Training is a paradox. If you train your staff, they will not only be more valuable to you, but they will also be more valuable to your competitors. Once they have your training, maybe they’ll just walk away.
The solution:
o Hire fast learners
o Use just-in-time training
For years consultants have told me to train my employees, that training makes them more productive. But when I do, the employees often walk out the door and some other company benefits from all the money and time I invested!
Like many entrepreneurs, this advice bothered and confused me. He knew it was true: the better-trained people performed better. Then I started implementing the just-in-time training.
This approach is much better and your competitors don’t get a freebie. Create valuable task bundles and responsibilities for new hires, significant roles, as soon as they join you. Creating doable and realistic roles from the start requires breaking down the elements of more complex existing roles and creating new, narrower jobs that people learn quickly to start contributing right away.
This approach gives your employees a great sense of ownership in their work. It also leads to a greater commitment to quality, since your reputation is tied directly to the observable results under your control. As a person gets up to speed on each set of tasks and begins to perform them skillfully, their goal is to keep adding new responsibilities. Train them in stages for each new work package.
The good news is that you can give important pieces of work to people who don’t yet have the depth and wisdom for the whole job. However, you can’t just do it and walk away. This requires a high degree of commitment (continuous negotiation, coaching, and measurement) from you and your managers.
The real challenge for your company is to create an environment where all of your employees are, to some degree, knowledge workers. That means training everyone, but not in the long run. Train an hour, a day and a week at a time.
Most people today want to learn what they need to learn when they need to learn it, and not because they are lazy or have a short attention span. Just-in-time learning is the only way to learn given the tidal wave of information we all deal with. We must be strategic in learning. “Will this be useful today or tomorrow?” becomes the key question.
There are hundreds of corporate universities in the US, including a high percentage in Fortune 500 companies. They range from bad to great, just like “real” universities. But these are the specific skills of the future to do specific jobs at your company now.
Yeah, put new hires through boot camps. But if you used to do a ten day camp, make it three days and make them work faster. Then follow up regularly with targeted half-day training.
If you want real talent in your new hires, focus on their ability to learn quickly and narrow your focus on the skills they bring now.
Once hired, employees are assigned a relatively simple starting job or task. Provide training to get exactly what they need to know so they can be ready for work tomorrow or next week. An experienced employee then spends the minimum amount of time necessary to teach the new worker how to perform the first task.
The new person does not follow the more experienced person, taking notes, observing, and hoping to learn by osmosis. Rather it is a low-cost one-on-one boot camp to make maximum impact quickly.
Each time new responsibilities are added to the new person’s job, someone with more experience provides hands-on instruction, always the minimum amount to ensure the new responsibilities are learned.
Will your employees lose the big picture with this ‘chunky’ training? Potentially they could. The cheap way to avoid this (and also to build teamwork) is to have regular team meetings to keep everyone informed about your strategy.