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HOW TO TRAIN THE PEOPLE WHO WORK FOR YOU

Training the people who work for you is critical if you intend to keep your business strong. If you do not have a knowledgeable work force, the job just will not get done - not the right way and not on time.  Most businesses recognize the importance of training.  Maybe that is why so much money is spent on training. From recent estimates, businesses with one to nine employees spend over $360 million a year on training.  Businesses with ten to forty-nine employees spend over one billion dollars per year. Training in the United States in the 1980s was an $8 billion-per-year business. And that just counts actual outlays for purchased training programs. It does not include in-house programs or the cost of on-the-job training. If all the other types of training are included along with travel costs, statistics, per diem, and so on, the total spent on training approaches is not  $8 billion, but nearly $30 billion for U.S. firms alone.

These numbers sound staggering - and they are. But they gain even greater significance when we realize that most of these dollars spent on training are wasted. By some estimates, employees who attend training - even the best and most professionally designed training - absorb just 15 percent of what is presented in the program, and apply only 15 percent of that 15 percent. That is a tremendous loss.  But it is not only the loss of training dollars.  A much larger potential loss to your company is from the mistakes new - and even seasoned - employees can make if they are inadequately trained. Andrew Grove, president of Intel Corporation - the  microprocessor and computer memory device company - and author of High Output Management, told the following story in the January 27, 1984, issue of Fortune magazine.  He says in that piece:

The consequences of an employee being insufficiently trained can be much more serious.  In an instance at Intel, for example, one of our sophisticated pieces of production machinery in a silicon fabrication plant - a machine called an ion implanter - drifted slightly out of tune. The machine operator . . . was relatively new. While she was trained in the basic skills needed to operate the machine, she hadn't been taught to recognize the signs of an out-of-tune condition.  So she continued to operate the machine, subjecting nearly a day's worth of almost completely processed silicon wafers to the wrong machine conditions. By the time the situation was discovered, material worth more than $1 million had passed through the machine - and had to be scrapped. Because it takes over two weeks to make up such a loss with fresh material, deliveries to our customers slipped, compounding the problem.  

If the potential loss from poorly trained employees is so great, how do you effectively train your employees? How do you avoid wasting time and money on training that does not take? How do you ensure that your work force is a truly knowledgeable one?  Here are some suggestions.

Provide the Right Training
Make sure the training you provide is the training your employees really need. A significant portion of the training dollars and the time devoted to training is wasted because it is spent on the wrong thing. Training - as opposed to education, which we will
discuss later should he directed specifically toward providing employees with skills they do not currently have, but must have to perform.  In effect, the appropriateness of any given training is a function of two things:  the need for a skill and the absence of a skill.  Much training is wasted because the employee either already possesses the skill(s) thus does not need the training, and/or does not possess the skill(s) but has no immediate need for the skills anyway - the absence of the skill does not matter for performance, or, more likely, the skill is not immediately required for performance on the job.

To make sure the training you provide is the training your employees really need, you should first complete a training needs assessment. There are two parts to such an assessment.  Frist, you identify the skills your employees require to meet the needs of your customers, and second, you match your employees with the skills you have identified. Let's examine both of these steps.

Step 1: What skills do your employees require?
An employee who possesses a skill is an employee who can properly execute behaviors required to satisfy the needs of a customer.  A "behavior" is something a person does or says; therefore your first task in identifying training needs for your employees is to list all the things they must do or say to satisfy your customers.  To make your list, just take a blank sheet of paper and start listing items as they come to you.  Don't worry about the order or, at this point, which employee needs the skill - the ability to demonstrate this behavior.

As you make your list, certain obvious skills will come to mind:
• Answer the phone.
• Take an order.
• Complete an order form.
• Locate a part in a catalog.
• Locate an item in inventory.
• Operate the cash register.
• Make change.
• Complete a credit card order.
• Complete a credit card application.
• Estimate a job.
And so on.

But don't stop with the obvious. Keep adding to your list. What about:
• Answer a customer's question about how to do something.
• Make a customer feel important, respected, and comfortable with a transaction.
• Report a problem.
• Make a suggestion.

You need to draw up as exhaustive a list of skills (behaviors) as you can. If you have a partner or existing employees, ask for their suggestions about skills to add. Your first task is to develop a complete skills inventory.

Step 2: Match your skills inventory to specific employees.
As you are developing your skills inventory, you are not matching skills to employees. Once you have compiled your skills inventory, your job then is to decide who needs each particular skill.  Not all employees do. You need to ask yourself two questions to make the correct match between employee and skill. First, if taught this skill, would the employee be able to (need to) apply the skill immediately after training on the job? The opportunity to immediately apply the skill is critical. We all have short memories; or more precisely, many thoughts, ideas, concepts, and so on compete for our attention. Consequently, if we learn a skill but do not immediately apply the skill, it is crowded out of our memory by the thousands of other sights, symbols, thoughts, ideas, and other information we are bombarded with every day. Repetition is the only method for ensuring, for most of us, that something learned is remembered. And repetition is dependent upon application - immediate application. Never train a person in a skill unless they will have the opportunity to apply what they learn from the training immediately on the job.

A second question to ask in matching employees to skills is this:  Do they already possess the skill?  Have they done it before, or, in the words of Robert Mager and Peter Piper, in Analyzing Performance Problems, "Could they do it if their life depended on it?" It may sound simple to say that we should not train people on things they already know how to do, but too often training is wasted for exactly that reason. We see an employee who is not performing, and immediately decide that the answer is training.  Yet the reason for poor performance or nonperformance has nothing to do with a lack of knowledge or skill. The employee could do it, has done it before, but is just not doing it. In later chapters, we will discuss how to respond to a "won't do" (nontraining) problem, as Mager and Piper refer to it, as opposed to a "can't do" (training) problem. When matching people to training, just be sure that the cause of nonperformance is a "can't do" problem.

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