Down the drain

By Melissa Hardee, Director, Hardee Consulting

There is a great temptation for firms in difficult economic times to make some rather dodgy management assumptions, such as: training is a support function, a luxury the firm can’t afford.

Or another one: outsourcing is always cheaper than employing your own people to do it; or, if you are making fee-earning staff redundant, how can you justify keeping non-fee-earners?

Yet, running a training programme or employing non fee-earning support staff is not actually how a firm wastes money. In any business, you waste money by not being clear about why you are making the investment, what you need the investment to achieve and whether the investment is actually giving you the return you are after.

The topic of this column, ‘how to waste money on training’, could easily have the words ‘without really trying’ added, because firms tend to waste money on training without even realising it.

Strategic planning

As a fundamental principle, the training a firm invests in should be aligned with its business strategy and should be the means of filling any skills or performance gaps in current personnel. If your training programme isn’t tied in to your business planning, it begs the question, why are you running the training at all?

If you are going to invest in people, then not making sure they can do the job at the level you require when you require it is crazy, particularly if you are paying them a salary on the assumption of either their actual or potential competence.

Another way to waste money is to assume that training is something that only happens in a training room in a formal training session delivered by an (expensive) external trainer. The best training happens on the job. Training is about learning and development. If your juniors have supervisors who act as role models, and the supervisors take the time to give feedback to help improve performance, just how much formal training do you actually need to invest in?

Then there is thinking that you need to train everyone on everything – do you? Does your business plan require everyone to be able to do everything? If it doesn’t, your training programme doesn’t need to either. If your business plan plays to people’s particular strengths or is about (re-) deploying staff where you need them, your training programme should underpin that.

Check on trainees

If you sponsor your future trainees on the Legal Practice Course (LPC), you probably have an exclusive arrangement with one of the LPC providers. You may not, but many do. By hooking up in this way, you have probably saved money on LPC course fees and you therefore think ‘deal well done’.

However, if you don’t actually keep in touch with your future trainees during the year that they are doing the LPC and just leave them to it, you could end up later running training for them on the same things they studied on the LPC if it turns out they didn’t pay enough attention and apply themselves during the course of study.

If all you require for your investment in paying the LPC fees is a ‘pass’, and they remain ‘out of sight and out of mind’ for the year, there is little incentive for them to do much else.

Return on investment

If your training programme does fill the performance and knowledge gaps of your business plan, but people are pulled off training sessions (particularly sessions the firm is paying someone to run) because of a macho fee-earning culture (“if it’s not fee-earning, it’s a waste of time”), or the training they do get doesn’t get followed up or consolidated once they return to their desk, then you are not getting what you paid for.

If you don’t have a training budget based on the training that your business needs to invest in, then you are not spending your money wisely. Even if you do, training on its own is not enough; it has to be effective.

This begs the question: do you have the means of evaluating whether your training is effective, and, even more importantly, do you actually check? If you don’t address in an appraisal what training an individual has done and why, how can you see whether the training has made a difference to their performance?

If you don’t use metrics of some sort to assess whether training has delivered the benefits the business needs, then you haven’t a clue whether the investment has been worthwhile. And happy sheets that say that a trainer or particular training session was popular are not proof that money has been well spent.

 If you want to do a quick check of whether you are wasting money on training, ask yourself whether any of the examples above apply to you. Give yourself one point for each one you answer ‘yes’; give yourself ten points for each one you don’t know the answer to. And, by the way, the higher the score, the more likely it is that your money is going down the drain.