I recently received a call to come and do a 1-hour training event for a local business.  When I started asking questions about the goal of the session, I learned that they were experiencing some difficulty with conflict in their organization.  After some dialogue I conveyed that an hour wasn’t long enough to solve their problems.  They were disappointed with my answer, but I didn’t want them to waste their money. 

Just a Quick Fix

With 1 hour you get entertainment value; it can spark your thinking and start to heighten your awareness, but it really isn’t going to solve the issue internally or change behavior.  To solve business issues, we need to spend time diagnosing and formulating a plan to address over the long haul.

I often find businesses wanting a “quick fix” to some of their human resources problems.  After 25 years of doing this work, I know that the best way to do it and that is through consistent and strategic investments.

How do your numbers compare? 

ATD’s 2017 State of the Industry report  highlights that organizations spent an average of $1,273 per employee in 2016 on direct learning expenditure and average of 34.1 hours of formal learning hours used per employee.  These numbers increased from 2015, confirming organizations’ commitment to learning.  In fact, this is the fourth year in a row that has seen an increase in both the direct learning expenditure and the number of learning hours per employee.  In the words of Pete Senge, author of The Fifth Discipline, “In the long run, the only sustainable competitive advantage is your organization’s ability to learn faster than the competition.”