It is no surprise that organizations have been and will continue to
lay off training staff - to reduce overhead. While these
individuals added value to an organization when it was financially
stable, many training projects are deemed nonessential to an
organization's vibrancy during more difficult economic times. This
poses a problem for the training field and all of us involved in
it.
In any economy, a company employs individuals to do a job, if and
only if value to the organization is created by hiring that
individual. In our current down economy, the value that each
individual worker possesses comes under scrutiny. This is similar
to a household budget. In times of prosperity, we feel comfortable
expanding our budget to include nonessential items. When times
warrant tightening our budget, we make judgments about what can
stay and what can go, based on the value of each item. If an item
holds very little value, then we typically move it from must-have
column to the nice-to-have column. An organization makes similar
judgments based on the usefulness of each individual and sometimes
of entire departments.
Training's value
A training department indeed adds value to its organization. It
improves workers' knowledge, skills, and abilities by offering the
right know-how, at the right time and in the right format.
Improving employee knowledge, skills, and abilities makes the
organization more efficient and more productive. This can be
quantitatively measured and justified to the appropriate executives
to demonstrate the department's ability to deliver value to the
organization. While this thinking is logical, it falls short. The
question to ask is not what value training brings to the
organization, but how much value?
Where training falls short
Training is a specialty function that focuses on employees' lack of
knowledge, skills, or abilities. This narrow focus, although often
huge in scope, means that trainers are specialists. In an economic
downturn, specialists are less valuable for an organization than
generalists because the specialist's usefulness is limited to their
sole function. When the sole function of a department is devalued
from must-have to nice-to-have, the department lacks the
flexibility to add value to its organization in other ways.
Let me provide an analogy to make the point a bit clearer. If I
need to replace my toaster because it no longer browns my morning
bagel, I might be more inclined to purchase a toaster oven instead
of a toaster because it is it more useful. A toaster oven not only
toasts my bagel but it can also bake a potato and broil a steak. So
if one day I decide I no longer want to eat bread--making the
toaster function unnecessary--the toaster oven still has value to
me because of its ability to bake and broil.
An organization is made up of the work it does, the employees who
do the work, and its workplace or physical building. The training
department focuses only on the worker. Employees may be well
trained and doing their job according to the training, yet
productivity may be sluggish. Trainers, being specialists, do not
look at the nature of an employee's work or workflow. They are only
focused on the knowledge, skills, and abilities an employee needs
to do his job efficiently and effectively. Many times,
organizational issues do not stem from the worker. By being
narrowly focused, the training department thus offers less value to
the organization as a whole.
A performance approach
Instead of focusing on a single function such as training, what
would happen if learning and development departments focused on the
performance of the whole organization? Would we save our jobs and
possibly the organization if we adopted a performance approach to
our jobs?
The performance approach is a generalist approach. Instead of
focusing on one type of service, a performance approach solves many
types of problems, including processes, capacity, environment, and
incentive. This flexibility to solve myriad issues using a broad
range of tools immediately adds more value than a training function
alone.
Another difference between a performance approach and a training
approach is that performance takes a systems view instead of a
function view. The performance approach looks at the health of the
whole organization to find where it is weak or not performing. One
key difference is that the performance approach looks not just at
the worker, as the training function does, but at the whole
organization. This means it evaluates more than just employees
because performance issues do not occur in a vacuum. They can stem
from the work, worker, or workplace.
A performance technologist examines the health of the whole
organization to uncover and solve what ails it. By being a
generalist rather than a specialist, a performance technologist
brings more value to the organization. And this value is often the
deciding factor between staying employed and having to start
circulating your resume.