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How to Make Your Staff Training Sticky

And save a bundle in the process (it’s as easy as “pie”)

Feeling squeezed between your shrinking budget and demands to optimize employee performance?

Here’s a way to bridge that gap that seems to have eluded the grasp of many otherwise inventive organizations: stanch the flow of wasted dollars on employee training programs that do little to advance your organization’s goals.

“It can be a boondoggle,” says Christy Sneddon, Product Developer, Ontario Service Safety Alliance (OSSA). “Many organizations share an unspoken acknowledgement that training is a waste of money. Staff routinely come back with binders that nobody looks at again. Often training is seen as nothing more than a holiday.”

Unless employers learn how to make their training sticky, employees are likely to forget 50 per cent of what they learned the day after they’re out of the classroom. A week later: 94 per cent. That means for every $1,000 spent on training, an organization ultimately retains $60 worth of benefit. Might as well give it away.

Training that sticks, on the other hand, leads to a return on investment such as improved performance, growth without an increase in the costs of labour, and employee engagement—which in turn leads to less turnover, more commitment, and better customer service.

According to Sneddon, the recipe for making training sticky is easy as PIE: preparation, implementation, and evaluation. Here’s how it works.  

Preparation: Till the soil

“People think training will solve everything,” says Sneddon. “It won’t. It won’t fix an unmotivated employee. And it won’t fix a situation where a person is in the wrong job, or where there’s a relationship problem.”

Nor will it fix process issues or unclear job descriptions. OSSA shows organizations how to determine whether training is the right solution. If the answer is yes, the next steps are to:

• Match training type to learning style: Best not to send an ESL employee, for example, to an e-learning course requiring a certain reading proficiency.
• Describe post-training behaviours: What will staff do differently? What performance gaps prevent them from being effective in their jobs?
• Discover how employees will benefit: Will the training open doors to career goals, recognition, more autonomy? (Not sure what motivates? Ask the expert.) 
• Know how the company will benefit: How will the training affect corporate goals and objectives; e.g. do you expect to see a reduction in workplace incidents, or increase in production?
• Till the soil: Meet with staff before the learning to share expectations.

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Implementation: Clear the decks

Supervisors play a critical role in allowing effective training to take place:

• Let your staff actually attend: Remove barriers so people can focus; e.g. banish BlackBerries and cell phones, and avoid venues that tempt staff to visit their work stations to check voicemail and email (especially true for e-learning students).
• Spread the wealth: Make opportunities for staff to share what they’ve learned with co-workers at group meetings or one-on-one.

Evaluation: Close the loop

“Often, employers will choose the least expensive training provider or the shorter course,” says Sneddon, “but if you’re measuring your results, it’s soon clear that this is false economy.”

• Work your plan: After the training, meet with staff to revisit the plan you co-created during the preparation phase. Hold yourself and employees accountable for the promises made.
• Act on lessons learned: If you didn’t meet your goals, that too is valuable information. Ask why not, and take steps to avoid repeating the mistake; e.g. stop sending people to the same course or presenter.

Stop Wasting Money

Some day the economy will come swinging back. Invest in your people now by taking advantage of the huge efficiencies to be gained from making training sticky, so that when it does, you’ll be ready to profit from it. Stop wasting your money. Instead, make PIE.

Do these barriers prevent learning at your firm?

1. My boss doesn’t notice what I do, so why bother.

2. The training was good, but the way my work station is set up makes it impossible to put into practice.

3. Nobody else is doing it the new way, so why should I.

4. It was great to get away for a day, but the training doesn’t even relate to my job.

5. I’ve always done it the other way, and I’m not going to change now.

6. I don’t remember how to do it, and there’s nobody here to ask.

7. The training was a waste of time—nobody could understand what the guy was telling us.

8. Forget it: my co-workers will make fun of me if I change the way I do things.

 

Learn more: To help organizations enjoy the benefits of training that sticks, OSSA has packaged best practices and easy-to-use tools into a powerful, one-hour presentation available to anyone interested, free of charge. Call Christy Sneddon, 905-614-3021, for more information.

The Ontario Service Safety Alliance (OSSA) is your WSIB-approved provider of health and safety solutions, and your trusted advisor in developing a prevention program for your organization that will help keep new and young workers healthy and safe. Call OSSA at 1-888-478-6772 or email info@ossa.com.

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