I spend at least half my week speaking with operational management and frequently with Learning & Development practitioners. The workplace – particularly in regulated markets – has undoubtedly become more complex and, according to analysis from McKinsey, the workforce needs to catch up.
The skills gap crisis: a hybrid work dilemma
90% of the current working population will require upskilling by the end of this decade. And some sectors, like financial services, are struggling to recruit and retain the younger generation. There would appear to be a gradual decline in competence that many firms are struggling to resolve.
Personally, I do not think hybrid working helps the situation. In fact, I think it is a primary driver of falling workplace competence. Pre-Covid, when we all worked in offices (WFO) we were surrounded by colleagues who either consciously or sub-consciously helped with the collective education of the workforce; peer-to-peer (P2P) learning or on-the-job training as it used to be called.
According to Training Industry, an employee develops 70% of their in-role competence from on-the-job experience and learning from their colleagues. So, when you work hybrid and you are only in the office two days a week, you are only getting at best 40% of the P2P learning you would have been exposed to when WFO five days a week.
I saw a meme recently on LinkedIn contrasting an L&D practitioner and a line manager. The L&D chap was moaning that nobody turned up to his training course and the line manager was citing they were “too busy”.
And a couple of weeks ago I was on a call with the L&D leader of a global BPO who was frustrated that, post-Covid, they had hired a great many agents and about 70% of these had failed to achieve the standards required for the role at both the six-month and 12-month formal review points. And despite L&D making extra training available to all the agents in the 70% cohort, few if any took up the option of more training. They were, you guessed it, “too busy”.
Why is it that line managers and the employees themselves are deprioritising training when they clearly need it? Are they really “too busy” or are they / their managers making excuses? I see this situation all too frequently.
In my experience, as unpopular as the sentiment may be, if people – regardless of rank – perceive something to be important, they do it. If people attach value to something they will treat it with respect. Ergo, if they do not value it and perceive it to be unimportant, they will disrespect it and not do it!
So perhaps the question we should be asking is how come employees and line managers are perceiving workplace training as part of the problem and not part of the solution?
The competence crisis: a threat to UK customer satisfaction
The Institute of Customer Service’s (ICS) UK Customer Satisfaction Index (UKCSI) – which is regarded as the leading barometer of average UK CSAT across 13 sectors (including financial services) – tells us that customer service standards have continued to fall to an all-time record low.
The UKCSI report also found that ‘poor staff competence’ is one of the top three drivers contributing to declining customer satisfaction in the UK, with around 20.1% of CSAT issues being attributed to this by UK consumers surveyed. To put the escalating problem of competence into perspective, only ‘quality or reliability of goods / services’ and ‘late delivery or slow service’ were ranked higher by UK customers as the leading two drivers.
I feel duty bound to defend those in the L&D community who genuinely have a passion to educate and improve the performance of employees in their workplace. I meet many passionate and talented L&D folks every week and many of them are frustrated and feel side-lined. Many feel they are expendable and worry about job security. They are busy people, many have spent time building relevant qualifications, they enjoy their work but believe they could achieve far more.
Back to the problem in hand, how come line management and employees aren’t valuing the training? The logical conclusion would be that it isn’t fit for purpose. Harsh as that may sound, I would be inclined to agree.
If you look at how you train your employees now (when you are probably hybrid working) versus how you did so pre-Covid when everybody was WFO, I suspect very little has materially changed. And what you are doing isn’t working. If it was, we wouldn’t see the criticism of the financial service’s regulator calling out ‘tick-box, one-size-fits-all training’ in Dear CEO letters. We wouldn’t see record low levels of customer satisfaction. We wouldn’t see some sectors struggling to recruit and retain younger employees.
The shortcomings of speed and low cost in workplace training
I fear that many companies have lost sight of the object of the exercise. It is not to deliver workplace training as quickly and cheaply as possible. It is to deliver and maintain employment-ready employees into the workforce. In a nutshell, the frustrations from L&D practitioners are fuelled by this focus on speed and low cost. Most know that this approach will not provide the appropriate levels of support and genuine development that the workforce needs to simply keep pace with the changing operational landscape.
And given line management are themselves recipients of the current low cost, ineffective training model, they speak from experience when they conclude that attending some training is more likely to hinder productivity than improve it!
The answer is that employers need to adapt and refine their workplace training strategy and invest in achieving and maintaining super competent employees – not ticking a box and hoping for the best. Those employers that have already done so are bucking the trend, winning awards for service, driving down operating costs and removing errors and customer detriment from their CX journeys. And they are restoring line management faith in learning and development because the training is working and can be directly mapped to improvements in operational KPIs.
Our customers have all recognised that training practices need to move with the times and now deploy Clever Nelly, our multi-award-winning AI, to gently and continually coach and support every member of staff to optimise and maintain their in-role competence.
Curiously, it doesn’t take a lot of time or cost a lot of money and, as one of our customers recently said to me, it sure costs a lot less than repairing all the problems and errors and customer complaints that a lack of in-role competence has been delivering for the last few years.
It also has the benefit of improving employee wellbeing, confidence, and job satisfaction. Nobody wants to go to work feeling they don’t have the skills to do the job “properly”, which probably explains why a record level of youngsters joining the sector are bailing out inside the first year.
Employee competence is a pre-requisite of Consumer Duty, as is evidencing good customer outcomes. You are unlikely to achieve the latter without the former.
Isn’t it time you looked again at your workplace training strategy and got an elephant in the team to help restore faith in your L&D function?