Employee Training

Employee training is essential for an organization’s success. Despite the importance of training, a trainer can encounter resistance from both employees and managers. Both groups may claim that training is taking them away from their work. However, a trainer can combat this by demonstrating that training is actually a crucial part of employees’ and managers’ work.
Why Employee Training Is Important
Training is crucial because it:

• Educates workers about the effective use of technology,
• Ensures competitive edge in the market,
• Promotes safety and health among employees,
• Creates opportunities for career development and personal growth, an important factor in retaining workers
• Helps employers comply with laws and regulations, and
• Improves productivity and profitability.

Laws that Require Employee Training
There are several federal laws for which employee training is either required or recommended.  One law under which there are a series of training requirements is the Occupational Safety and Health Act.  Two areas of federal law in which training is recommended are sexual harassment and ethics.
One reason training employees and supervisors on the subject of sexual harassment is recommended is because of a recent Supreme Court ruling. In the decision, the court said an employer can be held liable for sexual harassment if the organization failed to exercise reasonable care to prevent and promptly correct any such behavior in the workplace. An employer's responsibility to exercise reasonable care includes ensuring that its supervisors and managers understand their responsibilities under the organization's anti-harassment policy and complaint procedure.
Training can also reduce an employer’s liability if an employee is found guilty of criminal misconduct. Under the Federal Sentencing Guidelines, providing employees with compliance and ethics training is one of the 7 requirements for an employer to demonstrate that it has an effective compliance and ethics program.  An organization that has an effective compliance and ethics program can reduce its fines for a criminal conviction by as much as 90 percent, according to the Federal Sentencing Commission.

Besides greater legal exposure, employers with thin or nonexistent training programs often see other negative results. The Bureau of Labor Statistics, for example, has found that employers with high employee turnover train less and spend less on training than other organizations.
BLR’s Employee Training Center has more than 60 courses to help you train employees on a wide range of HR topics. Training subjects include:

• Sexual Harassment (Employees and Supervisors)
• Business Ethics
• Diversity
• The Family and Medical Leave Act
• Managing Challenging Employees
• Customer Service Skills
• Workplace Safety

Related Resources: Training Courses  Training Resources  Training Topics 

Training Courses

Becoming a Leader: How to Prepare for a Leadership Role

If you want to be a leader in the workplace, you need to prepare to assume leadership roles. You must go from being a follower to being the one who guides, directs, motivates and manages. This transition takes time, experience, skills, and commitment. But if you want to lead others, you can. This session will tell you how to ready when the right opportunity comes along.

Crash Course in Leadership Skills

This online course in leadership skills conveys that, to be an effective leader, you need to learn and practice certain skills addressed in this training session. The bottom line is—anyone can be a leader—and this course shows you how.

Diversity for All Employees

Diversity in the workplace means having a group of employees with a wide range of different backgrounds in terms of race, age, gender, and other characteristics. This online diversity training course will teach employees to support diversity in the organization. At the end of the training session, you will be able to identify how we are diverse, understand the challenges and opportunities of workplace diversity, help avoid discrimination, and follow company policy.

New Employee Safety Orientation Training

This online new employee safety training course will teach employees to understand their role in the company's safety and health program, including security procedures, and safety information. This course covers topics important to employee orientation including company safety newsletters, bulletin boards, safety committee members, and labels or material safety data sheets.

Stress Management

This online stress management training course helps employees better manage stress. Too much stress is one of the most common causes of health problems. It can also cause mental distress that leads to serious illness and to distractions that can jeopardize safety on and off the job. This course helps trainees identify the causes of stress, recognize the different types of stress, understand how stress affects them, and manage stress effectively both on and off the job.

Training the Trainer: Effective Techniques for Dynamic Training

This course discusses effective training in all its stages, from assessing the needs at your workplace to developing a culture where training is ongoing and seen as an essential part of every job.

Training Resources

Developing a Training Plan for Legal Compliance

Training topics may include general skills such as literacy, technical skills,orientation about the organization, as well as programs designed to prevent lawsuits, audits,and fines, such as sexual harassment training, safety training, and ethics training.

How to Prepare for Training

There are several major steps in preparing a training session, including the importance of promoting the program to top management, preparing training materials, the training space, trainers, and trainees. The most successful training sessions are well-planned and well-prepared.

When and How to Outsource Training

Do you have the resources and the qualified personnel to accomplish your training goals? You may find that after analyzing your company’s training needs you don’t have the best training materials or most qualified personnel in house. The United States has many employment laws designed to protect employees and to guarantee a workplace that is fair and equal for all. Most of these laws spell out what employers can and cannot do with regard to employment decisions, but they do not include specific

Related Training Topics

Online Employee Training

A growing number of employers are turning to online employee training for a hands-on, interactive way for employees to learn. More economical in both time and money than conventional training, this form of training has become more and more popular as Internet technology has improved.

Online Safety Training

OSHA believes that computer-based training programs can be used as part of an effective safety and health training program to satisfy OSHA training requirements, provided that the program is supplemented by the opportunity for trainees to ask questions of a qualified trainer, and provides trainee