Finding, and closing, the training gaps at your frontline with observation
Take the guesswork out of your training needs, how to find the gaps and focus your learning and training for impact.
Learning used at work
Surprisingly, people use only 27% of what they learn through traditional training methods at work, which shows how inefficient our current educational practices are and highlights the need to rethink how we approach learning.
So, how can you make sure your frontline teams translate their training into actual business results?
This fast-track guide is for L&D professionals managing frontline teams who want to make an impact with their training.
This is specifically for training managers like you who are committed to delivering training and measuring its impact on customer service and overall business performance.
Understanding and filling knowledge gaps is critical. A good learning needs analysis can help you spot these gaps so your training programs hit the mark.
Read on now for tips and strategies for making effective frontline training decisions, monitoring employee performance, and ensuring their actions match your training goals.
Focusing on continuous improvement and measurable outcomes can make sure that your training programs are engaging and impactful, help improve customer service and speed up the time it takes to hit goals.
Without a plan — where do training asks come from?
Without an ongoing process to discover the actual training needs of your frontline team.
You might find you’re prioritising and deciding what training or learning is needed from:
Persistent manager — always mentioning something they care about, but not grounded in reality or evidence.
Annual surveys — We survey our teams to see how they rate themselves and their performance. This usually skews the data of people who think it would impact their career if they’re vulnerable or too hard on themselves.
Your desires and ambitions — what looks cool to work on or trend-chasing, what may help us get a promotion.
Sound familiar? Then, you might have a knowing-doing gap.
Do you have a knowing-doing gap?
Does your learning not match up with the end results? You may have the knowing-doing gap.
After you publish your training, you get:
Good Results on LMS
Great Feedback on Training
High Engagement
BUT ultimately, when you look at the results, they say otherwise:
Customer Surveys / Review
Metrics & KPIs
Own Experiences
Your frontline teams know what they should be doing, but the results say otherwise.
That’s the knowing-doing gap — you see that these learnings aren’t being put into action.
“70% of what we learn is never put into practice. It’s like learning how to ride a bike by reading the manual but never hopping on! Closing the knowing-doing gap is all about getting hands-on and actually using what you know to make it stick - and that's what makes your investment in learning worthwhile.”
— Chris Duncan-Scott
Learning Lead and Founder at Acceler8, People Engagement Consultancy
Now that we know there’s a gap, we can examine how to find these gaps and highlight training needs.
Learning Needs Analysis (LNA) vs Training Needs Analysis (TNA)
What is learning needs analysis, and how does it differ from training needs analysis?
Before we look at how to find the training needs, it’s important to understand the two key differences between training needs analysis, and the better-suited continuous performance improvements offered with Learning Needs Analysis.
Understanding your frontline teams' specific needs is essential when ensuring your training programs are effective and impactful.
Two concepts often discussed in this context are Learning Needs Analysis (LNA) and Training Needs Analysis (TNA).
While they might sound similar, they serve different purposes and are suited to different scenarios.
Training Needs Analysis (TNA)
CIPD states that TNA is “a one-off, isolated event looking at the needs for a specific training activity“.
Training needs analysis (TNA) is typically conducted as a one-time event focused on a specific training requirement.
It usually happens independently of the broader business strategy and isn't integrated into an ongoing process.
TNA helps identify which employees need training and what training is necessary.
How Training Needs Analysis (TNA) is usually carried out
Training Needs Analysis (TNA) is important in identifying the training requirements of any business. However, where it falls short is the traditional approach, which is usually used to gather data and refine the training.
Here are some of the methods commonly used for TNA:
Define training objectives
Assess current skills by looking at previous employee competence data
Identify the gaps
Benchmark against the industry - look at the skills trending in the market
Release new training to plug the ‘perceived’ gaps
As you can see, the TNA process is largely based on previous data rather than data in the moment, making it slow, outdated, and not very adaptive to current challenges or circumstances for frontline teams.
It is also largely based on assumptions rather than in the moment data specific to your unique business and employees.
Example of how it works in reality
Imagine a retail chain rolling out a new point-of-sale (POS) system.
The company conducts a Training Needs Analysis (TNA) to identify which frontline employees need to be trained on this new system.
The TNA determines that all cashiers require training on the basic functions of the new POS system.
This training event is organised, and employees attend a one-time session to learn how to use the new system.
However, this approach may not fully address the ongoing and evolving needs of the frontline team.
For instance, after the initial training, cashiers might encounter new challenges or updates to the POS system that weren't covered in the original session. Since TNA is a one-time event, it doesn't account for these changes or provide a continuous learning path.
As a result, frontline teams may struggle to adapt quickly to new features or issues, which can impact their efficiency and customer service.
Pitfalls of TNA for frontline teams
TNA often results in standardised training programs that may not adapt quickly to changing needs. Here are the main pitfalls of training needs analysis for frontline teams.
Annual or periodic assessments
Not frequent enough — Conducting TNA once a year or at set intervals means training programs may not reflect current needs.
Lag in response time — Training needs identified during annual reviews are usually outdated by the time training is implemented.
Top-down approach
Limited input — Upper management often makes decisions without real-time input from employees, leading to a disconnect.
Slow adaptation — Changing training programs based on evolving needs is slower due to bureaucratic decision-making processes.
Generic training programs
One-size-fits-all — Often results in generic training that may not meet the specific needs of different groups or individuals.
Rigid structure — Limited ability to customise training programs quickly in response to changing needs.
Learning Needs Analysis (LNA)
Learning Needs Analysis (LNA) is a way to determine what your team or company needs to learn to improve and reach its goals.
It looks at what skills and knowledge everyone needs and how they learn best.
Learning is not just about classroom training but also about growing as individuals, teams, and the whole company.
LNA helps you see the big picture of what everyone needs to learn, assessing ALL the elements which impact employee behaviour and business results. This enables you to reach your goals faster by plugging the gaps you wouldn’t know were holding you back from achieving your overarching business objectives.
Example of Learning Needs Analysis
Let’s say your frontline teams work at a busy store and want to sell more of a new product.
Learning Needs Analysis (LNA) identifies the subtle nuances that prevent employees from selling more products.
For example, noticing the different objections that customers raise or the lack of display models for customers to use.
LNA helps you quickly understand what your frontline team needs to overcome the barriers holding them back from achieving the overarching business goal.
Advantages of LNA for frontline teams:
Adaptive and responsive — LNA continuously assesses learning needs, allowing for quick adjustments to training programs as new challenges and opportunities arise.
More personalised — By focusing on individual and team-specific needs, LNA creates more personalised and effective training solutions. For example, it considers not only the hard skills required to perform well but also the soft skills that are needed.
Immediate relevance — LNA ensures that the training provided is immediately applicable, leading to quicker improvements in performance and customer service.
Questions to assess if LNA or TNA is best for your frontline team?
To determine whether TNA or LNA is right for your team, consider the following questions:
How quickly do the needs of your frontline teams change?
Are your current training programs flexible enough to adapt to these changes?
Do you need a more personalised approach to address specific skill gaps within your team?
How important is it for your training to have an immediate impact on performance?
By answering these questions, you can better assess whether a more adaptive Learning Needs Analysis approach is needed to keep your frontline teams performing at their best and aligned with business goals.
Adopting LNA can help make sure your training programs are not just well-intentioned but truly impactful.
Learning Needs Analysis
The importance of learning needs analysis for frontline teams
Frontline teams are the face of your company, interacting directly with customers and making sure they receive the best service possible.
Their training needs are constantly changing, and traditional training methods often fall short, leaving knowledge gaps that slow down progress.
Why?
Because they are working with people and people have different and sometimes surprising demands which you can’t predict.
You can write the best procedure for frontline teams to follow when they carry out consultations on the shop floor, but you can’t predict how customers will respond. So, if you’re not constantly monitoring interactions and behaviours, you’re missing the mark when it comes to training that drives real change.
Why LNA matters for frontline teams?
The changing nature of frontline roles — Frontline roles are dynamic and fast-paced. Employees regularly face new products, services, and customer queries. Traditional Training Needs Analysis (TNA) might identify current training needs, but it doesn't adapt quickly enough to new challenges that pop up. By the time you roll out a training program, new issues have already emerged, making the training outdated.
Continuous improvement — LNA is a flexible, ongoing process that keeps training relevant and up-to-date. It constantly assesses what your employees need allowing you to update training programs quickly to make sure you’re keeping up with new challenges. This means your frontline teams are always ready to tackle new issues and stay ahead of the curve.
Preventing knowledge gaps — Without a system like LNA, knowledge gaps can develop and grow over time. These gaps can lead to inefficiencies, lower performance, and a misalignment between what your employees can do and what the company needs. For example, your retail team may be trained on how to upsell, but they lack the confidence to carry out the upselling training properly. If this isn’t addressed early on, their confidence will worsen over time and they won’t complete the tasks asked.
Closing the knowledge gap is hugely important
Did you know that a Deloitte study found that 84% of executives believe learning is important, but only 37% think their learning programs are effective?
This highlights the urgent need for more adaptive training solutions like LNA.
For frontline teams, this urgency is even more critical.
Delaying the address of learning needs can cause significant performance issues, impacting customer satisfaction and overall business success.
Avoiding biases in needs analysis
May, 2001
On the 19th of May, 2001, the first Apple store opened in Tyson’s Corner, Virginia. It wasn’t like any other computer store; instead, it was a huge open space focused not on the products but on activities such as movie-making or listening to music. It was developed almost exclusively based on the opinions of Steve Jobs and his new head of retail, Ron Johnson.
Their vision resulted in a different type of store, bringing in $1.2 billion of revenue within the first three years.
November, 2011
Ten years later, Ron Johnson left Apple to take over American retailer J.C. Penney. Ron took a similarly bold approach to its stores, installing boutiques and doing away with discounts and sales.
Sales dropped 25% and the retailer posted losses of $795 million.
13 months later, Ron was gone.
When asked why none of the changes had been tested with customers, Johnson replied, “We didn’t test at Apple.”
Sometimes intuition can be a powerful thing, where our years of experience and expertise crystallise into a simple decision, unfettered by endless discussion and spreadsheets.However, intuition also has a big weakness: it can be heavily influenced by bias.
And sometimes, those biases can get in the way when planning our training.
“Anyone can have different opinions about what works, especially when it comes to behaviours. When you’re just doing what you think is right, you have nothing to back it up or no real measurable evidence.”
– Steph Howe, Store Training, Victoria’s Secret
Using observation to uncover learning needs
Training data and insights let you know if the training or learning has happened, but they do not tell you if the behaviours and outcomes you hoped for are actually implemented.
The quickest way to uncover these? Through observation.
These are as simple as they sound, here’s the three steps:
Observe
Typically, a team leader observes the behaviours of your teams, maps them against your ideal journeys as a checklist, collates the results, and sees the shortcomings.
Coach
The great thing about observation is that you can coach in the moment. After observing a behaviour, you can take corrective actions, coach improvements, and, of course, recognise the successful areas.
Analyse
Take all the observations, collate them, and analyse them.
What’s left? The real learning needs at the frontline, not the guesses in head office.
Learning and Development Specialist, Vodafone
Real insight: What happens without data?
Shane Byrne, from Vodafone, shares his experiences with training needs;
When we assess training needs outside of launches and scheduled changes, ‘the data’ is our go-to resource to help us begin to find the gap.
What are our customers saying about interactions with our teams, what do the metrics from the quality team show on the back of their observations, what are our call drivers and what is causing complaints?
Gathering data allows us to analyse the gap and determine whether it’s a skills or knowledge gap.
Without this data, we run the risk of not accurately assessing training needs. This could potentially lead to ineffective training that may not address the actual gaps, wasted resources, a possible decrease in performance, and compliance issues.
As my team and I predominantly look after new starter inductions, it’s important for us to keep on top of the above data and the time to competency of our new starters. Time to competency, along with Kirkpatrick L3 data, is imperative for us to maintain a first-class induction. It provides us with invaluable data to evolve and enhance our inductions to deliver a brilliant learner experience.
I have a young son who is obsessed with Disney Cars. Like all Disney films, Cars offers a lot to take away; Lightning’s training offers several lessons that can be applied in the workplace.
Adaptability — Lightning learns to adapt to new challenges and environments, highlighting the importance of flexibility in training. Not every gap or need will be the same, so be willing to adapt to ever-changing environments. One size doesn’t always fit all.
Persistence — Lightning’s journey emphasises the importance of perseverance and continuous improvement. TNA/LNA can’t be a one-time thing; they must be revisited to keep pace with new trends and insights.
Teamwork — Success often comes from collaboration and support from others. Use the teams around you. Quality team for observations, Managers for coaching & teams who can provide critical data.
Examples of Learning Needs Analysis Observations
New starter competency
As Shane said above, one of the most critical times to find training gaps is when someone joins.
With attrition at an all-time high, ensuring your new starters are confident in their roles will benefit both them and your organisation.
Think about what are the behaviours you want to see through the first 90 days:
Do they have good product knowledge?
What’s their attitude like?
Do you need to do more to motivate and excite in the first 90 days?
Can they do key tasks
Where do they struggle?
Sales journeys
Are your sales teams taking your customers on the ideal journeys:
Welcoming the customer?
Meeting their needs?
Closing the sale?
Traditional TNA might mean conducting an annual review of customer surveys and KPIs to track down customer sticking points. By then, these customers have gone to a competitor.
An LNA approach through observation, however, would continuously monitor learning needs, finding gaps in real-time to provide immediate training as soon as new sales barriers arise.
New process launch
When launching a new system or process, you’ll need to be doing lots of training, quickly, to get everyone up to speed.
So start as early as possible. During the pilot, observe to see what steps are slowing people down, where people are struggling, what’s working and what isn’t.
As a bonus, you can share this feedback with the process owners, and fix the problems, instead of having to train around them.
Use this to shape the training going forward and continue the observations to close the gaps.
Customer service
In a hotel, frontline staff need to stay updated on the latest customer service protocols and safety regulations.
A one-time TNA might address the current needs of guests, but because there has been a viral illness spreading across the country, safety procedures have had to change quickly.
With LNA, the hotel can regularly assess and update training programs, ensuring staff always meet safety standards.
Compliance
Don’t just rely on training results to make sure your frontline teams are competent; take the opportunity to see those behaviours in action.
Consider:
Selling finance products? Make sure these are compliant with selling regulations like the Financial Conduct Authority.
Observe that healthcare professionals are taking the right approaches.
Ensure adherence to Good Manufacturing Practices (GMP) and FDA guideline.
Manufacturing Industry
In manufacturing, operational efficiency and safety are critical to both output and employee wellbeing. But are your production teams consistently following the optimal processes?
• Adhering to safety protocols?
• Properly using equipment?
• Maintaining quality standards?
Traditionally, manufacturers rely on annual compliance audits or reviewing incident reports to track safety violations, equipment misuse, or quality lapses.
An LNA (Learning Needs Analysis) approach through real-time observation can identify these gaps continuously and allow for immediate intervention.
How do you implement a learning needs analysis observations?
Here's a simple 10-step approach to launching and implementing learning that needs analysis observations.
Step 1 — Identify the objectives
Step 2 — Develop training content
Step 3 — Create observation questions
Step 4 — Carry out frontline observations
Step 5 — Identify and analyse challenges
Step 6 — Coach in the moment
Step 7 — Aggregate and analyse data
Step 8 — Develop new training
Step 9 — Communicate and implement training
Step 10 — Monitor and repeat
Step-by-step learning needs analysis strategy
Here’s a detailed outline of the steps you can take to build your learning needs analysis strategy and launch observations.
What you'll need:
Pen and paper — For taking notes during observations.
Excel or spreadsheet software — To manually input and analyse data.
Digital learning needs analysis observation tool (this will be easiest and save you the most time). This tool can automatically aggregate your answers and highlight strengths and weaknesses, making the process quick and easy, allowing you to tap and swipe to record observations in real-time from any phone or tablet device.
Step 1: Identify the objectives
Define the specific goals you aim to achieve.
For example, if your objective is to increase order value per customer through better upselling, make sure that all training and observations align with this goal.
Step 2: Develop training content
Create a training program that is focused on the skills and behaviours needed to meet your objectives. For upselling, include modules on:
Understanding the main product thoroughly.
Techniques for naturally integrating upsell suggestions into conversations.
Building customer rapport to ease into upsell conversations.
Step 3: Create observation questions
Develop a detailed list of questions to guide your employee observations. These questions will help you observe and assess whether the training is being applied effectively. Example questions include:
How well do employees introduce the main product?
Are upsell attempts integrated smoothly into the conversation?
Do employees appear confident and knowledgeable about the upsell products?
How do customers respond to upsell suggestions?
Does the store layout support longer, more detailed conversations about upsells?
Step 4: Carry out frontline observations
Ask your frontline team leaders to work through your observation questions and mark them on pen and paper or an observation app.
Ideally, encourage them to observe each employee at least once, or ideally monthly or weekly.
During each observation:
Take detailed notes on employee-customer interactions.
Observe employees' body language and tone when they attempt an upsell.
Note customer reactions and engagement levels.
Set a good example when you’re out in the field by completing your own observations, and consider getting your leaders to be observed by their team as well.
Step 5: Identify and analyse challenges
Review your observations to identify specific challenges. For instance:
Employees might engage customers well with the main product but sound too pushy when attempting an upsell.
Some employees may appear confused or hesitant when offering an upsell, indicating a lack of confidence or understanding.
The store environment may feel too rushed, preventing employees from having detailed conversations.
Step 6: Coach in the moment as opportunities appear
Get your frontline leaders confident to coach “in the moment”, offering their team advice and guidance on what they can do better. Here are a few tips on best practices.
Use constructive language
Offer clear examples of what you observed and why it matters.
Start with what the employee is doing well before moving on to areas of improvement.
Focus on behaviours and actions, not personal attributes.
Align with training
Relate your feedback to specific training modules or materials to reinforce their importance.
Make sure that your coaching aligns with the company's standards and training programs.
Listen to your employees
Encourage employees to share their perspectives and experiences.
Show that you value their input by actively listening and responding thoughtfully.
Step 7: Aggregate and analyse data
Using a digital tool will automatically compile and analyse your data, saving you a lot of time and providing more accurate insights for you to act on. If not, follow these steps:
Input data into a spreadsheet — Record your observations in a structured format.
Look for patterns — Sort and filter the data to identify common issues and trends.
Highlight gaps — Focus on areas where employees consistently struggle or where the environment hinders effective upselling.
Step 8: Develop new training
Create updated training materials to address the identified gaps based on your analysis. This could include:
Role-playing exercises — To practice natural upsell conversations.
Updated scripts and tips — To help employees sound more confident and less forced.
Course corrections — Working with your internal comms team you can send out short actions and improvements for common opportunities you find to improve.
Step 9: Communicate and implement training
Make sure that all relevant employees are aware of the new training. Use your frontline internal comms app to make all employees aware.
Step 10: Monitor and repeat
Continue observing employee behaviour and gathering feedback. Use the same observation questions to maintain consistency. Regularly review and refine your training programs based on new insights and progress toward your business objectives.
Ready to launch?
The biggest hurdle in getting started with observations is thinking of the questions. So we’ve built a 100% free tool (no credit card required) that will give you suggested questions based on the activities you want to observe.
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