Is your employee training based on actual problems?

If the current employee performance falls behind the desired one, gaps in knowledge and skills may only be part of the problem. When you hire 10 new support agents and your customers suddenly start to give only two stars for the quality of support they get, it might be tempting to jump into the conclusion "we need MORE training for our new support agents asap". But before writing up the list of topics for the training, it's best to identify the root problems first.

• If support agents fail to meet your SLAs and take 48 hours to post a reply, it can be because they are waiting for an approval from their team lead on every ticket they work on.
• If notifications are going to Spam and customers are missing ticket updates, they are unhappy with the system, not the work of a support agent.?
• If clients are annoyed with support agents going in circles asking the wrong questions about an issue, more hours of training about canned responses and workflows won't help.??

With the SLA issue, if you set your goal to "All tickets must be addressed within 24 hours" and decide that the best way to get your agents back on track is to have them retake their onboarding training, it can only make things worse.

Being under the pressure of the SLA goal, agents could start to skip the review step (and lower the quality of support even more) or bombard their team lead with reminders about a pending approval. However, if you talk to the team and try to get to the bottom of what causes this friction, you might discover that:

• Only 10% of all tickets actually need a review.
• However, all tickets are sent for approval because there're no guidelines to easily sort all the incoming requests.
• Working on guidelines and reducing the amount of tickets that need a review could be a solution.

While adding more reviewers, time management training sessions, or removing the approval step all together would have less positive effects.

In some cases such a quest would make you realize the training is the answer. But if you skip the "talk" part and go straight to training for the sake of training, it will be an attempt to treat a symptom rather than address the underlying cause. While the conversations where all the right questions are asked will let you discover concrete tasks and parts of the job that training needs to target.

It's vital to find out how high-performing teammates do the task (what they think, how they make choices, what common mistakes are) and create a practical model for others who experience difficulties.

Cognitive task analysis (CTA) can help you with that. One of the ideas of this method is that experts leave out up to 70% of the important details when asked to describe how they do their job. Subject-matter experts are simply unaware that they are not sharing the critical information. It happens because that valuable knowledge becomes automated, non conscious and procedural.

The CTA process starts with identifying the tasks that need to be analyzed and selecting 3-4 experts (people who've done something long enough and are consistently successful in what they are doing). Once done, the following 6 steps happen:?

• Interviewing experts - Interviews focus on what sequence of tasks an expert performs in order to do the job. If there's no sequence, tasks are captured from easy to difficult.
• Revealing WHEN and HOW - Gathering the information about when and how experts perform each task we are analyzing. Looking for actions (something they do actively) and decisions (things they do in their minds).
• Creating transcripts - Interview recordings are put onto paper. The transcripts are edited so that the language and the flow are meaningful for team members who will be trained to do what that expert does.
• Experts make edits - The edited transcript is taken back to the expert to make the document accurate. Checking if the interviewer missed or misinterpted something / if the expert forgot to mention important details the first time.?
• Creating a gold standard - The information from all experts is summarized and inconsistency are discussed with each expert individually. Trying to get all experts to agree to one version – a gold standard. In addition, a lot of information about equipment, standards, examples, and common mistakes/difficulties is collected.
• Training design - Gold standards are translated into models of the underlying skills, mental models, and problem solving strategies.?These models are the basis for the training design.

The research showed an average increase of 44% on outcome performance measures for CTA-based instruction. So even though the whole process is time consuming, it will pay off once the performance boost outweighs the investment.