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HR Training Pain


What's one of the biggest pain issues for HR professionals?

Having to use inferior training programs or inferior training materials.

How do you spell relief? 

Why Hook, 43, IHD – REM

That mnemonic is the actual learning formula I use and teach in my Placebo Talk course. It stands for the following:

If you have a strong enough why, it will hook you into learning, where you can learn four chunks of information, if you repeat it three times, and the repeats are completed immediately, in an hour, and in a day, and you fall into a rapid-eye-movement cycle during sleep. 

Knowing the process of learning is the first step in solving your problem and it also gives you a blue print to solve it.

There are all kinds of reasons why a professional may need to use an inferior training program; such as poorly designed compliance training or unavailability of better training material.

When employees are subjected to an inferior training program, they judge and blame the company and the people requiring them to be subjected to such poor training.

This is terrible for morale. Worse, your employees will not or cannot learn. This is not because they don’t want too, rather because their brains will not let them.

There are several ways to lessen negative employee impressions and to learn the needed information from poorly written or presented material.

I find the best way to do this is to address the elephant in the room. Let your people know that the material is poor. Then challenge your employees to run the inferior training materials through a process improvement project to make the learning stick.

If you are not familiar with how to create employee-led process improvement projects, then contact me and I can lead you or your team through the process.

Of course, in a good organisation, your employees need to know how to make that inferior training, work better. One of the easiest ways is to create and use a training-cheat-sheet.

The cheat-sheet does not fix the program. What it does is make the poorly designed training, usable. The cheat-sheet is like a 'Cole’s Notes', that summarizes the needed information contained within the inferior training.

To be able to create a cheat-sheet effectively an employee needs to:

  • know the process of learning
  • know how much learning we can do at any one time
  • know how to break the material down into usable chunks of learning
  • create a learning breakdown template based on steps, key points, and reasons why, and steps, hazards, and controls, and 
  • know how to record the right sized chunks in the template

Finally, the learning is compiled into a process improvement project and then reported out. The template becomes part of your improved training.

Because your employees have improved the learning material they will support or lead the buy-in for other employees to complete the learning.

Essentially, you can solve the problem of the inferior training material, and you can get employee buy-in. It’s a win/win situation.

Want to know more about how we learn and the learning formula itself? Read the learning formula by clicking on this link.

Conversely, get in touch with me through my booking page or email me at dale@placebotalk.com and I will be happy to discuss this with you.

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