Is Training Really So Important?

by Tripp Johnson

It has been a tough quarter for your business unit. You are over budget on that new contact management initiative, and you have to report your numbers Monday morning. No worries – just cut that line item in the project plan that says “training.” In six months when asked why no one is using the new system, blame it on IT.

Of course, most of you would never do something like this. Innocent as OJ; aren’t you?

During client engagement interviews, I’ve heard employees comment, “I wish our teller platform did this,” or “Why can’t IT make this system track that?” Inevitably during that same interview, there is another employee in the room who says, “It does do that,” or “It will track that.” For example, the other day I was interviewing a client’s cash management personnel, and one regional manager said that they would like to offer one of their clients positive pay and wondered when their vendor was going to have this function available. I began to write this comment down when it occurred to me that their vendor does offer this service. Before I could say anything, the other regional manager in the room said, “We have positive pay; I have been offering it to my clients for two months.” How does this happen?

Despite best intentions, banks are under-investing in training.

With a median of $199 per employee, it’s no wonder some bank employees have no idea what their current systems can or cannot do; they have never been trained to use them properly.

Training is often viewed as time that cannot be spared. What I mean is that every year management will include a line item called “training” in the budget. Many even put dollars into the plan. Unfortunately, when employees ask if they can go to training classes or development seminars, their requests are often denied, justified with “we cannot afford to have you out of the office for an entire day.”

If that is the case, perhaps computer-based training is a solution. This technology has come a long way in the past few years. CBT gives your employees the opportunity to get the training they need and desire without ever needing to leave the bank. Now before you dive in head first to this new training method, I feel it is my duty to highlight a few keys to success with CBT:

• Set a corporate goal from the top of the company (e.g. 20 percent reduction in training-related travel costs). Don’t limit this initiative to just one area of the bank. CBT can pay for itself by reducing travel and administrative costs, but only if it becomes a corporate focus.
• Don’t introduce CBT without the technology bandwidth. You should check with your IT personnel before getting too far down the road with any CBT initiative to ensure your internal network can support this technology. If you have T1s in the head office but dial-up modems to all your remote locations, then CBT may not be for you. A training room could be set up in the head office building, but some would argue that this defeats the purpose of not being out of the office for a day.
• Incorporate testing and certification into the CBT process. As mentioned in Steve Williams’ article last year, “Winning the Bank Talent War,“ we at Gonzo HQ believe that testing and certifying will separate the winners from the losers and should be key components of any training initiative.
• Set up CBT in small modules (e.g. 30 – 45 minute “snippets”) and don’t get caught up in long, boring programs that never seem to end. Employees like to come back to modules again and again.

Some of you may be thinking to yourself that you could never get CBT approved, especially with the focus always on cost reduction. Heck, you may be right. But before you go too far into the deep end, let me remind you that a well-thought-out training program can help you reduce costs. The availability of training has been proven to reduce employee turnover. Employees, believe it or not, like training. Happy employees make for satisfied customers. And don’t forget, the cost of turnover can be very high when you factor recruitment, training and lost productivity into the formula.

Okay, cost reduction is one potential benefit of training, although I admit that it is sometimes hard to quantify. Fret not, Gonzo-loyalists! There are some other benefits that can be realized when your organization adopts a training focus:

• Risk reduction. Privacy is a big issue today, and the more your employees understand what they can or cannot do with customer information, the less chance you have of winding up on the front page of American Banker.
• Customer satisfaction. There is nothing worse than calling a bank’s call center and getting routed to five different people just to get your question answered. I wonder how many customers have decided to close their accounts after the fourth transfer.
• Revenue. Amazingly, employees who truly understand the bank’s products have the confidence to actually sell them.
• Consistency of data. Listen up, those of you who are heading down a multi-channel integration path or a CRM initiative! Entering the appropriate data into the designated field is a key component of any integration initiative. If employees are not trained on the appropriate field in which to enter a customer’s email address, then it probably will not be entered, or it won’t be entered correctly. When your customer elects to receive her statement electronically; where are you going to send it?
  Now as you continue your 2005 planning retreats, we expect to see many more zeros in the training category. One small plea: if you do start to certify and test employees (which we think is a great idea), please don’t let those certified employees add a bunch of acronyms to their business cards.

Until next time…
-tj