Training Issue or Attitude Issue? Understanding the Difference

Stacey Lett, Director of Operations – Eastern U.S., Proactive Technologies, Inc.

If you spend some time in the Human Resources Department office, you often witness a supervisor or manager trying to explain why the new-hire isn’t working out. “Why do you believe that?” asks the HR Manager. The supervisor thinks a moment and says, “He just doesn’t act like he wants to learn.” The issue seems to be attitudinal. The HR Manager doesn’t bother to ask for any empirical evidence since it usually doesn’t exist, so the decision is made to terminate the new-hire and start all over…again.

Some, more forward thinking, human resources departments concluded that assessing job prospects might reduce the amount of hiring turnover. It certainly does help do that if the job classification was properly analyzed and the assessment instruments were aligned to the data for “job relevance.” However, even with the best screening potentially good employees might be lost. Knowing how to recognize the difference between attitude and training-related issues may save good employees from being lost due to misdiagnosis.

Whether a challenge to learning or performance is attitudinal is not easy to determine. Attitudes fluctuate from day to day, throughout the day. They can be affected by personal issues such as health of the individual, health of a family member, financial issues, relationship difficulties at home and the work culture (e.g. relationship with coworkers, supervisor and company management). Rather than hastily concluding any issue of worker development is attitudinal, I find it easier to eliminate the obvious and more common influence on worker learning and development; whether proper training has been conducted. After all, employee insecurity caused by feeling expendable while a 90-day probationary period clock is ticking can, in itself, affect anyone’s attitude and personality. If proper training is not available or worker development is conducted in an unstructured, haphazard and inconsistent manner, this is a major contributor to worker attitudes toward the company, themselves and others in the workplace.

Assuming that the offered wage and benefits are competitive, there are four essential considerations to the hiring and keeping the best workers; the selection strategy, the learner’s capabilities, the instructor’s capabilities and the training infrastructure. Given the high cost of recruitment, selection, initial training efforts and separation, and heaven forbid a repeat of the process for the same job classification, an internal examination of these 4 components might go a long way toward reducing this cost and making the process cost-effective and efficient.

Selection Strategy: Has anyone analyzed the targeted job classification to make sure the right assessments for the core skills and competencies are used for today’s job classification? Has anyone given thought to what happens once a person is hired?

The Learner’s Capabilities: Having the right core skills and competencies really says nothing about a person’s capability to take in new information and apply it to learning how to perform tasks unique to your operation. This is theoretically assessed during the 90 day probationary period through close observation, but if there is no structure to the experience it may be impossible to measure.

The Instructor’s Capabilities: A good performer does not always make a good trainer. An expert is an expert because they are so experienced in the performance of the required tasks that they have committed the details they needed when learning the task to memory long ago. They operate as robots, quickly and competently performing the work to be done without stopping to think deeply about each step unless encountering an error or defect. Asking them to become a “thoughtful, sensitive trainer” is often too great a transition without training on how to switch the trainer mode on and off.

The Training Infrastructure: Transferring expertise to new learners is difficult without a training infrastructure, which includes a commitment by management to allow the necessary time for training, an outline of tasks to be learned (prioritized by importance), written guidance on the best practice for each task, a subject matter expert instructor “trained to train,” metrics to ensure training to a mastery level is achieved and maintained, and feedback to the trainee. If any of these components are missing, the outcome becomes less certain.

Once an employer can honestly say every opportunity was made to ensure each worker received the proper training for the job classification, assessing a worker’s performance can focus on more traditional management areas of evaluation such as employee attitude. Focusing on attitude, without determining if the observer of learning and performance is not, also, influencing it can lead to costly false conclusions.

Visit the Proactive Technologies, Inc. website for more information on how structured on-the-job training can free supervisors and managers to be just that.