Chapter six on training and Development. Now this chapter includes a lot of information and so what I've done here in this set of slides is to summarize the concepts that I feel strongly about and those that I'd like you to focus on. Virtually every company out there has some sort of training that they provide to their people and most of us, I'm sure listening to this have gone through some level of training in their careers as well. But considering how expensive and time consuming training is, why does it really matter? Well, first thing to keep in mind is that companies actually have a legal obligation to conduct training. And in doing so, they are protecting the company from lawsuits and at the same time there informing their employees of their rights and obligations under the law. Training is also used to impact a company's efficiencies by improving employee performance and at the same time enhancing guest service and developing new products. So it's an essential part of every organization. And I can tell you that the companies that I've worked with and consultant for in the past who do not conduct training are usually those that have some significant challenges going on. And many of them honestly don't even survive. So this section will be discussing the very important topic of training. This diagram is fairly representative of the typical training cycle at most organizations. Let's go through it. The first step of course is to determine and conduct some sort of a needs assessment. What organizational challenges the company having or what information are they helping to convey that would justify having the training Session in the 1st Place. And in doing so, we have to determine what the objectives are, which is the overall goal. For example, in a diversity training session, the goal might be to minimize incidents of lawsuits against the company, to improve worker morale and to improve hiring of diverse individuals. And so from there, the content that you develop in the training session will have to move the company further along toward its objectives. And if it doesn't do that, then it's probably the wrong information. So we say that's the content. Then we have to determine who is going to receive the training, these are the trainees. It's not usually the case that every individual in the organization will receive the training at the same time. But there may be instances in which the entire company workforce needs to have the training, but that it will be staggered over some period of time. We need to protest the trainees to determine whether or not these are the right individuals to be training in the first place to understand that this is a very complicated and expensive process. And so we want to make sure at the outset that we're training the correct people. Then how do we actually deliver the training? Should we do it in person via lecture? Should we do it through a zoom session? Should we bring an outside consultant. Once those questions have all been answered, then we implement the training. And then we conduct some sort of an evaluation afterwards to determine if the training actually met the goals of the organization. So let's look at all this in a lot more detail. If you ever asked to participate in a training session or you are asked to design one. Hopefully the person asking you to do either has conducted some sort of a needs assessment to determine if the training is actually necessary. And then how it will impact the organization for better or for worse. Usually we hope that there will be a positive benefit for the training but understand again that it's very expensive and very time consuming to implement these training sessions. So part of your analysis would be, for example, if housekeeping receives new training, let's say on Procedures that are being implemented. That require them to clean, let's say one additional room per shift. We would also want to look at how the impact of that new policy and procedure would impact other departments and facilities because you may need to conduct training for them as well. Number two, we would conduct a task and behavior analysis of every position in the organization. This is very time consuming, but what better way to understand if the knowledge, skills and abilities that are needed to perform Job tasks are actually being done. Than having conducted that that level of detail. Number three, conducting an individual analysis, identifying the strengths and weaknesses of the individuals performing the job to determine if they need training. So this would be more of an ad hoc approach where some people might receive training and others might not. So again, if you don't have the needs assessment in place, you're really not going to know who needs training and who doesn't to begin with. Let's look a little bit closer at some of the different ways that you can put together a needs assessment. One of the more common ways in doing so, particularly within academia is via the advisory committee. And this is where a committee is formed, comprised of members from different departments. Who have input and guidance as to whether not the training needs to happen and what form it should take. Another way of doing it would be to conduct work sampling, which is usually done By some outside 3rd party observer. And they put together a report and that report is the basis for the needs assessment going forward. Another way to do it internally would be to really look closely at the job descriptions and job specifications and compare those two performance. And if they don't seem to line up properly or let's say the performance is lagging, then that might be a good indication where training might be appropriate. Job performance measurements would be observations of employees at work to assess the performance as the book notes. This is very time consuming and very expensive. So probably you want to do that with a select group of individuals and then determine whether or not the ROI actually works. ROI meaning return on that investment. Performance appraisals are quite common, virtually everyone in the organization today will receive some sort of performance appraisal or work review. So what we would do is simply review those and determine whether or not there is information contained in those appraisals that suggests the person needs training in a particular area. And if enough people fall into that category, then that might justify having a company wide training in that area. Questionnaires are great because they can typically be conducted anonymously and they're very inexpensive to do. I mean, you could literally do so via Surveymonkey or something like that. You're able to conduct lots of information, collect lots of information and conduct some sort of an analysis with that. And then based on that, you can determine whether or not the training would be appropriate and in what areas we should do the training. The book talks about exit interviews as being a potential source for conducting a needs assessment. And I agree that you can certainly do them understand that when people are on their way out the door there many times not very happy or there's they're leaving for a reason. And so it's possible that the responses that they provide could be biased and somewhat unreliable. Very often, the audience for the training material will dictate or determine which training methods you should use. Let's look at the type of training method that might make sense for training of management. It's often the case that managers receive additional and ongoing training above and beyond that, at the line level employee. And so the case study training method is often used in those cases because it allows the manager to look at specific incidents that have occurred within other organizations. And it's one of the really the best ways to learn. In fact, the entire law school experiences taught through the case study method. And I can tell you that, even though it's been 20 years since I was in law school, I remember some of these cases like they were yesterday. They're very powerful because they paint pictures in your mind and again, these are incidents and situations that real people have lived through and were able to learn from how they dealt with them. Anything that's one on one such as an in conference training is going to be very expensive, but it might be required for essential skills workers. These are individuals that have unique and maybe specific skills that require lots of additional training and education, so that may be appropriate. But again, very expensive and time consuming. Myself, I really learned well from observation, bringing in a new team or even an individual. It might make sense to have them shadow an expert or ask questions of an expert and observe that expert in terms of learning that new skill. As opposed to watching videos or PowerPoint slides like you're doing. Training the trainer is fantastic because if you can put somebody in a position where they're comfortable and confident in delivering information to someone else. They are usually going to be at the top of their game in terms of learning the material. So, I think that's a very effective method to prepare someone to actually deliver the training to someone else. Typically the non-manager training group is much larger and so in many cases it would make sense to allow them to receive their training through what we call on-the-job-training or OIT. Again, similar to what we talked about in the previous slide where you're allowing the individual to shadow or follow an existing employee in the same or similar position to learn how that's done. Very inexpensive because the other person is already at the job. But keep in mind that those people may or may not be very good at communicating. They're not teachers and they may have concerns about being overshadowed by the person that they're training. JIT or job instruction training is probably the most common example and this is where the delivery of the training is done via live lecture and or structured class. Programmed instruction is becoming very important, especially with COVID, where the training is done completely remotely via online learning. I've been through several training sessions via the programmed instruction model in the last couple months. And typically what happens is the information is delivered through a series of slides, such as these that we're doing together or videos. And then there's some sort of a testing mechanism that's administered following those slides to ensure that people are learning the material before they can move on. Very inexpensive once the content has been developed and implemented via the software, but there will be some costs obviously associated with doing that in the beginning. I pulled out of the book for additional types of training that I'd like you to be familiar with. The first one in particular because it's just so commonly used in hospitality and this is something that many of you have probably experienced if you've gone through an internship. And this is where people are trained by virtue of going through job rotations or cross training within different apartments. The benefit of course is there being exposed to multiple disciplines within the organization, so they're getting exposed to tons of information. But it can take several weeks in many cases to get the individuals through the process. By the way, this is a really great way of orienting or doing the orientation that we talked about earlier, is to require that the new hire go through the job rotation training process. The second one is role-playing, which it's out there and I want you to be familiar with it. I'm personally not a big fan of it, because I don't think that people take it seriously. Essentially what you're doing is acting and you're attempting to replicate the situations that the training might face on the job. I think a better way to do this would be to produce some sort of a training video that might show role playing as opposed to act asking the trainee to participate. I think in many cases, the training it's got so much more on their mind than having to deal with acting in a role playing scenario. Sensitivity training has been around for decades. Oftentimes conducted in small groups and we're focusing on behaviors rather than skills. I really think this is something that should be done in the hiring process as opposed to the training process. But be that as it may, it's very common. And essentially what you're doing is allowing members of the group to learn from each other based upon their responses to various situations and questions. Understand by the way that some very personal matters can often come out in these sessions. So something to keep in mind. Finally, diversity training, as I said, almost not optional anymore. So very common, virtually every large company does this and the smaller ones if they don't they should. Essentially, in the past you'd have diversity training which focused on race, gender and issues concerning disabilities. The idea is that you are trying to create a workplace, it's more open and inviting in supportive. But now we're also considering how the guest fits into that picture. And certainly in hospitality, I can't emphasize enough how important it is, understand that guests will respond to those who understand their needs. So we're talking about needs based on their factors that relate to diversity, but also culture as well. So from a business point of view, this also can assist in terms of making the company more sales. But it's also ethically the correct thing to do because we want to make sure we value and embrace others and recognize them for the skills and talents that they bring to the table. Understand that when the word goes out to the organization, that there will be some training that people will often be reluctant or resistant to change that might be required of them. And then also they begin to develop some concerns about how this might impact them personally. So I understand that both managers and employees are resistant to change. We don't like to learn new skills necessarily because it's time consuming and we want to enjoy the benefits of the skills that we just learned. The new training program if it's not communicated properly, can definitely send messages of uncertainty. People begin to form conclusions on their own about what's happening. And so I can tell you that I've worked for organizations where the managers at the top were very poor communicators or didn't communicate enough. And what will happen is that employees left to their own devices will begin to talk among themselves and begin to spread rumors either wittingly or unwittingly about what's happening. And then it's much more difficult to get everything back on track. So open lines of communication is really, really crucial to establishing trust and credibility with the employees before the training. Begins and essentially what you're doing here is your explain to everybody why we're doing this and if you can explain to them how it benefits them. So I do want you to know what with him is what's in it for me, is what that stands for. This is one of the best ways and quickest ways to attract the interest, attention and interest of the target group in this case, the employees if you can explain to them how this is going to benefit them and be good for them. Now you might have a company that trains thousands of its workers every year and you can be sure that one of the questions that they're going to be asking themselves is was it worth it? And is this actually paying off for us? Sometimes you don't know the answer to that question until several months after the conclusion of the training and by that time you probably started a new training process. So it's really important that we understand on a rolling or rotating basis, whether or not the training is actually meeting its goals. And so the question that we have to ask ourselves in terms of evaluating the training is where the goals met that were established in the beginning. So we have to go back to our flow chart perhaps and we have to look at, okay, so if one of the obligations, sorry one of the outcomes that we were hoping to achieve was to minimize turnover or to let's say establish or and attract a different work worker group. Were those goals actually met. If we look at the data, the answer is no. Then we either need to tweak the training in some way, try to move us closer to achieving those goals or perhaps start all over. On this final slide I'd like to leave you with some really critical information that I've learned after having been a part of the legal profession for many years, where we represented plaintiffs in primarily sexual harassment cases against businesses. And one thing that we discovered are that the companies that don't have adequate training are usually on the losing side of lawsuits a lot more frequently. So in my view and really in the view of everyone that I know in this profession, training is just not optional. You need to make it a priority. And I can tell you that the companies that often try to cut corners in this area the most, tend to be the small businesses, frankly the restaurants of those types of companies, they simply have other priorities in their mind. And they often complain that they don't have the money to be able to implement formal training. That's a terrible strategy. And in fact you just have to look at training as being an essential operating cost to doing business. It just cannot be optional. And you might recall from your hospitality law class that when you learned about negligence, which is really defined as setting the standard of care that's required by an organization in the same or similar circumstances. And if you're not conducting adequate training and then that falls below the standard of care and you can be held legally responsible for that. Another concept is the idea of negligent hiring. This is where people are hiring individuals without doing adequate background checks. Well, having adequate training as to how to conduct hiring would minimize or reduce liability in the area of negligent hiring. So there's a real direct nexus if you will between those two. I can't think of any large companies today that don't have sexual harassment and diversity training. Why are they doing that? Well, they may try to communicate that they're doing so because it's the right thing to do. But I can tell you that in almost all cases, the reason why those programs began is because their legal department convince them that by having this training you're going to minimize or reduce your liability. Now, I'm not saying that there are tremendous benefits that are also coming along with that training, such as providing information to victims or potential victims as to how to protect themselves. But I can tell you the companies are willing to make the investment because they've done the calculation that shows that the investment they make inadequate training will more than pay off when it comes to defending themselves or minimizing liability from lawsuits to begin with. So if you're ever in a position to make decisions about training, you are going to look out into the landscape of your organization and identify areas that can get them into legal trouble. And perhaps that might be a good place to start in terms of where we put our training investment dollars first.
