Getting a Return on Your Traiing Investment - Episode 8

Transcript:

Lou Quinto:
Welcome to Q and A on Breakthrough Leadership. I'm Lou Quinto.

Craig P. Anderson:
I'm Craig Anderson.

Lou Quinto:
Today what we're going to do is we're going to cover the topic of, are you getting a good return on investment on your learning and your training programs that you're providing to your employees? Three of the topics that we're going to cover that will help flush this out is going to be, one, increasing awareness and informing, two, setting employees up for success, and lastly, to incorporate accountability into your training to ensure that you're getting a good return on investment. So, Craig, why don't you take the first one?

Craig P. Anderson:
Sure. Increase awareness and inform. I think that we're all aware that people want training, but I'm not sure everybody really understands the value of it. I think there's a sense, especially in environments I came from really when you get into things like compliances, here's a video training. Everybody's aware there's video training.

Lou Quinto:
Diversity, you're talking diversity training.

Craig P. Anderson:
Diversity training, corporate compliance, financial compliance. Those are all out there, but are they really informing anybody or are they just checking the box? I think there's a difference between awareness of value of education, the ROI of it, and making sure that people are going through something so you can say we've got that covered.

Lou Quinto:
Yeah. One of the things I find particularly that's a significant portion of my business is that when it comes to training programs, training is one of those areas of an expense that people have a hard time tracking from the expense side to the return on investment side. I think that's the big question, particularly when you get a situation in the economy when there's a downturn in the economy and money becomes tight. Training and advertising are the two first things to go, and the fact that you're going to provide training to your employees, and the analogy I like to provide is that if you're going to buy a machine for your company, you're going to maintain that machine. Well, people are like machines. You need to maintain them because you just can't hire them one day and then expect them to continue to be professional their entire time.

Lou Quinto:
Particularly since everything changes so quickly in the industry, no matter what industry, technology, things are changing. We've got to keep just like our machines up to date, we got to keep our employees up to date. So, when it comes to training programs, there needs to be, and going back to our topic here, an awareness of information of why we're putting people through training. It's not just with the people who are going through training. I find it's got to be the managers too, because the manager's making expense usually on their budget side to put three people through training. It's coming out of my budget, and we just, as you say, check the box that okay, they went to training. So boom, we're done.

Craig P. Anderson:
Well, when I'm leading a team or when I was running my business, to sit there and say I've got $10,000 on the budget line. Somebody comes in and says, hey, we'll do this training and it's $6,000. It was always a struggle and a frame of reference to say, okay, is this worth $6,000? Am I going to get $6,000 worth of value out of this? I think it's incumbent upon managers when you're thinking about when you have staff that say, hey, I want training, or even if you want training for your team, what is the return you want as a leader? Am I trying to get an increase in sales? That's why I'm doing sales training. I think sales training is the easiest one to justify, right? Because the sales training guy will come in and they'll tell you, hey, your sales will increase X percent on average.

Craig P. Anderson:
So that's pretty easy. But when you start getting into some of the softer skills that are important, we talk about what's the value of. We talked here about training on the different generational differences. What is there? Am I looking for an increase return on that or am I really just looking to get rid of a headache and I'll pay anything to get rid of the headache that I'm dealing with? It's incumbent upon managers to understand why am I paying for this in the first place and what do I want to get out of it? Because that's ultimately how you have to define value. Otherwise, you go through training, you're like, well, what did I get?

Lou Quinto:
Okay. All right. Next, setting employees up for success, and again, I'm going to speak from my perspective, employees come to a training program. Some of the things I see right off the bat and I hear, I can sense is that, one, even though you're in training class, you're still responsible for what's back in the desk. So you've got people who are sitting in training programs, either in a classroom training or even CBT type training, computer based training, where what they're doing is they're multitasking. So, if I'm up there teaching, I'm seeing people who are on the laptop sending emails and everything like that. That's not setting the employee up for success. You're telling them they've got to keep one foot in both bucket, daily work that needs to be done and training work.

Lou Quinto:
The other thing too, in setting up employees for success is to create an expectation. A lot of times I see people sitting there in class and go, well, this is all good stuff, but I can't apply it where I work. My manager and rest of people around me won't let me do it. If that mentality exists right off the bat, you're not setting employees up for success.

Craig P. Anderson:
No. I think if you really want to take the bold move on this is, set the line when they walk in the door, no laptops, no phones. Get people's attention for [crosstalk 00:05:11] minutes.

Lou Quinto:
Okay, let's be realistic now.

Craig P. Anderson:
[crosstalk 00:05:15].

Lou Quinto:
For most people, that phone is part of their body.

Craig P. Anderson:
Absolutely. But because this doesn't just happen. I joined Orange Theory Fitness and their rule is no phones on the floor, right? It's an hour. So, set it up for an hour-

Lou Quinto:
Was that an advertisement by the way?

Craig P. Anderson:
Yeah, but it's not an advertisement for Orange Theory. At any rate, but the amazing thing to me is they get adults of all ages to set their phone down for an hour. I'm in a lot of gyms where you see people all day in there. So, let's set up realistic timeframes, right?

Craig P. Anderson:
Give them an hour. Say, all right, for an hour, but here's the breaks for you to go back and do business. Because I agree. When you're sitting in training, there's lots of things coming at you. But if an issue's come up that's such a crisis that someone needs you in a 60 minute window, they'll come find you. Everybody knows you're in training, someone will find you, but set it up so there's increments for success. We'll work this, then you get to [inaudible 00:06:03]. I think there's nothing worse, even if you're not training, in front of any crowd, entertaining, whatever, and you look out and everybody's like this. It's disheartening to the trainer and frankly, no one's getting anything out of it. So, you take the bold move and really say, hey, this is how valuable this is to me. As a leader, we're going to actually tell you, leave it alone for now.

Lou Quinto:
See, one of the things I definitely would suggest is a practice that I've been doing for many years now is that when I do a training class, every hour we take a 15 minute break. A lot of people I know who do training don't do that. They'll keep people in there from 8:00 till 10:00 and at 10:00, they take a 15 minute break, and then they take another break at lunchtime, one break, one 15 minutes in a four hour period of time. If you're a manager of group, I would demand that involve your trainers. Anyone you bring in, I would tell them that this is the way you want the format set up. Don't be afraid to push that individual who you're giving money to train your people.

Craig P. Anderson:
As a leader too, make sure you tell people, hey, I'm putting you in this training for a reason. Don't set up everybody to go through two days of training and then have some massive project due on the third day that they're not going to get done. So, you've got to set people up for success and give them a framework for it. So, make sure you have realistic expectations saying, I'm pulling you out of the world for a day or for two days and I'm going to treat you like that. Then we'll reset. Don't set up conflicting priorities for your staff.

Lou Quinto:
All right. Okay. Making it stick. Study's show that only 18 to 20% of the people who attend a training class actually use what they learn in class. So, that means there's 80% of the people who just went and they took a day off basically, they were vacationers and it was great. I got away from my desk, I got away from the hectic pace of everything going on. Didn't have to return a lot of emails, make a lot of phone calls. I sat there in a training program. So, one of the things I always recommend, and you've been on the front line, and I know we've talked about this a little bit, is that I believe that, as part of that making it stick, the manager needs to be responsible. It's one thing bringing in programs and letting people go through, but if the people up top don't know what's going on and what the objectives were, what the learning should have been, then you've got a problem.

Lou Quinto:
So, I always recommend is that, at the end of the training program, I tell people, go back tomorrow morning and spend 10 to 15 minutes with your manager and tell them what you learned. It would be great if the manager had some advanced knowledge of what they were going to learn, either through some sort of session with the person or the group that's delivering the training to say, okay, here's the objectives over teaching them or the new technology, here's what you should expect from them. Maybe even providing them some coaching tips because what's the old adage? If in order to add a new habit, eliminate an old habit, you have to do something for 21 straight days. After 21 straight days, it's comfortable. But after another 21 straight days, it becomes a habit. So, whatever people are going through and training, you've got 42 days before it "sticks." So, what are managers doing? That's one of the things that I see most companies don't do.

Craig P. Anderson:
I think it's, having managers just have a Cliff's Notes version of the training probably isn't enough. I think you make sure the managers have the training so they actually know the material.

Lou Quinto:
In fact, one of the comments I get on evaluations form is, has my manager been through this training? Because I found it so valuable and obviously my manager needs to be through this training.

Craig P. Anderson:
Well, I can't think of enough times when you go to a town hall meeting or whatever and the CEO or whatever stands up and says I need everybody to complete that's training on safety or whatever it is, because it needs to get done. That's bad leadership. The leaders should come up and say, here's the reason we're doing this training. This is why this is important. This is important because it's going to help us do X, Y, and Z. This gets back to our video on the mission and vision. Here's how this ties into what we're doing. So many leaders are just like, look man. By God, you do not want to get an email that says you're on the bad list. How is that an incentive for training? Here's why we do the compliance training. This is why compliance is important. This is why we do sales training. These are why there's reasons we're doing these trainings because we think, in a good leader, if you want accountability, you want it to stick, frame it. Don't just throw some poor schmuck trainer up in front of your room for a hundred people.

Lou Quinto:
[crosstalk 00:10:29] poor schmuck.

Craig P. Anderson:
For putting in training for out of context. If you go to this training, what's the context? Go to the training. Give people a reason. Make sure you're doing things that are tied back to the mission and vision of the company because that builds context for why this will stick. I'm teaching you this because I want you to do this because the company's trying to do this. That's how you make training valuable, give it some context, and also make sure you know the material. Make sure you've been through it. Otherwise, the staff, employees, can see fake a mile away and they will find it and they will call you out on it and you'll pay for it next time you send them through.

Lou Quinto:
One of the things I find is when a manager does take a training program with his or her employees, all of a sudden, the training becomes different. Because they're sitting in this program with me. So, if the manager has the opportunity, I always say, sit through a training program. Even if there's going to be multiple training programs, you don't have to sit through all of them, but sit through one of the training programs on that subject so that the word gets out that you did sit through that training.

Craig P. Anderson:
Yeah.

Lou Quinto:
So, what'd you learn today?

Craig P. Anderson:
What I learned today, I would say a big takeaway for me out of today's work was just this idea of making training work for the employee. Providing context, giving them opportunities to get their work done and making that deal to say, you pay attention for 45 minutes, as you said, and then I'll give you 15. Set up people for success. Make the training valuable. That's really my key takeaway today.

Lou Quinto:
See, in training after 30 years, one of the things, sometimes training is considered to be the solution to solve all problems. We're going to put our people through training and then everyone just sits back and just waits for it to happen. But success just doesn't happen magically. Success has to be planned for. So, the topics that we've talked about, we need to inform people why we're putting them through the training, what we want them to get out of it. We want to be able to set them up for success by giving them the time, either at the front end or if a program requires pre-work, that they have time at work to do it, that we're not requiring them to do that pre-work at home at night, taking away from family time. Then, as you indicated, setting them up at the back end where the day after they come back from training, don't have a big report that's due. Make sure that you put that training in a spot where it can be done.

Lou Quinto:
Then, making it stick, that's part of success also is to make sure you're getting a return on investment, and it's got to stick in order to get that return on investment. Otherwise, what I always tell people is, take that money that you're going to put it on training and just take your employees out to dinner. They'll have a lot of fun. They'll talk to each other, they'll do networking, and they'll probably get a lot more out of that dinner than they would out of training if you don't do everything before that.

Craig P. Anderson:
But do the training first.

Lou Quinto:
Yeah, buy them lunch.

Craig P. Anderson:
There you go.

Lou Quinto:
Good. All right, well, we hope you enjoyed this episode of Q and A on Breakthrough Leadership. If you liked our video, go ahead and click the like button. Subscribe to it so you know when the next podcast comes out. With that, have a great day. I'm Lou Quinto.

Craig P. Anderson:
Craig Anderson.

Lou Quinto:
Thanks.