People Skills Training is Not Enough

Organisations spend a lot of money on training. I fear that if they looked back over five years at the changes in behaviour that their training had brought, they would say, “Not enough”.

Can People Skills Training Change People’s Behaviour?

People Skills Training as a tool for changing people’s behaviour to better achieve the goal organisations set for themselves is a failure.

Most organisations do not think through the design of their people skills training enough to make it as useful a tool for employee development as it should be.

Hence they do not get a sufficient return on their investment.

People Skills Training Has Little Impact

It is difficult to find organisations that would say, “We find that people skills training has little impact on our bottom line year on year”.

Is this because organisations know exactly what return they get from training?

The answer to that question is a clear no.

The American Society for Training and Development reported that only 3% of organisations measure what happens to their bottom line as a result of training.

We Waste Our Money on People Skills Training

Or is it that it is politically incorrect to say in an organisation that has a high investment in training.

“We waste our money on training”

My observation is that this is somewhere near the truth.

Designing training that allows adults to learn is no simple feat. Once the objectives of the course are understood, effective learning must take four major elements into account.

Information and Rapport

Participants must recognise the need for information and rapport with the trainer must be established early, otherwise, the trainer’s efforts will be in vain.

The opening of any training effort must provide a believable and appropriately challenging answer to the question, “Why am I here?” and must lead to an early engagement between the participants and the trainer.

Reinforce Positive Behaviour

The design must also be able to reinforce positive behaviour. In doing so, the design must not ignore negative or undesirable behaviour.

The design needs to include negative reinforcements to eliminate undesired behaviour as much as it includes positive reinforcement for the desired behaviour.

Maximum Retention

Retention is a key aspect of people skills training design that is often ignored, Very few entities undertake a training programme test for retention.

Participants must also have adequate opportunities to practice what they learn to increase levels of retention.

Transference to the Workplace

The fourth critical element of training design is transference. Participants must be able to transfer what they have learnt into a new setting away from the classroom.

For example, the workplace! Participants are more likely to transfer their learning to the workplace when the learning is critical to them doing their job or the learning revisited familiar patterns of work or knowledge.

Conversely, they have a high probability of learning transfer when the learning was very new and fresh.

Promoting Undesirable Behaviours

Transference is stopped cold if participants return to a workplace which has policies, processes and measures of processes which promote behaviours opposite to those reinforced in the training.

If negative policies, processes and measures are well known and expected to remain after the training then the motivation for attending the training will be severely hampered as well.

Most training is completed over a period of a day or two. In many industries, it is difficult to allow participants the time off to attend even a day’s interpersonal skills training hence the training may only be a half-day or two hours.

Changing Behaviour

Let me assume that we believe that when we set out to have people learn something and to change their behaviour as a result that we have to address motivation/rapport, reinforcement of desired behaviours, retention of knowledge and transference to the workplace.

I then ask the question “How can all of that happen in a two-hour or half-day or one-day training session?”

The simple answer is that it cannot. Workplace learning happens mainly in the workplace, not in the training room.

People Skills Training Design

Much “Training” design typically starts with

“What are the training outcomes we want?”

This is to miss the point. The first question must be

“What business outcome do we want?”

The second question can be

“What change in behaviours do we need to get the change in business outcomes we want?”

The next set of questions to ask includes:

“What measures do we need to change to reinforce the behaviour we want and discourage the behaviour we do not want?”

“Do we have measures that make it impossible for our employees to exhibit the behaviour we want?”

“Are there policies that stop our employees from exhibiting the behaviours we want?”

…and finally

“What knowledge and skills do our employees need to have to help them exhibit the behaviours we want?”

Building Skills That Will Transfer

Even when we get to the design of people skills training using the answers to the last question we must take into account how we are going to pass on knowledge and skills in a classroom, how we are going to reinforce those in the workplace, and how we are going to aid retention of knowledge and build skills and how we can organise work such that there is ample opportunity to transfer the knowledge to the workplace.

And then we have to work out how we will know that the learning programme is working.

Organisations spend a lot of money on training. I fear that if they looked back over five years at the changes in behaviour that their training had brought, they would say, “Not enough”.

This article was contributed by Kevin Dwyer