Learning not taking hold in your organization? It may bebecause you have lots of training activities, but also have lots of training waste.Waste can be found in what you do—or don’t do—to enable people to learn faster,better, and more efficiently, and then to translate that learning into valuedperformance. This is where your training strategy (including eLearning),approaches, processes, systems, philosophy, and attitudes come into play.
So let’s focus on waste and how to eliminate it. These areseven waste factors—prime targets ofopportunity in the drive to make training more efficient and more valuable. Thismonth, we’ll look at the first four projectlevel contributors to waste that your L&D organization can deal with directly.I’ll present three more strategic levelfactors that require more organizational buy-in next month.
Waste Factor #1: Solutions before problems
Failing to identify business and performance problems first has a ripple effect foreverything that follows. It is wasteful to just evaluate what you are doingwithout looking at why you’re doing it. So, beforeyou rush to build a course, think about what the business goals are, and whatindividual and organizational performance requirements you should put in placeto meet them.
When you jump to any solution before you fully understandwhat problem you are trying to solve, you invite waste. Yet many people, fromtrainers to executives, focus on training courses in an almost knee-jerkreaction to any perceived problem in the organization. The fact is, training,while useful in many situations, is also expensive, and there are many othersolutions to consider before a training decision is made. How do you determinewhen training is appropriate? By conducting a needs assessment to firstdetermine exactly what the performance requirements are and whether or notlearning may be necessary to achieve performance goals. By resisting the needto offer up courses without such an assessment, it is more likely that thecourses you do offer will be much more appropriate and work better.
Waste Factor #2: Bad training, poorly delivered
Even when atraining solution is called for, tolerating poor design and implementation willalmost always create waste, killing any positive value. Simply “shoveling”content into a training format can seem easy and inexpensive, but if it’s thewrong content, or focused on the wrong people, learning will suffer. Evenseemingly accurate and appropriate training can be fruitless if it’sunrealistic, boring, or not designed and presented in a cogent manner. That’swhy quality and context matter—a lot, and why the right instructional designand delivery decisions are critical for learning that is not wasted.
Waste Factor #3: Testing knowledge rather than performance
How do you know if training is working? Relying ontraditional tests may measure whether any learning has occurred (assuming thetests are actually valid—they often aren’t), but they may not be adequate todetermine whether performance has changed or any value to the business has beenrealized. So merely testing employee knowledge following training can lead tounsubstantiated projections about performance.
The consequences of inadequate assessment, both financialand physical, loom large. The wasted training—resulting in having to spend timeand money to rework the solution a second or even a third time to get it right—isjust the tip of the iceberg. Putting people in jobs they are not truly trainedfor can result in lower organizational productivity, profitability, andcompetitiveness. That’s real waste!
Waste Factor #4: Failing to support job performance directly
When people have to stop work to take training, theirproductivity, while in the training mode, falls to zero. Since there are manysituations when some training is highly desirable, the issue here is not toeliminate training, but to determine how much training is appropriate—no lessand certainly no more.
What if learning (and performance) could be facilitated faster so that less time is taken awayfrom work? What if at least some components of learning were embedded directlyinto the flow of jobs and tasks (the workflow)? What if learning and work wereso closely aligned as to become indistinguishable from each other? It seemsthat the more learning is aligned with work, the fewer disruptions and wastethere will be. Of course, you can never eliminate all disruptions from work;there will certainly be times when “off-task” training, in the classroom oronline, is called for. But what if you could reduce the amount of thosedisruptions by 20, 40, or even 60 percent? What would that mean forproductivity?
This is where performance support comes in. The idea behind this issimple: Look at what people are doing, and determine whether you can develop toolsto simplify or expedite the task so that it canbe completed faster, easier, at a higher level of quality, and/or with fewererrors. The classic example here is tax preparation software that allows peopleto complete a tax return in less time, with greater accuracy (the higher levelof accomplishment), and at a lower cost than using an accountant or trying itwith no support (the value).
No matter how much training people get, it is a wonder thatthey can successfully operate the increasingly complex technology common inmost work situations. To get to this level of performance, there is an emergingunderstanding that training can only go so far; the complex technologies mustbe more user-friendly, simpler, and more intuitive. So almost every technicalsystem increasingly needs a corresponding and extremely important effort tobuild tools and interfaces to guide the user. In a sense, the systems aredesigned so that they enhance the competence of the user beyond what thetraining could have provided alone.
