For years, in the HR area there was a trend to try to help the other departments; sometimes quite far from the area of the department and employees’ needs, but more from the HR people need to feel useful.
Were thus taken ideas from psychology (elements of memory, concentration, communication, role play , personality or intelligence questionnaires), management ideas (types of management, leadership, mentoring ), marketing ideas (markets types, market trends), to personal frustrations (climbing, parachute jumping , off road) and mixed in a way that the actual employee did not understand anything.
He was invited to all kinds of trainings where a trainer was speaking for hours about all the above and many more, all in the name of the employee’s personal development and the HR’s desire to feel useful.
What is not understood still in the HR area is that: the market needs, the company needs and employees’ needs are a complex mix worth studied at length and that change does not happen overnight, starting from a course. A different approach to understand these needs is required.
Any beginner in psychology can tell you that no one has the patience to listen to eight hours, or that no one remembers more than 3% of the information after an 8h class. In fact, what happened during that training was merely a demonstration of the HR department that they can make unnecessary and unrequested damage.
Why say that? Because I met as a psychologist and as a coach a lot of people who attended a large amount of courses, trainings, workshops, team buildings, from which all that they remembered was how drunk they all got with the company’s money. When you ask about the training topic, what they remembered about the training or what they think they managed to change after the course you receive no answer. The answers are in the elaborated, clever speech of the HR director, loaded with English phrases, satisfied that he obtained and once spent the department’s allocated budget.
Unfortunately or fortunately, the personal development, whether we speak of communication, sales coaching and even company development need to be one on one or in group of up to 10 people who meet once a week, several months in a row.
In this way, substantial changes may take place, starting from solving frustrations or personal trauma, streamline personal relationship with: money / time / objectives / resources, to team homogeneity.
An 8 hours training in two days is but a cheap show, where the trainers must believe they are omniscient, given that their profession is of financier or engineer. They seem not to understand at all or too little from the personality questionnaires they buy with big money from companies abroad, translated poorly and eventually applied after an online course or after obtaining their license following a three-day course.
And what you get is a frustrated employee because instead of receiving a raise as he produced good results, he sees the company’s money spent on accommodation, meals, drinks or training companies that stick around too little and go.
In the end, the employee remains with the same problems: overloaded at work, led poorly by a manager who reached a plateau in his professional development, frustrated that he cannot advance any more in his career or that his salary is not enough anymore.
Then I hear him talking about his colleagues who are paid like him, without having the same results, or that he doesn’t have time to spend time with his child as he needs to work too much. He also does not like the fact that he is summoned to meetings that take hours and hours just for the manager to hear himself talk, or that he is asked why he wants to leave at 17.00, or why he would want a raise, doesn’t he understand that there are not sufficient funds for this?
For these real problems there are not yet studies in the HR area, maybe because it would not sound good in English or they do not have a real trainer to deliver a good training.
Autor: Psiholog Constantin Cornea