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74 PCB007 MAGAZINE I MARCH 2024 Every sit-down with an employee is a poten- tial training moment (new procedure revision, internal defects, customer returns, process changes, etc.). Don't worry about creating huge employee training files; customers like to see lots of training evidence for the people who are mak- ing their products. A cautionary note: As with pretty much anything, the more complicated you make your training program and the docu- mentation process, the higher the potential for failure. Some companies fall into the habit of over- training, for example, performing annual train- ing on every work instruction. is is a signifi- cant expense in terms of time and money and is not very effective. How much effort do you think employees put into reviewing several work instructions they have read many times as part of the company's "read and understand" annual training? e better solution is to do a good job of the initial training and then only retrain when the work instruction changes, or if there is a performance issue or a finding in an internal audit. en, don't just rely on the employee to read it independently. Sit down and review the changes or specifics that trig- gered the retraining. is is a much more effi- cient use of time and is ultimately more effec- tive. "It all has to do with the training; you can do a lot if you're properly trained." Are these the words of a modern corporate training offi- cer attempting to motivate her workforce? Hardly. Elizabeth II, Queen of Great Britain and Northern Ireland made this salient procla- mation over 50 years ago. What has held over the ages is not a secret; people perform better when properly trained. PCB007 Steve Williams is president of The Right Approach Consult- ing. He is also an independent certified coach, trainer, and speaker with the John Maxwell team. To read past columns, click here. bly not documented anywhere. Preserving this tribal knowledge and turning it into a training competitive advantage is critical to a compa- ny's long-term survival. is particular problem is compounded by high employee turnover during times of uncertain economic environments. is logic becomes fatal when long-term employees begin retiring, and that tribal knowledge is lost forever. It has become all too common to witness companies cut costs by offering early retirement (or worse) to long-term experi- enced employees so that they can replace them with younger, inexpensive new employees. What these companies fail to realize until it is too late is that this strategy severely backfires as decades of experience and tribal knowledge walk out the door with the employees. Many of the businesses that have not survived recent economic cycles were companies that had been successful for 30-plus years until several "Stan- leys" began to retire. Others who have survived have never fully captured all the tribal knowl- edge that le with their best employees. Once you begin to peel back the layers, it is amazing to note just how many outcomes (both positive and negative) in any business can ultimately be traced, in some fashion, back to training. Training Records Ironically, the companies that have the best- trained workforce many times have the weak- est system. Most companies do a tremendous amount of training but do not take credit for it. A common mantra you will hear me say is, "If you can't prove it, it didn't happen." If you take the time to flowchart all your processes, you will be surprised by the amount of infor- mal training that takes place daily that is not recorded in any way. It is critical to develop a simple method of documenting all training that takes place; in other words, you need a train- ing record. Whether part of a training soware solution or a simple paper document, com- plete a training record at every opportunity.