The Hidden Cost of Inconsistent Training Delivery

Training delivery can be a tricky part of learning and development as a whole.

Do you hire someone to do facilitation? Do you recruit team managers who may or may not be comfortable delivering training? Do you avoid the issue entirely and only produce asynchronous training?

There isn’t any perfect answer, and the truth is, it sometimes depends on your organization and the resources on your team.

But one thing is true no matter the company, industry, or audience: providing a consistent experience for every employee is fundamentally important to the success of a training program.

So, if you’re on the training team at your company and noticing inconsistent training delivery, what can you do about it? We’ll discuss:

• How Inconsistent Training Delivery Hurts Everyone

• The Flawed Fix: Asynchronous Training for Perfect Consistency

• The Best Blend: Asynchronous Delivery & Proper Facilitation Support

Let's dive in!

HOW INCONSISTENT TRAINING DELIVERY HURTS EVERYONE

Firstly, it’s important to understand the magnitude of this problem. To demonstrate, let’s look at a scenario.

Imagine this:

You’re a new hire at your very first corporate job. You walk into the building and find your way to the elevator and up five floors to your department, trying to remember where to go from your interview three weeks ago. You finally find your cubicle. You struggle to login until your manager eventually comes over, apologizing for seeing you late and rushing off to a meeting. You sit and wait at your desk alone, unsure what you should be doing. A coworker comes over and chats with you, asking if you’ve completed your onboarding. You say you haven’t done anything yet. They try to help you login until eventually calling IT for you, who doesn’t know how to help other than getting you logged onto your computer.

Five minutes before noon, your manager finally returns and tells you there’s a lunch in the main cafeteria downstairs for new coworkers. You rush to the elevator and eventually find the cafeteria, ten minutes late. You feel embarrassed - everyone else was on time.

You sit next to some of the new hires. One of them is talking about how impressive the experience has been so far, how they were welcomed in the lobby by their manager, how they had a small morning party with the team to meet everyone, and how robust and impressive the new hire training has been so far.

You feel confused. You can’t understand why your manager had nothing prepared for you. You think that perhaps your job is less important than this other person’s and, perhaps, the company even values their position more than yours.

One of the main things we can gather from this scenario, other than how unwelcomed our character felt, is this: according to the other new hire in the cafeteria, the company’s onboarding program has been quite good and robust.

So, what went wrong? Not the training content itself. Not the LMS or other HR software. Not the breadth or depth of information covered.

The delivery consistency was off.

I’ve talked briefly about the difficulties brought about by inconsistent training delivery before: check it out in my article titled, Why Your Sales Team Isn't Retaining Product Training - And What to Do About It. The gist is, you can have the best, most comprehensive training in the world, but for any of your employees who don’t see it, it might as well not exist.

If there’s no infrastructure in place to ensure employees see it, then it’s up to the manager to make sure it happens. And whether the manager will do this depends on a few factors: accountability, whether they value training, their time (in cases where they have to deliver it), and more. I discuss this more in my published eLearning Industry article, Training Completion Is a Leadership Problem, Not a Content Problem.

When employees don’t receive their training, everyone suffers:

• Employees can’t perform their best work or don’t have knowledge or insights on information the company values (else there wouldn’t be training for it).

• Managers have to regularly correct behavior, which takes time and energy they likely don’t have. They have to account for their employee’s missed metrics or KPIs as related to the role. And they have to deal with the burden of turnover. Deloitte estimates that effective training can reduce turnover by 30-50%.

• Company executives have employees with lower-than-ideal productivity, creating errors, inefficiencies, and turnover that cost the company money.

• Clients or customers don’t receive the best possible service, product, or experience because of the employee’s inefficiencies, possibly even causing them to go elsewhere.

Perhaps you’ve been in this boat yourself before! If so, you may recognize this next part: how many teams attempt to fix it.

THE FLAWED FIX: ASYNCHRONOUS TRAINING FOR PERFECT CONSISTENCY

So, your team recognizes that the training experience - whether onboarding or ongoing development - is too inconsistent. Some employees get a great experience, but others don’t receive it at all or get a watered-down version.

And you start to examine what’s happening. You look at all the materials developed so far and see that much of the training experience falls on managers in the company for delivery. You have a lot of slide decks or PDFs or even just checklists of information managers should cover. Materials are stored all over the place like shared drives and the company’s intranet. This can be especially difficult as teams become distributed, whether with several locations of corporate offices, field employees on different sites, or store employees across different regions.

The team decides there needs to be more structure. After months of deliberation, you purchase an LMS. You decide that managers will no longer handle facilitation at all because of how inconsistent the experience has been and decide to recreate all the existing content as eLearnings, videos, and guides. Hands-on activities are erased entirely because there’s no accountability on employees to get them done.

In essence, you overcorrect.

Don’t feel bad if this has been your strategy in the past! Organizations often do this. They don’t intend it, but they sacrifice valuable, live learning experiences in pursuit of perfect consistency.

Years ago, as eLearning emerged, many companies did away with any form of instructor-led training because it was cheaper, easier to scale, always consistent, and available whenever the learner needed to take it. Those reasons are certainly good ones to move in that direction!

The problem is, there are many cases where live training is more valuable than asynchronous models. Learning a soft skill is one of the best use cases for live training (in-person or virtual) because it allows you to roleplay scenarios and practice the new skill. When companies erase ILTs and VILTs for the sake of consistency, they lose a valuable tool in the toolbox.

Just to be clear, I’m not suggesting not to get an LMS if your company doesn’t already have one - they are very much worth their cost. And I’m also not saying to avoid eLearnings or other asynchronous materials - far from it! But the equivalent here is like a contractor getting rid of a hammer because a screwdriver more consistently turns screws and then trying to use the screwdriver to hammer in a nail. It might work okay, but at the end of the day, you could’ve simply kept both tools and used them as needed.

Funny enough, some companies are beginning to swing the other way. I once worked for a director that wanted to phase out eLearning entirely despite our team protesting. Our list of modalities are the tools in our toolbox and are each valuable for specific needs.

THE BEST BLEND: ASYNCHRONOUS DELIVERY & PROPER FACILITATION SUPPORT

So, we know that training delivery needs to be consistent. And we know that using only asynchronous forms of training will solve one problem while creating another.

What’s the answer then?

The secret here is that you want a little of both: asynchronous training like eLearnings, videos, and guides while supporting managers in facilitating important in-person training to their teams.

So, what does this mean exactly? Let’s break it down!

First, you want to examine your training curriculum and make decisions on what content would be good asynchronously and what would be better delivered live. Here are some tips for choosing:

• Either way, someone has to take the burden of training, whether it’s managers delivering it live or your team creating the pieces. Balance these two workloads as much as you can so the burden isn’t too heavy on either side, especially in the beginning when there may not be as much built yet, leaning on the manager more for a while as you get assets built.

• Start with evergreen content for asynchronous development, things that won’t change ever or for a long time: HR/legal/compliance trainings, soft skills, company mission/vision/values, long-standing processes like sales training models, etc.

• Anything that changes regularly will likely be best handled live or with asynchronous materials that are easy and fast to make, such as processes that are regularly updated.

• Operational items or information that is better learned hands-on should usually be handled live, such as anything that requires practice and feedback from the manager.

Once you decide what will be asynchronous, part of your team begins creating that content. Other teammates create assets to assist in the live delivery items.

This is where the magic happens. Facilitation will become much more consistent if managers are properly supported for it. Here are some things you can create to help with facilitation:

• Add notes to presentations to include explanations of each slide, talking points, questions to ask the audience, and answers to expect.

• Create checklists of topics to cover with explanations of how to cover each. For example, if a checklist item is, “Show how to change laptop password,” include the steps for doing so with screenshots if possible. Yes, you might end up with a longer guide, but page count is less important for a training document than covering the topic comprehensively.

• Create facilitator guides the manager can print and give to employees. Not only can employees use them to follow along with the training and to refer back after training ends, but some of the steps or activities can be listed there. Employees can do some portions of the training on their own and come back to the manager for feedback.

This type of support for live materials is one of the main drivers of consistency. You shouldn’t need to hire a team of facilitators to handle live training. If your materials are detailed enough, anyone in the company should be able to pick it up and deliver the training, even if they may not be the best speakers.

And if ever you think your efforts are going to be wasted, remember this: The more information you give those facilitating, the more likely they are to follow that information. Most people want to follow your steps and instructions and will be thankful for the detailed information (assuming it’s correct - if not, you can easily lose credibility, but that’s a whole separate topic!).

Alternatively, if the company has the budget, you could hire facilitators to deliver training the right way every time and hold multiple sessions per day or week as the main duty of their role. Many companies don’t spring for that nowadays with eLearnings in the mix, but if your company would go for it, it’s a viable solution!

One thing we didn’t cover in this article is how to help managers who are uncomfortable delivering training. This itself can be a driver of inconsistent delivery - managers who simply don’t want to do it and will avoid it if no one is following up. This situation requires some leadership development training for these managers, which I’ll cover in a future article sometime.

TO WRAP IT UP

Keep in mind, your materials aren’t the only drivers of training delivery consistency. Things like accountability and learning culture play a role, too.

But making your materials facilitator-friendly is one of the most important steps you can take to not only keep live training available in your company where it makes sense but also to support those who have to deliver it.

If it sounds like your team now has a lot of work to do, that’s exactly what Phoenix Learning Solutions is here for! Send us a message for help developing your new materials!