Estimated reading time: 5 minutes

The Right Approach: I Hear the Train A Comin'

Training is often an afterthought in many organizations, and the longer a company has been in business, the more this seems to apply. Over the past couple of decades, it has been amazing to observe that the biggest offenders of this are the companies that overuse the sound bite, “Our most important assets are our people.” When you dig into the process and peel back the onion, their commitment to training is not commensurate with that statement.

Don’t Substitute Time-of-Service
One of the keystones of a world-class organization is the depth and breadth of its training program. Training can be defined as learning provided to improve performance on the present job. A well-managed program can be the differentiator between merely average and outstanding performance. The beauty of training is that it applies equally to any industry, business, and technology. Of course, the higher the degree of difficulty in the product or service, the more important training becomes.

A very common mistake that an organization typically makes when assessing the state of its training program is to substitute time-of-service for formal training. It has been my observation that the longer the average employee's tenure at a company, the less formal the training program. When you think about the reasons that drive this correlation, it certainly makes sense. Owners should be extremely proud of a long-term employee culture. However, not taking full advantage of this expertise can be a fatal mistake, especially for small businesses.

A typical scenario is walking through a manufacturing facility and stopping at a work center staffed by a highly skilled operator. The management escort quickly says, “Stanley, here is our department lead and one of our most experienced lathe operators.”

When asked to see Stanley’s training records, the manager states, “Stanley is our trainer, and all new employees apprentice with him before becoming certified to run a lathe.”

When asked again to see Stanley’s training records, the manager says, “Well, uh, Stanley was grandfathered in since he has been running this lathe for 30 years. He certainly doesn’t need to be trained.”

While Stanley may not need to be trained on the operation of the lathe, there are other “company-specific” aspects of training. Whether having a certificate from an outside training service or another company, technical education, or performance testing, there should be something on file to verify the operator’s competency. Experienced people like Stanley are the greatest asset to any company’s training program and should be the foundation the program is built around.

Tribal Knowledge
In this scenario, both the company and its employees tend to view training negatively, even insulting, like some form of remedial action. This perception couldn’t be further from the truth. One of the greatest advantages of training in this situation is to capture the tribal knowledge of the highly skilled workforce. What I mean by tribal knowledge is the entirety of people like Stanley with expertise, experience, tricks of the trade, and the idiosyncrasies of the job that have been learned over the past number of years that are probably not documented anywhere. Preserving this tribal knowledge and turning it into a training competitive advantage is critical to a company’s long-term survival.

This particular problem is compounded by high employee turnover during times of uncertain economic environments. This logic becomes fatal when long-term employees begin retiring, and that tribal knowledge is lost forever. It has become all too common to witness companies cut costs by offering early retirement (or worse) to long-term experienced employees so that they can replace them with younger, inexpensive new employees.

What these companies fail to realize until it is too late is that this strategy severely backfires as decades of experience and tribal knowledge walk out the door with the employees. Many of the businesses that have not survived recent economic cycles were companies that had been successful for 30-plus years until several “Stanleys” began to retire. Others who have survived have never fully captured all the tribal knowledge that left with their best employees.

Once you begin to peel back the layers, it is amazing to note just how many outcomes (both positive and negative) in any business can ultimately be traced, in some fashion, back to training.

Training Records
Ironically, the companies that have the best-trained workforce many times have the weakest system. Most companies do a tremendous amount of training but do not take credit for it. A common mantra you will hear me say is, “If you can’t prove it, it didn’t happen.” If you take the time to flowchart all your processes, you will be surprised by the amount of informal training that takes place daily that is not recorded in any way. It is critical to develop a simple method of documenting all training that takes place; in other words, you need a training record. Whether part of a training software solution or a simple paper document, complete a training record at every opportunity. Every sit-down with an employee is a potential training moment (new procedure revision, internal defects, customer returns, process changes, etc.).

Don’t worry about creating huge employee training files; customers like to see lots of training evidence for the people who are making their products. A cautionary note: As with pretty much anything, the more complicated you make your training program and the documentation process, the higher the potential for failure.

Some companies fall into the habit of overtraining, for example, performing annual training on every work instruction. This is a significant expense in terms of time and money and is not very effective. How much effort do you think employees put into reviewing several work instructions they have read many times as part of the company’s “read and understand” annual training? The better solution is to do a good job of the initial training and then only retrain when the work instruction changes, or if there is a performance issue or a finding in an internal audit. Then, don’t just rely on the employee to read it independently. Sit down and review the changes or specifics that triggered the retraining. This is a much more efficient use of time and is ultimately more effective.

“It all has to do with the training; you can do a lot if you're properly trained.” Are these the words of a modern corporate training officer attempting to motivate her workforce? Hardly. Elizabeth II, Queen of Great Britain and Northern Ireland made this salient proclamation over 50 years ago. What has held over the ages is not a secret; people perform better when properly trained.

This column originally appeared in the March 2024 issue of PCB007 Magazine.