Shawnee Love   •  
February 12, 2016

Penny wise and pound foolish is an adage with a wealth of meaning behind it.

Too often people think they are making the right decision to cut costs without paying attention to the long term impacts.  My blog on the incredible long term costs of layoffs demonstrated the risks of this type of thinking in one aspect of people management.

Another example of misguided savings is cutting training when “belts need to tighten”.  There are plenty of good reasons to modify your training program (education not transferring to the workplace, lack of results, newly able to train in house, etc.) but pure cost savings is rarely one of them.

In fact, one of the best times to train your people is when the economy slows down.  With less sales, less calls, less work in general, employees will have the time they need to:

• Pay attention during the training,
• Process the information received,
• Think about how to incorporate what they are learning into their work, and
• (If the trainer is any good) Take action and implement when they get back to their work station.

Changing how employees do their work or how they behave takes time and often cascades into other changes (and the underlying necessary learning associated) which also takes time and effort.  Busy, overworked, stressed out people aren’t going to take all that new information let alone do a good job of integrating and transferring the learning to work.

Hence, when the calls and work load ease up, its a great time to initiate training.  You can educate people on new systems and processes, new tools, and also help develop their soft skills (decision making, communication, interpersonal interactions, etc.).

Getting better at most things takes time and practice.  Slow downs are just the opportunity you have been waiting for.