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.

]]> http://blogs.e-bim.com/letstalktraining/2008/12/16/a-spoonful-of-sugar-can-make-people-grumpy/feed/ 0 http://blogs.e-bim.com/letstalktraining/2008/10/08/the-cart-and-the-horse-engaging-leadership-support/ http://blogs.e-bim.com/letstalktraining/2008/10/08/the-cart-and-the-horse-engaging-leadership-support/#comments Wed, 08 Oct 2008 13:41:21 +0000 will kenny http://blogs.e-bim.com/letstalktraining/?p=13 Will Kenny, Best Training Practices

To promote key messages and crucial best practices that ensure success for your company, you are probably working to get the management visibly involved in your training activities, whether through some kind of public endorsement or by actually participating in the delivery of information.

This can be a powerful boost to the impact of your employee communication and training efforts, but not just because of how statements from top management affect employees and how they do their jobs.

Public statements about “how we do things around here” can have an equally powerful impact on the managers making the statements, and how they do their jobs!

The common practice is to build support with management, to work on them until you are confident they are committed to the training message and then have them come in and display that commitment in front of the employees. We tend to look down our noses at executives who make appearances only because it is expected of them, who may work in ways, within their own functions, day to day, that are inconsistent with what they say in public.

That may be getting the cart before the horse. Get the executives in front of your audience, with the right message, and worry about their personal commitment to the cause later. You are likely to find that as time goes on repeated utterances in favor of a policy or best practice will evolve into supporting it with actions.

A recent article in The Economist (Aug. 30) focused on turnaround specialist Greg Brenneman, most recently credited with bringing the fast-food chain Quiznos back from the brink. One of his practices was to send out a voicemail to all franchise holders every Friday morning, updating them on what was happening in the business.

Naturally, the primary purpose was to improve communications with franchisees, as relations had been rather toxic (including lawsuits) before he took over. But he pointed out another benefit to this practice.

Brenneman said, “If someone gets on a voicemail and promises something to thousands of people, that person will do it.” In other words, whatever his level of commitment to follow through on a given behavior before the massive public statement, afterwards he pretty much had to live up to his words.

And I’ve worked the same “trick” among my own clients. In one instance, what was then a large regional bank (now grown into one of the largest banks in the country) had some core training to spread the best practices they wanted applied consistently in every state where they did business. The regional managers in those states, on the other hand, liked to do things their own ways.

That presented the usual problem all trainers have encountered: The official message delivered at training got undermined went employees when back to their desks in their own locations. In their own states and regions, the senior managers were willing to deliver the approved message to employees, perhaps knowing that it wouldn’t matter what they said, since they could greatly influence how employees worked afterwards.

The solution? Company-wide conferences, where all the state-by-state managers appeared together to deliver the training message. Having publicly supported the corporate best practices in front of their peers (and their own bosses), they found it much more difficult to veer away from those practices in their own operations.

In other words, don’t wait for corporate leaders to believe what they are saying before you engage them in your training events. Get them on the broadest, most public platform you can devise. The more publicly they say the right things, the more likely they are to do the right things privately, in their own fiefdoms.

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.

“Training cost” is a favorite topic of conversation among training professionals and between training staff and management. As convenient and affordable tools are applied to move training to online delivery, one factor, delivery cost, has shrunk.

I’m not convinced this is entirely good news. People talk about “training delivery” very glibly when they should be talking a little more thoughtfully about design, development and delivery.

Changing employee behavior to establish and sustain best business practices requires more than mere “formatting” to produce a “deliverable.” Too often “training costs” refers only to the delivery step in the training process, when participants actually work with content. Driven by low delivery expense, apparent convenience (see “Your Inconvenience-O-Meter”) and overall “sex appeal,” this focus on delivery method sometimes obscures the value of sound design and development.

The Decline of Design and Development

Both training staff and management can be seduced by an oversimplified definition of “training” when existing courses are converted to online format (which is where we usually “pilot” the new approach). Everyone is delighted with reduced expenses for employee travel, meals, facilitator time and duplication of materials.

But in that situation, much of the design and development work has already been done. Most of the effort goes into putting existing content online.

Now, there should be additional design and development costs for even these simple conversions. Too often, existing material is simply loaded into an online format with little consideration of what is required to make the online version as effective as the original. This is probably why I see so many really good classroom courses being turned into really mediocre online training.

As training staffs apply user-friendly software to create online courses on their desktops they may assume that since that final step in the process has become easier, creating and delivering truly effective training has also become easier.

What has become much, much easier is generating poor quality online training quickly. I cringe at how many “online courses” are really just slightly enhanced, read-on-your-own-time PowerPoint presentations. Whether or not a course should even be delivered online is a design decision, but more and more often, design and development are driven by the delivery method.

True Training Costs

Equating “training costs” with “delivery costs” has made it more challenging to budget properly for good instructional design and skillful development. When it comes to creating a completely new course, everyone expects expenses to be in line with their initial conversion experiences, which faced almost exclusively with delivery issues.

This is precisely why training professionals are needed—to educate management, to ensure that the two steps that contribute the most to training impact, sound instructional design and thoughtful content development, are not neglected simply because they are more difficult to see and understand.

The ultimate cost of being beguiled by the ease of building an online course is the cost to the company of less effective training, of the reduced impact on employee performance that comes from shortchanging the design end of the process. It reminds me of discussions about a “carbon tax,” or pricing based on total impact. If you had to pay more for a car with lower mileage or higher emissions to reflect its impact on the environment, you might make different purchasing decisions.

Similarly, if the base model preserves significant design and development components, the company will make better decisions about investing in training. A few well-designed training activities (however they are delivered) will contribute much more to your company’s success than a wealth of second-rate courses. Don’t let shortcuts to building the online components of your training shortchange the overall experience and the expected improvement in employee performance.

Does your organization truly value training? How do you know?

I believe that the value an organization places on any given training can be measured by the inconvenience that organization is willing to impose on trainees, their supervisors and the company itself.

Unfortunately, I see a lot of companies claim their training delivery methods are “more flexible and convenient for employees,” when most of the convenience really accrues to the company, rather than to the participants. Employees automatically compare their own sacrifices to the company’s. They learn to read the “Inconvenience-O-Meter” very quickly, which tells them:

• When management really believes training will produce performance enhancements that outweigh the temporary inconvenience to employees, to management and even to customers;
• When managers and supervisors consider just about everything else to be more important than training;
• When management shifts most of the inconvenience onto the trainees, with little sacrifice from the company.

If a “best practice” truly has value, then training that spreads that practice is important enough to require an investment. And that investment goes beyond money and materials to time, to small sacrifices. Maybe an employee will miss a meeting or a conference call. Maybe a customer or supplier will have to wait a few hours longer than usual to get a response.

Employee Sacrifices Only, Please

I remember one company I worked with that held fairly regular best practices training. They were proud of their investment in their employees. But it took me a while to see what the employees had figured out long before I came along: every single hour of training they attended was scheduled in the evening or on a weekend. It wasn’t hard to figure out why employees arrived in a resistant mood and put the least possible energy into “getting it over with.”

The employees knew that if training were truly important, management would be willing to put up with some inconvenience in their normal business operations to get it done. Management never thought about making the same sacrifices they demanded of their employees. It was little wonder that performance never improved.

In many organizations, employees learn to be rather wary of the “convenience of online learning.” Perhaps the company replaces a four-hour seminar with a four-hour online course. Do employees get to block out four hours of work time to complete the training? Or do they end up doing the training on their own time?

Maybe there should be a sign on your company’s lunchroom wall: “Don’t waste precious company time learning to do your job better!”

Suffer Together, Succeed Together

Fortunately, smart managers and well-run companies know that investing in training and communication is not just about money. The best managers get better work out of their employees in part because they don’t let convenience take priority over tangible results.

• They spend their own time and energy getting employees to appropriate training, telling them why they are going, and setting expectations that participants will be fully present and engaged;
• They help “clear the decks” as much as possible, arranging for others (themselves if necessary) to cover for people while they are in training;
• They follow up after training to help employees apply what they have learned.

I like convenience as much as anyone. But I’m willing to trade convenience for results. If your company’s training delivers “convenience” and “efficiency,” but only to management and training staff, expect to be disappointed in the impact of your training efforts.

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