Training’s Soft Side
‘Soft’ skills training requires the right environment and managers’ support to ensure success

Housekeeping managers have long understood the need for skills and safety training for their employees, but more are paying greater attention to “soft” skills training.

Soft skills can encompass many areas not related to cleaning and equipment — everything from communication, teamwork and diversity issues to customer satisfaction and continuous quality improvement.

Managers may have a harder time justifying the investment in a course on a topic such as customer satisfaction, especially in this era of shrunken budgets.

Will managers’ training efforts — and dollars spent — make a difference? When is training the right solution? Or, when is training a substitute for addressing underlying issues?

Managers often provide soft-skills training because they want to provide people with the skills to improve their performance. However, the success of the training efforts may be minimal.

For training to be effective, the following conditions must be present:

  • The systems must be in place to support the training, to make it possible for staff to actually use the new skills and implement new procedures.

  • Management must continually support the new skills and procedures by providing time and materials and by using the new skills themselves.

  • A feedback mechanism must be in place to ensure that people are able to follow through on the new skills and, when they’re not, the issues preventing their new behaviors are addressed.

The failure of training usually can be found in a failure to change the underlying systems so that people actually can use the new skills and processes.

People behave according to the unwritten “rules” of the organization — the norms that tell them, both consciously and unconsciously, what is OK and what will bring problems. When managers just plop training into an organization, the results may be undermined by these unwritten rules.

For example, if peformance coaching is the the issue, managers and supervisors must also have the time, a private place and management support to effectively coach and mentor their staff. If leaders are training people to deal more effectively with difficult customers, they also must have the time to help a customer become calm, the resources to solve the customer’s problem and the support of their management in particularly difficult situations.

The rule is simple: Address changes needed in systems before conducting training. Be certain staff can actually practice and use what is taught in the reality of their daily work.