When is enough enough?

My son is notorious for only eating part of his dinner, saying “all done”, and running off to play with his toys. We pull him back, he eats a few more bites, and waits for us to finish. The question is, when is enough enough? This is the same for training employees - when is enough training enough.

The core of this question comes down to expected performance levels after training and negotiating the time it’ll take to reach particular performance levels.

But there are diminishing returns on the amount of progress learners make given more time. If you think about it, this makes sense because we tend to pick up a lot of the basics rather quickly. For example, think about teaching someone to cook. We can teach someone the basics of kitchen safety, preparing meats, cutting, and different cooking methods in just a few weeks. In that short time, a novice can go to at least a solid beginner to almost intermediate in just a few weeks to months. But how much longer will it take for that person to become advanced or an expert? Likely several more years of proper mentorship and coaching.

Because of this curve, these conversations can be challenging. Our stakeholders want people to be productive faster. We want to make sure they are properly trained. It all comes down to what kind of performance we need people to do after training and if they aren’t fully proficient, what can we do to shore up those differences? Could we offer a mentor program or buddy system after training to help newly trained people perform tasks? Could we limit the types of work they do until they get more experience and/or training?

Don’t be afraid to get specific on whether there is a “training standard of performance” which is difference than the normal expected performance standard. It’s only fair to the learners. It should be clear what kinds of requirements learners must attain to “graduate” from the training program. This helps the learners but also the stakeholders because there aren’t people performing substandard work.

If the organization decides to wait until they reach the standard performance expectation, it should be clear how it’ll take more time. You may train some additional content or “tips and tricks” but most of the additional time will be for practicing as realistically as possible considering the variety of different outcomes one may see in those tasks. Coming back to our cooking example, let’s say that one of the standards of performance is, “a learner should be able to prepare an 8oz porterhouse steak to medium taste in less than 15 minutes.”

Let’s say that during training it takes over 20 for someone to complete this task because they aren’t sure of the cuts of beef, which pans to use, getting things hot, testing the meat, etc. Also let’s say they under or overcook the meat about 20% of the time. It’s going to take time to get their performance time down to 15 minutes and improve their accuracy in cooking temps. Most of this is through practicing. They could do this practice on the job but it’ll result in unhappy customers and food waste. If we do it in training instead, we don’t lose customers and we can give more precise feedback to ensure they hit the mark.