06 - Employee Training Challenges

Introduction

As described in earlier articles, training and development is a very imported component for an organization. Since it is an essential factor, where it will reduces employee turnover while motivating productivity, increases the making of a healthy working culture, and helps your employees feel strong and confident to provide their best self and reach their fullest potential. Due remote/hybrid work model, it’s essential to examine the evolution of the workplace and also the expectations of employees. This provides how L&D will develop in the digital age. Training is not simple as gathering your people in a conference room, conducting them a lengthy lecture, and letting employees to grab the knowledge and use them practical environment. Traditional method will not offer employees the same benefits nowadays same as before. This is why some organizations find themselves across employee training challenges (Koumparaki 2023).

Difficulties of Employee Training

Due to the change of modern workplace especially due to the pandemic situation, meetings, training had to conduct via online platform, where traditional methods will no longer effective. Since there is no right or wrong method of employee training. Organization has to decide what fits for their employees. As mentioned there are various training options like, one to one coaching, offsite training, video conferencing and etc. Each training option consist of different level of investments. So choosing the right method with direct to the cost optimization also. Also different channels will affect your workforces differently and will also affect how much of whatever they’re learning they can retain. So, to implementing multimodal learning programs for employees so that they can access through any channel they like will be ideal. But arranging the training program to fulfill all employees training needs will be challenging. Employees may go along with any desired channels available but eventually, their performance won’t demonstrate significant improvement, if they are not able to retain and develop what they’ve been trained (Olmstead 2022).

Employee Training Challenges Impacting Enterprises in 2023

1. Reskilling & upskilling for a digital workplace

As remote work becomes the model and companies have adopt digital transformation, there’s a need to reskill and upskill employees so that employees can stay on the cutting edge and understand how to continue to meet their job requirements in a digital setting. Now, companies have to fetch training programs designed for large numbers of their workforce, while trying to settle the resources required to make it feasible (Olmstead 2022).

2. Adapting to remote learning

Nowadays most of the giant companies like Apple, Google and Meta has requested their employees to return to the office at least few days per week. So you have to check with the company policies and request employees to return to the office accordingly. Due to the flexibility most of the employees are more comfortable on working remotely for few days even for a week. So organizations can focus on adapting their planned learning programs for a remote audience also. That is a huge challenge as an organization have to carefully test to identify on engagement with remote employees, roll out your remote learning strategy at scale, and modify it to suit the majority of your employees (Olmstead 2022).

4. Ineffective and outdated training methods

Employee training is not an easy task like assembly workforce into a conference room for few hour lecture which is the least effective way of training people. As Edgar Dale’s learning Pyramid showcase how learning methods encourage retention That figure keeps reducing as the memory curve grows and on a long enough timeline, it’s hard to see any such training having an impact on employee productivity.

(Hall, 2022)

Companies that bind with unproductive training methods might have to make significant investments into training and preparing workforce with the skills they required. But Organization will never get an expected ROI because they are not fulfilling employee expectations (Olmstead 2022).

5. Lack of employee feedbacks

Ineffective training initiatives only train employees without providing any long-term skills, it follows that feedback is required to assess what your employees are learning and if your programs are impacting them. Without knowing the feedback loop, it’s easy to continue with ineffective programs with large training gaps, putting the blame on employees for poor performance, and ultimately driving down workforce morale (Olmstead 2022).

6. Measuring ROI of training programs.

Organization can decide to use productivity, revenue, profit, or some other metric tailored to the company’s structure, but it’s essential to focus and define on how a training program should increase performance. And it is very important to track the status (Olmstead 2022).

7. Scaling personalized training and development

Majority of employees need personalized training programs and also most employees will stay longer with a company, if their company focus and invest on their employee’s career growth also. Training a team of lesser number of employees, organization can easily use 1:1 coaching that educates workforce and tracks their progress continuously. But programs that are designed for many will make more challenges when an organization has to roll out programs designed to engage employees across different channels and help them develop relevant skills at scale (Olmstead 2022).

8. Developing leaders inside

The main purpose of employee training should be to develop capacity within the organization. As the senior team, they should be able to guide their subordinates, provide closer guidance and help them to develop their job tasks by providing training and feedback. These kind of practice will reduce the cost and will help to improve trust between teammates, increases engagement also. Also it makes major impact on the time that important staff need to work on high priority initiatives and will eventually fail if an organization doesn’t figure out how to balance it (Olmstead 2022).

9. Trainings under busy schedules

Even though the amount which organization invested on employee training programs, expected improvement of productivity due to that and how the competitors are performing to develop, human factor required to be focus more as an organization which thinks about their staff. Else, organization can expect high turnover figures and worker satisfaction will also be reduced (Olmstead 2022).

As the conclusion, there are various type of training methods available. Among them choosing the most cost effective and employee flavored training will be a very challenging one for organization, since organization consist of employees with different mindset and different knowledge levels. There are several of challenges which organization will faced on arranging proper training program to their employees. Such as, busyness of employees with day today work, use of ineffective and outdated training methods, gap between arrange method and employee preferred method and etc. Most importantly the recent pandemic situation made a huge impact on training methods, where all everyone have to search for an alternative method rather than traditional way.  Training method like learning from senior staff will be helpful for new recruits with in these conditions. How to align employees into the best preferred method is a responsibility of organization HRM.

List of References.

Hall, 2022. Overview of the learning pyramid for training providers arlo.co [Online]. Available at  https://www.arlo.co/blog/overview-of-the-learning-pyramid-for-training-providers Accessed on 21^st of August, 2023.

Koumparaki 2023. 8 training challenges in the workplace and how to rise above them talentlms.com [Online]. Available at https://www.talentlms.com/blog/training-challenges-solutions-workplace/. Accessed on 21^st of August, 2023.

Olmstead 2022, 9 Critical Employee Training Challenges to Overcome (2023) whatfix.com [Online]. Available at https://whatfix.com/blog/employee-training-challenges/. Accessed on 21^st of August, 2023.