Training Trends: Training for a healthy bottom line

Got training?

See if it’s time for a training check-up in your business in the latest issue of our Training Trends newsletter. In it, you’ll also find expert answers to these key training questions:

What are the three kinds of training a company needs to keep its bottom line healthy?

Are your employees up to the challenge of doing business across language lines?

Providing your employees with the right training is important, but how do you know they’re using what they learn?

Here’s a quick look at the June issue of Training Trends:

Got training?

It’s dairy month, and that means lots of photo ops for celebrities sporting milk mustaches. Ads will tout how healthy milk is, and why everyone who is anyone just can’t wait to down their next ice cold, creamy glassful. A few years ago, the slogan was “Milk. It does a body good.”™ Catchy.

We’d like to say the same thing about training. Okay, so it’s not creamy and probably shouldn’t be served ice cold, but otherwise it’s pretty much on target.

The right training is healthy for your company. A well-trained employee is less likely to make mistakes, generate errors, get hurt at work or waste materials. Teams with the right training perform more efficiently, require less supervision and are more likely to stay with your company. That means a healthier bottom line for your company. (more)


Going global with language training

It’s a fact. The world has gotten noticeably smaller in the past 50 years or so. Okay, maybe the geographers wouldn’t agree with that, but marketers, sales people and just about anyone who uses the Internet knows exactly what I mean.

We have gotten used to doing business with people in different countries, chatting with friends across the globe and seeing images of places thousands of miles away in real time.

The one skill that has not kept up with this nearly borderless worldview is language. Most Americans speak only one language fluently. That’s not the case in the rest of the world, where learning effective communication skills in two, three or even four languages is considered a basic part of childhood education. (more)


Down the road: Is your safety training staying on track?

You’ve done it all. Harassment training, forklift training, hazardous materials training and first aid training. Your employees are ready for anything. But before you pat yourself on the back and sit back to enjoy that wonderful sense of being up-to-date on everything, we have two questions for you.

First, where are your training records? If there was an accident at work and OSHA came knocking on your door, could you show them proof that your employees had received the right training at the right time? If you were served with a lawsuit for sexual harassment, could you show proof of your company’s efforts to train employees in what is and is not acceptable behavior at work?

And second, are you following through? Even if you have training records, are you following up to make sure the lessons learned in the training seminar or interactive CD-ROM are being applied at work? Are you posting signs and reminders to keep safety practices or acceptable behavior standards in front of employees every day? (more)

Each month, the experts at TrainingTime.com share all of the latest and greatest tips, trends and buzz from across the training industry in our Training Trends newsletter. If you’re not on our mailing list, please take a few seconds and sign up.

If you’re a training expert or HR professional and are interested in writing content for Training Trends or TrainingTime.com’s learning library, visit our “Write for Us” page for instructions on how to contribute.

Top training tips any company can put to work

It doesn’t matter whether your trainees are young or old, new hires or existing employees, or even if your topic is safety or sexual harassment, every form of employee training will share a common thread.

Especially today, companies are looking for programs that deliver the best training ROI. At the very least, these programs must be designed with a clear purpose and outline measurable objectives for employees to reach.

Any organization can use these top five employee training tips to help design their own training courses or to improve the ROI of any current programs:

1. Set clear goals. Identifying goals should be the first step to developing a new training program or enrolling employees in outside courses. A clear set of goals will ensure that employees complete the required course material and know what is expected of them once the program is finished.


2. Keep it ongoing. Employee training should be viewed as a way to continually learn and improve, rather than just something to check off your to-do list. With continuous training, employees will develop new skills and abilities that will improve their productivity and boost to your bottom line.


3. Keep it simple. Keep training programs focused on one topic at a time. If there are too many topics or too much information, you can easily overwhelm employees and turn training into a burden instead of an opportunity. If necessary, split up a large training program into smaller, more manageable courses.


4. Spend wisely. Do your homework and make sure you’re getting the best bang for your buck when investing in employee training. Whether you’re using an outside resource or developing an in-house training program, ensure the materials are the best quality for your budget.


5. Follow up. After the training course or seminar is complete, managers should meet with employees on a regular basis to determine the effectiveness of the training and to monitor employees’ progress. Managers can also help employees who may be struggling with any new information.
   

You can only improve your employee training ROI if you put in the time to plan an effective program and are prepared to follow up. Without any follow through, many employees will lack the motivation to hang onto their newly-learned skills, turning the training into a waste of time.

A business is only as good as the people who work for it. Help your business succeed by giving employees the tools and training to perform at their best.

Training for training sake? Improve training ROI

By sending people to seminars and training courses you expect them to come out as better leaders, better employees and better supervisors. The trainee may seem changed for the first few days they return to the office, but their excitement dwindles and things soon go back to the way they were before.

Without hard evidence that training is making a difference, why do businesses keep spending millions on training and development each year? Are we just training for training sake?

Ron Ulrici from R and S Associates brought up this big HR mistake in a recent post, suggesting that training will only be a success if we include it in the overall system within our organizations.

Building on Ulrici’s advice, here are some ways to improve your training ROI and ensure you’re not just training for training’s sake:

Get managers to buy-in. Before sending anyone out to participate in outside training, make sure their boss knows what the training involves and what they can do to foster newly-learned behavior the employee may returned with.

Outline desired goals. HR, trainees and managers should meet prior to a training course to outline clear expectations for employees after completing a training program. Defining training goals before sending employees through the program will create a benchmark to help measure employee progress.

Measure effectiveness in performance appraisals. When appraisal time comes around, address how well or not an employee was able to implement training in their work. Measure the progress a trainee has made and how well they attained their goals.

Follow-up. After completing a training program, HR should meet with each trainee and their supervisors to measure how effective the training was, if the employee is putting their knowledge to use and to asses any difficulties the employee may be having applying the training to their job.

Encourage practice. Work with managers to be sure trainees have a chance to practice what they learned when they get back to the office. Find practical ways for employees to put their knowledge to action with small projects or presentations.

Preview seminars and workshops. Don’t encourage outside training programs before you know exactly what they’re all about. If the messages delivered in the program or seminar don’t match your business culture, the message will be lost. Even worse, employees may be punished for exhibiting behavior learned during training.


Forgetting the follow-up is a sure way to lose any new habits an employee may have learned during training. Get everyone on board and prepared for follow-up training to ensure you’re not just training for training sake.

Tips to plan an effective and memorable team building event

Team building events outside of the office can help strengthen the bonds between coworkers in ways that can’t be done inside the four walls of a building.

Those left back in the office may look at your outing as an excuse to have fun and get out of the office for a day or two. The folks on the trip may see it that way, too.

Before you take a group on an adventurous outing, thoroughly plan ahead and follow up back at the office to make sure your team building goals are achieved and the day doesn’t turn into just another fun day out.

TrainingZONE, an organizational learning and development community from the UK, recently published an article on the topic and came up with a few points to help employees transfer their experience back to the office. Here are some of the best tips:

Develop clear and simple outcomes. Don’t make it complicated and try to achieve too many things in one day. People will only take away about three messages, according to the author, so keep your message simple.

Involve the team in planning. Take a quick survey of what worked and failed on the last outing and determine what they would like to get out of this trip. Managers should still have control and set clear parameters for the outing, but employees can help come up with new ideas.

Plan with the trainers. Bring the trainers into the planning process early to ensure they know your goals and budget. They may have suggestions on how to achieve team building goals more effectively and for less money.

Create a memorable event. Remember that your goal is for employees to bring what they learned back to the office and implement it into their daily activities. Plan on follow up activities in the office to drive the team building message home.

Make the event relevant and be consistent. No matter what the activity, make sure it stays relevant to the real world at work. “If the connection to work is lost altogether the event becomes fairly meaningless ‘play.’” Also remember to keep the event consistent with your company values and make it fit with your company culture.

A little bit of planning ahead can go a long way to help employees retain what they learned at the team building event. In ever step of the planning process remember that your goal is to have employees implement the lessons they learned at the event back in the office. Without proper planning and follow up, your goal may be lost and buried under the day everyone had outside.

Warning: Information overload, memory full

While we’re on the subject of brains ... are your employees running out of brian space?

It’s a good chance they are.

Scientific research now shows we’re not forgetful, we physically just can’t store it all in our brains.

The great people at Incentive Intelligence bring a recent MSNBC article to light about how our ability to retain information is shrinking.

It’s been previously thought that we can hold seven things in our short term “working” memory, but that figure is now thought to be closer to four.

The new research explains why we break up phone numbers into three and four number strings and why it’s easier to remember either the first or last half, not the full string.

Our working memory may be smaller when you factor in everything else we have on our minds at any given time - paying the phone bill, remembering the doctor’s appointment you have tomorrow, responding to that email you just opened back at your computer.

Keep these new research findings in mind the next time you plan a training presentation, or come up with goals and objectives for an employee reward program. Your audience only has a set amount of space to store the information you tell them.

Remember - keep it simple. The more information you give, the more they will forget. Keep it short and be repetitive. You may sound like a song on loop, but the more you repeat yourself, the better your audience will remember the information you’re delivering.

Should training stop at competence?

You hire a new employee, train the new employee how to do a job and they become competent at the job. Does the training stop there?

In a recent article on TrainingTime.com, “Author & Attitude Adjuster” Kevin Burns, answers “yes” and explains why.

Burns states that an employer’s responsibility to improve its employees ends once they become competent at the job. It is then the employee’s responsibility to make themselves more valuable to the company.

“In order to better one's position in life, they have to become more valuable. It's not the company's job to make the individual better. Sure, the company can provide an environment where self-improvement is encouraged but ultimately it's not the company's responsibility to improve the individual beyond the expectations of being able to do the job. That's it.”

Burns divides employees into three categories: competent, high-performer and under-achiever. The company will do anything to keep high-performers, keep competent employes where they’re at, and get rid of the under-achievers.

It is not the company’s fault if an employee is upset that they didn’t get the promotion they wanted or if they’re being paid less than they want. The employee should be self-motivated enough to seek out further training, learn new aspects of the business and become better at their job.

What do you think? What’s your opinion on training employees past the point of competency?

Don't forget to follow up

So, your employees have completed the training program. How do you make sure the trainees have retained the information and implement it in their workday?

• Refresher training - Give your employees some time to soak in the initial training program. In a few days or weeks after, set up a refresher course to make sure the information sticks.
  
• Follow-up activities - Set up mock situations for employees to run through that is tied to the training they received. It will keep employees engaged and it will help you reiterate your key training points.
  
• Performance appraisals - Follow up your training after a determined amount of time with a training appraisal. It doesn’t have to be a strict, formal appraisal, but just something that gives you proof on paper whether the employee retained the information or not.
  

Remember that not every employee is going to fully “get it” on the first shot. Follow-up activities will help those employees who didn’t completely grasp what was taught the first time around.