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Lesson 7: Education and Training
Training
Virtually anyone who has been employed has been involved in some type of training. It may have occurred the very first day when you were shepherded through company orientation. Or it might have occurred a few weeks subsequent to your arrival when you were sent to a school to learn a new skill. It might have been a required class that taught everyone about the new health benefits system. Or it might have occurred when you were paired with a fellow employee in an on-the-job training opportunity.
In other words, there is little in this chapter that you will not recognize from personal experience. In this lesson you’ll have a chance to more fully appreciate the scope of the issues associated with this common organizational practice.
Training as Chicken Soup
We should perhaps provide one caveat in focusing on education as a crucial element in managing human resources. Too often the first reaction to any organizational problem is someone blurting out, “We should do some training!” The presumption is that, much like my grandmother’s chicken soup, training is a panacea that will solve all ills. In truth, training has certain virtues. Consider its application to ethics in the workplace. A well-constructed program can help develop ethical awareness, or in some cases hone skills associated with applying ethical decision making to specific dilemmas. Training and related educational efforts can help staff understand and adopt those ethical standards the company deems consistent with its mission and values. In addition, ethics education can also provide participants with the courage to contest the formal standards articulated within the organization that have questionable moral consequences. (In other words, it can help an employee decide to become the whistleblower.)
Nonetheless, by itself a well-constructed educational effort is but one way to solve a problem. If Human Resource managers couple great training with ineffective performance management, flawed selection processes and compensation systems that reward bad behaviors, the salutatory effect of the training will diminish as the other processes overwhelm the initial messages.
This set of observations suggests that training is not always the appropriate intervention. If anything, it might provide a false sense of accomplishment when the “illness” really requires a different remedy.
PROFESSOR: I often think that sometimes training is considered what I analogize to the chicken soup of organizational development. Every time there's a problem, somebody says, we ought to do some training. It reminded me of my grandmother when I was growing up. And, honestly, she thought chicken soup would cure everything.
So I remember, years ago, I was involved with an organization that called me one day and said, we need some training. We have supervisors that aren't doing a good job managing time and attendance for employees. So I said, fine. I came down, and they decided I would do one day of training with 30 people.
Now it turns out, I discovered, they had 900 supervisors. In my back of my mind, I'm wondering how that's going to really make a difference. But in any case, it was a day's work. I'm going down, doing the training. During the lunch hour, I was talking to the supervisor-- I guess it was the HR director at the time.
I said, I'm just curious. This is a very large organization. People work 24/7 in this organization-- three shifts, seven days a week. How do people report an absence? How do they let you know that they're not going to be there?
And the HR director said, well, we have a switchboard. And they have to call the switchboard and leave a message. And the switchboard operator will relay the message to the supervisor. And I said, you know what? I have an idea.
Why don't you do this. Change the policy. Because if that employee, who is going to call off sick, had to call the supervisor him or herself, I got to guarantee you, people who are just calling off just to take a day off are less likely to do it. I just read some research on that, as a matter of fact, and I was trying to connect and give people an option here.
He says, a great idea. So I go back home, and five years later, get a phone call from the same office saying, by the way, we have a problem with attendance and leave. We need you to come down and do a training program for 30 supervisors. So I go down, and I'm at lunch with the human resource manager again.
And I asked him, how do you report attendance? And he said, we have a switchboard, and the employees are supposed to contact the switchboard, leave a message, and the switchboard operator will contact the supervisor. When I thought about this experience, it reminded me of what the point I made early on-- the chicken soup issue. That, somehow, just doing some training is going to matter. It's going to make a difference.
The reality here is that training can't simply be a solution for everything. It's part of an array of options one would use to solve problems. So when you go to work somewhere, and someone says, we're doing training, you might want to ask, for what purpose?
Is it going to work? Does it matter? Because, very often, very frankly, it's just simply a way, particularly, in worlds where people are being asked to comply with regulations-- it's a way to make people and external folks feel that you're doing something. And sometimes, it doesn't amount to any more than chicken soup.