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Human Performance

Published September 2008

Stop Wasting Money on Training

  Harold D. Stolovitch, Ph.D.

The cost of inadequate workplace performance is staggering. Rework, poor customer service quality, declining productivity: They add up to higher costs and lower profits. Faced with such problems, training appears as the default solution.

Studies on the difference between exemplary and average performer productivity demonstrate dramatic contrasts as high as 200 percent, such as the case of Chrysler improving vehicle sales 210 percent, as documented in "Demonstrating Your Worth to Management With Credible, Business-Focused Results," in The Trainer's Portable Mentor.
 
To close the gap, training seems a logical intervention, but training is also costly. Can it guarantee results?

"We need a training program on…" is often the opening salvo in an expensive, frustrating and unsuccessful campaign to achieve desired performance. Rationales for training usually seem clear enough:

• "We're implementing a new system. Employees must be brought up to speed."
• "The quality of our customer service is being hammered. We've got to clean up our act."
• "They aren't selling the new product."
• "Wastage and rework costs have gone through the roof. This has got to stop!"

Adding to this rationale, industry data by the American Society for Training and Development shows that while leading companies spend more on average on per-employee training annually, they also enjoy gains in profit margins, income per employee and price to book value. What conclusion can we draw? "Let's train… right?"
"Wrong! Maybe."

Numerous workplace performance specialists have demonstrated most performance gaps are not due to skills and knowledge deficits — the only ones for which training is appropriate. They are more frequently caused by environmental factors related to expectations, feedback, resources, incentives, obstacles, worker selection and task-value attribution. Nevertheless, when performance gaps occur, the reflex, all too often, is training.

And if we've already trained them and results are still inadequate, the answer often is: "Why, let's train them again." It's usually cheaper and easier to fix the environment than the people. Yet we keep spending money trying. In short, if the cause of the gap is not lack of skills and knowledge, don't train.

Training is necessary. But is it enough? With very few exceptions, the categorical answer is no. To back this assertion:

• "Most of the investment in organizational training and development is wasted because most of the knowledge and skills gained in training (well over 80 percent by some estimates) is not fully applied by employees back on the job," said Mary L. Broad and John W. Newstrom in their book Transfer of Training.
• "Research indicates that, on average, less than 30 percent of what people learn (in training) actually gets used on the job," Dana Gaines Robinson and James C. Robinson in the book Performance Consulting.

Why this phenomenon? Because often the wrong people are sent to training. They are not ready for it, lack capacity for it, can't apply it immediately or are inundated with other priorities. Supervisors inadequately prepare trainees. There's little on-the-job support leading to lack of confidence to perform or there are few incentives to apply new learning. Without preparation and post-training support, workplace training quickly dissipates into the morass of other unmemorable learning events.

Training as a one-shot injection to achieve performance goals rarely works. It should be part of a systemic performance system.

Further, consider how you learned to perform your work. Was it from what you were told or from what you experienced? Almost no one selects the former, which leads to the mission of training: to transform performance capability, not to transmit information. Yet, observations of workplace training reveal countless training sessions stuffed with PowerPoints, manuals and lectures.

Disconnects occur between what training "tells" and job-practice reality, between explanations and on-the-job experience, and between new concepts and ingrained attitudes. The result is inefficient use of learning time, confusion and low retention. Unless you are prepared to train in harmony with how people learn and tightly tie it to what they will truly have to do, stop wasting money on training.

     

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