The T&D challenge: How to get management to pay and employees to show up.
Your product development pros are working long hours to meet their deadlines. Customer service staff are coping with a major downsizing and senior managers are putting the finishing touches on a new global partnership deal. Just how and when are you going to get staff up to speed on those new training programs?
Making time for training is often a tough task. Yet the relationship between training, corporate growth and profitability is well-documented.
“It has been substantiated by studies in both Canada and the United States that companies in the top half of the group for spending on training had a shareholder return that was 45 per cent higher than the market average,” says Jason Orr, president of the Ontario Society for Training and Development.
Oasis Technology, a Toronto-based electronic payment software developer, knows this first-hand. Its product demands an understanding of highly technical information — information that changes on a regular basis. New and improved product features are a fact of development life.
According to Ruth Daniels, education manager at Oasis, it is vital that the company’s 280 employees and numerous channel partners receive the training they need, when they need it, and that it is something that cannot be left to chance.
Daniels embarked on a multi-step mission to analyze the company’s training needs, create a business case and gain buy-in from senior management. She stressed the importance of taking the time to detail potential benefits, challenges and risks associated with rolling out a training program. In Oasis’ case, attention had to be paid to partners and staff working in different time zones and possessing different technical capabilities.
“By sitting down and putting it on paper, all the potential roadblocks, and things you don’t really think about, suddenly become very clear. And you also have to consider contingency plans,” says Daniels.
“If you don’t write it down while you’re thinking about it or present this as an entire business case, then you have to go back, regroup, rethink, reconvene. All of that takes an incredible amount of time… and if you do that too often you lose credibility.”
Performance-based training made the most sense in serving the diverse and constantly changing training needs of Oasis’ stakeholders. The company is now in the process of incorporating its training plan into performance reviews. Each employee group will have its own set of competencies, so on-the-job performance and learning will become indelibly linked.
Since Oasis’ training is performance-based, business and training goals had to be aligned. The firm’s training and development specialists could not accomplish this on their own. Communication with senior management played a critical role in helping to identify learning gaps associated with business goals.
“If training is a partner at the strategic planning table, then the training will occur throughout the organization. If training is an afterthought or a good intention, then that’s all it will ever be,” says Nancy Burnard, program developer at Toronto-based training consulting firm Eagle’s Flight, and member of the Board of Directors for OSTD.
“I think that companies that are the most successful with training, and have the greatest focus on training have it as part of their strategic plan. It’s woven right into the organization. It’s not seen as anything exceptional or different or ‘We’ll have to make sure to make time for this.’ It’s seen as part of what we do here.”
Selling training to the top brass will always be more effective if you sell it on hard business issues, says Burnard. Concrete information, such as the sales department is down 25 per cent or marketing is generating 10 per cent less leads, will provide convincing arguments for training.
Orr says being able to present the benefits of investing in training in such a tangible manner is often a tall order and companies under pressure to improve the bottom line may often look in other directions first.
“I think it’s a major problem in management’s mind because they cannot precisely quantify the benefits. There’s a perception that it’s a nebulous result, if you will,” says Orr.
“With a piece of new equipment, they can say we’re going to have production efficiency savings of 20 per cent a year. With advertising, they can say it’s going to increase revenue by 10 per cent. With training, they have difficulty connecting the actual investment with the benefit. Intuitively and logically it makes sense, and we know that there are benefits, because human capital is the greatest source of competitive advantage.
“On an emotional level, I think businesses realize they have to do it, but when it comes time to put pen to paper and actually sign the cheque for the training, that’s where there’s the disconnect.”
Of course, even once executive sponsorship for training is achieved, there’s no guarantee that employees will embrace courses with open arms and minds. Training must be adequately marketed — by both HR and training staff, as well as senior management. Employees need to learn how they will benefit from training. That can be accomplished by delivering an internal pre-training campaign incorporating e-mails, memos from management and personal meetings to convince employees of the relevancy of attending training.
Yet there are always employees who resist training, claiming other more urgent priorities. How does one increase the chance of enticing these individuals?
“I think employees need to see ‘what’s in it for me,’” says Burnard. “Most companies today can’t offer job security, but they can offer marketability. What you’re doing is offering your employees an opportunity to better themselves and learn more.”
New training delivery channels also work wonders to motivate reluctant staff. Instead of having to board a plane and lose several days away from the office, employees can mix and match their learning with self-paced online courses, live Web-based coaching sessions and face-to-face classroom sessions.
This blended approach to learning is part and parcel of the Oasis Technology’s training master plan. The company is piloting an approach that provides employees with off-the-shelf software packages for independent study, lunch-and-learn sessions led by internal business analysts, and CD-ROMs with assignments to complete prior to attendance at face-to-face classes.
Oasis’ business partners will no longer have to wait to partake in once-a-month product training. Thanks to the soon-to-launch e-learning courses, training will be just a click away.
“To succeed, an organization really needs to want training,” says Burnard. “Just like quality can be a good intention in an organization, if you don’t put the quality systems in place, it’s never going to happen. It’s the same for training… it’s often a good intention within an organization. But once you understand the organization’s constraints, then you can develop a strategy to make it fit.”
Sandra Mingail is a frequent contributor to the OSTD’s magazine, The Canadian Learning Journal.
Making time for training is often a tough task. Yet the relationship between training, corporate growth and profitability is well-documented.
“It has been substantiated by studies in both Canada and the United States that companies in the top half of the group for spending on training had a shareholder return that was 45 per cent higher than the market average,” says Jason Orr, president of the Ontario Society for Training and Development.
Oasis Technology, a Toronto-based electronic payment software developer, knows this first-hand. Its product demands an understanding of highly technical information — information that changes on a regular basis. New and improved product features are a fact of development life.
According to Ruth Daniels, education manager at Oasis, it is vital that the company’s 280 employees and numerous channel partners receive the training they need, when they need it, and that it is something that cannot be left to chance.
Daniels embarked on a multi-step mission to analyze the company’s training needs, create a business case and gain buy-in from senior management. She stressed the importance of taking the time to detail potential benefits, challenges and risks associated with rolling out a training program. In Oasis’ case, attention had to be paid to partners and staff working in different time zones and possessing different technical capabilities.
“By sitting down and putting it on paper, all the potential roadblocks, and things you don’t really think about, suddenly become very clear. And you also have to consider contingency plans,” says Daniels.
“If you don’t write it down while you’re thinking about it or present this as an entire business case, then you have to go back, regroup, rethink, reconvene. All of that takes an incredible amount of time… and if you do that too often you lose credibility.”
Performance-based training made the most sense in serving the diverse and constantly changing training needs of Oasis’ stakeholders. The company is now in the process of incorporating its training plan into performance reviews. Each employee group will have its own set of competencies, so on-the-job performance and learning will become indelibly linked.
Since Oasis’ training is performance-based, business and training goals had to be aligned. The firm’s training and development specialists could not accomplish this on their own. Communication with senior management played a critical role in helping to identify learning gaps associated with business goals.
“If training is a partner at the strategic planning table, then the training will occur throughout the organization. If training is an afterthought or a good intention, then that’s all it will ever be,” says Nancy Burnard, program developer at Toronto-based training consulting firm Eagle’s Flight, and member of the Board of Directors for OSTD.
“I think that companies that are the most successful with training, and have the greatest focus on training have it as part of their strategic plan. It’s woven right into the organization. It’s not seen as anything exceptional or different or ‘We’ll have to make sure to make time for this.’ It’s seen as part of what we do here.”
Selling training to the top brass will always be more effective if you sell it on hard business issues, says Burnard. Concrete information, such as the sales department is down 25 per cent or marketing is generating 10 per cent less leads, will provide convincing arguments for training.
Orr says being able to present the benefits of investing in training in such a tangible manner is often a tall order and companies under pressure to improve the bottom line may often look in other directions first.
“I think it’s a major problem in management’s mind because they cannot precisely quantify the benefits. There’s a perception that it’s a nebulous result, if you will,” says Orr.
“With a piece of new equipment, they can say we’re going to have production efficiency savings of 20 per cent a year. With advertising, they can say it’s going to increase revenue by 10 per cent. With training, they have difficulty connecting the actual investment with the benefit. Intuitively and logically it makes sense, and we know that there are benefits, because human capital is the greatest source of competitive advantage.
“On an emotional level, I think businesses realize they have to do it, but when it comes time to put pen to paper and actually sign the cheque for the training, that’s where there’s the disconnect.”
Of course, even once executive sponsorship for training is achieved, there’s no guarantee that employees will embrace courses with open arms and minds. Training must be adequately marketed — by both HR and training staff, as well as senior management. Employees need to learn how they will benefit from training. That can be accomplished by delivering an internal pre-training campaign incorporating e-mails, memos from management and personal meetings to convince employees of the relevancy of attending training.
Yet there are always employees who resist training, claiming other more urgent priorities. How does one increase the chance of enticing these individuals?
“I think employees need to see ‘what’s in it for me,’” says Burnard. “Most companies today can’t offer job security, but they can offer marketability. What you’re doing is offering your employees an opportunity to better themselves and learn more.”
New training delivery channels also work wonders to motivate reluctant staff. Instead of having to board a plane and lose several days away from the office, employees can mix and match their learning with self-paced online courses, live Web-based coaching sessions and face-to-face classroom sessions.
This blended approach to learning is part and parcel of the Oasis Technology’s training master plan. The company is piloting an approach that provides employees with off-the-shelf software packages for independent study, lunch-and-learn sessions led by internal business analysts, and CD-ROMs with assignments to complete prior to attendance at face-to-face classes.
Oasis’ business partners will no longer have to wait to partake in once-a-month product training. Thanks to the soon-to-launch e-learning courses, training will be just a click away.
“To succeed, an organization really needs to want training,” says Burnard. “Just like quality can be a good intention in an organization, if you don’t put the quality systems in place, it’s never going to happen. It’s the same for training… it’s often a good intention within an organization. But once you understand the organization’s constraints, then you can develop a strategy to make it fit.”
Sandra Mingail is a frequent contributor to the OSTD’s magazine, The Canadian Learning Journal.
