Employee training is always a good idea and is one of the best ways a business can invest in itself. Often, especially in sales and management, however, the best employees are often the least interested in attending training the company requires. There are several reasons for this and understanding them can mean working with employees rather than against them.
— The Perception
The way employees perceive training will come from both past experience (whether with your business or another) and learned expectations. Resistive employees will often have this view:
“Mandatory training” is a term to be loathed. To the resistive employee, it speaks of boring and long meetings where a lecturer or “trainer” pontificates endlessly about some new method or idea and shows endless charts and illustrations to go along with it. Often, it will contain fruitless and even embarrassing exercises to “build the team”. All lead by some clueless “consultant” hired just for this training and who otherwise has no clue what the business is all about.
So how do you change that perception? Frankly, you don’t. Instead, you prove it wrong. To do this, the meeting will have to be conducted in such a way that employees see for themselves that “mandatory” does not mean “worthless chore.” This means three things about your best employees must be accommodated.
— Control
The best performing employees, especially in sales and management, are usually those who prefer to be in control, which is a trait most often shared by those who are good decision makers – very likely the trait that made this person one of your best. Decision makers don’t like others making decisions for them and they enjoy forcing their schedule around “mandatory” things even less.
The best way to put them back in control is to give them a time frame to take the mandatory training (giving them back their schedule) or make the training itself optional, but with the clear indication that attending would be a good career move. Although these employees like to be in control and to make decisions, once colleagues are attending and showing that the training is useful, it’s very likely they’ll forget about obstinacy and join in.
— Apathy vs Effort
Once the powerful motivation of control is appeased, motivating the employee to put effort into the training is relatively easy. Most good employees are “good” because they continually work to improve their performance on the job. So if incentivized to attend training with the idea that it will help improve their performance, the motivation to put effort into the training itself will come automatically. Incentive, of course, doesn’t always mean payment. Good employees are given incentive in many ways.
— Encourage Input
Finally, back to the control issue, we hit on the third thing most likely to interfere with “mandatory training” being a success. That is the ability of the employee to have some control by having the ability to include their own input in the process. This could be ideas about what type of training should be undertaken to active give-and-take participation in the training itself to tailor and improve it for the business and individuals in the training.
Management that accommodates these three aspects of their best employees in order to maximize the profits employee training brings will reap great rewards by doing so.