Firms often train workers, and nearly always for very
specific reasons. We are most familiar with how they teach specific skills for
their equipment and procedures, including re-training people when these change.
Whether we’ve taken such training ourselves or have worked with assistants or
administrators who have done so, we understand that such training is important
for both the organization and the worker: it should help the worker produce
more valuable output (which they can share), and it is more valuable if the organization
can retain the worker on the job longer after training.
But the reality is that many workers don’t stay on the
job very long, either because they experience a lack of fit with the employer
or they have difficulty meeting the organization’s expectations of them as an
employee and continuing to manage their responsibilities outside of work. This
is especially true for women entering the workforce for the first time whose domestic
roles haven’t prepared them for work. It is also true for people with
self-employment backgrounds such as families doing farming or craftwork. Such first-time
workers are the focus of an article in Administrative Science Quarterly by Aruna Ranganathan, who studied women entering the workforce for the first time as
employees of a garment factory in India. Many of these women didn’t last long
on the job: about a third left within three months of hiring.
As expected, the employer provided training to help new
workers get up to speed. But what was unusual is that the content of the training
differed depending on the trainers’ experience, and the content made a big difference
in attrition rates. Ranganathan found that less-experienced trainers in the
factory focused on teaching the new employees assigned to them only job-specific
skills, such as how to use a sewing machine. These trainers saw their goal as
teaching the “equipment and procedures” knowledge I referred to before.
More-experienced trainers taught job-specific skills and also provided more general
work-readiness training that focused on skills related to self-presentation,
interpersonal communication, work–life separation, and self-reliance.
Clearly this is a different form of training because
it is a way of socializing the first-time women workers, helping them feel
comfortable in their workplace, behave as expected, communicate well when
needed, and work independently when needed. These activities are natural for
many people who are socialized into workplaces early in life through exposure
to an organization such as a university or a business. The women studied by
Ranganathan came from rural villages, where such socialization is hard to get.
Successful work-readiness training, which decreased the numbers of women
quitting shortly after they were hired, was important both for the firm and the
employees: re-hiring is costly for the firm, and leaving paid work as a result
of lack of fit hurts these women’s income and further employment chances.
Socialization training was different from job-specific
training because the trainers didn’t work from a checklist of skills to impart.
Instead, the experienced trainers seemed to have a natural understanding of
what the new workers could experience as problems; they taught new employees how
to get to work on time in the morning, showed them where the bathroom was, and
encouraged them to take breaks for drinks of water, for example. Without the
benefit of a checklist of such seemingly simple (yet clearly important) skills
to teach, less-experienced trainers didn’t teach them, perhaps because they
didn’t understand the importance of such work-readiness skills.
We rarely think of training as having such general
goals to help employees feel ready to work. We rarely think of socialization as
happening through training rather than through workers interacting formally. We
rarely study how developing nations modernize through having people who were
earlier engaged in farming or housework taking on the role of paid employees.
Ranganathan’s research is eye-opening because it is right in the middle of so
many important and neglected topics.
