10: Training Evaluation

How to Improve Employee Training and Development

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There are three things in life that are always in limited supply: time, energy and money. Whenever an organization runs a training program it is using up those three limited resources: time to train, time away from productive work, the energy required to design and participate in training, and the associated monetary costs allocated to the training. These factors must all be considered when implementing any training programs.

An article published in the Harvard Business Review (HBR) by Keith Ferrazzi, author of the book Who’s Got Your Back?, sheds light on how employee training can be improved. His broad research included training leaders in large organizations and from many different industries. He also consulted with academic leaders in several universities.

Ferrazzi’s research identifies 7 key challenges organizations must understand and address in order to improve their employee training and development.

Click here to read the HBR article, entitled the 7 Ways to Improve Employee Development.

Here is a summary of the themes identified by Ferrazzi. Remember there is a best-before date in training — everything moves so fast in today’s business world that most training has a short shelf life. So, when you think of training, think milk.

Two of the most critical factors in effective training have little to do with the content of the training and everything to do with an organization’s culture and climate. How much do employees trust an organization, and how passionate are managers about developing employees? These factors are critical.

The remaining training improvements focus on specific elements:

  • individual accountability
  • understanding the complex world of different learning styles,
  • and how to develop your virtual teams.

Dr. Edward Hess has asserted that organizations will either “learn or die”. If organizations reflect on Keith Ferrazzi’s ideas about to improve employee development, I believe they might just remain in rude health.

Discussion Questions:

  1. After reading the HBR Article reflect on the following:
  2. What is your opinion on the validity of Keith Ferrazzi’s ideas on how to improve employee development? Do you agree or disagree with the ideas? Support your position with evidence and your own ideas.
  3. From Ferrazzi’s 7 training improvement ideas pick the two that you feel are the most important and defend your position as to why.

Training Must Continue

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The need for work-related training and re-training is real.

This need is heightened for those who serve and protect the public, specifically, the police. The published results of the inquest by a coroner’s jury into police reactions to mental health crises, highlight the need for a different kind of training in order to protect all members of the public.

Click here to read the article.

To put our training and development studies into practice, the results of the inquest stand as a classic needs analysis. It provides organizational, task and person analyses and recommendations to change the outcomes of existing practices through new skills and organizational training.

In the absence of any other methodologies, the responses by the police in crisis situations are learned. The police, as a unit, have been trained to apply a certain set of protocols in any given situation. This is understandable given the life threatening circumstances the police deal with each and every day. Their job is to protect us, the public, from harm.

Individual police officers also need to protect themselves from harm. When the risk of harm is real, when the threat to life is real, police are trained to react in a certain way. As noted in the information from the coroner’s jury, the ‘use of force’ model is the trained reaction an individual police officer has learned to use in a crisis situation.

When dealing with mental health issues, the modes and methods of handling crises have a different type of challenge. The threat to life and public safety may be the same. When the person ‘causing’ the risk and the threat is mentally ill, however, the trained response through the ‘use of force, too often ends with tragic results.

In order to provide a different response, an individual police officer must be equipped with the right tools. These tools come from a collective and organizational commitment to train the workforce with new skills and approaches to save lives and protect the public. These approaches include increasing an understanding of mental health issues, the impact of the illness on individuals and training on de-escalation techniques in conflict situations in order to reduce the risk of harm to everyone involved.

This is not an easy task. To be successful, we all need to increase our understanding and support for individuals coping with mental health issues and for those who serve and protect us.

The time for learning to change has begun, and must continue, in order to produce different outcomes for the future.

Discussion Questions:

  1. What is de-escalation training? How does it differ from ‘use of force’ as a conflict resolution tool?
  2. How could you include mental health training in your current workplace? What type of training would you recommend?

 

Is Experience the Best Teacher?

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Source: Patsy Michaud/Shutterstock
Source: Patsy Michaud/Shutterstock

We have often heard the expression ‘walk a mile in my shoes’ when someone wants to relay how a certain experience has affected them.  Usually, the experience was unpleasant, challenging, or just very difficult and we want to have someone else understand how we felt.  Why?  Sometimes, when we experience a difficult situation we want to talk about it just to complain,  but we also talk about our negative experiences because we don’t want to go through that experience the same way, again.  Having a negative experience, especially one that causes us discomfort, is certainly a key factor in changing our behaviour in order to avoid repeating the same experience in the future.  One hopes that what we learn for ourselves, we might help others with as well.

Listening to someone’s negative experience is very different from living through the actual experience itself. A very effective training design technique which implements experiential learning, is being used at the Michener Institute for Applied Health Sciences.  An “aging simulation suit’ is being used to train future healthcare practitioners.  The suit is designed in such a way that it literally allows someone to walk in the shoes of an aging person and to learn, through personal experience, what it physically feels like to be a patient or a client in a healthcare setting.

Click here to read the article and watch a video

Discussion Questions:

  1. Besides healthcare, what types of industries would benefit from having this type of sensory aging & mobility training provided to their employees?
  2. Have you changed something in your own work style because of how you felt someone treated you? What did you change and why did you make that change?
  3. From a customer service perspective, what other types of training tools could be used to relay the experience of aging?
  4. Why is this type of experiential training effective?

Learning to Listen

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Source: Tumblr. The above content constitutes a link to the source website.

Effective transfer of training for all employees is easier when there is a culture of learning.  Creating a culture of learning must come with clear support from the top of the organization through the office of the Chief Executive Officer (CEO).  As we have learned through our studies, two additional key strategies recommended for the effective transfer of training for employees into productive performance behaviours include, management support and on-going performance coaching.  So how does the CEO become more effective in their own performance as a cultural role model for the learning organization?

They too need management support and on-going performance coaching.

Click here to read the article.  

According to this article, there is a 65.4% increase in management productivity due to one-on-one coaching when compared to the transfer of learning that comes from attending a three-day management training session.  Further, most of us forget a significant portion of what we have heard within 8 hours!   So, it is particularly interesting to note, that for the CEO, the focus of performance coaching in this example relies on the continued development of their own listening skills in order to become better communicators.

If the CEO learns to listen more, then employees are more likely to be heard.  If employees feel like they are being heard, then they are more likely become more productive.  If there is more productivity, then there is likely to be an increase in organizational value as a result of employees feeling valued and listened to.

Does it matter?  If the transfer of training by the CEO makes for better listening practices and effective communication, then a positive chain reaction throughout the organization could occur.  This result makes it obvious that it does matter…a lot!

Discussion Questions:

  1. What advice would you give the CEO where you work (or have worked) in order to increase their communication effectiveness?
  2. What types of performance coaching would you benefit from in your current work situation?
  3. How much do you remember from past training sessions that you were able to implement into your daily work routines?
  4. Who would benefit from on-going performance coaching in your current workplace and why?