Training causes turnover. Before you hit the exit button or scroll down to find the punch-line, consider that every reliable survey regularly places training high among the list of things that both new and experienced workers want from a job.

Bright people understand that good training represents a company’s investment in their future. As job skills and performance improve, their opportunity for advancement goes up. But that understanding is only half the equation. The other half relates to the degree that the company is willing to change to accommodate a better-trained workforce. If workers are never empowered to use their new skills and competencies, much of the incentive to stay, and all incentive to learn quickly evaporate. And so does the company’s investment, because learning is portable: it can be carried to the next job if the current one doesn’t meet worker needs and expectations. You probably know people who have said they are “tired of training the competition.”

360° Approach
Management can improve the return on its training investment by doing a few simple things. One is adopting a “360°” approach to training. That is, improve the competencies of workers while at the same time developing ways to channel these newfound skills and knowledge to achieve greater efficiencies, expand the business, and identify future leaders.

Encourage Free Thinking
Workplace training has only one objective, and that is to improve workplace performance. Teaching new skills and sharpening others is useless unless the company encourages their application and makes room for new thought. That means changing the way managers manage, specifically at the multi-unit level. There, bosses must encourage the kind of questions, feedback, experimentation, and freethinking that come with new learning. It’s normal for people who have gained new knowledge and ability to question old methods and practices, to want more input in what they are doing and how they do it. This can be painful and somewhat threatening to a boss who only expected better closes and more deliveries.

Top Down
If middle managers suffer gaps in their own learning and development - specifically in the areas of identifying and developing new managers - the company can never get full benefit from any training of frontline workers. It’s not uncommon in rent to own to find high-level supervisors and executives who came up through the system and learned most of what they know by watching and doing (this should not be confused with On the Job Training, which is somewhat more complex and also highly effective). What such managers may not have learned was how to reinforce the learning of others, and how to reorganize and delegate to take advantage of the more complete employee skill sets and broader competencies that come from better training. Supervisors too often are dragged into a training process for subordinates that they are expected to manage and maintain, and deliver bigger and better numbers as a result. Unless the supervisors themselves receive specialized training, little real progress can occur.

Multi store supervisors who have learned to do more, but not necessarily to think more, will quickly find ways of preventing newly trained employees from interfering with their own vision of how things should be done. And they won’t take much guff from graduates of RTO-101 who question their decisions or directives. So the training program slowly gets wallpapered over. The good news is that these attitudes can usually be changed over time, but only through hard work and a desire for self- improvement; some may feel no further improvement is needed.

Don't Train The Competition
When good people begin to realize that the company’s training is not advancing their career, much less the company’s objectives, they simply leave. And, as noted above, because learning is portable, they take it to their next employer. This is why we so often find that former employee who couldn’t manage a route for us last year doing a pretty fair job today managing a store for our cross-town competitor. We have again succeeded in training the competition. When the employees leave and take their training with them, ownership may have some pointed questions for supervisors. The easy out is to blame the turnover on bad attitudes, or the outrageous pay plans offered by our cross-town competitor. So the training budget is cut, we raise pay, and send everybody to seminars on being a team player. At least now when people fail, they feel better about it and they fail as a group.

Stop the Madness
None of this has to happen. People can be trained and they can be empowered. Line employees can become key players in the company’s growth and development. But some changes must be made in the role that management plays in the training process. It isn’t enough to introduce a big training initiative and then sit back and wait for the graduates to begin producing lower closes and bigger gains.

Define Objectives, Tactics, Roles
First, some clear training objectives must be identified and agreed upon. Each person’s role must be clearly defined with lines of responsibility drawn. If specific processes or functions are to improve as a result of this training, what impact might that have on other areas and other people within the organization? (For example: if pickups go down and deliveries increase just a little, what does that mean for Purchasing?) What must change? When? Who will guide the change? How will it affect the overall operation? Owners and managers must agree on what each is willing to give up and what they will get in return. For example, if the training will consume an hour a week of the assistant manager’s time, what happens to the tasks that usually fill that time? Can we say with any certainty how much time really is available for training or do we need to look harder at the entire operation before committing? These are questions that cannot be answered by somebody behind a desk at home office.

Make The Time
Managers may say they don’t have time for the training process. That is the first indicator that training is needed. No supervisor should brush such complaints off lightly. Go over schedules and staffing and reinforce the company’s commitment to this training. A very real issue is the likelihood of diminished results while training is in progress (it’s hard to catch bass when you’re hunting for deer). Top management must exhibit a fair amount of patience and a high degree of tolerance. The focus should be on completing the job at hand, which in this case is training and not selling or collecting or service. Some work has to be done to find offsets. Training is an integrated effort with shared responsibilities, not a task managed by one person. To that end, multi unit supervisors who prefer checking and counting to coaching and teaching should be retrained or reassigned. If there is to be one company with one set of objectives, there cannot be mavericks installing their own variations and impeding the progress of others.

Increased Knowledge Leads to Higher Standards
Everybody should understand that the training will lead to improved performance. Accordingly, higher standards will be in place thereafter. Everybody will be encouraged to think outside the box in applying their new learning to reaching higher goals. And it must be absolutely clear that attaining higher goals will lead to advancement and reward for everybody, not just the company.

Will training the right way add to turnover? Not likely. Will it reduce turnover? Probably. But consider the variables that impact employee turnover and productivity. Most would agree that organized and effective training never hurt a company. But training alone won’t keep or attract the best people. It’s only one piece of a bigger picture that includes pay, benefits, opportunity, workplace fairness, the physical environment, and even the boss’s personality. Apply a simple test. Ask which of those factors you’d give up or overlook and still happily come to work every day. Then decide if a few hours of P&L or Sales training would be an acceptable replacement.