Use Downtime to Enhance Skills

Business insight from

In even the best of times, organizations often pay lip service to professional development. Excellent front-line workers might receive better titles or become project managers without actually having learned how to deliver a group’s work on time, assure quality, and stay within budget. Even experienced managers may be so preoccupied with quarterly, monthly, weekly, and daily reports that they have no chance to learn something new — or to unlearn what’s become obsolete. A downturn presents the perfect downtime to enhance the skills your people really need to excel. “Are you kidding?” you might ask. “When times are tough, professional development is a luxury.” Not so. Often that’s precisely when there is enough breathing room in the daily work flow to give your people the chance to better themselves. Employees at all levels can be sent for training to improve their team-building, collaboration, process ownership, and other skills — which pays off when economic normalcy returns.

For example, after the economic downturn of 2000–2002, Alliance Business Academy (ABA) started conducting annual team-building exercises at a top Indian software company. Working with two of the company’s 200 teams a year, ABA focused the training on endeavors such as completing joint tasks, clarifying group values, and improving team processes. Since the program started, trained teams have been 50% more productive, on average, than untrained teams, according to aggregated measures of quality, time, and cost. This year, the company is putting five teams through the program. ABA has replicated the results at a major aerospace company and a large European engineering conglomerate. 

Of course, casting a downturn as an opportunity to fine-tune skills is not easy. Various stakeholders’ anxieties about the short term need to be assuaged and framed in a long-term context. That includes the people whose skills are being improved. They need to have a broad enough view of how their professional development fits into organizational goals to be sufficiently motivated to make the downtime investment pay off. And they must be confident that the organization’s culture will tolerate honest mistakes as they progress and grow.

Those caveats notwithstanding, actively seizing a downturn as an opportunity can take much of the drudgery out of the current one and can soften the blow of the next. Those are luxuries  you  can’t  afford not to indulge in. 

BV Krishnamurthy is the director and executive vice president of Alliance Business Academy in Bangalore.

Additional resources on these topics are available from Harvard Business Review at hbr.org.