Have you heard of Gary Vaynerchuck, the wine aficionado, business owner and thought leader?  He has pioneered a new way of personal and professional branding, and this title shares his path to success with the rest of us (Harper Collins, 2009).

 

This book is enthusiastically written, with down-to-earth advice about how he has made a personal brand out of his love of wine.  He takes that advice and superimposes it on practically any business or career. 

Do your employees enjoy working for your organization?  If they do, they are in a narrow majority. According to a survey of 5,000 households by the Conference Board research group, only 45% of Americans are satisfied with their work–the lowest number ever recorded by the organization in its 22 years of studying the issue. What is causing such discontent? There is a variety pack of reasons, all related to the ever-present remnants of our recent economic upheaval: incomes have not been keeping up with inflation, health insurance is cutting into take-home pay, and many people are concerned about job security.

 

According to John Gibbons, program director at the Conference Board, "Challenging and meaningful work is vitally important to engaging American workers. Widespread job dissatisfaction negatively affects employee behavior and retention, which can impact enterprise-level success." In fact, 22 percent of respondents said they don’t expect to be in their current job in a year!

 

Organizations feel the affects of these attitudes in worker productivity, workplace atmosphere and eventually, the bottom line. It is a simple and well-known truism: 

 

As we dive headlong into a new year, there are plenty of unknowns related to the business and economic climates.

 

Whether you are a trainer, manager or executive, you have an investment in the training and development of staff and are always looking for ways to be more effective, successful and (of course) cost-conscious.

 

What can you focus on this year, to accomplish your organization's training goals? 

 

In the past, corporate training programs were often seen as an optional component to the human resources budget.  We all have learned that training initiatives are vital to the organization, but only if they are focused on results and their objectives are clearly mapped to organizational goals Would you like to see a better ROI on your training efforts in 2011?  

 

 

Our situation this time focuses on an international auto company that was able to keep profits fairly stable during the economically volatile time of the last two years. 

 

The executive board is now looking back at its investments and assessing where they experienced successes and challenges.  

 

One specific challenge that has come up is in the ROI from employee training.  Although the organization fared much better overall than its counterparts, the executive team does not see any positive return on its training programs.

 

As a matter of fact, the executives are just now finding out exactly what kinds of training programs were offered last year!  They are skeptical about continuing the current training budget in 2011.  In order to find out more, they have called in Bruce, the training manager, to plead his case for continued training programs at the same level. He can't understand why they would think of cutting the critical training programs that helped the company weather the tough economy.

What piece is missing? What shift does this organization need to make, in order to make their training programs more effective?