For CEOs of mid-market organisations located between Auckland (UTC+12) and Bangkok (UTC+7) because I live in Australia.
“Good help is hard to find”. Or so they say.
“Millennials don’t know the meaning of work!” they also say.
“All they want is ping-pong tables, complementary smashed avo on sourdough, and to be able to bring their doggo to work. How am I expected to find the kind of employees to help this organisation grow?”
At the same time, there’s this uncomfortable, back-of-mind thought…
“What’s going to happen when this slew of boomers we’ve got on staff retires in a few years? All that institutional knowledge and know-how walks right out the door with them. What the hell is being done about that?”
I dunno about you, but this seems kinda bad to me. Like, more than a little bit bad.
On the one hand, you’ve got to attract top talent… then hold onto those people. (Your HR department has a strategy for that, right?) In some ways, that’s a perennial business challenge — unchanged since… forever.
And all the carping on about “the younger generation” is simply a rehash of what my old man was saying 40 years ago… and his old man was probably saying 40 years before that. The specific grievances levelled against “the youth of today” might have changed, but the apparent need to complain about how hopeless younger employees are doesn’t seem to have changed very much at all.
Then… on the other hand, you’re looking down the barrel of the proverbial “brain drain”. Will your middle managers — and, by extension, the teams they currently lead — be able to step up once all the experts with 40 years’ experience cash in their chips? Will they have the skills needed to — at a minimum — maintain your market share? Will they be able to grow your market share?
I’ve heard this story more times than I can count.
Meanwhile, someone has to juggle the onboarding and induction of new staff. Who owns that? Is it HR? Or is it L&D? Or does L&D create the materials which HR then administrates? (If so, hopefully, this process is executed in a coordinated way that rolls up in line with the overarching employee experience strategy. It does, right?)
Plus, there’s all that compliance guff to wade through. Seemingly endless policies for which you need to keep legal records to affirm that employees have indeed read and understood it all… down to the letter, Your Honour. Policies which can mostly be boiled down to “Don’t be a sleazebag; don’t be a fuckwit”.
It’s a dead-set, never-ending hamster wheel every organisation contends with:
- Attract the right kind of people
- Welcome them in a way that affirms their decision get on board
- Get them up to speed within a reasonable timeframe
- Suck up the inevitable cost of attrition
- For those who don’t throw in the towel or get the sack in the first few months, deliver ongoing support and feedback on their performance (forever)
- Invest in skills-development and career-planning (forever).
This is obviously not news.
And yet… I’ve seen this relatively simple framework go off the rails again and again.
Why?
Here’s the NUMBER ONE reason:
- Someone identifies a performance problem…
For example:
- blue widget sales are down for the past two quarters; or
- near-misses and incidents on the production line have increased recently; or
- customer satisfaction ratings are down
…and, from this, concludes there is a training problem.
I have a theory that the thinking process goes something like this: If training is how people develop skills… and performance is falling short… employees either need more training or better training.
It seems reasonable. It really does. Unfortunately, it is frequently wrong.
Now, I’m a “training” guy. I’ve been designing, creating, and delivery all kinds of training for 20 years. So why would I say such a thing?
Because there’s a faulty premise in there. Training is but one factor among many driving performance.
For sure, there are clear cases for a “training solution”. For instance, if employees in a particular role are not getting the appropriate type of training, they’re not going to be able to do their job to the required standard. The most obvious intervention here would be to provide different training materials and measure performance again.
Another situation might be where the type of training is fine, but the length of the training program is insufficient to get participants to the required level of performance. Again, the most immediate remedy would be to redesign the training program and evaluate whether performance improves.
Sadly, one of the most common problems is that the content is simply garbage.
Equally common is poor-quality delivery — especially of instructor-led training.
Often it’s both.
There are others, but I’m sure you get the idea.
So just to be clear: sometimes changing the training materials is the solution. However, in my experience, it is very, very rare (like, albino Siamese-twin wombats rare) to meaningfully improve on-the-job performance — and sustain that uptick — with a purely “training-based” solution.
And this is where so, so many organisations go wrong, spending stupendous amounts of money on training packages that I know are not going to move the dial in any way.
I shudder at the thought of just how much money is being wasted every year due to some version of the fallacy alluded to above:
Training leads to improved performance; therefore, if performance is lacking, training is the solution.
Not all training leads to improved performance. Training is just one factor influencing on-the-job performance. In fact, training might not form part of the solution at all. (*gasp!*)
And so this is where I might be able to help.
Are you confident your training budget is producing any ROI? Could you, hand on heart, look your Directors in the eye at the next Board Meeting and tell them the organisation’s training efforts (and expenditure) are directly influencing key metrics such as:
- Reduced time-to-hire AND reduced attrition rate for new hires
- Increased tenure for key personnel
- Lower risk to the critical path of big projects due to employee flight risk or unexpected illness/resignation in the absence of robust succession planning
- Decreased rates of defects and rework
- Increased customer satisfaction (and repeat business and/or referrals as a result)
- Fewer on-the-job injuries (and all the associated costs)
- Increased efficiency as a direct result of improved capability.
I see organisations spending sooooooooo much money on “training” and it’s just this insane black box of year-on-year expenditure. It often feels to me more like an exercise in faith.
Yet, weirdly, there’s always plenty of “reporting” on the training function. You can show how many programs have been delivered this financial year. Or how many participants received training on this or that. You can display graphs of completion rates for every program in the L&D library. You can even do it by role or region or any other combination of filters. You can pull assessment data demonstrating that 98% of employees, in aggregate, scored in the top percentile on end-of-course quizzes. And on and on and on.
But these are the worst kind of lagging indicators because they don’t tell you anything useful. Not a jot. Where some lagging measures can at least provide valuable insights, this kind of typical L&D data does NOTHING to move the dial for your business. Nothing.
All this extracting of data… and formatting it… and making it look pretty… and presenting it… and giving ex post hoc rationales… it’s all one big exercise in burning money.
It doesn’t actually have to be this way.
If you hold a position that cuts across L&D, HR, and Operations, I can help you transform “training” within your organisation from a cost-centre into an engine for real, measurable growth.
But… *** insert the sound of needle skidding off the LP ***
…I can only do this by working with the person who has the authority to direct cross-functional teams. Typically, that’s the CEO or General Manager. Your particular title might be different, but the head of HR, L&D, and Operations (and Safety if that’s a separate department) all need to report into you. Directly.
If you’re the L&D Manager… or HR Manager… or the HR Manager also responsible for L&D… and you’re reading this because you know there’s a problem and you’re actively searching for a solution, that’s terrific. You’re doing your organisation a great service.
All you need to do now is get your CEO to read this. If my message doesn’t jive with him or her, that saves everyone a whole lotta time and headache. Easy.
SIDENOTE: For the sake of transparency, the reason I’ll only work with the Boss Man or Boss Lady these days is that I’ve seen far too many hard-working L&D Managers and HR Managers who really do want to improve organisational capability bust their humps for months and months and months on big, expensive initiatives…. that go nowhere. People who care about making a positive impact; who lead talented teams also wanting to do great work and make a change.
Some kind of “training program” eventually gets pushed out (often with much fanfare and little support)… yet six months later, there’s no appreciable change in on-the-job performance! And, then, to add insult to injury, no way of identifying where things might have gone wrong in order to make improvements. Eek!
Nett result: the whole thing gets written off as a failure. The “training function” continues to be seen as a money sink. And, well, the whole cycle repeats itself ad infinitum.
I can’t be part of that tragedy anymore — which is why I’ll only work with a CEO (or GM, etc.) who resonates with what I’m banging on about here and genuinely wants to explore ways to fix it.
Bottom line:
- Are you directly accountable for L&D, HR, Ops, and Safety? Do the heads of these functions (however they’re structured in your org) report into you?
If the answer is NO, do not pass Go; do not collect $200.
If YES, then:
- Do you actually feel there’s a problem with the capability/on-the-job performance of your workforce and can you clearly describe it?
A niggling feeling that “things just aren’t working as well as they could be” is definitely not the best place to start. The first thing I have to do is help you correctly diagnose the problem. It’s rare for the problem to be obvious so there’s typically a bit of round-and-round until we uncover the real problem. Nothing wrong with that. Par for the course.
But… a starting-point that’s vague will require significantly more work upfront to diagnose the “first order problem” and I’m expensive so it’s not the best use of your resources, frankly.
Likewise, “room for improvement” isn’t where you’ll get the best value out of me. I’m not interested in gold-plating things that are actually working just fine. Or squeezing diminishing returns out of someone’s favourite internal hobby-horse. Or polishing turds. What gets me out of bed in the morning is solving fair dinkum business problems — and providing senior leaders with a clear path for dramatically improving organisational performance.
I doubt you’d have read this far if you didn’t think there’s a problem. However, if you can’t describe it concisely and it doesn’t elicit a sense of visceral discomfort in you, I’d suggest now is not the time for us to work together. I’m happy to talk it through and provide any general pointers or ideas I can offer, but I’d be hesitant about doing a project together; we’d just end up pissing each other off.
If YES again, contact me via LinkedIn.