Will Training Solve Your Performance Problems?

Posted by admin

April 6, 2008

Answer furnished by Barbara Jones www.stellartrng.com

You trained your employees when you hired them but performance problems have cropped up. You are thinking of hiring a professional trainer to get everybody back on track. Before you make a buying decision, ask yourself whether training is really the answer. The classic question is, “Could they do it if their lives depended on it?”

If the answer is “no” training can make a difference in performance. Sometimes the answer is as simple as a gap between the time original training occurred and the time a new tool became available. Software training is a good example. If software training happens before the new software is available to use newly-acquired skills will be lost rapidly and training must be repeated.

If the answer is “yes,” the question becomes, “If they know what they are supposed to do, why don’t they do it?” If often turns out employees are not rewarded or are actually punished when making the desired choice. This commonly happens when levels of an organization are working toward competing goals. For instance, new employees may be taught that management feels low error rates are essential. Then they find their immediate supervisors evaluate them based solely on how quickly they work.

Training cannot solve this type of problem and has the potential to make it worse. As uncomfortable as it may be, just talking to your employees about what they think is causing the problem may be a more effective solution.

Human Resource