First of all, they don’t grin. They frown and then they complain to one another about being forced to take “the latest, greatest, flavor-of-the-month training” that will be forgotten a month later. They don’t like spending an hour to learn three minutes of material. At most places training is not seen as an opportunity for advancement, or the acquiring of skills that are really wanted. It certainly isn’t seen as an adventure. Hours spent at one’s regular job are felt to be a relief compared to undergoing training.
You can’t do effective training or improve your work climate if your employees hate the training.
We have heard from many employees that the typical training they have been subjected to, feels like an insult to their intelligence and a waste of their time. It feels like just “going through the motions.”
Making training into something employees want doesn’t mean making it “enjoyable” in an artificial way: dressing it out with little warm-up jokes or pasting slightly humorous stock photos into a Power Point. It means making it challenging and real, where people feel they are experiencing a deeper truth, something original, perhaps something previously sensed but not directly spelled out. The trainee must discover him or herself in the training in a central, key role. Their future, and its chance for reaching a higher level of success, must be felt to be on the line.
Theme to theme, moment to moment, second to second, the participants must feel they are deeply in the center. The training should have a feeling of transformation, or realization and growth. It should be the buzz and topic of discussion as soon as the participants leave the training. It should remain alive and grow.
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