Training is Not Just for End Users

Companies often make a critical mistake that training is just for the people receiving the change, whether related to people, process, or technology, only to learn that untrained middle managers can sink adoption just as fast as resistant end users.

How many times have you been a part of a major change and your people leader didn’t even know you needed to learn something new about your job?? Or perhaps they knew about the change, but didn’t know how to help you adopt the change?? Unfortunately, as people experiencing change at large organizations, we see this phenomenon first-hand.? All too often, companies define key changes in ivory, executive towers and presume that the project teams cascade information to the rest of the organization that informs the right people about the changes at the right time.? Then the project team gets busy with the definition and creation of the actual people, process, or technology changes and never build the right amount of time to adequately prepare the change recipients (and their leadership teams) for the impending changes.? When this happens, the changes fall flat, folks at all levels of the organization are inadequately trained on the changes, and nobody knows how to work differently when the changes go live.

Within the training domain specifically, we find two key issues that often arise, so let us break them down individually and then wrap up this blog with general statements on effective training.

1.?????? Training focuses exclusively on the change recipients and their leaders, adjacent teams, and broader value chain partners learn nothing about the changes.? Colleagues and leaders that need to request, react, or respond differently with the change recipients, based on the changes, have no idea that anything changed.? When this happen, the changes either fall flat, are not adequately reinforced by people leaders, or the change targets get frustrated operating differently, while nobody else around them is expected to change their behaviors.

2.?????? The training department justifies their existence not by the quality of their training or the precision with which they train change targets, but rather the volume of hours training end users.? When this happens, the training department trains people for far too many hours, cognitive overload sets in with change recipients who don’t understand the changes or what they need to do differently, and training becomes a compliance exercise, not a development exercise for the change recipients.

End-User Focused Training

Training should never focus exclusively on change recipients, because even as the predominant team members experiencing the changes, they are by no means the only stakeholders impacted by the changes.? I can think of so many experiences in my own career as a change recipient and a change advisor where organizations announced major changes in very public forums and then put training on change recipients’ calendars to teach them about the change.? When time came for performance evaluations, managers knew about the changes, but without sufficient understanding of the changes and how that changes their team members’ jobs changed, evaluated them based on dated expectations, and employees already fatigued by change feel slighted in their evaluations.?

Addressing this potential risk does not require hours of training for all leaders and change adjacent teams across the organization to better support the change target.? However, with a simple overview of the changes, a discussion around what the changes mean for the change recipients, and how they will operate differently in the future goes a long way in helping their colleagues understand not only the impacts to the change recipients, but also their own day – to – day.

Let’s take a look at the good and the bad side of training, as part of a change exercise.

A large retailer struggled with customer service and product availability and recognized an opportunity to change how they operated on their sales floor.? They assessed the current performance to collect a better understanding of the key pain points and developed a plan to actually add headcount to the sales floor in most stores to better address the two critical operational challenges.

Before rolling out the changes, they met with the store leaders, starting with assistant managers, then department managers, and finally the shift managers, so everyone in the stores understood the changes.? They decomposed the training schedule into bit – sized chunks, to over a four-week period cover the following topics with all audiences:

1.?????? What are the changes?? Why are we making them?

2.?????? What are the physical staffing changes?? Role changes?

3.?????? How does our work change??

4.?????? What’s in it for me WIIFM?

Over four – weeks, everyone in the stores understood the changes, the impacts, and value, creating space for the department managers to complete a longer training on the physical process changes they needed to implement as part of their jobs.? On the first day of the new org structure, schedules were correct, 98% of the department managers showed up for work, and within a quarter, the NPS and OSA scores both came in 12% higher than the same quarter the year prior.? While we can’t attribute all of the company’s successes to the training elements, we can confirm that the training and engagement activities tied to the restructuring efforts received high marks in an employee survey.

Now let’s look at a situation where the company implemented change, only trained end users, and didn’t think to involve management practitioners in the training process.

A global consulting firm experienced poor financial results during the economic downturn.? They recognized a need to expand capabilities and looked for ways to build an expanded brand beyond their core services.? With a workforce generally focused on the niche services they offered during their growth phase, they knew they needed to define the future of work at the firm, identify critical growth capabilities, and train employees to operate differently.

Without little to no communication and a group of instructional designers that knew how to build courses around the old capabilities, more so than the new ones, they launched new training to change the way people worked.? They offered the course in most major locations, expecting people to execute the new capabilities after the course ended.? But they didn’t build in reinforcement activities for leaders to use with their people after the session and they didn’t change expectations of how people operated at the firm (or the metrics they delivered).? And they never communicated with adjacent team members who worked with the change recipients to understand how their roles changed.? And they promised redefinitions of the other roles across the firm to map into the change recipients’ expectations, but a year after the training wrapped, they delivered nothing beyond the 1 training program.? As a result, the firm never really found footing in the new model and the old habits / capabilities that led the firm to deliver mediocre results for many years after the training.

In the end, the limited scope and the training, coupled with the no changes to the consultant expectations and minimal adjustments to other roles sunk the value of the changes the firm wanted to implement.? Headcount reduced by 25% in the first year of the changes, and while the firm still exists, it finds itself in a continuous loop of mediocre results.

Excessive Training or Training for the Sake of Training

The inverse of overly focused training, whether based on audience or content, centers on excessive training for the sake of training.? The practice of over training overwhelms change recipients and creates resistance for the changes the organization wants to implement.? Users feel like the organizations wasted their time and used training as a compliance exercise designed to check boxes, rather than truly helping them learn the changes.

For this section, I’ll lead with the bad story, because it paints the better picture of why this practice hurts the adoption of strategic changes, while the positive story paints a view of how to do it right.

Let’s look at a large organization that possessed many operational employees in active, shop-like settings.? They made a strategic choice to upgrade their HRIS, after many years of using the legacy system.? As they designed the go-forward solution with the vendor and defined the technical requirements, they instituted a much higher percentage of self-service activities, required shop-floor employees to directly enter time (rather than pre-loading based on shifts), and implemented a new performance management process.? Worried that their lowest level employees would not understand how to use the system, they went down a path of over-training the employees, so they could ensure everyone received the information about the new system in a timely manner.

Unfortunately, they didn’t consider two very critical elements.

1.?????? Time keeping is a simple task that even the entry level shop employees completed in the old system.? The new system is much more intuitive, so why did the employees need to complete 10 e-learning classes about how to keep time?? Shop floor managers grew frustrated with the lost productivity, the shops lost ground on product goals, and employees knew after the first course how to complete the task.

2.?????? Performance management is much more than using the system.? Like the time keeping curricula, the company over-trained on system usage.? They put teams through modules on how to write goals in the new system, how to request feedback, and how to review their quarterly / annual performance reviews.? They did not train leaders and employees on how goals should tie to strategic organizational objectives.? They did not train leaders on how to provide good feedback or how to deliver tough news when performance or compensation outcomes don’t match employee expectations. ??In this case, the company not only over trained on system usage, they under-trained on the most important part of performance management…how to actually manage performance.? In the end, employees grew frustrated with the volume of system training, the leaders did not feel equipped to execute performance management activities at key intervals, and the first few cycles of performance management in the new system delivered subpar engagement results from employees.

Training for the sake of training puts organizations in a bad position, because employees quickly realize the organization simply wants to complete training for reporting purposes.? It frustrates employees, pulls them away from critical job-related activities, and creates a culture of compliance, rather than growth.? It also frustrates people leaders, because they must follow up with non-compliant employees, focus development plans on activities the company trains on regularly (and therefore considers critical), and does nothing to help people get better at their jobs in the functions leaders lead.

So how do you create ensure that your organization does not simply train for the sake of training?? Here are five simple tips to help your organization ensure that training has purpose, intent, and value for everyone in the training value chain.

1.?????? Establish an organizational culture based on growth, not based on training.? This notion extends far beyond training, but on the basis of training, only offer learning programs that drive growth of the employee, leader, or business.? When functions ask the L&D department or change activation team to build courses based on simple tasks, compliance activities (unless required by federal law), or system usage, decline the request.?

2.?????? Focus all formal training on things like leadership development, sales enablement, and customer obsession, rather than compliance activities.? Learning things that help you perform better, deliver better customer experiences, and drive revenue for the company deserve the time investment required to deliver those well.?

3.?????? Training on rote tasks, repeatable processes, and simple system usage should live in real-time documents that employees can access when they need them.? Things like system usage for basic tasks can sit in job aids or support materials that users can readily access at the time they use the system.? With the onset of AI, searchability of how to perform rote tasks proves much simpler and frankly, most learners already use You Tube to learn most things they do in their homes.

4.?????? Invest in external experts for hard to train topics.? It’s really attractive to hire really good facilitators, pair them with internal experts in the business process they want to teach, and hope for the best.? The organization already pays both of their salaries and frankly who knows how to perform that process better than your own people.? Except your facilitator probably doesn’t know the topic as well as the experts, so they fall flat in their stories and struggle to give actionable feedback in the course on activities.? And your experts usually do the thing really well, but can’t succinctly describe what good looks like, because they just know intuitively what to look for to avoid risk.

5.?????? Measure your training ROI and use that to build the business case for future learning strategy work.? The general attitude towards L&D functions amongst business leaders centers on the notion that the L&D department should build whatever training they request.? Historically, L&D departments have operated with order-taker mentalities and business leaders have grown to assume L&D does what they tell them.? By measuring the cost of learning development, as well as the sunk payroll cost associated with not performing their daily job-related activities.? This paints a beautiful picture for business leaders, putting the cost of excessive or less valuable training in their language of business productivity and ROI.

Well done training delivers knowledge, practice, and even feedback to team members learning new strategies, processes, and work activities, before they have to perform them in a live environment.? Disorganized, excessive, and poorly designed learning experiences rarely deliver valuable and usually cause more damage.? Not only do organizations absorb the hard dollar costs of training development and time away from job, but they also absorb soft-dollar costs associated with things like decreased engagement, lost productivity, and general employee sentiment.? Using tips like the 5 I offered above put your organization in a much better position to focus training on the highest value topics and ensure that your organization values the learning programs you deliver.? In the end, nothing is more damaging to a learning culture than training for the sake of training.

Thanks for reading.? I look forward to the discussion.

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