Turning Training into Performance

Have you ever tracked how many employees are sent to training every year? We’re probably about to be stoned here, but the fact is that most likely many of these are just a waste of time. HR specialists work with a variety of training programs (some of them organized indoors, some are bought from the training organizations) mostly because “every company needs to have employee training”. It is even supposed to help with talents attraction and retention. But have many of them evaluated the payback of the training programs?

How much a training really costs

It’s not only what you pay the training facilities and various organizations that undertake to teach your staff to be magicians. Don’t forget to add up:

• how much you pay your employee during these days;
• how much the transport and accommodation cost (in case he’s lucky enough to travel somewhere far for training);
• how much you pay someone who replaces her during her studies;
• how much you pay your HR specialists who spent time choosing the appropriate training program and arranging the participation.

A tidy sum of money, isn’t it? Which is why it is really important to make sure you pay for something your company can’t live without.

How much a training could bring to the company

It’s all about numbers. Suppose an ordinary grumpy goblin in the Gringotts Wizarding Bank (right, you heard it) can open 10 accounts a day resulting in 100 galleons of profit. After he’s sent to the social skills training, that cost the Bank 12,000 galleons, he becomes an appealing and somewhat cute person, providing more people are eager to open bank accounts. This gets the goblin to bring 150 galleons of profit daily. The difference of 50 galleons per day is what the training brought to the company here and it’ll take 240 days to pay off (roughly a whole year). Starting from the following year only the Wizarding Bank will truly benefit from the training.

We oftentimes don’t have the KPI defined for a specific position or a specific job, and thus it is not that easy to calculate the true benefit of the training. And if a training has given an employee some set of new skills it’s even more difficult.

How to turn the training into performance

Maybe you won’t be able to calculate the profits right away when your employee acquires some valuable and expensive knowledge during the training. But you can (and you definitely should) help her turn it into performance. A whole concept of assignmentology was born to help us turn training into performance. Here is a short step-by-step instruction on how to implement it:

1. Discuss with an employee what particular skills will be beneficial for this position.

2. Choose an appropriate training program where these skills can be obtained.

3. As soon as the employee is back at work, give her an assignment that involves these new skills and knowledge.

4. Don’t wait until the assignment is completed, break it into the manageable parts to be able to make corrections on the way and analyze the intermediate results before it’s too late.

5. Assign similar tasks to the employee.

6. Go back to the beginning of the learning cycle.

Assignmentology seems to be a story written by common sense, but as all the ingenious it’s simple.

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