Why staff need training

I have stopped talking about training and started talking about performance; that's what manager's listen to," says Vodafone's David Fuller.

Not only has Fuller found a way to avoid the glazed over look people get when the word 'training' is mentioned, his title of 'manager, passionate people' stands apart from more conservative alternatives, and is fitting considering training companies are reporting heightened interest in 'soft skills' or relationship training for customer-facing sales and service employees, and for middle and senior managers.

Derek Good, managing director for workplace training firm Rapid Results, says there are three main areas of training commonly requested by New Zealand companies: IT systems; company specific products or services; and soft skills, life skills, communications and selling. Good says soft skill training includes all those areas not typically covered off by universities, and is highly rated by today's companies who want people trained for customer focus.

"We [even] have councils and government departments looking to provide their customers with a really good experience," says Good.

Fuller says Vodafone runs generic induction programmes as well as tailored training for specific team functions. For example, Vodafone recently found it necessary to increase communication and negotiation skill training for staff in its inbound call centre as well as team managers connected to the call centre.

"On inbound calls there is a level of negotiation that is transactional in nature - staff may not get to talk to the customer again so they need to be skilled at spotting a need and meeting it. This type of training carries through to high level account management relationship skills," says Fuller.

Vodafone is not one of those companies that plan and budget for staff training on an annual basis and then forgets about it, says Fuller.

"Training budgets need to be bigger every year and we also have to be creative with what we do with those budgets. They are reviewed quarterly," he says.

Good says many companies don't understand the dynamic nature of workplace training; that it may need to be tweaked on the fly or that some people will need more training or a different training approach than others.

"The response we sometimes get from employers is 'what if I train these people and they leave?' We say 'what if you train them and they stay?'," says Good.

He says many employers know 'Generation Y' people are interested in working for a company with workplace incentives, and are interested in what a job can do for them. So employers can't have a 'well, this is the way we do it; like it or lump it' attitude to training - or set woefully inadequate training budgets, says Good.

He says one employer had an annual training budget that was a tenth of their recruitment budget, meaning new staff were hurried through the door and then left to it. Successful workplace training involves a few simple elements: planning, clear goals, follow-up, and measurement, says Good.

"We have said no to training when the client's budget meant no follow-up was going to happen - the biggest [positive] impact of training occurs with refreshers and follow up. Otherwise, 85 per cent of what people learn goes out the window after the first few weeks."

Companies want tangible results from training, usually increased sales, but equally attractive are an improved customer satisfaction index, higher staff retention, and more assertive and confident staff, which can reduce employer costs such as sick leave. Good says eventually, all workplace training goals point towards a better bottom line and measuring the success of workplace training requires taking a 'snapshot' of people's skill levels before and after.

Clare Fass, HR business partner for consumer goods firm Nestle, says Nestle completes a corporate training calendar with goals for individuals gleaned from the company's performance management processes. Like Vodafone, Fass says Nestle is keenly interested in soft skills and relationship building training - IT capability and time management skills are also identified as important. Fass says many companies need to train to meet health and safety requirements; Nestle's training programme includes defensive driving, manual handling training, and rehabilitation training for managers in the event they need to manage employees recovering from an accident.

Fass says Nestle has learned from training budget mistakes made in previous years and now always builds in "a bit of fat". She says being flexible with a training schedule is also important.

"Last year we cut the end of our training calendar because we were implementing a new [IT] system and we found people had too much on their plates. As a result, we have a busy training year this year because people want to catch up on what they missed out on," says Fass.

She says employees and their immediate managers are asked to complete a form stating what they hope to get out of the training and are asked how many of those goals have been met following training. As well as being useful for measurement these processes help employees to be responsible for their own efforts, says Fass.

"They know they can't just rock up [to training], eat the food, go to sleep and go home," she says.

At the end of each year Fass says Nestle managers look at where the business is going, how it is moving forward with new brands and new products and what training needs might arise as a result.

Fuller says Vodafone also tailors training according to new telecommunications products and services or to accommodate people who want to move between one area of the business and another - for example, someone in a service role who wants to move more into a sales role.

"Training has to be directly supporting performance on the job. Where training falls down is where people can't link training with tasks they are supposed to be doing," says Fuller.

He says Vodafone also measures training and performance programmes - usually by their impact on its 'customer delight index'.

"We interview customers and take their responses as an overall measure of training and business success - do our customers love us, and to what degree?" he says.

When employers skimp on training or on a full training programme, both Fuller and Fass say staff confidence and morale are affected first. People need to feel resourced to do their jobs and need to emerge from training and be able to cope with all eventualities.

"We don't want inbound call centre staff coming out of training and having shocks on the phone. There is only a certain amount of time to create a great relationship with a customer, so we want to make sure that people have the skills to do that no matter what happens on the call," says Fuller.

He says ideally, training starts with induction and then foundation skills are progressively layered upon, with ongoing input and feed back from participants.

"There's a lot of churn right across the [call centre] market people know if they're not happy they can get another job tomorrow. That's another reason to ensure you have a strong mixture of practical and people skills in your overall training programme," says Fuller.

TO E OR NOT TO E

In the past few years, training organisations have been buzzing about e-learning - using the internet to give people access to online training and education courses.

But does it work? Rapid Results managing director Derek Good says his firm launched an e-learning programme 18 months ago to service clients with telephony call centres who couldn't afford to have their people away from their desks. He says while e-learning is not for everyone, it works well for imparting general information and for upskilling people on new products or regulations.

Good says the best model he has seen is ongoing access to an e-learning course that was combined with a training day and then one-on-one coaching with a trainer who worked with telephony agents on site. He says people have different learning styles and the more interactive an e-learning programme is, the more successful it will be.