CULTIVATING COMPETENCE:

Leveraging Training Tools for Measurable Results

Theres a problem in the world of training management. Despite the fact most businesses recognize training is an essential aspect of business performance, it is often undervalued: many organizations view it as something they should do in other words, to check a box or to fulfill a regulatory, standard-related, or corporate requirement. Few organizations approach training as something that will fundamentally improve overall business performance, cultivate talent from within, and ensure not only that employees have completed the courses required for their job, but are actually competent in their job functions and best positioned to improve the overall performance of the organization. But whether training is viewed as an afterthought or taken more seriously, a number of problems still pervade many organizations. Specifically: Too few businesses deeply, strategically and proactively invest in fulsome training programs. In the face of economic uncertainty, training budgets are often the rst to suer. Training regimens are too often dictated from the top, with little room for malleability, feedback and collaboration in the name of creating more eective training programs.

In spite of this, there is a growing trend among some businesses to invest more seriously in training and, critically, to shift towards bottom-up training approaches to build training programs that are measurable, effective and designed to cultivate competence among all employees. The intent of this paper is to: Discuss the negative impacts of a poor emphasis on training. Present some of the weaknesses of traditional top-down training methodologies. Review the benets of bottom-up training methodologies. Discuss the tools that support bottom-up training approaches to yield highly eective, agile training programs that actually cultivate competence.

While the virtues of the bottom-up approach to training will be focused on in this paper, it is important to realize there is no one-size-fits-all training methodology, and top-down approaches may work in some cases. Weaknesses of the traditional top-down approach will be reviewed, and while these weaknesses are pervasive, an organization may find that such an approach has been measurably effective and has worked for their organization.

Intelex Technologies Inc.

905 King Street W, Suite 600, Toronto, ON. M6K 3G9 | T: 416-599-6009 | www.Intelex.com

CULTIVATING COMPETENCE: Leveraging Training Tools for Measurable Results

TRAINING: THE NEGLECTED INVESTMENT?
The logic behind comprehensive and continuous training is sound: better-trained employees are equipped to perform their job functions at the highest possible level and less likely to make errors that negatively affect business performance. Yet while the virtues of training excellence are obvious, investments in training dont always reflect the purported value of developed training programs. Though human resource and professional development personnel are often the loudest champions of adequate and aggressive training budgets, those that hold the purse strings in any organization dont always see things the same way. A typical HR advisor, for example, might argue for a training budget that sits at about 5 to 6 per cent of payroll. In reality, the average training budget for organizations in the U.S. hovers around 2 to 2.5 per cent of payroll. Training Magazines 2011 report on the Training Top 125 revealed a median training budget of 2.9 per cent of payroll among all applicants. The top performers in the report, however, typically contributed closer to 7 per cent. Not surprisingly, many of Americas most profitable and highly regarded businesses (Verizon, Microsoft, Best Buy Co., Intel Corp., etc.) also ranked highly in the training poll, meaning they boasted the best training infrastructure, the highest training budgets (both as a figure and a percentage of payroll), and the most trainers. But as far as commitments to training investments go, these are the exceptional performers. Most organizations are inclined to minimize the financial burden of training, and this dynamic only gets worse in periods of economic uncertainty.

TRAINING IN TOUGH TIMES

If analysts are correct, though the recent economic downturn may be winding down, the impact the recession has had on operations has barely begun to take shape. Consider, for instance, that training budgets are typically the hardest hit expenditure in turbulent economic times or when corporate purse strings are pulled a little more tightly. The effects of a reduced training budget might not be evident immediately, but over time will show through cracks in product and service quality. A widely cited survey by learning management consulting firm Expertus in early 2009 confirmed what many suspected might occur in that year: training budgets plummeted as businesses launched preemptive measures to mitigate the anticipated effects of the economic downturn. According to the survey, which included 84 training professionals across 19 industries, nearly half (48 per cent) of respondents indicated they expected to see training budgets fall in 2009, up from 41 per cent in 2008. This trend continued into 2010 and 2011 as indicated by a recent survey of 600 private and public sector organizations by the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD). It indicated 43 per cent of organizations saw funding for learning and development drop in 2010, and 42 per cent anticipated further cuts over the following year (compared to only one in 10 who thought training budgets would increase).

THE COST OF INEFFECTIVE TRAINING

While the worth of a training program isnt necessarily designated by the dollar value specified in a training budget, training investments often reflect the importance an organization places on training. Compromised, ineffective or inert training programs have myriad consequences, with direct impacts on: Employee morale and condence. Companywide eciency. Customer satisfaction. Product and service quality. Lost time, injury and illness rates, and more.

Intelex Technologies Inc.

905 King Street W, Suite 600, Toronto, ON. M6K 3G9 | T: 416-599-6009 | www.Intelex.com

CULTIVATING COMPETENCE: Leveraging Training Tools for Measurable Results

DIFFERENT TRAINING APPROACHES
Budget commitments aside, the effectiveness of a training program is directly impacted by the organization-wide methodology used to train new and existing employees. While others exist, two methods are most commonly adopted to train employees: Top-down: Often considered the traditional approach to training, top-down training features training regimens and requirements that are dictated by the upper echelons of an organization. Bottom-up: An emerging philosophy in training methodology, bottom-up approaches are exible, agile systems that rely on collaboration, feedback and continuous improvement.

With the right metrics, evaluation tools and feedback mechanisms, either approach can be used to positive effect. But in the 21st centurys economic climate of increasing innovation, creativity and competition, the top-down approach is beginning to show its age.

INHERENT WEAKNESSES OF TOP-DOWN TRAINING

The most common and traditional approach to training management is also, on the surface, the most logical: HR representatives, executives and other senior parties within an organization define the content, structure and objectives of training programs while managers and supervisors ensure new and existing employees complete requisite courses and fulfill training requirements. This approach is, for many reasons, the most immediately appealing to senior management and human resources. Quite sensibly, it allows executive teams to structure the training regimens that, in principle, will endow employees with the skills and knowledge they need to perform their jobs to the best of their ability. In actuality, while this approach enables an organization to confidently meet regulatory, corporate, or standards-driven (e.g. ISO 9001) training requirements, it does not necessarily improve performance and cultivate employee competence. While an appreciable measure of simplicity is inherent in top-down approach, it is accompanied by a number of potential and business-critical weaknesses: LACK OF CROSS-TEAM COMMUNICATION Just as quality management pioneer W. Edward Deming argued that thorough quality control is best cultivated when all contributors have a sense of how their actions play into the bigger picture, organizations are better equipped to achieve high-level business goals when all individuals and teams have an understanding of how their individual and team efforts contribute to the organizations success. Isolated, narrow perspectives fail to give employees a sense of meaning in their jobs, and fail to motivate individuals to incorporate a sense of their organizations mission into their day-to-day responsibilities. But cultivating a sense of purpose begins with training, and when training programs are dictated from the top, limited to narrowly defined tasks and insensitive to how teams work together and how an operation functions as a whole, cross-team communication is inhibited and employees arent as motivated to work together to achieve organizational goals. PROTRACTED MANAGEMENT OF CHANGE Any growing or established organization will have to handle change as departments expand or are restructured, as employees and senior staff come and go, and as improvements to existing structures are identified and implemented. Top-down training approaches ill-equip businesses to handle changes, especially in large organizations where a series of hierarchical tiers must be surmounted before essential training modifications are implemented.

Intelex Technologies Inc.

905 King Street W, Suite 600, Toronto, ON. M6K 3G9 | T: 416-599-6009 | www.Intelex.com

CULTIVATING COMPETENCE: Leveraging Training Tools for Measurable Results

STAGNATION OF CREATIVITY Employees directly exposed to the processes they execute day after day are the most likely to devise more creative ways to improve and streamline the systems they interact with, since they interact with those systems more closely than others in the organization. And in most cases, lessons learned and identified process improvements can be mapped directly back to training and leveraged to better prepare incoming personnel to do their jobs more effectively. Yet with top-down training approaches, new, useful ideas face a panoply of organizational hurdles that must be overcome before they can be institutionalized and rolled into new training. Not only does this inhibit the pace or even existence of continuous improvement in training management, it stifles the cultivation of creativity as employees are dissuaded from proposing new ideas because they expect they will be met with business-as-usual resistance. In addition to the above-mentioned disadvantages, a top-down training methodology also tends to stagnate the pool of talent an organization can draw on to improve training. And critically, top-down approaches often lack built-in mechanisms to ensure employees are both trained and competent in their job functions. In essence, it is the difference between employees being taught how to push a button and actually applying valuable lessons in their day-to-day responsibilities in order to fulfill an organizational goal.

BENEFITS OF BOTTOM-UP TRAINING

As opposed to a top-down methodology, a bottom-up approach to training management relies on creativity, collaboration and communication, as well as a degree of organizational flexibility and agility. Essentially, under this approach, executive management defines high-level corporate and training goals. Smaller teams are responsible for defining targets that contribute to these goals and configuring training regimens accordingly. Team leads and managers are accountable to their supervisors, but teams themselves are graced with the flexibility to adjust training and procedural approaches on the basis of both their up-close-and-personal knowledge of the processes they are exposed to most intimately and regularly, and the fresh insights that accompany new additions to the team who are recently trained or in the midst of training. The net result is teams, departments and the organization at large are able to achieve defined targets and goals more effectively and expeditiously. In spite of the apparent benefits, bottom-up approaches can be difficult to adopt. Firstly, while in effect bottom-up approaches do not necessarily relinquish senior management of actual control, they often generate the perception of requiring managers, directors and executive staff to cede control. Also, the migration to a bottom-up approach from an entrenched, top-down approach will often generate an amount of institutional friction as it represents a degree of cultural change. In some cases, it can be difficult to convince established management/executives that a bottom-up approach ought to be tried. That stated, the benefits of bottom-up training approaches are vast and include: Common Goals: Since trainees and trainers are, by the nature of bottom-up training, driven by targets that contribute to organization-wide goals, they are more inclined to appreciate their role within the organization and understand how training relates to the accomplishment of organizational objectives. Enhanced Communication: Bottom-up approaches thrive on communication. With top-down training approaches, trainers and trainees are handed sets and subsets of tasks that, in isolation, dont engender a coherent sense of where a department or organization is headed and why. However, when those tasks are framed by targets, which in turn are framed by goals, employees are encouraged to go out of their comfort zone, interact with individuals from other teams and departments within the context of common goals, adopting more eective and holistic approaches as a result. This dynamic bleeds into training as trainers and teams craft more focused, nuanced training programs that are driven by big-picture thinking. Continuous Improvement: Bottom-up methodologies invite all aected parties to provide feedback and proposed improvements on training programs to ensure they are as eective and ecient as possible. This include not only feedback from existing employees who may have informed perspectives and thoughtful suggestions; it also includes

Intelex Technologies Inc.

905 King Street W, Suite 600, Toronto, ON. M6K 3G9 | T: 416-599-6009 | www.Intelex.com

CULTIVATING COMPETENCE: Leveraging Training Tools for Measurable Results

fresh insights from those who are new to the organization and have recently completed training or, in some cases, are in the midst of training. While obviously all suggestions from a new hire would not be immediately incorporated into an established program, the potential value of an outside perspective, unencumbered of the corporate myopia that tends to aict individuals and teams that have worked within an organization for protracted durations, and this is accomplished by leveraging individual talent more eectively. Improved Morale: No successful business leader should need to be convinced of the virtue of a high level of employee morale. It boosts productivity, eciency, retention, innovation and, ultimately, the bottom line. Bottomup training approaches engender improved morale in three critical ways: Employees realize their insights and suggestions will be heard and valued; they will make the eort to communicate suggestions since they wont see a futility in attempting to foster change; and they will have a greater level of job satisfaction by understanding how their work contributes to the whole.

While the benefits of a bottom-up training approach are clear, recall that the virtue of a top-down approach is simplicity. Bottom-up approaches can be more difficult to implement and manage, given they feature an array of insights, suggestions, proposed changes and approvals. However, training management software tools exist to streamline and prioritize information and also minimize the financial burden of any approach to training management.

LEVERAGING SOFTWARE FOR MORE EFFECTIVE TRAINING

As with any complex business process, a streamlined software solution is capable of minimizing the associated burden on staff, resources and capital. This is no different with bottom-up training management solutions. Whether a business has made a leap to bottom-up management from an entrenched top-down mode, or is still training employees from a top-down perspective, management will have to deal with an enormous amount of information: namely, the input of new and existing staff members, the progress of training of individual employees, training test scores, scheduling training courses, and evaluating employees to ensure actual competence has been achieved. These are all ongoing tasks that can be left to software to automate and streamline, so that managers and supervisors can focus their time and energy streamlining training processes, improving training programs and, quite critically, ensuring employee competence. For example, consider a company that has recently hired a batch of new employees in one department. Without a streamlined solution in place, a manager or supervisor would be preoccupied with the minutiae of training management: assigning new employees to a course, scheduling the course, ensuring the employee has taken his or her course, and other mundane activities. These are all basic actions that can be streamlined and automated with a robust training management solution: once an employee record is created, that employee can be immediately assigned to a workgroup within a centralized, accessible and email-integrated, web-based system, such as Intelex. Once assigned to a workgroup, the system will automatically ensure the employee has requisite training courses assigned to him or her, has taken all necessary training courses, and has met all training requirements. Automatic escalating email notifications alert superiors as training requirements are met or left unfulfilled passed deadlines. Suddenly a manager or supervisor is free to focus on the more relevant elements of training: building competence and continuously improving the integrity of training programs and employee performance.

QUIZ BUILDING FOR COMPETENCE

One way to ensure employee competence is to build customized quizzes that can be modified on the fly, and improved on the basis of current, relevant feedback including the fresh insights of recent hires referred to earlier in this document. Intelex, for example, offers a training quiz construction tool that enables managers, trainers, supervisors and others, to create, add to, and modify existing training quizzes. This ensures questions are always relevant and applicable, and because questions are randomized and pulled from a larger database, employees always face a new subset of skill- and competence-building scenarios. Analytics can then be assessed, analyzed and rolled into revised training programs in

Intelex Technologies Inc.

905 King Street W, Suite 600, Toronto, ON. M6K 3G9 | T: 416-599-6009 | www.Intelex.com

CULTIVATING COMPETENCE: Leveraging Training Tools for Measurable Results

the name of continual improvement. To illustrate the latter point, imagine a training question database that featured one question trained employees repeatedly failed to answer correctly, or was associated with metrics that, over time, didnt reflect the actuality of what was occurring in day-to-day operations (for example, though trained employees indicated 95 per cent of the time that they would, as required, wash their boots before exiting a quarantined workspace, most of the time employees failed to wash their boots before exiting the workspace). With a fully integrated system, the actuality of what occurs in day-to-day operations can be mapped back to training records to ensure employee competence has actually been achieved.

CONTINUOUSLY IMPROVING TRAINING PROGRAMS

But critically and to the very heart of bottom-up training approaches a comprehensive software system should be capable of highlighting chinks in the armour of a training program, providing immediate opportunities to adjust the system to eliminate weaknesses as well as account for opportunities for improvement. Some Intelex clients have been equipped with a very simple scalable tool that allows businesses of any size and scope to build web-based forms that allow interested employees to submit change requests and suggestions to help improve the integrity of training programs. Succinct dashboards with real-time metrics allow managers and supervisors to hone in on the top 20 or 10 per cent of training components employees most frequently sought changes with or provided suggestions related to. This enables trainers to draw upon the the insights, knowledge and will of employees to implement changes proposed and agreed upon by a critical mass of relevant personnel, thereby continuously improving the integrity and performance of their training programs, from the bottom to the top.

CONCLUSION
Most businesses view training as an afterthought or simply something to be fulfilled to meet corporate, regulatory or standardsdriven requirements. However, streamlined training management represents the greatest opportunity for companywide continuous improvement, across all processes and through all departments. Though investments in training tend to slip in the face of economic uncertainty, best-in-class companies know training spells success. Though top-down methodologies have dominated corporate training in recent years, the emergence of bottom-up training presents greater opportunities to continuously improve business performance, boost employee morale, and ensure actual, measurable employee competence.

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Intelex Technologies Inc.

905 King Street W, Suite 600, Toronto, ON. M6K 3G9 | T: 416-599-6009 | www.Intelex.com