How to improve your employees with less or no training? Let’s talk Management Innovation!
All organizations keep aside a certain percentage of their annual budget for employee empowerment activities and trainings. Trainings can be technical that are immediately put into use or soft skills, leadership and related. Trainings are followed by a feedback form to assess the effectiveness and in most of the cases they are shelved. Have you spent enough time in calculating the returns for your investment in these training? If yes, you would end up finding that you have been watering a plastic plant.
The objective of most of the non-technical trainings is to raise the standards of the employees in turn raising the standard of the organization they are part of. This is a continuous process and there is no visible end to it.
It is never easy to improve the standards of the employees by trainings. Trainings are like drugs or supplements that give an instant boost, which of course vanes away eventually. So why do companies spend large amounts of money on trainings that yield no result? May be it’s a tradition that we all stick to but hard to let go?
Alternatively, there are other methods to approach this.
For most of the employees, their standard or innovation potential is set as per the environment they are used to. When there is no competition or a need to improve, the potential is saturated and over the years the state becomes so solid that a change is an undesirable event. Haven’t we faced such state in our own company or team?
Civilizations survive when they move forward in time, reinventing themselves and their own values in a world where only the fittest survive. In an organization, this is equally true.
Take an example of a company A with a headcount of 100, broken down into smaller units. Let the average rating for the standard or innovation potential be 5 on a scale of 10. Generally, organizations plan a series of trainings for all the hundred employees focused on improving their standard or innovation potential.
How about recruiting 5 to 10 energetic, highly innovative, motivated, self-managing people? These are people whose innovation potential rating is about 8 to 10 on a scale of 10. It is a general fact that when a small bunch of people of a higher league are diffused in the team, it is certainly a head turner or a ripple maker.
Other employees who are not motivated and are comfortable in their own state with no need to advance themselves will now see potential threats within the organization and also will sense competition. The new recruits are far ahead that the others will have to put on their performance suits and improve themselves to match the new guys. Within couple of months, you will certainly see a change happening within the company resulting in increased productivity and a new energy.
The change that happens because of this is permanent and is no short term boost that the training gives. You may argue that the new recruits would be more expensive to hire. But isn't that a good investment? Considering the revenues these new recruits would bring in and the organic change they initiate, the resultant net expense will certainly be much lower than the training budget for the year.
There are plenty of advantages that I haven’t listed down in this article. But those are left to your imagination. There hasn't been any breakthrough approaches to Organization Management in the last couple of decades and we still follow what GE, Toyota etc. set as examples long ago. If you are in a role where you can try and test different approaches, go ahead and give them a try. After all, the way organizations are managed deserves a change.
---------------------------------------------
Articles by the Author: