HR exec Susan Gary was spending money on training for employees but not getting the results she wanted – until she changed her company’s approach (part of an ongoing series).
Our company is a big believer in the value of effective training, especially for new employees. Problem: With limited dollars, you can’t go wild and just train everyone for everything.
We wanted to make sure our training money was being spent well and where it was needed. To do that, we looked at one training area that was a bit expensive and reactive: remedial learning programs for areas of our operation where we had high error rates.
Was there another way to solve that problem and use training wisely to do it? Maybe taking a more proactive approach would work.
Get ’em coming in the door
Instead of training people on the back end – after they made mistakes – maybe we should try doing more training in those mistake-prone areas when people walked in the door and before they took on the jobs. Along with that, we could scale back a little on training in clean areas that were sources of few or no mistakes.
We tried it and closely tracked the error rates.
Great news: Mistake rates –
• went down in the problem areas, and
• stayed low in the already clean areas.
(Susan Gary, VP, Ohio Savings AM Trust Bank, Cleveland)
