Avoiding training pitfalls is crucial for building a capable, compliant, and confident workforce—but things don’t always go as planned. Staff can disengage, managers may fail to prioritise, and compliance training often misses the mark entirely. These common pitfalls can derail even the most well-designed training programs, leaving businesses struggling with skill gaps and regulatory risks. In this blog, we’ll explore how employees and managers unintentionally undermine training plans and uncover two critical reasons why compliance training often fails, helping you create a strategy that delivers lasting success.
Avoiding Training Pitfalls – How Staff Ruin Training Plans!
The role of the manager in training is critical. Managers ruin training all the time. However, it’s not all on the shoulders of managers! Training participants have a role too and can’t sit there blaming management for their poor training outcomes. The problem for most staff when approaching training, is that – frankly – they are not good learners. Staff ruin training all the time too.
Training for adults usually involves (a) learning new, unfamiliar knowledge or (b) changing long-term habits. Your staff are no longer children. They are adults with embedded beliefs, attitudes and habits. The learning process can, therefore, be confronting, challenging and frustrating as staff often feel their beliefs are being challenged, that their way of doing things may not be optimal or they are not used to feeling a lack of control or expertise.
Staff ruin training with excuses, excuses, excuses
While some staff will instantly see the benefits and push through any short-term pain, many staff will experience some uncertainty or fears during training. It is natural for participants in training to, therefore, seek excuses to avoid these difficult feelings.
- “I just don’t have the time to implement this”
- “I don’t see the value or point in changing my current skills/habits”
- “I tried it once and it didn’t work, so I am giving up”
- “I will give it a try when all the tools and processes are fixed”
- “It’s all too confusing and I don’t know where to start”
In all these statements, the participant is turning away from the training because they are finding it hard at the start, often when they are used to being on top of everything. This is a pivotal moment in learning and a failure to push through this moment will almost certainly result in a failed training exercise. Staff ruin training simply because good training isn’t always easy. In many organisations, where staff are educated and used to feeling in control, this is a particular problem.
The problem is that unless the participant is quite self-motivated, they may not be able to overcome these barriers on their own. So, yes, once again, managers might have to step up and do several things to help deal with these situations.
Set the correct expectations upfront about learning
Learning is a journey, not a day or a session. Staff need to know it’s about exploring some new knowledge and then spending some time AFTER to implement it. Ideally, managers should tell staff that in addition to the time spent learning at the training event/module, staff are also expected to set aside time to review, test and implement their new knowledge.
Make a safe environment to learn
Managers need to be sure participants feel safe to ‘make mistakes’ with their new knowledge. If staff feel they need to be ‘perfect’ immediately at the end of a training event or module, they may never actually have a go afterwards for fear of failure.
When we learn something new, we are usually bad at it for a little while. Practice, repetition, adaption and reflection are needed to embed our new knowledge and become good at it. Managers need to encourage this spirit and allow not just success sharing, but also sharing of hurdles or difficulties.
Keep the training alive
A key responsibility for management is to keep training alive beyond the event or module. As noted above, staff need time to implement. If the training is seen as an event – finished in one go and never spoken of again – then the training will be defeated. Managers can help keep training alive by ensuring its on the weekly team meeting agenda for a few weeks/months, asking for success or problem sharing, asking staff to debrief with them about the training or setting a medium-term goal for staff to achieve from the training.
Most staff don’t set out to defeat training. It’s a subconscious outcome because learning is hard. Learning doesn’t come naturally to most people. If it was easy, then why would your staff even be doing it?
As a result, staff ruin training easily. They end up defeating training, even when it’s not in their best interests! When management is aware of this and takes additional steps to create a better learning environment, the difference in outcome can be striking.
Avoiding Training Pitfalls – How Managers Ruin Training Plans!
In any modern organisation, managers play the most important role in training. Not the trainer or expert. Not the participants themselves. Managers – the person to whom your employees report to on a daily basis. Yet managers ruin training. All the time. Let’s find out why.
Managers set the tone before the training, are responsible for setting the expectations and accountability of learners and set the tone after the training. So managers include…
- Team Leaders or Team Managers
- Partners or Owners
- Business or Practice Development Managers
- Senior Learners (Directors, the most experienced and senior Learners)
- Anyone in a role model or mentor capacity
Unfortunately, managers can sometimes say and do things that reduce the engagement or enthusiasm of the learners in the learning experience. In fact, managers ruin training all the time, no matter how good the training might be!
Have you heard managers ruin training out loud…
Perhaps you’ve listened to managers say…
- “I do things my own way and it works, so I’ll ignore the training”
- “This training isn’t for my benefit. It’s for my staff, so I don’t need to worry about it”
- “My employees will attend, but I have more important things to do”
- “We have so much going on. Let’s deal with these fires and the training can wait”
- “Business is good now, so we can park lessons from the training until it’s slower”
- “I need you to do a few things today, so pop out of the training for a few hours”
When these statements come from people who influence the behaviours of learners, it can disengage learners from the training…even when the manager says or does these things implicitly or inadvertently. If this occurs, it is almost certain that the effectiveness of the training will be reduced.
In fact, too often it is these casual comments, lack of personal interest or outright annoyance with training taking time from their employees…which leads to just one outcome: managers ruin training. Managers turn training into the very thing they hate – wasted time – because they end up dis-engaging their employees from the training!
What we want to see…
Consider the opposite though. Consider the manager who gets involved in every aspect of the training, demonstrating their enthusiasm, experience and knowledge. Those managers who attend or complete the training themselves, leading from the front, helping their employees and showing a real interest in ensuring the training makes a difference.
This type of manager creates a new level of interaction and engagement by their employees in the training.
Managers ruin training – Managers help training
As a result, we must be cautious that managers send two critical messages to participants…
- Employees need to see managers engaging in the training at a personal level. The “Do as I say, not as I do” message from some managers will be interpreted by staff that the training can be ignored. Instead, managers MUST be involved in the training to demonstrate how important it is.
- Employees need clear expectations set by their managers. Managers who view “training attendance as training completion” are failing to help their staff realise that “actual change is training completion”. Managers need to set expectations with staff about what they expect them to do differently as a result of the training.
- Employees need to be held accountable by managers for change. Further to this, staff should know how they will be ‘measured’ after the training. Once managers explain to staff, upfront, what is expected to occur after the training, those managers then need to check for that change. They need to conduct 1:1 debriefs, ask for feedback, review workbooks or journals or make on-the-job observations.
If you want the best possible result from your training investment, you need to get your managers involved in advance. Making a small additional investment – often just of time – in your managers will boost your training…rather than defeat it. In many service-based organisations, where managers are often fee-earners and busy, there is even a great emphasis on getting managers positively involved in your training plans.
Providing managers with ‘training on training’
The involvement of managers in successful training is so important that Tribal Habits has several built-in features in this area.
- Manager notifications. First, each employee in Tribal Habits can have a designated manager. Within each topic, manager notifications can then be enabled when participants hit certain milestones. This automates the involvement of managers, as required, in the learning process. Managers can be notified when they need to have a 1:1 meeting with their staff members as part of the topic. They can be notified to review or observe new skills or materials. They can also be notified when their employees start or finish topics, including summary information on their staff member’s outcomes from the training. Reminder notifications can also be escalated to managers when their employees are significantly overdue in their training completion.
- Manager training. Our Development library includes ready-made training for managers on how to manage training in their teams. This topic, available to all firms using Tribal Habits, can help your managers understand their role in the process and overcome bad habits. It includes automatic polling of managers on their concerns with training at your firm and where they feel they need additional help.
2 critical reasons why compliance training fails!
Despite the huge amounts of money, time and energy spent on the problem and the solution, compliance training fails more often than many other forms of training. This failure can occur for both the organisation and the employee too, for both are making investments in the process.
In this article, let’s consider why compliance training fails and, at a high level, what is missing that creates this failure in compliance training.
Compliance training fails due to intention
All training begins with the ‘why’. Why is the training occurring? Why is it required? Why can’t another form of activity or intervention achieve the desired result – why was training selected as the appropriate activity? If there is a failure at this level of intention then the training intervention is probably doomed from the start!
How does this play out for compliance training? What is the intent for most compliance training activities carried out at most organisations? It’s probably…
- What is the intent of the organisation? All too often, compliance is a ‘tick the box’ activity. It’s a one-off attempt to create a safeguard against the risks of non-compliance for the organisation. It’s a necessary event.
- What is the intent of the employee? All too often, compliance is a ‘tick the box’ activity. It’s something the employee has to do to meet internal requirements or avoid a negative outcome. It’s a necessary event.
Perhaps this is a little harsh. Compliance training is a necessary event. However, if it is only ever viewed as ‘necessary’, then what perceived value does it have for any stakeholder? When things occur because they are only necessary, the level of engagement is always low – compared to things done because they are valuable, relevant or beneficial to the parties involved.
Low engagement is a massive problem for compliance training. Think about the desired outcome – to safeguard the organisation and employees from non-compliance. When engagement is low in the very activity designed to create safety, how much safety is being established anyway? Not much. Compliance training is often ‘in one ear and out the other’.
Yes, the organisation may feel they have shifted some of the non-compliance risks onto individual employees, but they have not reduced risk – merely shifted it. Chances are when a non-compliant event occurs the organisation will still take damage. The illusion of safety is not the same as actual risk reduction.
Compliance training fails due to implementation
A second failure often occurs during the execution of compliance training. Let’s think about how most compliance training occurs.
- The organisation imports a bunch of compliance training modules. These modules are typically not customised for the organisation and often branded with an external provider’s details.
- The organisation groups modules together and requires employees to complete them. Usually, but not always, this is a one-off process, particularly for non-regulatory content.
- The employee is deemed ‘compliant’ once they have their completion certificate. The end goal is to get that certificate. So they go through the motions to obtain their certificate.
Now the organisation has a list of compliant people, and those people have a bunch of compliant certificates. Yet what has occurred here? What risk has been reduced?
This is the ‘minimal level of effort’ approach to compliance training. Throw together some external content and throw it at some employees.
What is missing? What could change?
If these two critical failures are occurring, then it’s almost certain compliance training fails. Yes, boxes have been ticked and certificates have been obtained. Yet what level of behavioural change is likely to have occurred? What level of change will still be occurring in three weeks? Six months? One year? Probably not very much.
At a high level, the entire approach to compliance is flawed.
The cultural attitude, by both organisation and employee, towards compliance is flawed.
So let’s start there. Let’s consider how we can reframe compliance from a cultural point of view.
- The organisation needs to approach compliance as a cultural issue. C-Suite and Senior Management need to believe that compliance training drives organisational behavioural change which enables employees to behave and act in ways which will benefit all stakeholders. Compliance, in some form, should be represented in organisational values. Links should be established (identified, tracked, monitored, reported, celebrated) between compliance training and organisational outcomes.
- Compliance training should be presented in an organisation’s branding (not just in an external provider’s generic branding).
- Compliance training should be a regular event occurring throughout the year (not just when someone joins or in a mad scramble before year-end).
- The creation of compliance training content should be an organisation-wide responsibility (not solely led by a HR, Training or Compliance team).
- Employees need to see how compliance training improves their work. There needs to be a clear benefit for employees in completing compliance training (not just a benefit for the organisation).
- Compliance training should explicitly discuss workplace or role benefits. It should be made clear how the training can help employees do their work better).
- Compliance training must include discussion of the organisation’s own policies and procedures (not just be discussed in the abstract of legislation or generic scenarios).
- Compliance training must allow for questions from employees to allow them to confirm scenarios or raise uncertainties (not just the answering of quizzes or assessments).
Does all of this require a little more time and effort? Yes, but not much (and certainly online compliance training platforms like Tribal Habits can simplify this work). It may not even require any additional cost. In fact, it may even result in cost savings if the end result is actual changes in behaviour and actual reductions in risk, not just the illusion of safety from a training certificate.
If you enjoyed this article, be sure to check out our ‘Online Compliance Training – The Ultimate Guide’!
