An employee development program only works if the people we are developing actually change what they do at work. Most programs never get that far. The content is solid. The instructor is engaging. Evaluations come back positive. Then Monday arrives, and nothing looks different. What’s missing from most employee training is a way for the participants to create new, more positive habits as they develop new skills.
So, in this post, we’ll give you an overview of how to create an employee development program that builds skills and positive habits. This guide will cover three main areas. First, we’ll show you that shorter training sessions over time will improve both retention and application. Next, we’ll show you how to tie the training into real business skills that help the employee improve performance. And finally, we’ll show you ways to get your employees excited or motivated by the learning process. This reduces resistance from them.
Before you design your employee development program, though, you first have to know what actually needs “fixing.” So, step one in this process is to conduct a performance assessment or skills gap analysis. Don’t skip this part.
Human resources departments around the world spend a lot of time and money each year trying to fix symptoms rather than addressing the problems themselves. It would be like taking aspirin for a chronic migraine. You may get temporary relief, but the migraine will come back. And whatever is causing the migraine may get more severe over time. So, make sure to conduct a thorough assessment of which skills are missing from your team member(s) before putting a plan together.
For our purposes, we’ll assume this skills gap analysis has already been completed, and we now want to create a plan to help the employee(s) improve performance.
The Best Employee Development Programs Focus on Skill Development Over Time to Increase Retention.
Most companies buy training the way they buy a conference. They block a day. Bring everyone into a room. Cover the material start to finish, and then send them home. It looks efficient on a calendar. But the format fights the way people actually retain content.
Researchers at Washington University measured how much material people would retain over time without any review or testing. Five minutes after studying, participants only recalled about 83 percent of the content. One week later, they retained only 40 percent.
And the content in this study was just simple sections of text that took less than five minutes to cover. The more content is crammed into a single session, the more difficult it is to retain.
However, when you break the content into simple component parts, they are easier to remember. For instance, in our High Impact Leaders course, we cover dozens of different ways to improve performance. But we divide the content into one-hour modules. Those modules build on each other.
It’s easier to keep a person or group engaged for an hour. And if the session is interactive and gives the participants a chance to practice the new skills in the classroom, the retention improves dramatically. Then, we take a short break and deliver another interactive session.
I call this process time-spaced learning. I’ve heard other consultants call the technique “chunking.” But basically, we’ve found that you’ll get better results if you cover a little information, and then give the participants a break. We suggest that your employee development program consist of a series of modules that build on each other. Cover no more than a half-day of training, and then give the participants time to apply the skill in the workplace before returning for additional training.
The Time Between Your Sessions Is Important
If you recall from the study, the people only retained 40% of the content after a week. Something interesting also happened, though. Participants who reviewed the content experienced dramatically improved retention. We find that something similar happens in how we roll out employee development programs.
For instance, we always suggest that our clients schedule a series of 1/2-day training sessions one week apart. This seems to be the ideal “break” between sessions because it gives the group time to apply the skills we practice in the workplace. Also, we’ll talk about this in step two below, but they get an assignment for the week. And they know I’m coming back in a week, so there is built-in accountability.
Recently, though, I trained a group that had an erratic schedule. So, they had to put two weeks between a couple of the sessions. What I noticed was that we had to spend much more time reviewing the content at the beginning of each session—even when sessions were only a week apart. So, this group didn’t achieve the same efficiency as other groups.
If you’re training new employees on totally new skills, we find that one-day intervals work very well. For instance, you might do a few hours of training in the morning. Then, give the new employee time to apply the training on their own in the afternoon. That on-their-own application time dramatically increases retention. And when the new employee comes back fresh in the morning, they’ll be more confident as they do additional training. This training-then-application time is critical to building a skill.
Focus on Real Business Skills with Assignments to Apply the Skills at Work.
Once you have created the training schedule, you need to build the content around a real business skill. And the type of content that you create will be determined by the type of skill you are trying to develop. The two basic types of business skills are closed skills and open skills.
A closed skill is often a technical skill or process. It’s something a person can do right there in the classroom or in a workshop. Let’s say that I’m teaching somebody how to use a new piece of software. That software has certain rules and processes. I can teach the rules, and the student can practice using the software on the spot.
That kind of skill doesn’t take much time outside the classroom. The person gains confidence in the new skill pretty fast.
An open skill is much more difficult, though. Communication skills are an open skill. So are listening skills, running meetings, motivating your team, mentoring your direct reports, and time management.
You can learn every one of those things in a classroom. But until you apply them in the real world, you won’t be confident using them. That’s one of the reasons we put a week in between our professional development sessions. We give people the content and let them practice it in class.
But we know that classroom practice is a little forced. Practicing with your classmates is never as effective as using the skill with your own team. It’s not the same as using it on a real project. So the open skill is a lot harder to reinforce.
If you train your team in an open skill, you need built-in accountability. You need built-in application too. Without those two things, there’s a good chance the whole session is wasted.
I can teach a full day of leadership development to an organization. But if I don’t build in any assignments, follow-up, or real-world application, the content will likely be forgotten quickly. The moment those people walk out the door, they retain a little over 80 percent at best. That’s five minutes after the session ends, and it drops fast from there.
So there has to be some kind of reinforcement.
Give an Assignment, Then Start the Next Session with Reports
Here’s what we do in our classes, and you can probably apply it in your own situation. Our sessions are spaced a week apart. So we cover content in the classroom, let the team practice in that controlled environment, and then give the group an assignment. Then we tell them they will report on their results when they come back.
We start the next class with those reports. This does a couple of things that are really important.
First, it builds accountability, because the group knows that I’m coming back. And since the assignments I give them are tied to a real business skill—a real workplace application—the results they report have more meaning. That connection helps a lot.
Second, it creates positive peer pressure. Some people in the group won’t have the right attitude about the training. (We talk about this below in the next section.) Maybe they feel like they’re being “fixed” or that they don’t need to improve their skills. Hearing positive reports from the rest of the group may push them to actually use the skills themselves.
Here’s how that plays out. People come back for week two, and the first week was fun and exciting. But some of them got busy, so they never applied anything at work. They didn’t do the assignment.
Others did, though. Those folks got real results, and their reports are exciting to listen to. Now the people who skipped the homework have to say something. Their reports will be more vague.
Sometimes they just admit they got busy and promise to do it next week. They saw everyone else get good results, so now they want results too. That positive peer pressure causes a behavior change that would never have happened on its own.
Without the built-in accountability, none of that happens. It’s another reason time-spaced learning works so well.
The Attitude that Your Employee or Team Has about the Training Is Critical.
Here’s what typically happens when leaders create an employee development plan.
Somebody goes through an annual appraisal or review. The manager tells them they have a deficiency in communication skills, mentoring, or something else. Then the manager tells them they need to fix it.
Sometimes that person doesn’t agree with the assessment. If HR or the boss forces them into a training program anyway, you’ll have a problem. You can’t push a rope. That person will resist the training and everything you’re trying to help them do.
So part of the Employee Development Program is getting the employee to want to develop. When the participant sees the training as an opportunity, they’re open to the process. They’re more motivated. And they get much better results out of the program.
Here’s what we do. We sometimes have people register for one of our public cohorts without ever talking to us. We still do a consulting call with them before the class starts, though.
One of our instructors calls to interview the attendee. We’re trying to find out if they’re open to the training or being forced into it. If they’re being forced, our job is to motivate them. We ask questions until they see the class as a positive thing for them. If we coach them well during that first call, they’re a lot more likely to get the most out of our classes.
This matters a lot, though, when you build an employee development plan. Some participants won’t be open to the process. And sometimes it’s a big percentage of the entire team.
They may just go through the motions because you’re making them attend. They’re sitting there thinking about the thousand other things they need to be doing. That attitude can damage the results of the entire program.
The Pre-Assessment Can Help Employees Start the Development Process with a Better Attitude.
So getting people into the training with the right attitude is critical. And this is where we come full circle. If you recall, early in the post I mentioned that a great way to start an Employee Development Program is to conduct either a Performance Assessment or a Gap Skills Analysis.
In many cases, all that you really have to do is show the team the results of that analysis. One of my last clients was a school district, and we started the team development with a quick assessment workshop that ended with a survey. The participants rated the district in areas such as leadership, communication, and employee satisfaction. They also identified areas of training that would have the greatest impact on their performance.
The old adage is that “people will support a world that they help create.” So, I compiled the data and presented it back to the group prior to our training sessions. I reported the data that they gave me in the survey. Then, I let them discuss the results. I gave them an opportunity to explain to me why the data was what it was.
After a little discussion, I ended the session by asking, “So, do you want to fix this or just keep struggling against it?” The group unanimously agreed to fix it. So we got 100% buy-in from the group before we did any training. We got better participation and results from the training because of that positive attitude toward the sessions before any participants even started the process.
Use the Ideas in this Employee Development Program Guide to Make Your Training “Stick”.
So if you want your employees to really develop as a result of your Employee Development programs, do these things. First, determine the actual skills that need to be developed using a good performance assessment tool. Next, organize that skill development over time—give employees time to apply those skills in the workplace. Reinforce that “real-world” application by giving assignments and coaching along the way. And make sure to keep your team’s attitude about the development program positive throughout the process.
If you do those things, you’ll build a culture of continuous improvement throughout your organization.