How Do I Create an Effective Training Plan for Our Diverse Office Teams? Seeking Your Advice

My seniors have asked me to conduct an in-house training session for the employees. I'm in a small organization with 50-60 employees, including blue-collar workers. I need to prepare a training plan for the employees who are in the corporate office. They are from Operations, Accounts, Sales Support, and Dispatch teams.

Request for Training Suggestions

Please suggest what kind of training should be imparted to these employees. I would request all of you for your valuable inputs on how to prepare a training calendar and the topics that need to be covered.

Deeba - This is dangerous. If you can't identify what training needs to be delivered, then inviting ideas from us or a general audience will only compound the confusion. I recommend meeting with the division heads, offering 8-14 options, and having them each rate how much they require the training or how unnecessary it is. Then, invite qualified trainers or training companies to either create modules or utilize an in-house resource from each team to prepare and deliver a training module after researching it from the internet.

I am in a family-run organization, so there is no structured PMS or TNI in place. It's more of a lala-run organization. I am starting from scratch. Management wants employees to be trained to make them more productive. They want to switch to a professional culture and have employees trained in soft skills such as email etiquette, leadership, decision-making, etc. Please suggest how to proceed.

I am in a family-run organization, so there is no structured PMS or TNI in place; it's more of a lala-run organization. I am starting from scratch. Management wants employees to be trained to make them more productive. They want to switch to a professional culture and want employees to be trained in soft skills such as email etiquette, leadership, decision-making, etc. Please suggest how to proceed.

In that case, your training plans have to focus on modernizing the employees. Forget about email etiquette, leadership, decision-making, etc. They were needed in the heyday of email, and if an employee (after having one Gmail and one Yahoo email address) still can't write or draft a good email, training them won't make them productive. It's best if you put together a presentation on the guidelines to be followed by professionals, always with a focus on the bottom line.

I have to impart training. How do I go ahead? What do I start with? Please suggest.

Alright. Here are the topics I recommend for the presentation [title it appropriately to reflect the focus on professionalism]:

1) What is an Enterprise - For example, talk about HP (starting from an idea, beginning life in a garage, and then becoming a large MNC) and how your organization intends for it to be that way. This is to allow your employees to focus on an interesting point.

One day: 30 minutes talking about HP (or the example you want to use) and then the rest of the day, allowing employees to discuss how they can contribute to taking your HP from the garage to Global, outlining it and making it KRAs or key deliverables.

2) What Do You Need to Achieve KRAs? Use this to flesh out what you and the rest of the contributors from the forum think is necessary, and then put together the info and use a participative discussion model. This whole exercise should allow you and your organization to contribute and participate instead of just delivering needless and ineffective training programs.

Regards

Plan for TNI of each person. You can analyze the gap between required competency and actual competency through individual job descriptions, which will give a real picture of training needs. Then you can plan for training that addresses the maximum needs.

Organizational Focus in Training Needs Identification (TNI)

Let me write here what I have been emphasizing all along. TNI cannot be person-focused; the focus should be on the organization. Training programs are organized to bring about organizational change. If the TNI is planned for each person, then it becomes difficult to measure the training effectiveness. That is why not many companies in India are able to provide evidence of training effectiveness.

Therefore, as mentioned in my previous post, concentrate on measuring the costs associated with the business, direct the training efforts towards cost control, and measure whether cost reduction has occurred or not. This is a sure-shot formula to establish credibility for the HR department.

Thanks,
Dinesh Divekar