Hey, Big Spender….
Average spending on employee development in the US was $800 per learner, in 2011, according to Bersin & Associates.
Training Triage – Pick One
One of the things The Training Doctor specializes in is TRAINING TRIAGE - that is - why doesn't training work? Throughout our 20+ years in business, we've discovered the answers to this question. This month, we share with you one of the reasons:
PICK ONE:
Very often, especially when teaching a psychomotor skill (how to manipulate something) there is more than one way to complete the task. For instance, when copying text from a Word document in order to insert it somewhere else - one can use the keyboard (Ctrl+C), the ribbon (Home>Copy) or right click and choose from the drop-down-menu. While the variety of options makes for a very user-friendly software it does NOT make it learner-friendly. When something is new to an individual, it must be taught in one way and one way only; offering multiple techniques only leads to confusion and a lack of mastery of any one.
Two solutions for solving this common problem are:
Officially choose the ONE way to be taught and
Document the one way in your learning materials - both facilitator materials and participant materials.
The latter solution is particularly important because we all have our "favorite way" of doing something, so it is imperative that all trainers understand, that for the sake of learning, the ONLY way that can be taught is the documented way. It is OK for the trainer to say "There is another way of completing this task, and once you have mastered THIS way, we can teach you the others," but do NOT allow them to say "I know it says XYZ in your participant guide, but let me show you an easier way."
Imagine that you had three driver's ed instructors when you were learning to drive - one in the front seat and two in the back seat all shouting out different ways to approach an intersection. Would you have mastered any of them? Would you have remembered any one of them? The key to efficient learning is to teach only one way. The others will come on-the-job through informal learning, or can be documented in an appendix for the 'advanced' learner.
5 Questions to Ask a Stakeholder Before Designing Training
Performance problems can be caused by a myriad of things. Perhaps your organization has undergone a downsizing, or perhaps a department is understaffed or their equipment is unreliable. Unfortunately many managers and organizations assume that poor performance is directly linked to a lack of skill or knowledge which can be solved by training.
In my 20 plus years of consulting experience, I’ve found that what is initially presented as a training problem is often something else entirely.
Before embarking on any training program it is imperative that a needs analysis is conducted in order to pinpoint the exact cause of poor performance and to ascertain if the poor performance can be solved by applying training. Unfortunately, most organizations skip the needs analysis, assuming that they already know the cause.
The following 5 questions will help you to pinpoint the true cause of a performance problem and also help with the design process by ascertaining what training truly needs to be created. Ask these questions of the individual in the organization who is requesting that you design and develop a training program to address an assumed training issue.
1. What is the problem you are experiencing?
Often you'll hear a request along the lines of, “My sales team needs training on teamwork." Well that’s putting the cart before the horse, isn't it? Ask the requestor to give you a big picture view of the factors they see as contributing to the poor performance. Do not accept their definition of the performance problem (in this case, lack of team work) until you hear more about the work environment, the intended audience, their job related duties, etc.
2. What are the symptoms that led you to believe this was a problem?
Notice the key word “symptoms." Very often what presents itself to be a performance problem is truly a symptom of a deeper or related organizational problem. For instance, a large publishing company believed it needed customer service training because it came in dead last in the customer service category in a survey published by its industry magazine. When more investigation was done, it was determined that the organization was suffering from an inadequate technology system that led to the symptom of poor customer service.
3. Why do you think this is a training need?
Remember, the person requesting you to design and deliver training has their own perspective on the situation. When this question was posed to a retail executive his response was that a particular department's reports were consistently wrong and therefore they must not know how to use the reporting software. The executive made a huge leap from the evidence of erroneous reports to employee’s lack of skill or knowledge. The intended trainees will also have their own perspective and it's a good idea to ask them, at some point, if they feel a need for training based on the evidence at hand. When further investigation was done with the intended trainee group, from the above mentioned retail organization, it was discovered that the employees lacked basic math skills but knew how to use the software quite well.
4. What organizational factors might be playing a role?
When organizations are in flux, a sense of ennui trickles down to every individual's performance. If the organization has been talking about an acquisition or merger, it can cause people to change their work habits. If a downsizing has occurred and more work needs to be accomplished with less people, it’s logical that poor performance will follow. Perhaps the department has had three different managers in the last 18 months, and every manager has a different perspective on how the work should be done; eventually people start to second-guess their abilities and perform at a minimal level in order to “play it safe.”
5. What training already exists?
Often you'll find that a “training problem” is a frequent issue within the organization, and one that has been addressed in the past. Determining what training already exists is helpful in two ways: 1) it helps you to determine what training people have had in the past and alerts you to look for reasons why that training did not “stick,” and 2) it should minimize your need to reinvent the wheel because it's probable that you can repurpose the existing training content.
Tech Industry Thinks to the Future
New York City's recently built Academy for Software Engineering (high school) is supported with direct help from many leaders in the tech industry, including Google, eBay, Facebook and FourSquare.
Surely They Don’t Mean the Company Party!
The most time-wasting learning and development activity reported by employees is.... Teambuilding Activities; according to the 2011 National Learning and Development Index conducted by the Australian Institute of Training and Development.
Keep It Suitably Simple
While there is still a need for formally-packaged courses, these are for special occasions, when we or our employers require some formal record of achievement (or at least of participation). In the meantime, there's a job to be done, and that's far better achieved through access to videos, PDFs, forums, blogs and simple web articles. These are much easier to produce than highly-structured e-learning and just as easy to consume. Nothing lasts more than five minutes and the emphasis is strictly on practical application.
Excerpted from Clive on Learning - Clive Shephard's blog. You can read the full text here: ttp://tinyurl.com/cc9kwhn
Bring Your Wii to Work!
Too often, e-learning modules end up being glorified PowerPoint presentations. The learner reads through the information in a linear, beginning-to-end format, and is tested for knowledge retention at the end. As detailed in 5 Gaming Elements for Effective E-Learning (Training Industry Quarterly, Fall 2012), there are five takeaways from video games that can take e-learning to the next level.
Contextualization takes the e-learning out of the void, and puts it into a time and place, such as a scenario or story that provides the back bone for the training.
Curiosity draws the learner into exploring the e-learning module, enticing them to completeness.
Control allows participants to direct their own learning, driving the direction of the training, and causing them to retain more information due to engagement.
Cooperation / Socialization integrates a very popular factor of many online games, removing feelings of isolation and fostering teamwork.
Engagement / Interactivity puts the learners in situations where they are participating in the training from the start, rather than at the end of a module.
And with the growing popularity of BYOD (bring your own device) we could have everyone bring their Wii controller to work! <grin>
Formalize Informal Training in Your Organization
About 80% of the training that occurs in the workplace doesn't occur in a formal training program. About 80% of the training that occurs is just one person assisting another in an informal way. You stand up and look over your cubicle and ask your cubicle mate, “Do you know how to take text out of table and just make it into a paragraph?” Or, a sales manager decides he's going to take his administrative assistant out on the road for a day so she can actually meet the customers and better understand what their customer's needs are.
This interview, with Dr. Nanette Miner, will discuss ways to formalize informal learning in your organization.
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Miner: Most of new-hire training is what we consider “follow Joe around” training. This means that you hook a new person up with a more experienced person - follow Joe around and he'll show you how to do your job. Although this is efficient, there are many problems with this style of training. If you have more than one person who is “Joe,” in this case, the training can be different from individual to individual because every trainer is going to emphasize what they think is important or perhaps show shortcuts, or “their way” of doing things which may not be the prescribed way of doing things. So while it is efficient and it doesn't take a formal training process, in the end you can actually have some pretty poorly trained new hires.
One of the things you can do to keep that process in place while making it a little more formal is to create check lists of training so that you have some kind of assurance that everybody's getting the same training process. For instance, in the retail industry there's a lot of turnover. Organizations tend to hire clerks on an individual basis. If you had a new hire training checklist you could at least ensure that everybody was getting the same training on the cash register. For instance you’d show them how to ring a cash sale, how to ring a charge sale, how to run a coupon, how to process a refund – these are a the topics any new hire would need to know, but you could “formalize” the training by prescribing the order of learning from easiest (cash sale) to hardest (refund).
Another way to formalize the training would be to recruit individuals who are interested in training. Believe it or not, there are a lot of people in organizations who love to transmit their knowledge to others and would be happy to do it for free. Recruit those people to serve as mentors or coaches for everybody, not just new hires, but everybody. They can be the go-to person when a new process needs to be created or a process runs into a problem; this person can be the one who figures it out and then trains everyone else in the “new way.”
Another idea would be to make training the responsibility of everybody in the organization. Require everyone to take on new learning and then share it with others. What we often do, as individuals, is figure something out on our own and say, “Oh cool, now I know how to do that,” and we don't ever share it with anybody else. I remember reading about a software company that made it everybody's responsibility to take on new learning to the point where it was in their performance review every year. What did you learn this year and how did you disseminate it to the rest of the organization? So, the employee might run a lunch and learn or they might write something up in the company newsletter.The point is that everyone is learning all the time, and we should formalize a way to share that learning.
T/D: Thank you Dr. Miner, those are great tips in making it everyone's responsibility and sharing the knowledge. Next month we will finalize this interview by focusing on Accessing Employee Training through your local College or University.
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Dr Nanette Miner has been an instructional designer for over two decades. She is President and Managing Consultant for The Training Doctor which specializes in working with subject matter experts to take the knowledge from their heads and design learning in such a way that others can adopt and implement the training immediately. She is also the author of The Accidental Trainer and co-author of Tailored Learning: Designing a Blend that Fits.
Informal Learning comes from ... whom?
Where do you fall?
The 90:9:1 rule suggests that only one in a hundred will start up a blog, create a new thread on a forum or put a video on YouTube. We're not going to see people do things like this at work unless they are seriously incentivized.
On the other hand, nine in every hundred will keep the conversation going and contribute in some way with a comment or refinement. That is more realistically where we should expect to see user-generated content emerging in the workplace - as thousands of short contributions to hundreds of conversations. With powerful search facilities on a corporate intranet, these can provide the answers to the everyday questions of the remaining 90%.
Excerpted from Clive on Learning blog
http://tinyurl.com/cc9kwhn
Training Triage
One of the three things that The Training Doctor specializes in is TRAINING TRIAGE; that is, figuring out what is "wrong" with a training program that is currently in place, but does not accomplish its intended goals, and then developing a 'treatment plan' to make return the training program to health.
Bob Pike, in a recent Training Magazine article, noted one of the key elements for why training fails:
"There should be a proper blend of content and process. Too many trainers I've observed focus on one or the other. The key is to focus on both. It is not either content (the right stuff) or process (the right delivery method) - it is both content and process.
Too much information in too short a time equals information overload. As trainers, we may be covering the content but delivering it so fast that it doesn't allow our participants to capture much of it in a useful way. We all need time to process, integrate and apply what we learned. On the other hand, too much focus on process leaves people wondering, 'Where's the beef?' There just isn't enough practical take away value to justify the time and energy each participant is expending - let alone the money the organization is investing in making the training possible."
Much ado about Leadership, er, Management, no, Leadership - what's the difference?
We've seen three articles recently that have taken up the "leadership" vs. "management" controversy and, in particular, the role that training plays in this "battle."
According to Paul Glover, in The Changing Face of Training,
"Statistics show that 50% of all front line managers who are promoted to the next level fail at that new job, and some even return to their previous lower-level positions. They fail because they don't have the training to be a manager instead of a worker. Sure, they may receive training on machinery or processes, but soft skills - the ability to communicate, supervise, and work in a team - get overlooked."
And Sebastian Bailey, President of Mind Gym Inc., says,
"Businesses tend to over-invest in leadership and concentrate on developing leaders but not managers."(HR Magazine, August 2012)
Finally, Michael Leimbach and Barb Taruscio of Wilson Learning, state,
"What's the difference between consistently successful companies and those that fail? To sustain success through good times and bad takes more than good products and marketing and finances - these are necessary but not sufficient. To pull these elements together and outperform the competition year after year requires great leadership. This is the one asset that makes all the difference: leaders with imagination, know-how, and highly effective management skills to encourage, inspire, and elicit high performance from a well-trained workforce." (Training Magazine, July / August 2012)
These authors go on to describe successful companies as driven by leaders "who have both Form (the skill and knowledge to produce results) and Essence (character to inspire and lead with values and clarity of purpose).
Perhaps it's time to assess your management (or leadership) development curriculum and see which way you lean? It seems it is not simply a matter of semantics. Each of the quoted authors makes a distinct point that management and leadership require different skills. Does one encompass the other? Can one learn one without the other? Is it possible to be a successful company with one set of skills but lacking in the other? All good questions to ask of your organization's current leadership and to contemplate when dissecting your current management / leadership curriculum.
This just in!
Recent findings released by the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development in the United Kingdom reveal that three-quarters of employers report a lack of leadership and management skills in their organizations. Bill Willmott, head of public policy at CIPD states, as a potential cause, "Too many employees are promoted into people management roles because they have good technical skills, then receive inadequate training and have little idea of how their behavior affects others."
1 Day a Week Dealing with Poor Performers?
Managers spend nearly 17 percent of their working hours dealing with poor performers, according to a report from staffing firm Robert Half International. That’s nearly a full day a week that could have been spent being productive!
This is a pretty shocking statistic. We have to wonder what role training plays in this. Can the managers categorize the poor performance? Is it the same for everyone? Unique to each individual? Is it knowledge, skill or personality that contributes to poor performance? Are people with inadequate skills hired-in to begin with and training fails to bring them up to an acceptable level? Did they have the appropriate skill(s) at one time, but then they diminished over time? Could ongoing performance support have prevented that?
The Training Doctor would LOVE to do a follow-on study with the same managers polled for the Robert Half report to find the answers to these questions.
Training for the Taking
It's odd, really, for an instructional design firm, we are all-for not reinventing the wheel. If there is training already "out there" and it fufills your need - even if you need to augment it a bit - why not take advantage of someone else's hard (and brilliant) work?
Here are some websites we've sourced recently, where you can find training offerings from A (Audacity) to Z (Zbrush).
Educator.com - From physics to music theory, Educator bills itself as having the most comprehensive math and science content on the web. Pay monthly or annually for discount.
Edudemic.com - Lots of free resources and links to free resources. Geared toward teachers but their ideas and findings are really universal to anyone trying to be the best educator they can be.
Lynda.com - A video-based, on-demand, portal for software and business skills. Pay monthly or annually for discount. Free trial.
KhanAcademy.org - Their tag line says it all, "Learn almost anything for free." The topics are more academically inclined and so would be ideal for assisting your workers with basic skills such as mathematics or sciences. Also video based in a really engaging delivery format.
And for some interesting factoids that you can use as icebreakers, energizers or to amuse, check out the Smithsonian's new website: www.SeriouslyAmazing.com.
Quotable: Sebastian Bailey
Businesses tend to over-invest in leadership and concentrate on developing leaders but not managers.
Quotable: Sebastian Bailey, President, The Mind Gym, Inc.