But Did They Really Show Up?

For the past 15 years, I have had the opportunity to train corporate teams, speak at conferences and organise events for different institutions. Over the years, I have noticed something interesting about the people organisations send for training.

It has become even more obvious to me in the past five years.

Put 30 employees from different organisations in a training room and watch carefully. Before long, you will begin to notice different attitudes towards learning, work and growth. In my experience, they generally fall into three broad groups.

Of course, people are more complex than three boxes, but these patterns can tell us something important about the culture we are building in our organisations.

The Hungry Ones

The first group I call the Hungry Ones.

You can almost identify them without asking.

They arrive ready to learn. They listen. They take copious notes. They ask questions. They participate in exercises. When there is an opportunity to network, they make good use of it.

During breaks, some will walk up to the facilitator with another question: “You mentioned something earlier about this. Can you explain it further?”

They are not attending simply because HR nominated them or because their organisation paid for the programme. They see the training as an opportunity to improve themselves and, hopefully, take something useful back to their workplace.

When the programme ends, they may come over to thank you, ask for recommended resources or find out how they can learn more.

These are the people who make trainers excited.

But more importantly, these are the kinds of employees organisations should pay attention to. Their hunger to learn often extends beyond the training room. They are curious. They want to improve. They are interested in becoming better at what they do.

You can teach skills, but hunger is a powerful advantage.

The “I’m Just Here” Group

Then there is the second group.

They are present, but not necessarily engaged.

The organisation has paid for the training, so they attend. Perhaps their manager nominated them. Perhaps everybody in their department was asked to participate.

Whatever the reason, they are there.

But that is about it.

They may listen occasionally and participate when necessary, but you get the sense that they have not connected the training to their personal development or the organisation’s growth.

For some, attending an external programme is simply a pleasant break from the office.

And, yes, sometimes the attraction can be surprisingly simple: the meals, refreshments, stationery, souvenirs or whatever comes with the programme. Anyone who has organised corporate events for some time will understand what I mean.

There is nothing wrong with enjoying the food or taking home the branded notebook. Please enjoy them.

The problem is when those become more memorable than what you were sent there to learn.

An organisation may spend thousands of Ghana cedis sending employees to a two- or three-day programme, but if those employees return to work exactly the same way they left, what exactly did the organisation buy?

Attendance?

A certificate?

A few photographs for the company’s social media page?

Training should eventually produce some form of change—new knowledge, improved behaviour, better systems, stronger performance or fresh thinking.

Otherwise, we may simply be funding expensive days away from the office.

The Completely Disengaged

The third group worries me the most.

These are employees who appear to have mentally checked out.

The organisation pays for the programme, but they arrive late or may not show up at all. Some come, sign their names and disappear. Others spend most of the session distracted and waiting for it to end.

Occasionally, someone who barely participated will later ask, “Please, can I get the slides?”

The slides are not the training.

The deeper problem is that this attitude may not begin in the training room. The training room may simply expose what is already happening at work.

The person may already be disconnected from the organisation, the role or both.

And that deserves management attention.

A Question That Left the Room Quiet

At a recent training session, I asked a group of professionals and managers a simple question:

“How many of you really love the work you do?”

I waited.

No hands.

So I asked again.

Still, no hands.

That moment stayed with me.

Now, I understand that everybody will not necessarily love their job. Life does not always work that way. Sometimes you accept a job because you need to pay the bills. Sometimes a role is simply a bridge to another opportunity. Sometimes you discover after joining an organisation that the work is not what you expected.

That is reality.

But there is another side to it.

As long as you have accepted the role and are being paid to deliver certain results, there is a responsibility to give the work your best.

You may not love every Monday morning, but you owe the organisation the work you agreed to do.

You are not being paid merely to occupy a chair.

“I Need a Job” Is Not Enough

This is one of the frustrations I hear from entrepreneurs and business owners.

Someone desperately needs a job. You employ them. A few months later, you begin wondering what happened to the person who was so eager during the interview.

The hunger disappears.

Initiative drops.

Everything requires supervision.

They show up because the salary must come at the end of the month, but they have mentally separated themselves from the success or failure of the business.

For a small or growing business, this can be very expensive.

Large organisations may sometimes absorb disengagement for a while. A small business cannot afford too many people who are merely present.

Every salary must eventually connect to value creation.

But Management Must Also Look in the Mirror

There is another side we cannot ignore.

Sometimes employees disengage because the organisation itself has trained them to stop caring.

A person joins with ideas and enthusiasm, but nobody listens. They try to take initiative and are repeatedly shut down. They perform well, but there is no recognition, opportunity or clear path for growth. Management sends them for training, but when they return with new ideas, the organisational culture does not allow them to implement anything.

After some years, the person learns a dangerous workplace skill: just do enough to survive.

So while organisations must assess employees, leaders must also assess the environment they have created.

You cannot continuously kill initiative and then complain that your people lack initiative.

You cannot send employees for training and refuse to give them room to apply what they have learnt.

Training alone cannot repair a culture that punishes growth.

Stop Measuring Training by Attendance

One of the mistakes organisations make is measuring training by the wrong things.

“We sent 20 employees for training this year.”

Good.

What changed?

What are they doing differently?

What knowledge did they bring back?

What process improved?

What customer experience changed?

What mistakes reduced?

What new responsibility can they now handle?

These are better questions.

After a significant training programme, managers should have conversations with participants about what they learnt and what they will apply. Give them an opportunity to teach colleagues. Let them propose one or two changes based on the programme. Then follow up after 30, 60 or 90 days.

That is how training begins to move from an event to an investment.

Your Training Room Is Telling You Something

The next time you send employees for training, don’t only ask whether they attended.

Pay attention to how they attended.

Who is hungry?

Who is simply present?

Who has completely checked out?

Then ask the harder question: Why?

Someone in the second or third group may need coaching, clearer expectations, a different role, better leadership or another opportunity to rediscover their drive. In other situations, you may eventually have to accept that there is no longer a good fit between the person and the organisation.

Keeping someone for five, ten or fifteen years without meaningful contribution does not help the employee, and it certainly does not help the business.

This is where brand culture becomes practical.

Your brand culture is not the beautiful values framed at reception. It is reflected in what your people believe about their work, how they treat opportunities to grow, what management rewards, what leadership tolerates and whether learning actually changes anything inside the organisation.

So periodically reassess your people, but reassess your systems and leadership too.

Are we developing our staff?

Are we giving capable people opportunities to lead?

Are expectations clear?

Are we addressing persistent underperformance?

Are we investing in training that connects directly to the work?

And after training, are we creating room for people to practise what they have learnt?

Because ultimately, sending people for training is easy.

Building a culture where people are hungry to learn, equipped to perform and accountable for results is the real work.

And that work belongs to both the employee and the organisation.

The best is yours.

Bernard Kelvin Clive

Recommended book. The CEO, the Customer & the Culture