The next time a workplace training session seems difficult to you, consider this: In August, USAA employees arrived at their Colorado Springs campus at 4:30 a.m. to be loaded on buses for Zero Day PT training.
The goal of Zero Day, spokesman Peter Casiano explains, is to give workers without military experience a taste of the life in uniform lived by many USAA members.
PT stands for “physical training.” In the course of three hours, participants hauled a backpack, memorized obscure facts, learned drill and ceremony basics, and did push-ups for bad answers. The military-style workout finished with a 1½-mile run — in formation.
Real drill sergeants — some on active duty, others USAA employees who are reservists or retired — volunteered to give co-workers an authentically brutal basic training experience.
“They got the whole shark-attack treatment,” says Casiano, a retired Air Force officer.
More importantly, workers saw how the military breaks down individuals and builds them into a team.
“The better we know our members, the better we are able to serve them,” says Kent Fortune, vice president and general manager of USAA’s Colorado Springs site.
With the labor market tightening, Colorado companies have stopped treating employee development as a perk and instead approach it strategically, as a way to build the workers they need and increase engagement.
“Instead of turning people over, you keep your workforce up-to-date,” says Susan Schell, director of the Career Management Center at Colorado State University’s College of Business.
At the same time, training and development professionals are being pushed to evaluate program effectiveness, says Stefanie Johnson, assistant professor at the Leeds School of Business at the University of Colorado.
“Learning and development is a $164 billion business,” Johnson said, citing a 2013 study by the Association for Talent Development. “Companies should see what they’re getting as a return on investment.”
Training ROI can be measured in the economic value of employee behaviors — such as patients seen or claims processed per day — or in reduced turnover and recruitment costs, or in higher revenues or market share when innovations are put into place.
Many of the companies recognized as 2015 Top Workplaces get high marks from their associates for the amount and quality of the training they receive.
Live Urban Real Estate created a mentor program that pairs newly licensed brokers with veteran agents. DaVita HealthCare Partners offers more than 680 classes through DaVita University.
Visiting Angels of Littleton partners with the Alzheimer’s Association of Colorado to teach home health workers how to care for people with dementia. At Robert W. Baird & Co., associates who earn their Certified Financial Planner designation can collect a $25,000 deferred compensation bonus.
At Craftsy, “we’ve invested significant resources in the last year in training first-time managers,” CEO John Levisay says. Each new manager is paired with a mentor, usually from a different functional area. Monthly meetings are supplemented with tools and tutorials from Jhana Education, an online company that specializes in manager development for tech companies such as Groupon and Match.com.
It’s an issue in tech startups where people who are experts in their field find themselves leading teams, Levisay says. “All of a sudden, they have three or five or seven people reporting to them. It’s a little overwhelming. I want to set these people up to win.”
Demographics are driving some of the growth, as millennials with a hunger to learn move into the workplace and baby boomers seek training in the new technologies that threaten to make them irrelevant.
Millennials have heard they will change careers seven times in their working life. “They’ll hold jobs that don’t exist, using technology that’s not invented to solve problems we don’t know about yet,” CSU’s Schell says.
Along with formal programs in the classroom or online, learning opportunities come from mentoring and coaching, job shadowing and day-to-day management practices such as one-on-one meetings and regular feedback.
Denver-based Physician Health Partners encourages its employees to cross-train and work in many places around the company. “I can think of a couple individuals who have been in four different departments,” says CEO Ken Nielsen. “They become more valuable because they can really put the puzzle together of what every department’s strengths are. Lateral movement keeps people fresh.”
Conversations in airports and at school events led Anadarko Petroleum to launch a unique training program to teach workers how to talk about Anadarko and the industry.
The half-day Anadarko Ambassadors training in oil and gas basics, energy economics, geology and communication skills is bolstered with a spiral-bound fact book and a smartphone app for quick answers.
Anadarko Ambassadors started in Colorado but has been adopted across the company and picked up by other energy companies, spokeswoman Robin Olsen says.
“With the challenges facing the industry in Colorado, I appreciate the time and energy that has gone into making sure everyone knows what we are all about,” one employee wrote. “Not all of us work out in the fields and understand the processes. But with the training, I am more educated about what my company does and speak intelligently with others.”
Anadarko scrapped its previous policy of deferring all questions to official spokespeople after research showed that people trust information about the oil and gas industry that comes from somebody who works in the industry — but not executives or “PR people like me,” Olsen says.
It’s part of a learning culture at Anadarko, says Korby Bracken, director of environmental health and safety. Along with training field workers on a range of issues from air-quality standards to safe equipment handling, his department does monthly “toolbox meetings” at Anadarko’s downtown Denver headquarters.
Issues range from driving skills — “People here in Denver tend not to obey traffic signals,” Bracken notes — to tornado safety.
“Safety in the home is just as important,” Bracken says. “Management realizes that our most important asset walks out the door every day.
“So don’t wear flip-flops when you’re mowing the lawn.”
