Why your employee training is failing

You’ve trained your employees. They completed the slides and passed the quiz. Yet, one week later, people can’t cite anything from said training, teams still have different standards and mistakes keep happening. Sounds familiar?

I’ve seen this pattern one too many times, and actually I have been asked to follow the protocol for privacy trainings. But here is the problem with those training platforms that offer thousands of pre-recorded sessions, which you then may be tempted to promote to your employees as “ample training opportunities”:

1. A generic training is not built for your business. Your marketing team will never be the same as your IT team or your HR team or your business/sales people. And yet the training is the same for all of them.
2. There is a serious disconnect from real life. Employees don’t need theory, they’ve had enough of that when they went to school. Now they need to link the information provided to real situations, otherwise it’s deleted from their memory as soon as they go on coffee break.
3. You treat the whole exercise as a legal obligation to prove compliance. Instead a training is the best tool to control risk; real tangible business risk, not the theoretical regulatory one which your lawyers can handle.
4. It’s too little, too late. One session per year won’t have visible impact on behaviour and culture, no matter how “obligatory” you frame it.

I believe these to apply in every kind of training. But even more so in privacy training. I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve witnessed people coming into my training room STRESSED and DEMOTIVATED to have been forced to follow another “obligatory training session” while deadlines are running, and then when they come out they are SMILING, ENTHUSIASTIC, BUZZING with excitement about what they learned and how they can apply it in their daily professional life.

Your employees want to learn, they want to grow, it’s what keeps them motivated to still do what they do. The minute they stop learning, they look elsewhere; think of it also as a good employee retention strategy.

So what do I do, you say? Invest in your employees. It will come back multiplied, I promise!

Favour the following:

• role-based training (by function, not one-size fits all)
• short, repeated touchpoints (2 minutes, tik-tok style, you’ll be surprised how effective it is)
• real scenarios from your own business.

And remember: those “obligatory training” hours are not free, if you mutiply by the employee hourly rate, it’s a huge investment you are making. Do you really want your investment to be a “tick the box” exercise, or do you want it to yield actual results?

And have you heard of any muscle being trained, just by watching a few exercise slides?