A common scenario
Consider this scenario. A company has discovered that their managers aren’t filling out a certain type of report. This report is important because the company can get audited at any time and if these reports are not properly documented, the company could lose an important certification.
Management decides that all the managers must be assigned training on the reports. They don’t have any budget set aside to hire a company to develop the training. They have an idea.
“Hey! No one knows more about this topic than Bill—let’s have him make the training!”
Bill is a busy subject matter expert in the company. He’s made lots of presentations before, but this is the first time he’s been asked to make training. He decides to create a presentation that covers everything that everyone needs to know about the reports. The outline of his training looks like this:
History of the reports
History of the certification
Overview of every section of the report
Other types of reports that are required for the certification
The risk to the company if the reports aren’t completed
Bill is detail-oriented and meticulous. By the time he is finished with his presentation, it is 83 slides long, with lots of data, bullets, and charts. He’s worked long nights and weekends to finish it up because he still had to do his “day job” at work. Management thinks it’s pretty long but feels comfortable since Bill is the expert that the content must be what the managers need. The presentation is assigned to all managers as required self-study training, and they must acknowledge they reviewed the presentation within 30 days.
Six months later, the company is audited and it is discovered that many of these reports are still out of compliance. The company is put on warning that they will lose their certification if it doesn’t clean up its act. Everyone scrambles in a two week period to get all the documentation in place so the company doesn’t lose the certification. There are lots of long nights and weekends for a lot of people.
Management blames Bill. He must not know his stuff. Otherwise, why didn’t his training work?
Poor Bill. Yes, he did make some mistakes. Without needing to see the course itself, I can already tell that Bill added information people do not need to be able to perform the job, such as history of the reports and the certification. A lot of people think, "What's the harm in adding extra information?" The harm is that by adding content that people don't need, you are making it harder for them to retain what they really do need, which decreases their chances of transferring knowledge back on the job.
But let's go back even before Bill made the training. Management saw a problem and immediately assumed that training was needed to rectify this situation. However, they never really understood why people were not completing their reports. Was it because there was something in the process that made it difficult to do? Were they somehow incentivized not to do the reports? Was there something in the company culture or external influences that may have been the cause? Training can be an attractive solution because it is tangible and action-oriented, but by taking a little extra time on the front end to understand the problem, you can create more effective and affordable solutions that truly solve the issue.