The Cost of Using the Wrong Tool

As I mentioned before, painting the picture of the tools you can provide a potential team member to grow within the organization once they come onboard can play a significant role in the recruiting process. Failing to make good on those promises though, sooner than later, will be a direct contributor to the profitability that’s killed through high turnover and low employee engagement. Let’s face it, we wouldn’t want to work for someone who doesn’t live up to their word so we can’t really expect anyone else to - regardless of how “good” the reasons are… But even when we do invest in training our team members, we can’t just do it blindly and expect to get measurable results!

An article from BusinessWire, a Berkshire Hathaway Company, called Employers Wasting Billions on the Wrong Training shared this:

Across the world, $130 billion is spent on learning and development programs. Research shows that only 25% of it is judged to be effective. The waste is attributed to a range of factors including the quality of delivery and uninspiring content. It is also likely that many staff are being trained to develop skills they already possess. Other training may be on areas that are not critical to performance.

If that’s even close to correct, close to $100 billion is wasted. I won’t speak for you, but that makes me think back to being told to clean my plate when I was a kid because there were starving kids in other countries! Well, maybe that reference is a bit of a stretch but $100 billion seems like a ton of money - especially when that likely doesn’t come close to all the profitability that could truly be captured if the right training is provided instead!

If you think back to some of the thoughts I challenged you to consider related to promotions and succession planning, it’s not hard to recognize how needs for different types of training can vary from role to role. Some of those variances are clear; I can’t imagine a company sending someone starting in an entry level position through an executive level course on business operations. But even when we have a relatively clear idea of the specific skills a team member needs to develop to grow in their current role or to grow into the next role, attending a training session and developing a skill are two VERY different things! And we still haven’t guaranteed that it translates into changed behavior…

Doing nothing has its own costs and doing the wrong thing kills plenty of profitability too! If we’re going to realize a measurable return on investment - earning engagement, increasing retention, and driving productivity - we need to be sure we’re providing not just the type of training each team member needs, we also need to be sure that training is delivered in a way that they can absorb it and apply it. And that’s rarely something we can pull straight off a shelf so we’ll pick up there next time…