Making Training More Effective In Organizations

Companies invest quite a bit on the training and development of their employees. On the other hand, there are companies which refrain from investing in training. This is partly because they doubt whether such investments would pay back anything to the organization.

However, today, most managers in companies appreciate the importance of training and want to invest in their employees' training and development.

Human Resources (HR) departments in companies could play an important role in capitalizing this opportunity and put in place systems and processes to make training more effective. Here are a few actions that HR could take:

1. Link training to other systems:.

Training is part of the development process. However, development would mean understanding the capabilities of individual employees, identifying gaps and focusing on the right training for the right person. We can see that this leads to linkage of training with recruitment and performance appraisals. Recruitment, i.e., the entry point of an employee in the company, is the best starting point for tracking capabilities of employees. Capturing the profile of an employee's capabilities at this stage helps the company build on his strengths and develop them further. Similarly, performance appraisals which are a periodic exercise, give adequate opportunity for organizations to take stock of the capabilities of employees and identify the gaps or the desired capabilities that need to be developed, and which emerge either from the career aspirations of the individual or business plans of the company.

2. Make training a systematic activity:

An employee receives a call from a Manager out of the blue one day, who asks her to attend a training program on communication to be held two days later. The employee is unprepared. There are other priorities lined up for the week. Suddenly, the employee is having to do her bit to either re-prioritize, or re-schedule activities, or, worse still, stretch herself for the next two days to complete some of the high priority assignments in a hurry so that she can attend the training program. All this only leads to the employee going to the training program in a totally unprepared frame of mind. A positive and receptive mood, that is necessary for learning, is absent. The time and the money spent on the program turns out to be a waste. This is a common scenario in many companies - treating training programs as one off events to which employees need to be "sent." HR can do a lot to take control and make training a lot more of a systematic activity. Planning for programs adequately beforehand, preparing the employee with reading material or exercises, sending alerts and other communication related to the training at different stages before the program—all these would help. In all, planning well in advance, preparing the employee, laying the foundation for an eagerness to optimise the benefit derived from the program—all these will help.

3. Tracking of training activities:

. Many companies have metrices such as number of mandays of training. Some track them periodically, but most do not. It is necessary to compare the tracking of training to that for compensation. Compensation is tracked meticulously, analysed in depth - across departments, levels, functions and so on. The same level of meticulousness, however, is missing in the case of training. Maybe the tracking and analysis of training should be done as seriously as in the case of compensation. Metrices help. Metrices, however, need to be carefully analysed and presented to the stakeholders periodically, to help them focus their efforts and plan for the training in a systematic manner.

4. Feedback loop.:

Measuring training effectiveness has always been a challenge, given the fact that the direct correlation between the training effort and results on the job cannot be clearly established. However, no one can deny that training contributes in a very significant manner to both   improvement in the knowledge, skills and performance of a company's employees, as well as the overall business performance of the company.. Such training- performance correlation has been well established, and thus, the best employers worldwide invest significantly and systematically in training their personnel. Notwithstanding the fact that the direct correlation between a training program and improvement in the performance of an employee who has undergone such a training program, is by now indisputable, collecting feedback on the impact will help in fine tuning the efforts made towards training.

In this context,  I recommend a three stage process for collecting feedback on training. Timing is very important here.  The first stage is immediately after the completion of the program. The main objective of this feedback is to get to know how well the trainer delivered the program, the usefulness of the content and effectiveness of the methodology. The second stage would be the collection of feedback thirty days from the completion of the program. The objective here would be effectiveness in retention, and the question to be asked is this: are the learnings from the program still retained by the employee? Correlation between the objectives of the programs and what the employee actually seems to retain would be a good indicator to find out how useful the program really has been. Finally, in the third stage we should focus on the application of the training on the job, which is more or less an ongoing process. Here it is recommended that the feedback be collected from the employee himself, as well as his supervisor. And the focus of the feedback would be on the attributes or areas that were covered in the training and on how it was applied by the individual on the job. A three stage process would, apart from giving feedback for improvement of the training effort, also contribute to the establishment of a culture of learning.

5. Blend of methodologies:

Learning styles differ from one individual to another.. To elaborate, the manner of teaching and learning different subjects can vary. What works for a training program on a technical subject may not necessarily work well for a behavioral area, and vice versa. With the leveraging of technology and proliferation of the net learning culture, learning is no longer confined to the traditional manner of training. Each of the methodologies have their respective advantages and disadvantages. A particular methodology may work well in a specific context and not so well in another. The cost would also vary from one methodology to another. It becomes the responsibility of the training personnel to choose the most appropriate methodology for the appropriate organizational context, for a particular subject and for the appropriate audience. Instead of trying to choose what works best, one may choose to provide two or three options with the same objectives, i.e., learning and improvement in the capabilities of the employees.

What would help in effective implementation of all the factors mentioned above:

1. A good and comprehensive training management system. Such a system covers all the areas mentioned above and involves all the stakeholders - employees, managers, HR/training function and the leadership
2. Trained and dedicated personnel to manage the training. It is desirable to have a dedicated team to oversee the training process in a company. However, given the size of companies today, some small ones may not be able to dedicate full time personnel. In such cases, the responsibilities need to be clearly built into that of the HR system of these companies.