Sometimes companies treat training and employee communications as a “nice to have,” as a luxury. Oh, they don’t come out and say that, but the eagerness with which they cut budgets for these functions in a downturn reveals much about their perceived value to the organization.

Ironically, the current economic crisis gives powerful testimony to the impact of training and employee communications!

Think about all that you have read and heard about this economic downturn, including the practices in the mortgage industry and other financial services. Some of what you have seen recently probably has you asking, “Why in the world did they behave that way?”

On the level of the individual employee, they behaved that way because that is how they were told to behave!

Remember, the news has not been filled with reports of rogue employees. From time to time, in financial services, somehow an individual manages to go against all the principles of the business and bring it to its knees. But there is no indication that has happened this time around and it certainly didn’t happen at all these different companies. What did happen was that many organizations adopted poor business practices, and they adopted them so effectively, they communicated them so well to the front lines, that they are now out of business.

Obviously, I’m not blaming the training or internal communications functions for the current crisis. They simply delivered management’s message very well—in each instance—and that’s the point.

When you encounter internal resistance to the notion that training and communications can really make a difference to how an entire company performs, just point to this economic crisis.
If training doesn’t make a difference, how did all of these employees in all these businesses just coincidentally travel down the wrong paths? How did so many people follow the same business practices, especially if they turned out to be bad for business?

Really, it is the ultimate test. Truly effective training and employee communications change the way employees do business. If what is communicated is a series of great business practices, the company is more likely to flourish. If what is shared with employees is a collection of bad business practices, the company is headed for trouble.

But putting the actual message aside, nothing makes it clearer that you can influence employees than these recent events. Companies managed to build cultures, to instill and reinforce habits among their employees, to establish consistent ways of doing business. Their cultures were ill-conceived, as everyone can see now, but they were strong and pervasive.

And if an organization can influence all of its employees to adopt business practices that will eventually lead to the organization’s demise, can’t the same tools, resources, energy and focus ensure that good business practices, the pathways to success, are engrained in the work habits of our people? Surely we can be just as good at cultivating healthy business practices as other companies have been at nurturing bad ones!

If you, your management or the other departments who are looking at your training budget with hungry eyes, don’t believe that training and employee communications truly impact how staff on the front lines do business, just talk to the former employees of any of the big firms that recently collapsed. When they say, “I just did what they told me to do,” you’ll see, firsthand, just how powerful internal messages to employees can be.