new skills. Furthermore, presentations rarely alter the conditions for employee action. Thus, employees will continue to perform as they did prior to the "training."

Commonly observed verbal repetition (and elucidation) of each bullet point in the presentation, generally given by one presenter to many “learners,” might appear satisfyingly efficient. However, for the most part, employees sit attentively during the training session, ask a few pertinent questions and return to their normal work environments only a little better than they were before the presentation. This ineffective scenario is further complicated by the requisite documentation that employees attending the “training” have been successfully “trained,” when in fact there is no evidence of such accomplishment, as there has been little or no observation or measurement of new skills.

While presentations are generally weak forms of training, significant amounts of learning and training occur as part of normal experience with a constantly changing environment, such as corporate mandates, managerial initiatives, changes in consumer preferences, competitive pressures, etc. Give your employees a fighting chance to accommodate and integrate your new performance expectations. Organize your memos detailing important procedural changes. Keep them brief and to the point. Leave out distracting graphics, cute pictures and overly ornate fonts that can be difficult to read and contribute little, if anything to message content. Tell your employees exactly what they need to know using clear, unambiguous sentences and provide them an efficient index system to find the information when they need it later to solve a problem.

Co-workers are an excellent source of information and experience and can substantially improve training program effectiveness by participating in “learning connections” between employees, allowing them to teach each other via the telephone for “audio based mentoring.” Significant amounts of training can occur through the audio channel, allowing your highly skilled employees to easily share their knowledge with other employees at distant locations. It might not seem “high-tech,” but telephone-based training is remarkably efficient and requires no capital outlay for new technology. Modern video/internet connections are a more modern form of such communication, and as it does not require significant physical movement of personnel, tele-training substantially reduces a sizable portion of common training expenses, such as airfare, hotel, car rental, meals, etc.

You may be surprised to learn that your company is already a “learning company” - even if your company does not have an official training department - given that some of your employees are likely very interested in measures of their performance compared to company standards. Are you specifically facilitating this kind of learning, or must your employees “figure out” whether they are doing well or not? If you have gone to the trouble of conducting employee training, ensure that your efforts and expenditures provide a measurable return on your investment by establishing meaningful measurement of learning, as well as measures of the impact of new employee skills on corporate profitability.

Management Technique

Employee behavior forms the basis for all commerce. Without employee behavior companies could create no products, no services and would have no business. While it may be easy to agree that employee behavior is a central concern to any business, managers often use their personal and highly varied experiences with employee behavior as a means of shaping their managerial technique, believing they "understand people" and "know what makes people tick," etc. Although extensive managerial experience can generate effective managerial technique, themethod of developing effective management solely through experience can sometimes be counterproductive. For example, managers with military experience may emphasize discipline in their civilian management style. While military management methods can certainly improve a lax team, the effectiveness of this style of management is generally maintained by an underlying and inescapable threat of coercion or punishment. Thus, while a military style of management adapted to the civilian workplace may show short-term advantages, it can also correlated with increases in undesirable or unproductive employee behavior, e.g., reduced quality, absenteeism, theft, etc., in response to the overall harshness of the techniques.

At the opposite end of the managerial spectrum we may find a more compassionate approach based on the view that employee satisfaction directly promotes performance excellence. Thus, to increase employee performance, we must first increase job satisfaction. While job satisfaction can be an important measure of managerial effectiveness it is doubtful whether satisfaction can produce superior employee performance. It is suggested that job satisfaction is at best a measure of one aspect of positive management technique rather than a direct cause of increased employee performance.

Improving performance through job satisfaction seems logical and legitimate. However, satisfied employees can be as unproductive and disruptive as unhappy, unsatisfied employees. Measures of job satisfaction are similar to measures of “awareness” commonly used to measure the effectiveness of marketing campaigns. While an interesting measure of marketing effectiveness, awareness does not always correlate with increased sales. Like awareness, satisfaction is a measure, but not necessarily a direct influence over employee performance necessary to increase corporate performance.

Behavior Management offers a more direct approach to improving managerial technique: train specific managerial actions that will directly facilitate employee improvement. Combining job skill training with effective performance feedback enables your managers to communicate to their direct reports the job that needs to be done, when to do it, and what will happen after they do it. The recognition they receive will directly support their success and will naturally foster job satisfaction.

Controlling Improvement

The purpose of training an employee is to increase profit through by controlling environmental factors that support improvement in the employee's work performance. Unfortunately, the word control often carries a negative connotation, encouraging us to place a more attractive face on its underlying purpose. Thus, instead of saying that we are controlling our employees, we are motivating, educating, training, mentoring and empowering them to willingly and conscientiously improve their performance. Regardless of the word we use to describe the methods and motivation for employee improvement, the process invariably involves a change in some aspect of employees' work environments. This of course is the behavioral perspective, whereby we control employee performance through positive environmental manipulation.

We often refer to someone controlling another when coercive or unpleasant methods are used. However, control need not be cast in such negative light. Control refers only to the extent that some aspect of the environment influences a behavioral outcome. These factors are to be found in the work environment and affect our choice of action. That is, we continually balance our personal perspective of being in control, with the unavoidable result that our choice of action is directly influenced by a wide range of environmental factors, such as friends, family, co-workers, supervisors, etc. While we might be aware of some of the factors that control our decisions. While we cannot meaningfully evaluate all of the alternatives and their consequences prior to our actions, these myriad environmental factors due control our actions. We might be very aware of our sense of truth, but it is the consequence of behavior that provides the greatest influence and control over our actions.

We can never be totally aware of all of the factors that influence our actions. However, we can directly increase our efforts to provide new sources of control over employee behavior that positively impacts profitability. That is, the purpose of control in the business setting is to provide employees the means and motivation to increase their performance in measurable ways that benefits the corporation. Sometimes employees possess the factors that can control their positive influence toward the company. For example, with regard to customer service, some employees possess the ability to treat unfriendly customers with sufficient friendliness to improve the outcome. Therefore, we can promote existing behavior (friendly customer service) in a new situation (unfriendly customer) as "new behavior." When we have sufficiently controlled employees' educational and work experiences, we enable our employees to more reliably choose behavior that positively enhances their personal achievement as productivity for the company.

Measurement

What is the best way to measure improvement? How can we ensure new techniques learned through training programs will enhance employee behavior? In order to evaluate the return on our training investment we must first consider the “great training misconception” - that knowledge learned in one context will be automatically applies, or generalizes, to other situations sharing a similar characteristic. For example, if a salesperson learns to sell one kind of camera in the classroom setting, he should therefore be able to sell that camera in the store. A further form of generalization would predict that from learning to sell one kind of camera, the employee can now sell all kinds of cameras. While classroom training offers the essential ingredients for learning, we cannot assume employees will apply this new knowledge to their regular work settings.

One of the greatest challenges presented to corporate trainers, is to accurately measure the result of their efforts - in and outside of the classroom. Without confirmation of learning in the classroom, it will be unlikely that such learning will generalize to the work setting. When your company provides training, do you require your employees to demonstrate their learning prior to receiving credit for completing that training module? Most often, employees receive credit for the training session simply for sitting attentively through the training session. Rarely is there a valid, individualized demonstration that learning has occurred.

What is the goal of training? For example, in retail sales settings, is normally assumed that sales training will increase sales productivity. If front line managers were asked about the benefits of sales training they might convey that something was accomplished. Rarely, however, is the employee ever challenged to specifically demonstrate their new skills in the classroom and in the actual work environment. Thus, the correspondence between training and increases in employee performance remains at best, weak and tenuous.

It might seem overly harsh to require each employee to demonstrate and validate training. Conventional testing, such as multiple-choice or fill-in-the-blank post-tests imply that something was learned, and is a reasonable way to validate training for policy and procedure changes, or federally mandated updates on programs such as “reducing sexual harassment” or “improving worker safety.” While educating employees on what they can and cannot do is an important function of training. However, training programs designed to increase employee performance are not reliably validated by multiple choice tests. Even the most detailed “pencil and paper” assessment of classroom training cannot adequately measure the effect of training on improving employee performance in the normal work setting.

Training effectiveness must be measured by changes in work performance. In the retail setting, sales skill training can only be evaluated by sales increases. In manufacturing settings, quality control training must result in decreased errors. If your company’s Performance Scorecards are not sensitive to the effects of training, it will be difficult to properly justify training program expenditures. Perhaps your company has a good assemblage of performance measures. Can they be focused on a small enough slice of sales or production? Will normal variation in sales or production obscure these improvements, leading to dissatisfaction with the rate of return on training investments?

It is not uncommon for companies that are experiencing financial difficulties to eliminate their training departments as part of general expense reduction. Such decisions are relatively easy to make, given typically poor cost/benefit measures and the difficulty of finding real evidence of employee improvement. Training program directors must be willing to sustain their jobs using real criteria - just like everyone else in the company must do. This way, when the time comes to evaluate and eliminate non-essential departments, the training department can prove their effectiveness and importance to company performance.

Make your training program a significant contributor your company’s success. Validate training by connecting it to real measures of employee improvement. Revise or eliminate ineffective training programs. Most employees do not want to waste their time attending boring, insignificant or otherwise irrelevant training. Invest in training, but demand ROI - as you would for other capital expenditures. This will ensure meaningful, cost-effective training and continued performance improvement.