Employee training has always been a vital component of a company’s quality culture and actually solidifies it but in certain scenarios EQMS is the best choice to effectively manage the training requirements in an organization. With the added benefits of interoperability with standard documents (such as SOPs/WIs/Guidelines, etc.), CAPA, Risk Assessment etc. an EQMS way of managing trainings is becoming a trend nowadays.
The following 7 signs are in no particular order. You have to read them and decide which ones are prevalent in your organization or how many of these can you relate to?
1. Repeat Quality Events vs. Repeat Trainings
Have you ever wondered why certain adverse quality events recur inspite of continuous training to correct? Are there cases where action plans are being closed simply by having the offending employee take remedial training? What if your existing training management process lacks the ability to immediately plan ad-hoc trainings? What if the training content itself remains ineffective? What if there is no way to track that the same training has been given to an employee over and over again?
Well, an EQMS way of managing trainings can prevent this since it has the ability to alert you on critical errors such as periodic review or updating training content or highlighting repeated trainings via timely analysis, reporting and preventing closure of training related action plan unless all the associated tasks are closed.
2. Delivering Inconsistent Training
In today’s global era with organizations spread across different locations and with so many trainers, there is little or no assurance for consistency of training being delivered. This is primarily due to varying knowledge level of the trainers, different teaching styles or emphasis on certain job role tasks.
Hence, the consistency of the training programs always remains in doubt.
These differences exist during the organizational changes when mergers, acquisitions, staffing or technology changes occur across different locations within the organization.
But consistency can be maintained by implementing standardized training content with inputs from authorized subject matter experts which are timely reviewed and made available to all affected employees for further usage.
An EQMS effectively ensures this through an integrated closed loop system by managing training content in its Document Management module and linking it with a Training Management module that addresses other necessary tasks such as tracking trainers’ qualifications to ensure their required competency to deliver consistent trainings as per standardized curriculum.
3. Tracking Skills Application
There are various ways to ensure effectiveness of training programs. This suggests an assessment of an employee’s skill set and performance before and after the training.
The direct observations made by the supervisors, interviewers, written tests, or submission of project reports against a given project or assignments are some of the ways done for post evaluation.
An EQMS can handle this effectively and efficiently by linking an open task to monitor the skill application in the related areas for a certain period. With automated notifications for further refresher trainings, an EQMS keeps employees abreast of changes for a particular training topic which is liable to frequent critical changes.
4. Compliance Issues
At times, inadequate training can lead to serious compliance issues. Organizations that are primarily staffed by contract workers or have significant new hires are challenged to create effective training management programs An example is GMP training for which FDA keeps a hawk eye focus on the training requirements and fulfillment procedures/records.
Failing to comply now has definite fines for non-compliance issues resulting in warning letters or sanctions by the EU ICO.
An EQMS way of managing training not only proves useful for onsite FDA investigations but it also demonstrates your commitment in meeting the compliance standards that you are measuring and monitoring your workforce training requirements and the impact of training events.
5. Management Intervention
Often it is felt that training fulfillment either slows down or remains drastically unfulfilled becoming an unpleasant surprise to management! What if management could be kept apprised to these situations and be alerted to take timely action? For instance, if increase in ad-hoc trainings on critical topics exhausts your budget versus planned trainings then management intervention can be obtained to get approval for additional budget or taking deviation requests to prioritise the ad hoc over the planned trainings.
6. Demonstrating Value to Leadership
It is important for training managers to demonstrate value of training to get the required support from management. When facing issues such as lack of in-house expertise and relying on outsourced trainers to deliver training or content development then it usually needs to be justified as it involves additional budget.
Hence, if managed through a scalable EQMS system it will be an easier and faster way to capture the progress of the training requirements course, cost analysis and trainer feedback analysis, thus making it easier to obtain management approval whenever required.
For instance, during acquisition of a new business entity it will be challenging task for the concerned Human Resource professionals to train the newly added staff on the acquiring company’s common procedures, work culture and various other training aspects. It also becomes even more challenging when the newly added workforce is high in numbers.
But if your organization’s trainings are managed through a scalable EQMS system then you can easily overcome such challenges by swiftly using standardised training modules to reach the large audience within a timely manner.
This also provides confidence to top management when contemplating new acquisitions.
7. Engaging with the training
To ensure employees are fully engaged in the learning process is another challenge faced by the Human Resource professionals. There are several ways to tackle this issue.
Apart from focusing on learning portfolios to make them interesting for the appropriate audiences, another effective approach is to make the trainees as stakeholders in their learning process. Feedback surveys, creating customized content and an employee input helps to get them engaged in the entire training process that yields better results.
While managing all this through EQMS solution it becomes comparatively easy for employees to stay engaged throughout the process since they can nominate, collaborate on new content development and thus being engaged through various other tasks creating a lively environment that brings the best out of everyone as a positive learning outcome.
So, how many of these signs can you relate to? You may want to send this article to your management or other responsible Training or Human Resource teams within your organization so that they can ‘see the light’!
We’ve tried to highlight the main training challenges in organizations, but you can see that all of these are easily surmountable. And, with an effective tool as EQMS it becomes even easier!
You can rely on the Qualityze EQMS way of managing your training requirements with its rich features that effectively deal with all of the concerns above which are commonly faced by the Human Resource and Quality professionals.
Qualityze Training Management automated processes help you reduce training costs, shorten time-to-compliance and provides you closed-loop best practice processes that are unmatched in the market place.
Want to give it a try? Contact us at info@qualityze.com or call us on +1-877-207-8616
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