A Spoonful of Sugar Can Make People Grumpy

Will Kenny, Best Training Practices

With the economy in the condition it is, and the endless drumbeat of bad news we are all exposed to these days, you are no doubt delivering training and employee communications to people who are afraid, angry and suspicious. You may be teaching staff how to do their jobs better, while they are worrying about whether they will have jobs. You may be guiding employees in practices and procedures that benefit the company, but your participants are wondering what the company is going to do for—or to—them.

Sometimes the connection between the economic downturn and the training function is fairly explicit. People may be learning new duties (with new processes and procedures) because layoffs leave fewer people to carry out all the company’s business operations. Others are receiving communications about practices that they once carried out with larger budgets and more staff.

Even in the best of times, training staff feel the brunt of employee frustration. While management conceives business strategies, the training department brings many of those strategies into the daily working lives of employees. Facilitators frequently find themselves the first line of defense for management decisions.

And with employee morale where it is right now, that can be pretty uncomfortable!

It might be a good time to review how your own training staff deal with these frustrations when employees express them. Are these worries and complaints “off topic” and quickly shut down when, say, they come up during a seminar? Do training staff just pass the buck, pointing the finger at management and doing everything they can to remove themselves as targets of employee anger and suspicion?

Worst of all, do they sugarcoat things, suggesting that things are not as bad as they seem, that if we just stay on task (that is, stick to the training script) everything will work out fine? Nothing is more infuriating than the feeling that one is being cajoled into pretending that the company is not having very real problems.

Handling employee anger, especially when it is really directed at someone else, is one of the most challenging aspects of the training business. But it is also one of the defining characteristics of a professional, it is one reason why you have dedicated training staff who have the skills and attitude to wrestle with these situations.

Your training staff will be more effective if they have guidance from the top on appropriate responses to employee concerns. Generally, that is going to involve acknowledging that participant worries are legitimate, not ignoring them or refracting them through rose-colored glasses. But whatever your approach, consistency across staff is crucial.

You will also want to decide, as a department, what you do with what you learn about employee concerns and frustrations.

Certainly, there are situations where management cannot answer all the questions employees are asking. But it is surprising how often there are opportunities for company leadership to work to improve morale, to really build that “we’re all in this together” approach, but they truly underestimate the strength of feeling, and the magnitude of the concern, their workforce is experiencing. Or they assume that certain issues are the ones to focus on, when dealing with other employee concerns could have a major impact on employee attitudes and performance.

Unfortunately, in many companies the training function hears a great deal of the general frustration and specific complaints of the workforce, but never passes it on. Or it ends up bottled up in HR, but that’s about it.

Communication is most effective as a two-way street. Your leadership team needs to know about employee morale, and they need to be aware of specific opportunities where they can take steps, even in tough times, to address employee concerns.

So pass on what you hear . . . and don’t sugarcoat that, either.