How to impact employee performance without training

If your organisation does not actively involve its workforce in assessing top strategies, you are likely foregoing an important channel of business success.

As a leader or manager, odds are you’re looking for these outcomes when training your employees: Better thinking, learning, on the job application, job performance and better customer satisfaction.

Putting employees through training courses sounds like the only way to achieve these results. But training, particularly with external providers, is a heavy drain on budget. Plus, it’s tedious at best to measure ROI and how training impacts employee performance.

I’ve been part of many leadership conversations that end up with the same conclusion: performance improvement is not clearly established after training and there’s no clear evidence of ‘transfer of training’, i.e. applied learning on the job. If you’re wondering if this is a legitimate issue, research over the years strongly indicates a transfer of training deficit.

• Only 10% of training expenditure leads to positive transfer of training (Georgenson, 1982)
• Only 10% to 20% of training gets transferred to the job (Baldwin & Ford, 1988)
• Factors other than training programs, such as individual, motivational and environmental, are responsible for learning applied on the job (Cheng & Ho, 1999)
• Training is only very weakly related to financial outcomes (Tharenou, P., et. al., 2007)
• Trainers are not required to have a thorough knowledge of transfer practices for achieving a level of professional certification (Hutchins & Burke, 2007)
• The haphazard approach to tracking training explains the failure of hoteliers to expect accountability for the investment into employee development (Kline & Harris, 2008)
• There has been a slow but steady decline in instructor-led classroom training from 61% to 54% since 2010 (American Society for Training and Development, 2013)

I do not mean to eliminate training as we know it. Training has its place. There are numerous research studies that show training benefits as long as trainees themselves are self-motivated and have high expectations out of their own abilities, a.k.a. ‘self-efficacy’.

There is however a better way to achieve success when self-efficacy is low. But it means eliminating the traditional content design and delivery model. It involves employees providing feedback in interactive sessions that address customer experience. Your employees are the only experts required in the room.

I’d like to illustrate this technique with a real client story.

An HR Manager’s chief complaint was that this particular electronic retail company’s product training had been ineffective thus far. Their last mystery shop exercise revealed that Sales Assistants were failing to answer customer queries adequately.

So I get a note from the HR Manager one evening asking me, “Can you design a better training program for us? My CEO expects our Sales Assistants to answer customer questions the way we’ve trained them to do.” As our conversation continued, I found that their training methods were typical and evaluations clearly showed no application on the job. I told her, “Another training program isn’t gonna work.”

I turned her thinking around by suggesting an experiment, based on a new paradigm.

“Why don’t you gather all sales personnel and tell them to play the role of your ideal customer. Now, let your CEO be the Sales Assistant and answer common product-related questions. Then, just sit back and watch what happens.”

I helped her with some rules of how the session should be organised, designed and recorded, and what her role as moderator was to be.

As the story goes, several things happened.

1) The CEO got schooled on the toughest product questions his sales team faced on a daily basis. He realised that customer questions were no longer the same as when he first developed and brought the product to market over 10 years ago. Their old training system had not kept up with the sweeping demands of new and smarter customers.

2) The sales team lit up with amazing product design ideas. Once the CEO opened up to his own expert Sales Assistants, he saw the value of engaging them. He didn’t need to pay sales trainers for more sales techniques when his own experts were telling him how to make a product that sells itself. The facilitation skills of the HR Manager increased trust levels to new heights and a new culture was born right there.

3) A root cause was uncovered. One of the reasons the sales team were ‘not answering customer questions adequately’ was because they were randomly pocket searched by store managers in the middle of the day, as per policy. This grave mistrust towards line management created a direct dip in customer experience. Leaders often lose sight of a bigger purpose when requiring their employees to do exactly as they are told. Employee feedback can get leaders back into the fold and that’s exactly what happened here.

4) The retail sales process, which was part of the internal training program for many years, got scrapped. A new sales process was reinvented together with the CEO right there in the room addressing critical points in daily customer interactions.

This famous retail giant has since reduced its investment in content-based training and has made it HR’s mandate to develop feedback systems throughout their business. The client and his/her team are always the experts every single time for every single goal.

‘If your organisation does not actively involve its workforce in assessing top strategies, you are likely foregoing an important channel of business success’.

What if you spent your time developing feedback mechanisms instead of investing in the next big training program? Not only are you guaranteed better business strategies and therefore results, you are creating learning and development from within.

Engagement, communication, trust, brand excitement and better sales are now consistently observed results, all without having had any financial investment to begin with. So the next time you are looking at a new training course, ask yourself if your internal experts might do better in a forum, which surfaces tough work situations that actually happen.

(Extract from an article written by Mubeena Mohammed. She is a global thought leader based in Dubai with a background in Philosophy and Organisational Psychology. She has pioneered a new methodology that transforms teams without training or experts in her book).