The workplace training is ineffective, according to a new report. Among the reasons: employees have no time during the day to develop new skills, and the training offered is not relevant for their needs.
Among 1,209 employees in the United States and the United Kingdom in organizations that offer some form of training or professional development, 65% said they did not have enough time or that training does not correspond to their role, according to The pursuit of effective training in the workplacewhich was published by Emergn, a digital sales service based in London.
The survey, conducted in July, focused on the opinions of learners in management or less, as well as IT directors and human resources leaders who are responsible for supervising training in the workplace.
A different relationship, The learning state in the workflow in 2022noted that almost half of – 47% of the 2,961 respondents – said that they do not have time to engage in structured and personalized learning at work. The only way they see their learning and their development improve, they said, is whether their manager claims their workload. The results come from a survey conducted in July in France, Germany, the United Kingdom and the United Kingdom for 360Learning, a collaborative apprenticeship platform based in Paris.
Find time for training
Employers must rethink the workloads and employees' schedules to carve time for learning and development, said Jennifer Moss, author of The professional exhaustion epidemic: the rise in chronic stress and how we can repair it (Harvard Business Review, 2021).
“We have to create space inside the working day to develop these skills,” she said. “People at the moment feel so exhausted, so tired. Their workload is so high” that there is no time to train, except on compulsory subjects such as sexual harassment.
During the Covid-19 pandemic, the organizations worked with a feeling of emergency, and “we always comport a bit like that,” said Moss. “Everyone has the impression (what he works on) must be done immediately, and we did not get out of this habit, … even managers.”
More than two years later, “there was no break,” she noted. “We did not sit down and said,” Should we upgrade our training? “We are still working with ineffective, which adds to our workloads and adds to our professional exhaustion.”
She recommended the following strategies:
Evaluate and adjust workloads. Be realistic as to what will be the workload of an employee during training and make adjustments, advised Moss.
It can be difficult, she said, because “we cannot imagine that there is no new income opportunities, not growing. This does not happen to any employer that we must slow down for a year because of (having lived) the pandemic.”
Finding time during the working day for training does not mean imposing employees at the time of lunch, said Moss, who disputes with the “lunch and learning” approach.
“We should be able to (let) people have their lunch without expecting them to follow the training. We are already in a” always on “” culture, “she said about workplaces in the United States” feels at the moment like school without lunch or recreation. It is really depressing, and people do not feel any of the good things “that they appreciated about the work.
Respond to the fatigue of the meeting. Rethink consecutive meetings and If a meeting is necessary. Moss highlighted a Microsoft 2022 working trend index report which found a 252% increase in the frequency to which teams have met each week since February 2020.
“More dynamic, creative or emotional subjects may require a meeting, while status recordings and information subjects can benefit from a collaboration of documents, a channel or an email of a team,” noted Microsoft in a previous report, his 2021 Work trend index. “Other simple tasks can be managed via the cat.”
Talk to your team. It can be precious, said Moss, so that managers meet each week with their team for 30 minutes to ask how everyone is, learning what motivates them and creating relationships within the team. Discuss what employees are working on, a specific training they may need to use the tools they have more effectively and how to reduce the workload or manage a current challenge. In addition, ask how their training progresses and if it is always aligned with the desired career progression.
Make the training relevant
The Emergn report also noted that almost a quarter (23%) of respondents in the United Kingdom and the United States said that the available training was not relevant to their role.
“Based on our survey results and our conversations with Emergn's own customers, managers and learners cannot always agree on the most important type of workplace training,” said Steven Angelo-Eadie, head of Emergn.
He underlined a data point which showed that learners and managers do not agree on training which is the most important: 49% of learners consider the effective skills of important communication and presentation, while 45% of managers said that learning people management was essential.
“Employers must take into account the comments (employees) and investigation of what training is most sought after by its employees,” advised Angeloie.
Also consider the specific training for roles – working on real projects and sharing learning throughout the team.
“Many employers consider training as a workplace as a day training sessions or standardized electronic letters,” observed Angelo-Eadie. “For employers to weave (in) relevant training for their employees, they should focus on real work situations and integrate learning on demand.
“Learning on demand focuses on the supply of education in the context of an employee's working day, which helps employees learn new concepts during work.”
When creating a workplace training plan, include the skills that employees can immediately apply to their roles, said Angelo-Eadie.
“The training plan should allow employees to internalize new knowledge and must align themselves with the skills necessary to support the growth of an organization.
