Last May, the HR Forum took place, where HR advisors shared valuable advice to help small and medium-sized businesses navigate the current climate of uncertainty. Among them, speaker Jean-Philippe Bradette proposed approaching training from a new angle. Here is what he had to say.
His position?
“We need to stop training out of reflex,” he says right off the bat. “Too often, I walk into an SME, we chat, and boom! The solution is training. You first have to ask yourself: do we really have a training problem or a performance problem? Was the employee poorly trained, or was an objective or an instruction poorly given?”
He gives the example of a manufacturer that wanted to train its 400 employees on a new procedure that seemed to be poorly understood. After review, the company realized that the confusion actually came from contradictory instructions given by experts on the production floor.
Let’s be clear: Jean-Philippe Bradette does not question the imperative of training employees. He cites a meta-analysis published in 2020 in the journal Human Resource Management by researchers from the United Kingdom. Combining 119 studies, it established a correlation between training and organizational performance. However, the HR advisor points out one important factor:
“The gap widens between those that train with a strategy and those that train somewhat randomly and, unfortunately, reactively.”
So, before training at great expense, it is worth asking why.
Lightening training programs
The other trap of training “at all costs” is overloading the program with information that could be communicated to employees in other ways. Rather than automatically turning to creating a course or a training session, Jean-Philippe Bradette suggests that companies build tools employees can use in real time. He gives the example of a checklist, a verification grid or a memory aid placed near a factory machine.
“This tool frees up the employee’s memory while they do their task. It’s the kind of initiative that is quick to set up and has a big impact on employees.”
Companies can take the exercise further by creating an AI agent responsible for answering employees’ frequently asked questions. The result: the amount of information to absorb during training is reduced, which frees up time to work through concrete cases specific to the organization, then to do practical learning that consolidates what has been learned.
“The brain remembers by association,” Jean-Philippe Bradette reminds us. “If the training was never anchored in your concrete situations, there is no trigger. The learning will remain dormant.”
He also implores companies to stop paying for generic training content that has not been contextualized to the company’s reality.
“Employees won’t make the effort to connect what is important to them with what doesn’t apply on the shop floor.”
The trap of satisfaction surveys
In his talk, Jean-Philippe Bradette also questions the way companies measure the impact of the training given to their employees. According to him, most training providers assess employee satisfaction with the training (e.g., “Did you like this training, from 1 to 5?”) rather than the impact of what was learned on the organization.
“The problem with this approach is that a training session that may have been informative and truly inspiring can get a 9/10. But when I go back to work, do I change anything in my practices? Maybe not.”
He stresses that “good” training sessions are not necessarily the most enjoyable to attend.
“If I was asked to make an effort, if I had to work, if I had to change those famous neural connections in my brain by doing a practice activity, it may well be uncomfortable.”
The HR advisor then suggests waiting 30 to 90 days, then measuring what has concretely changed in the field, in employees’ practices.
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