Training teaches workers to hate training

Wife of corporate manager: ``My husband's new boss keeps trying to take us out to dinner."

Me: ``Isn't that a good thing -- a boss who cares about his employees and their families?"

Wife: ``If he really cares, he might try letting my husband occasionally get home in time to have dinner with his children."

As if the economy didn't have enough troubles, I am forced to report this troubling finding: a dramatic rise in the BAI. That's the Bad Attitude Index, which is the frequency with which corporate employees complain about their managers. The index is based on my communications and thus is what narrow-minded people call -- and by narrow-minded I mean those who do actual research -- ``anecdotal." However, the disheartening anecdotes are piling up.

Why now? Here's my hypothesis on what has happened: Starting in the `80s, when it occurred to companies that the Japanese were about to dice their market share like a fresh piece of ahi, management started to ask employees for help, saying, in effect, ``Just give us a bit more effort per day, put in a little more time, and we might be able to stay in business."

And employees came through . . . well, they came through just as soon as the layoffs started and there were fewer people to divvy the work between. Then, the next year, management came back and asked for another helping of little-more. The next year, same thing.

Let's put some numbers to this expansion of hours on the job. Say that during the palmy days of limited competition, the typical employee worked six hours a day (out of the eight hours at the office). So if management asked for 10 percent more output, the employee could put in an extra 10 percent (36 more minutes devoted to actual work) and everything worked out fine. Then, the next year, management asked again. No problem. But after 20 years, and the accumulation of compounding 10 percent increases, the typical employee who was once working 360 minutes daily is now at 2,422 minutes, or 40.4 hours per day. Maybe that's a tad overstated, but you get the idea.

These days, when management asks for a pinch more time and effort, there's nothing left but the pinched face. I understand the exhaustion and how it drags down attitudes. As Freud put it, ``A man with a toothache can't fall in love." Yet there is one place where I see bad attitudes that disappoint me. Analyzing the BAI, I've had to conclude that one of the areas where patience has become most frayed is with ``training." In fact, we can conclude that recent management has trained employees to hate training.

Why this troubles me is that money spent on training is one measure of the concern companies have for their employees; it's one occasion when employees are truly treated as if they are an asset instead of just another expense. And yet here is where many employees are expressing the most truculence. In fact, I've noticed that when employees become sufficiently embittered, they turn ``training" into a three-syllable word, with emphasis on the ``rain."

What got me thinking about all this was reading excerpts from a speech by Jack Welch given to a FranklinCovey Symposium and reported in the May Training magazine. Welch pointed out that GE's training programs were three weeks long, saying: ``When I tell other CEOs that these were three-week courses, they pass out. They'd say, `Three weeks away from the job -- how can you do it?' I said, `How can you not do it?' " He added, ``We didn't bring in Harvard professors; we had our own people teaching it so that our employees could see what a leader looked like."

At GE they made being chosen for the three-week course an honor, part of a brighter future at the company. However, the real solution to making training better is not to use in-house instructors, but in-house marketing. When training is voluntary, attitudes toward it change. (A professional speaker told me that for one seminar the employees were so offended by being required to attend that an entire section of the audience sat with their backs to him.)

Further, when training is voluntary, the folks who put on the programs have to ``sell" them to employees, creating an equivalent of market feedback, eventually leading to programs that employees find helpful. And that's when ``training" goes back to two syllables, and even, if all goes well, to a different pair of syllables: learning.

Dale Dauten is a syndicated columnist. He can be reached at dale@dauten.com.