3 Steps to Successful Employee Training
Educate, Inspire & Equip: Help Your Team Do the Amazing Job They Want to Do
One of the true joys of my business over the last 30 years has been working with the employees of my client companies, helping them succeed by using the principles and concepts I have created.
As we all know, many employee training efforts fail. It’s hard to change behavior. One of my goals over the years has been to find a way for training efforts not only to work, but to create sustainable change. In this article, I share the formula that I have seen work time and again.
Here’s what it is: “Educate, Inspire & Equip.”
Employee training often stops after the first step, education. Once employees learn, it’s important that they are inspired and motivated to use that learning on the job. And, to make education and inspiration stick, employees must be equipped with the tools to use what they’ve learned, on the job.
Let’s look more deeply at each of these three elements.
Educate: Learning Is Not a One-Way Street
Any teacher will tell you that educating requires more than transmitting information, just like marketing requires more than advertising, and sales requires more than a pitch.
Last year, a new client asked me to look at their training videos. They had invested a significant amount in building a learning management system and loading it with content. However, every piece of content was a didactic, one-way monologue from one of the company’s senior executives. Not surprisingly, employees were not absorbing what the training intended.
People learn better when they access information from multiple modes and tie it into their existing body of knowledge. For example, students are more likely to absorb the material and learn when they:
read some material
hear from the instructor
hear from fellow students
talk in a class with both the instructor and other students
interact with multiple people in addition to the instructor
write about the material
I run a lot of workshops, which are always interactive and encourage audience participation, for the reasons shown above. Here’s my checklist that indicates a successful learning environment:
Is virtually everyone engaged and paying attention? (Yes, it’s really easy to know when someone isn’t!)
Are most of the participants involved in the group discussion?
How vibrant is the interaction between participants, both in the session itself and in breakout groups?
Are most people taking notes?
Are there “callbacks,” i.e., do participants refer back to things that either the other participants or I said earlier in the session?
Learning is a participatory activity.
Look for ways to include multiple learning modalities in your employee training. And if you have any one-way training efforts, shelve them.
Inspire: Embrace Meaning & Share It
How many times in your life have you learned something that seemed valuable at the time, and then never used that learning?
Your life is busy. You have more information in your brain than you can possibly use. You prioritize. You focus on things that matter to you. Same with your employees.
Inspiration is one of the key elements of training that is often left out. It can be daunting to imbue something with meaning and inspire your employees. But your team won’t embrace their training unless you embrace meaning.
I’ve found a few tricks for injecting inspiration into training. The simplest way is to use the interactive tools I suggested above. If people participate in something, it’s more likely to mean something to them than if they just observe or hear it. Think about the difference between listening to music and dancing while you are listening.
Another way to infuse inspiration into learning is through personal relevance. One reason I learn as much as possible about my audience before a training session or workshop is so I can make it about them, and not just about my material. This personal relevance happens at many levels:
Can I be relevant to their industry?
Can I be relevant to their company?
Can I be relevant to their job role?
And, importantly, can I be relevant to them personally?
One way I’ve found to increase a sense of personal relevance is to have employees in similar job roles work together to define ways to implement important concepts in their jobs. For example, a manufacturer I worked with had received numerous complaints about the process of working with their service department on repairs, with most complaints focused on missing deadlines and customers not knowing the status of their repair. In one 90-minute session, the service team came up with five easy-to-implement improvements. And, because they felt ownership for the ideas they had created, they were also inspired to implement those ideas.
Additionally, employees are inspired when they see how their work has an impact beyond the tasks they do on the job. I often had executives say to me, “My employees just care about their paycheck. They don’t care about what we do.” My response is clear: “Then that’s your fault. You haven’t helped them make the connection between their work and the impact they have.” I’m convinced that most people - especially those you want working for you - will be inspired when they see the personal impact of their work.
Equip: Everyone Needs the Right Tools for the Job
Even if you do a great job with education and with creating inspiration, you still may not be able to turn your training efforts into on-the-job reality. To succeed, you need to equip your employees with the tools to implement what you’ve taught them.
At the most basic level, companies often fail at equipping employees to implement what they learn in training. They don’t supply the necessary resources, such as support, time or equipment to do their jobs properly. I remember one project manager of a construction company telling me it took two months to receive his company laptop after his onboarding training on the company’s systems.
More frequently, employees aren’t equipped to implement what they learn because training is rich on concepts and light on specific action steps. Too often companies make their employees do the “heavy lifting” of determining the specific steps to implement concepts they are taught in training.
In my Ditch the Pitch program, we teach people to “build customer relationships one conversation at a time.” We provide learners with six Ditch the Pitch Habits, and each habit has three specific practices.
For example, one tool we give learners is to “Obey the One Paragraph Rule,” which teaches them to explain concepts to customers by leaving breaks in every paragraph’s worth of information, so that the customer doesn’t get confused, overwhelmed or disinterested. Consistently, learners share stories with me of times they’ve used the One Paragraph Rule successfully, and how this is helping them conduct customer conversations with confidence and effectiveness.
(Download a digital copy of our Ditch the Pitch Pocket Guide HERE, which includes these habits and practices.)
Are You Ready to Educate, Inspire & Equip?
What percentage of your training budget actually changes behavior? If you’re like most companies, that number is too low. Use the Educate, Inspire and Equip framework for your employee training, and you’ll see results. Your employees will be more effective; your dollars will be well spent, and your company will enjoy the benefits of all of the training that you do.
I help companies develop training programs using this framework—let's talk if you're seeing training investments that aren't sticking.