Whistleblowers often get a bad name, but without their actions, serious illegality would remain undiscovered.

Whistleblowers should be praised and commended for their bravery, as well as their invaluable service to their organization.

Whether it’s another employee abusing their sick leave or fraudulently stealing money from public clients, whistleblowing exposes the wrongdoing and brings the perpetrators to justice.

That’s why it’s important for organizations to educate their employees on how whistleblowing really works, why it can benefit the workplace and how the law will protect you in the process. This will dispel the negativity unfairly attached to whistleblowing.

This section explains the importance of whistleblowing for the safety and integrity of an organization, as well as how it can safeguard employees and the wider public from wrongdoing.

The content gives helpful examples of how misconduct can be a variety of dishonest, illegal and dangerous practices - ranging from minor to complex issues. In addition, wrongdoing can be internal or external, committed by any employee of an organization.

The course also addresses the stigma that’s attached to whistleblowing. For example, an employee can initially feel like a ‘snitch’ and speaking out can at first seem disloyal to their employer.

But, there are many good reasons for whistleblowing, such as saving lives, money and reputation. This section looks to cement the understanding that whistleblowing is important and the responsibility of all employees.

This next topic clarifies that any worker who speaks out against wrongdoing in their organization is protected by law from victimisation, putting to bed the rumours that you’ll expose yourself to trouble.

The content explains that the meaning of ‘worker’ has a wide interpretation, which also extends to self-employed, agency workers and trainees.

Revealing the misconduct is viewed as a qualifying disclosure, which becomes a protected disclosure if it’s communicated to the right person in an appropriate way.

It’s important to know the difference between making a complaint where you have been poorly treated personally and voicing a concern about an illegal or dangerous practice taking place in an organization.

This topic looks to illustrate this difference and allow employees to understand how a personal complaint can be upsetting for you, but won’t secure qualifying disclosure.

This section explains how employees can raise their issues about a wrongdoing that has happened in the past, is happening currently or could happen in the future, so it’s clear what to do.

The law will protect a whistleblower that’s reported criminal offences, failures to comply with legal obligations, health and safety threats, damage to the environment, and miscarriages of justice (or cover-up actions).

For whistleblowers to be protected by law, there’s a certain process that they must go through. This section details that you have to make sure to inform the right person in good faith about the situation.

There’s a variety of people you can tell depending on the situation, such as a health and safety representative or another prescribed body. You can always seek professional advice prior to raising a concern to ensure no mistakes are made.

What your employer or a prescribed person will do

This section explains how an employer or prescribed person will listen to an employee’s concern and take this matter further, based on the information they are given.

In particular, you should let the professional know straight away if you want to remain anonymous. While you can be kept informed about the action that’s taken, not all details will be communicated to you, due to confidentiality.

If an employee is unsatisfied with how their concern has been handled, you can express this discrepancy to an independent body, such as ACAS or a trade union who can provide you with support.

This finalizing section will tie loose ends together and provide a succinct summary of all the information covered about whistleblowing that the employee has learned.

It will recap how you must be a worker to blow the whistle and the concern you seek to voice is in the public interest. In addition, the law will protect you if you communicate your concern to the right person in the correct way.

Your employer or prescribed person must listen to your concern and if you are unsatisfied in how they deal with your information, you can seek support from an independent body.

This interactive e-learning course uses animated videos to explain content, with an engaging voice-over and easy to read slides. In addition, there’s a short quiz at the end for employees to test their whistleblowing knowledge.

Whistleblowing is the only real and effective way to combat illegal or dangerous wrongdoing in the workplace. After all, your employees are your eyes and ears in the day-to-day running of business.

When an employee brings any misconduct to light, it protects other employees, clients and potentially, the organization itself.

An open-door policy on whistleblowing can start the road to important corporate changes that will allow an organization to thrive, without any damaging illegality lurking undetected in the background. This will lead to the promotion of good business ethics.

For more insights, be sure to subscribe to the Go1 newsletter to stay on top of all the latest L&D trends. Or, you can book a demo today to find out how Go1 can help with your team’s learning needs.

False

Whistleblowing is actually essential for a transparent and efficient working environment. By encouraging employees to feel safe and confident enough to speak up honestly, having a whistleblowing policy means organizations can safeguard their integrity and reputation.

How whistleblowers could save your business

For companies in high turnover industries, such as retail, hospitality, finance and tech, there’s a risk of becoming a revolving door of employees. When this happens, it means your company is constantly using up resources to hire and train new staff, when these valuable resources could have been directed elsewhere.

What’s more, when people leave, the remaining employees will need to pick up the pieces, while also using their time to interview and train new hires. This isn’t in the best interest of your clients or customers, and can seriously impact your company’s growth and potential. There’s a lot of disruption in high turnover industries, as staff constantly need to adjust and re-adjust to new team dynamics and work processes.

So how can managers and employers approach training in high turnover industries? Is it worthwhile investing in employee training and development in these industries?

The answer is yes. 100% yes! Because with the right training, you can drastically reduce your rate of staff turnover and help your business succeed – even in high turnover industries.

Here are some important things to consider when it comes to employee training in these industries.

Hire the Right People for Your Organisation

First things first – make sure you’re hiring the right people in the first place.

By investing more time in your hiring process to find the right people, you’ll reduce staff turnover and save money on further recruitment, onboarding and training. We’ve talked about this before, in an article on hiring employees that are a good cultural fit – that is, finding a good fit for your own unique corporate culture.

Finding the right fit isn’t so much about impressive CVs and all-star experience. It’s about taking the time to find employees who share the same core values as your workplace culture – staff who are willing and able to support your company’s mission, vision and goals. As we’ve said before, “each new person that you bring on board has the potential to contribute either positively or negatively to your organisational culture.” That should be at the forefront of your mind when interviewing and hiring new staff.

Investing your resources in finding employees who are the right fit is just that – an investment. And it will be worth it in the long run. Hiring the wrong people, who leave within their first few months, will just result in a higher staff turnover rate for your company.

Retaining Employees in High Turnover Industries

It’s now important to hold onto those employees as best you can. Retaining staff is the best way to reduce future hiring and training costs. But how do you make sure you’re retaining good team members in high turnover industries?

Tech companies in particular are known for offering perks like ping pong tables and cool open-plan offices. Why? Because these companies know they’re operating in a super competitive, high turnover industry, where they need to offer candidates a sweet deal to secure the best talent.

But there’s something far more important than any perks or extras, that will help you hold onto your employees. You need to offer staff a strong, positive and supportive work environment and culture. One that fosters leadership and collaboration. Establishing this kind of company culture is your best bet of retaining employees in high turnover industries.

Providing feedback is also very important when it comes to helping to retain employees. Often, feedback is neglected in high turnover industries, but staff need to know where they stand and how they’re tracking if they want to grow and develop in their careers. Feedback, even constructive criticism, helps people to feel more confident (and secure) in their jobs. In a positive and open environment, employees will be more productive, creative and innovative – and far less likely to leave.

Invest in Employee Training and Development

Companies can significantly decrease their rate of staff turnover by investing in the right training for their staff.

People primarily leave their jobs for one reason – because they’ve found a better offer. The best way to prevent this from happening is to show that you are invested in your employee’s professional development. When a company spends time, money and effort on developing a person’s skill set, it is an acknowledgement that the employee is valuable. This feeling of being valued will do far more to instill loyalty in your staff than anything else.

Look at your employee training program – does it offer your staff opportunities for development and growth? Most people want to progress and achieve throughout their career. When they have nowhere to go within your company, or feel like they are not valued, they’re likely to eventually look for other opportunities.

Even if you are in a traditionally high turnover industry, make it clear to staff that you’re invested in their long-term development and committed to ongoing training. Show them that there is the potential for upward mobility within the company. Think about establishing a mentoring program within your organisation.

Investing in training is truly a win-win situation, for both employees and the company. With effective training, your employees will show improved productivity and profits, as well as increased job satisfaction. By providing up-to-date industry training, your employees will also have access to new skills and information, which they can bring back to your company. A company they choose to grow and develop with!

After going through the recruitment, hiring and onboarding processes, the last thing you want is for your new employee to leave before their first 12 months. However, for certain industries, this high turnover of staff is a reality.

Tips for training in high turnover industries

Many people find themselves struggling to give honest feedback or constructive criticism to the people around them. After all, everyone wants to be liked; it’s a natural human tendency. When it comes to feedback, it can be quite hard to hear things that we need to change about ourselves. People can feel threatened, angry or upset after receiving feedback that they consider to be negative.

Yet, without feedback, individuals will continue to make the same mistakes over and over again. In the workplace, it’s a manager’s responsibility to guide employees to improved behaviours and results, for both themselves and the business.

Being in a management position doesn’t mean that you’re instantly an expert on knowing how to give feedback to staff. But rather than avoiding this part of your job, it’s important to recognise feedback for what it is – and that is a powerful tool and a positive opportunity to learn.

Improve the way you deliver feedback to staff

Often, we hold back for fear of upsetting the person, or making them angry. Sometimes providing feedback can feel like opening a can of worms that will lead to more trouble than it’s worth. But avoiding conversations about feedback, because you’re worried how people will react, isn’t beneficial for either party. Especially in a work environment.

Check out these five easy steps for delivering feedback to staff:

Ask for permission – a simple “hey, have you got a minute for some quick feedback?” can help the person receiving the feedback be mentally ready for it

Be specific – use specific examples about the person’s behaviour, not statements about their personality or character

Explain the impact – explain the impact that resulted from the behaviour you’re addressing.

Use silence – give the person time to think through what you’ve said

Suggest how to improve – give one or two actionable suggestions that the other person could use to change their behaviour

Avoid feedback fights with your employees

There are generally two ways people respond to feedback they don’t like. They will often simply disregard the feedback – “yeah, whatever, what do you know?” or discount the source of the feedback – “well you’re not perfect, who are you to judge my behaviour?” Or, secondly, they will get angry and argue. Which is why so many people avoid giving feedback in the first place.

All of these scenarios are undesirable. So what can managers do instead?

Managers can learn how to tap into a third kind of response – curiosity. By tapping into an individual’s curiosity and avoid the feedback fight response you can avoid some common mistakes when delivering your feedback. You’ll be making a solid investment into your future relationships and career, becoming a much better manager in the process. Feedback is an important tool for constructive criticism that aids personal and professional development – try to teach and show your employees that!


For managers and team leaders, providing feedback to employees is an important part of the leadership role – but it’s also one of the most difficult.

The importance of providing feedback to employees

Many organizations only go as far as to comply with Equal Employment Opportunity requirements, without providing specific diversity training.

The scope of financial losses that an organization may incur because of the lack of diversity training is much broader than lawsuits and government investigations. If you have a diverse team and provide no diversity training, you will still be losing money even if you never incur any diversity-related legal expenses.

What Happens When Organizations Neglect the Issue of Diversity

Legal expenses of not training your employees in diversity can be huge. In the 1990s, the top management of Denny’s chose to neglect the discrimination problems that was running rampant within the company. As a result, a class-action lawsuit was filed and Denny’s had to pay tens of millions of dollars. In 1997, Texaco paid $176 million as a part of a class-action lawsuit settlement due to discrimination issues. In 2000, Coca-Cola paid $142.5 million to settle a lawsuit that very well could have been avoided if the proper diversity training had been used.

The definition of the term of diversity is “the state of being diverse.” The definition reflects of the reasons why diversity is such a controversial subject: it is a state of being. It is impossible to “do” diversity or “learn” diversity because a state of being is not a collection of facts or a description of a limited set of behaviors. Teaching something that “is” can only happen as a process and needs to include “doing.”

Diversity training always starts with awareness about the issue and then considering the goals of the organization. It’s also about understanding the various federal and state laws about discrimination that exist. In order to truly have a bulletproof diversity training program, the executive leadership and management teams need to be working toward the same training benchmarks.

Diversity awareness is a good place to start, but this is merely “square one.” Employees that are simply aware of the subject often lack the practical skills and guidance that they need to apply the diversity initiatives effectively. That’s why you need a clear and concise roadmap that takes your team from point A to point B.

While the issue of diversity training is relatively new, it’s based on very fundamental concepts about human psychology and the way that people behave. Effective diversity training is based on principles that psychologists and sociologists have known for many years, and one of the obvious and fundamental principles of human psychology is that people like to deal with people whom they understand and like.

Many diversity conflicts arise when individuals from different backgrounds, cultures, and ethnicities haven’t been given the opportunity to learn about each other. This lack of understanding can lead to conflicts and obstacles that can hold your organization back. As we mentioned before, it can also lead to very serious and costly compliance and legal problems.

Effective diversity training creates a new neutral space, a place where interactions between members of a certain group of people happen based on the individuality of its members and not based on their identity as a part of some other group.

When this happens, your team members can develop new relationships, create new connections, and communicate in a way that respects and explores everyone’s personal values.

Corporate practices that accomplish these goals can be formal or informal. They can occur at work or after-work. For example, common participation in sports is one of the ways that you can bring people together. Ethnic, cultural and religious boundaries, beliefs and practices have no impact on your ability to throw a football or go bowling, and so it goes with corporate initiatives as well.

Another way to illustrate the benefits of diversity is through storytelling. When people share stories about their lives and important events, people from very different backgrounds can see the similarities between the stories and realize that they have more in common than they previously thought.

Diversity training can help your organization in many ways. It can boost the morale and spirit of the teams within the organization, for example. It can also help your team members learn how to solve problems with creative solutions. When you are accustomed to looking at the world from multiple perspectives, you can see things from new and creative angles.

Many exercises in diversity training are based on problem-solving and decision-making, which can help employees apply these strategies to their work initiatives.

At the end of the day, diversity training isn’t just about compliance. It’s also a powerful way to train your teams to view the world from different perspectives and ultimately increase the productivity, efficiency and quality of your organization.

There’s no doubt that onboarding new employees can become very expensive and time-consuming for your business. Most hiring processes will involve writing job ads, running interviews, carrying out background checks, and organizing training for new hires, keeping HR managers and teams super busy. And pushing budgets.

In fact, according to Deloitte, the average US employer spends about $4000 and 52 days on hiring a new employee. That’s a considerable amount of time and money to invest in bringing new staff on board.

However, because onboarding plays such an important role in any business, it’s not something that you want to neglect or dismiss. Remember, each individual who enters your organization has an impact on your company culture. So you need to know how to deliver successful onboarding programs for your staff, while being careful not to blow your budget.

Sounds tricky, but it can be done! Here’s how to keep onboarding costs down, while still making sure the process is successful for both the employer and their new hires.

With successful onboarding, you’ll be able to reduce your staff turnover rate, saving you money.

Employee turnover is a huge problem in today’s workforce. Approximately 45% of companies estimate their total turnover costs to be more than $25,000 per person. From advertising to interviewing candidates and educating new hires, filling an empty position can add up to an enormous expense.

When you’re investing so much time, effort and money into this process, you want new staff members to stick around. To do this, you need to find the best solution for onboarding and training your staff. The best tech tool to use for this? eLearning.

Using eLearning to reduce onboarding costs

From software solutions to online resources, technology can be your best friend when it comes to reducing onboarding costs.

Using eLearning for onboarding allows you to develop a perfectly customized training program for each individual employee. With the right Learning Management System, you can create short, concise online courses that are tailored to the exact needs of your team members. Because the fact is, not all staff need to know the same skills or the same selection of company policies.

You want your onboarding program to reflect that, with content that covers only the relevant workplace safety, policies and procedures, and HR contacts that new hires need.  Taking onboarding online allows you to do this, keeping staff engaged and focused, while also providing an effective way for managers to monitor and gauge employee performance.

There’ll be no need for expensive training facilities, speakers, or printed materials that require updating – with all your modules, assessments and reports online you’ll save significantly over time.

Include mentoring as part of the onboarding process

Another way to reduce costs is to include mentoring in your employee onboarding process.

Mentoring is an easy way to use existing, internal resources, rather than spending money on external training consultants or programs. Pairing new employees with veteran employees in on-the-job mentoring, costs you nothing, while also working to reinforce a supportive and welcoming environment for new employees. It also allows new hires to receive informal feedback from someone who has actually been in the role, which can be invaluable for professional development.

Mentoring also has benefits for the veteran employee doing the mentoring. In fact, you might like to read our previous article on the many benefits of mentoring for employees – they include increased knowledge sharing, improved skill sets and the opportunity for constructive feedback and support.

In this way, mentoring relationships will not only save your company money, they also help contribute to a more collaborative, trusting and positive culture for all staff in your organization.

Yoav Vilner, co-founder of Ranky startup marketing agency, agrees that many big companies are using mentoring for onboarding, as “an easy and cost-effective way to train a new hire in the everyday roles and responsibilities of their new job. Moreover, the new hire has someone to turn to besides a supervisor for real advice, honest conversation and encouragement in their new role.”

Keen to read more about onboarding? Check out these two earlier articles on:

Why a Good Employee Onboarding Program will Reduce Staff Turnover

Using Online Learning to Reduce Onboarding Costs

How to keep onboarding costs down without cutting corners

How long is a piece of string? Sometimes, that’s how measuring professional development success feels – a question with a never-ending answer.

Though there are many ways to measure professional development success and some are more cut and dry than others.

In this article, we’ll offer suggestions to measure PD from a variety of angles so that a better picture of an individual’s professional development success can be formed.

Just remember that PD is about creating worth. The idea is that employees feel personal and professional improvement and that a business can enjoy its increasing value.

To get things started, let’s first look at a definition of professional development to make sure we’re reading from the same page.

Professional development, often shortened to PD, is a catch-all term for the variety of training and academic and workplace education that is intended to improve the knowledge and skills of employees and therefore improve their performance.

Professional development is a huge benefit for employees because it provides an easy way to improve their career outlook. Gaining new abilities to put on the CV should never be sniffed at! As well as this, the sense of personal growth to be gained from PD is also an important factor in keeping a workforce happy.

It’s a win-win for employees and employers!

Knocking it out of the park – what happened to their PDGs?

The most straightforward way to measure professional development success is to assess whether an employee met their Personal Development Goals (PDGs).

Most companies implement a personal development goal process that staff set at various dates throughout the year and are then reviewed at some point down the line.

These PDGs could be broken into three distinct sections; learning, connecting and creating. Perhaps an employee wants to improve their project management skills, get to know more people in the company by joining a group, and create something they own by beginning their own blog.

Though this route seems a little rigid, it offers the clarity of “yes” and “no” answers.


Pre-testing shows the employer the level of their employees’ job understanding before they go on their PD training course. The results from the pre-test can then be contrasted against a test after training.

The information obtained will determine whether the employee has gained the sufficient level of knowledge expected from them and whether there are still any points that need to be worked on.

To make sure that employees don’t feel like they’re at school, employees can personally discuss the employee’s strengths and weaknesses.

While testing gives us insight into the knowledge learning of an employee, it doesn’t necessarily tell us whether they are using this knowledge on the job or not. Make sure you follow up on the tests to see how these abilities are applied.


Engage in chitchat - speak to team members

In a formal setting, invite team members in to speak about each of their colleagues. Ask what it is that team members offer to the team and what they could work on.

Speaking to team members gives employers and view into the working lives of their employees that they may otherwise not receive. Just remember that this is a professional setting – this isn’t a time to gossip but a time to offer praise as well as constructive criticisms.


To really see whether your employees have developed professionally, shadowing may be necessary. For example, an employee may have set a PDG for improving their problem-solving. Shadowing an employee offers a window into this change. How do they go about solving unexpected issues? Have they used what has been learned? Do they panic or do they act?

One of the benefits of this route is that when discussing any of your employee’s strengths or weaknesses later, you are able to work from the information you have gathered yourself. It isn’t secondary sources, there is no confusion.


If you’re in the sales business, then the number of sales an employee makes is a fairly obvious means to evaluate their success in the workplace.

Though metrics like these may seem crude and ineffective to gauge “soft skills”, for the hard and fast figures in a corporate world, there is no more effective method.

For more insights, be sure to subscribe to the Go1 newsletter to stay on top of all the latest L&D trends. Or, you can book a demo today to find out how Go1 can help with your team’s learning needs.


In this article, we’ll offer suggestions to measure professional development from a variety of angles to gain a better understanding of an individual’s professional development success.

Measuring professional development success

Virtual teams are the talk of the town right now - and with good reason! This very modern mode or working takes collaboration and turbocharges it – giving you the opportunity to spread your team across continents, time zones, and cultures.

Virtual teams are changing the game as we speak. These people don’t work in the office, they work wherever they want. From mountain tops in Colorado to beachfront properties in San Diego, as long as there’s internet then the team is good to go.

This is all made possible to the internet - the lifeline of the modern virtual team. It’s their route to communication which they can do through email, collaboration platforms like Slack, WhatsApp and others.

And while this utopian vision sounds all well and good, the reality is a little more complex. That’s where good management steps in. To make sure people are working, hitting deadlines, and communicating well with others, a virtual team manager is essential.

So how can good management benefit a virtual team?

Team Focus – When the virtual team is distributed across a country or the globe, making sure everyone is on track is a tricky task. Good virtual managers can keep a tab on each individual to make sure they’re working towards the same end.

Improved Communication – As virtual teams aren’t in the same room there can be communication problems, leading to ineffective working and frustration. Management can remedy this.

Lack of Commitment – One problem with virtual working is that sometimes individuals don’t feel fully engaged and therefore fully committed to the team and its goals. A good team manager knows how to make everyone feel valued.

The course delves into the workings of a virtual team from every angle and is arranged by sections.

Find Out More – The first section primarily discusses the pros and cons of virtual teams and explains why it is that more and more companies are using this versatile style of team working.

The major benefit of the virtual team is the great savings that can be had if there isn’t an office building to pay for. The physical workplace is a huge overhead that most companies are glad to get rid of.

Another factor is that virtual teams make hiring better staff easier because a company is no longer constricted to only one city.

Virtual team members are also often happier than their office-based contemporaries.

But it isn’t all rainbows. Virtual teams often fall short of their goals – 82% in a recent survey – and over one third said they were “largely ineffective”.

The remedy to these problems are the five key stages that will be discussed in the rest of the course. Let’s get cracking!

Preparations – As always, the key to success is in the preparation.

No two teams are the same nor are the conditions they’re working under. They must be run to different costs and they’ll have different flexibility requirements too. As well as this, the individuals making up the team will be different and so the dynamic is bound to change.

What size team should you have? How should you structure the team for this particular goal? Which types of technology should they use?

The checklist that this section suggests will make sure you’re fully prepared with a system that offers the best care to the team and chance of success. Go get ‘em, tiger!

Launch – This is the moment you’ve been working towards. It’s the big day; you’re about the launch the virtual team!

But take a few breathes; there are some things to consider.

If individuals live within distance, you could have a meeting so everybody knows one another. Or a video conference if that isn’t possible. This way people feel a connection and are more likely to feel part of it all.

Run over the team goals and ways of working. Make sure everyone knows their roles and answer any questions. All this will save a lot of time later.

Performance – Once everything is swimming along nicely, there will be adaptions to be made.

Could you offer some self-management to team individuals? Are individuals doing what they should be? Are they communicating?

In this section you’ll learn to look out for performance problems and learn how to solve them.

Team Development – Just because virtual team members aren’t sat in the same office space as you doesn’t mean they don’t need training and development.

Not everyone will know their way around new technologies and perhaps some people need to work on their communication.

Team Disbanding – Saying goodbye isn’t easy, so why do it? When a project is over, make sure you manage the team breakup to keep everyone motived and happy, and willing to work for the next project you have.

And after all that, there’s a quiz to do!

If a virtual team isn’t managed well, then all the benefits it can offer – lower costs, a larger pool of talent, increased flexibility - can be lost.

This teaches what you need to know to take advantage of these incredible benefits and make sure your experience, and that of the team, is a more fruitful, enjoyable, and ultimately productive venture.

It’s great that you want to invest time and money into training for your employees – we all know the benefits that professional development brings to both individuals and organizations. But before you go ahead and decide on the best training program for your staff, it’s important to carry out a proper training needs assessment.

This way, you can determine just what kind of training your employees need, to make sure they’re confident and competent in completing the tasks you need them to do.

Unfortunately, when it comes to employee training, “one of the biggest mistakes that companies often make is that they start putting together training plans based on perceived training needs.” When this happens, we see training programs being designed around the leadership team’s perception of staff competencies and skill gaps, rather than their employees’ actual needs. This leads to ineffective learning – and watching your L&D budget go down the drain.

To prevent this from happening, employers and managers need to make sure that all training programs are based on the results of formal training needs assessments. But how exactly do you go about evaluating and assessing employee training needs?

Here, we’ll take a look at the steps you can take to conduct a training needs assessment for your organization.

What Does a Training Needs Assessment Do?

A training needs assessment should always be the first step to any training program if you want it to be a success. An assessment will help ensure that your training investment is properly targeted, to bring the best results to your company and staff.

Put simply, the assessment looks at each staff member and evaluates whether they have the skills and knowledge to do what you need them to do. This means considering the role of each worker and how it contributes to the business goals of the organization, then measuring their current level of competence, skill or knowledge in one or more areas.

When there’s a mismatch between the employee’s skills and the skill level you need them to have, you can then focus on finding the right training to bridge that gap and bring things into line.

How to Conduct a Training Needs Assessment

Keen to know the right way to conduct a training needs assessment?

The assessment should be a three-tiered process, that moves through the following steps.

In this first step, you will outline your company’s goals and objectives. Any training initiatives that are proposed from the results of the assessment must be in sync with these organizational goals and vision.

Next, analyze the specific jobs and tasks that need to be carried out by staff. Be specific. Consider the skills, tools and resources needed. And how the capability of staff can be measured to ensure each task is being done correctly.

You can look at industry standards, time frames and measurements as you assess this. This will help you set more tangible goals as you develop training materials.

You need to look closely at who is to be trained – on an individual, team and department level. Because “performance gaps may not always be across-the-board, necessitating training for every employee in the organization.”

Looking at performance gaps will help you ascertain whether there are skills lacking in individuals or whole teams. If the problem lies across a whole department, for example, there may be external factors, such as poor leadership or a challenging physical work environment.

Again, this will help you focus and target training initiatives and learning materials. These results will also allow you to personalize training towards individual employees, which is more effective.

Using the Results of Your Training Needs Assessment

Once you’ve carried out the assessment and gathered this feedback, you’ll have a clearer snapshot of the current tasks, skills and capabilities of your workforce. You can then see how you can use this information to create an effective training program that helps you to meet organizational goals and targets.

By using the results of your assessment to develop more focused training, you’re making optimum use of your L&D budget and helping employees to boost their skill sets and professional development.

Before selecting training for your staff, it’s crucial to conduct a training needs assessment. Here's a complete guide to conducting a training needs assessment.

How to assess employee training needs

There’s a lot of research into diversity and its impact on the workforce. The main message that’s currently broadcast is that diversity is a great thing and beneficial to business.

It can be a good thing, but it can also be problematic. I looked into both these aspects in my recent PhD into diversity in business. Understanding how and why diversity can have positive and negative effects is an important step in understanding how to create more effective and efficient teams.


Diversity can take many specific forms, such as differences in age, gender, ideology, geography, and many other attributes.

Research suggests that greater levels of diversity are critical when pursuing creative endeavours. Socially and professionally diverse groups have been shown to be more innovative than homogenous groups. Coming up with new ideas unsurprisingly benefits from a diversity of perspectives.

But in other pursuits, greater homogeneity may prove to be a quicker way of getting the job done. When it comes to implementing a task, diversity can introduce communication ‘overheads and other forms of friction.

I believe there’s a way of having our diversity cake and eating it too. The solution comes from implementing systems and processes that minimise the overheads associated with diversity.

To illustrate this abstract concept, imagine that you are working in a two-person team, and that you’re tasked with drawing a map of the world from scratch.

You might have a pretty good idea of the region around Australia. Perhaps you can add in New Zealand and parts of Asia too.

If you’re paired with a person who is similar to you, you’ll be able to work together and quickly add more detail to the parts of the world that you both know well. As you start drawing countries further from home you might struggle a bit more and the shapes will probably get a little less accurate.