When her boss told HR director Lynette Kautz to put together some training for the company’s managers — but not have it take too much time or cost too much — she figured out an innovative but simple approach.
Her story:
Squeezing in affordable management training was always a challenge for us.
Our operation runs pretty lean, so it’s hard for supervisors to head off to some remote site for several days for management training. And then, of course, there’s the cost involved.
We did try to do some onsite training, but you usually have to have a large group for that to be cost-effective — not practical in our small outfit — and you have to schedule a block of time that may not always convenient for everyone.
We had to figure out a way to address our management-education problem.
As a start toward that goal, I decided to call some education experts — the business department at our local community college.
Late-day classes
I explained our goals to the department head, and we worked out a solution. He’d send us a list of management courses that ran only from 3 to 5 p.m.
That way, our supervisors could attend at the end of the day for an hour or two without breaking up a whole day or going to some far-away site. The school even helped us work on getting a state training grant to help pay for some of the classes.
So we ended up with management training that’s effective, convenient and affordable.
(Lynette Kautz, HR director, Denison, TX)
