How can training and development programs benefit leaders and professionals in your organization? By helping your team do the following:
- Re-connect to the mission of your organization
- Expand employees’ understanding of each others’ roles
- Identify and build on team goals
- Raise awareness regarding individual communication styles to improve teamwork
- Enhance communication across all levels, including colleagues, leaders, and customers
- Improve conflict resolution skills
- Further examine and internalize diversity concepts
- Strengthen morale
- Increase employee retention
- Develop loyalty to your organization
- Create a healthy work environment
Overcoming resistance to training and development
Some team members are resistant because they may have the following beliefs about training and development:
- Takes time away from their work unnecessarily
- Does not connect to their day-to-day tasks
- Is not relevant to the mission of the organization
- Lacks support from leadership
- Highlights their weaknesses and shortcomings
- Results and outcomes are not supported by the organizational “system”— (in which case systems need to evolve and behaviors will follow)
In addition, some employees:
- Cannot see how improving certain skills can help them better perform their day-to-day tasks
- Do not want to look at themselves—preferring to maintain status quo
- Want to be including in the training, design, and development of programs—and may feel slighted because they are not asked
- Feel forced into training and development programs
- Do not fully understand the training and development concepts being offered
- Cannot see the ROI regarding program outcomes
You can help employees see the value of training and development
Before sending employees to a training and development program, you can do the following:
- Listen to employees’ concerns regarding attendance and participation
- Explain how the program is relevant to the organization’s mission and the team’s goals
- Communicate the value of improving knowledge and skills as they relate to job performance
- Link the program to performance of day-to-day tasks
- Connect training and development to improving customer satisfaction
- Get buy-in from leadership and other team members
- Allow employees to attend and fully participate in the program
When employees return to their jobs, you can do the following:
- Ask employees how to apply new concepts, knowledge, and skills to their work
- Remove obstacles to improving work flow
- Recognize the value in what employees have learned
- Reward and recognize ideas and suggestions resulting from program attendance
- Acknowledge when employees apply concepts on the job
- Reward improved performance
- Connect applied training and development concepts to success of the team
- Give employees feedback
- Communicate, communicate, communicate
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