When I saw a recent KPMG Community Banking Survey, I was left, as the kids put it, smh. Shaking my head at seeing what ranked dead last of 11 areas where community banks expect to increase spending over the next 12 months: Employee Compensation and Training.
It’s a tough time to be a community bank, so this is not to pick on them. They were battered in the credit crisis, and now they are being unfairly burdened with new and costly regulations geared for their much larger brethren. So they have good reason to scrutinize every dollar that goes out the door.
But what else are they going to compete on, if not the best employees? And how are they going to have the best employees if they don’t train them to be the best?
They have to spend a ton on compliance, but that doesn’t bring a nickel back in the door. They have to spend another ton on technology, but that’s just table stakes, not competitive advantage. Products or pricing? Commoditized. Brand? OK, but what’s the biggest component of the brand? The knowledge, skills, and behavior of your people. What drives that but compensation and training? And if you don’t have a lot of money to throw at compensation? That leaves…? Training.
But let’s get beyond community banking, as this paradoxical stance toward training is common across industries: In hard times, when the premium on having the best-trained employees is at its highest, training gets relegated down the priority list.
If the training budget is suffering a setback at your organization, here are five tips for refreshing the conversation with management and getting the budget you need:
Tip #1: Zero in on deficiencies and advantages.
To do their jobs well, employees need to be clear, capable, and motivated. And when you have trained them, the training needs to be embedded. If you don’t know which of those four components is lacking, your training will be just costly guess work, and your budget will be wasted—and employees will be demoralized, confused, or frustrated.
Managers need to conduct individual Employee Needs Analysis Profiles to ascertain who needs sales training, coaching, more collaboration, more resources such as time or equipment, or more motivation and what kind.
For example, do you have customer service employees who used to be stellar but have fallen off? Have they become de-motivated? Has product quality slipped? Is new technology confounding them? Is nobody measuring performance, letting the newly learned behaviors fade away?
And when you do your assessment, do it with an eye toward what matters. What training produces competitive advantage versus merely filling a gap that schools used to fill?
Tip #2: Make sure they are clear.
You can incentivize employees all you like, but the needle won’t move unless they are crystal clear on how they fit into management’s vision: the Who, What, How, How Much, and By When Protocol.
If you’re asking them to improve, it has to be one or more of these four changes: more, better, different, less. What are they doing right that they need to do more of? What should they be doing better? Differently? And what are they doing too much of that they should be doing less of?
That’s it. Those are the only levers employees have to pull to meet management’s objectives. So management needs to make sure each and every employee knows their more-better-different-lesses stone cold.
Tip #3: Make sure they are capable.
When you assessed your employees, you learned where they had deficiencies in being able to carry out their roles in your vision. It’s critical to turn those deficiencies into advantages through the right kind of training for the right people. Some might need better product training. For others, it may be a matter of communication: They may know what to say and do but be lacking in the skills and arts of doing so persuasively. Others may need pure sales training in one or more of the three steps of the sales cycle: creating interest, overcoming objections, and closing the sale. Others might be struggling with the technology.
And don’t forget: Being capable is more than having a particular skill. It includes the self-confidence and job satisfaction that comes from having the right skill.
Tip #4: Make sure they are motivated.
No matter how clearly employees understand their obligations, and no matter how completely you make them capable of doing so, if they are not motivated to perform, performance won’t happen.
Motivation is fed by many streams: pay, promotions, pride, recognition, being held accountable, fear, good observation and coaching, practice. Being clear and capable is motivating! And not all employees are motivated by the same thing. What motivates one might actually de-motivate another. That’s why it’s important to learn when you first assess them what motivates them.
But what’s one of the biggest motivators? Competence. When they know they are good at something, they are motivated to do it.
Tip #5: Make sure you embed.
Nothing diminishes next year’s training budget like management pointing out, frustrated, that people aren’t doing what you trained them to do last year. When people have been well trained, but then fall back into old habits, consider one or more of these culprits.
Did employees get to practice the new technique in situ so that they could see for themselves that it would work better? Was there accreditation at the end of the training—some serious certification that they could, indeed, perform the new technique? Did they get ongoing observation, coaching, and upskilling as needed? Was management engaged in the training and in the ongoing monitoring? If not, then it’s like, “Thanks for the coffee, I’m going back to my old ways.” And everybody blames the training, when it’s really the lack of embedding.
Edward G. Brown is the author of “The Time Bandit Solution: Recovering Stolen Time You Never Knew You Had,” creator of Structured Time & Workflow Management, a video-based training solution and co-founder of Cohen Brown Management Group, a firm that specializes in culture change management consulting, and training for the financial services industry. For more information, visit, http://www.timebanditsolution.com and http://www.cohenbrown.com and connect with Brown on Twitter, @EdwardGBrown.
