10 Ways on How NOT to Train Employees

Training has to happen in every organization. Even if it’s not intentional training, it still happens.

Here are some ways NOT to go about training your employees:

1. Leave it up to the Human Resource Staff. It’s not your job to teach them.
2. Give them all of the information at one time. If they get overwhelmed, how are you at fault?
3. Don’t ever make it hands-on training. Just tell them what to do and expect them to understand (and pick-up on it) right away.
4. Don’t actually follow the practices that you’re teaching them.
5. Don’t use new training videos. Make sure that the videos were done in black and white.
6. Be inconsistent with what you tell people in the same role.
7. Don’t be prepared when you train them. You won’t forget anything if you don’t plan.
8. Don’t tell them why they need to do something. Don’t give them the big picture or overall goal of what they’re working on.
9. Don’t update your training curriculum or material. Let the person figure out what is no longer applicable to them. It will help them think critically.
10. Don’t make it fun. It should be boring because people learn better that way.

So what’s the point?

Obviously most – if not all – of those statements are untrue and should not be followed. But it is amusing to imagine someone actually following those steps. Do you recognize any of those from your organization? What can you do about it? Use these as a spring-board to think about your training practices and how you can improve them.

——————————————————————————————————————————————————————–

Disclaimer: I work for an IT company (CDS Group) that (among other things) specializes in products that assist with transparency, government, and technology (to include multi-camera digital video recording, hosting and web presentation of public and private content). The company works with the public and government sectors in multiple ways to provide Gov 2.0 and related technology solutions.

About these ads