Let’s Talk Training!

A Spoonful of Sugar Can Make People Grumpy

will kenny — Tue, 16 Dec 2008 15:31:21 +0000

With the economy in the condition it is, and the endless drumbeat of bad news we are all exposed to these days, you are no doubt delivering training and employee communications to people who are afraid, angry and suspicious. You may be teaching staff how to do their jobs better, while they are worrying about whether they will have jobs. You may be guiding employees in practices and procedures that benefit the company, but your participants are wondering what the company is going to do for—or to—them.

Sometimes the connection between the economic downturn and the training function is fairly explicit. People may be learning new duties (with new processes and procedures) because layoffs leave fewer people to carry out all the company’s business operations. Others are receiving communications about practices that they once carried out with larger budgets and more staff.

Even in the best of times, training staff feel the brunt of employee frustration. While management conceives business strategies, the training department brings many of those strategies into the daily working lives of employees. Facilitators frequently find themselves the first line of defense for management decisions.

And with employee morale where it is right now, that can be pretty uncomfortable!

It might be a good time to review how your own training staff deal with these frustrations when employees express them. Are these worries and complaints “off topic” and quickly shut down when, say, they come up during a seminar? Do training staff just pass the buck, pointing the finger at management and doing everything they can to remove themselves as targets of employee anger and suspicion?

Worst of all, do they sugarcoat things, suggesting that things are not as bad as they seem, that if we just stay on task (that is, stick to the training script) everything will work out fine? Nothing is more infuriating than the feeling that one is being cajoled into pretending that the company is not having very real problems.

Handling employee anger, especially when it is really directed at someone else, is one of the most challenging aspects of the training business. But it is also one of the defining characteristics of a professional, it is one reason why you have dedicated training staff who have the skills and attitude to wrestle with these situations.

Your training staff will be more effective if they have guidance from the top on appropriate responses to employee concerns. Generally, that is going to involve acknowledging that participant worries are legitimate, not ignoring them or refracting them through rose-colored glasses. But whatever your approach, consistency across staff is crucial.

You will also want to decide, as a department, what you do with what you learn about employee concerns and frustrations.

Certainly, there are situations where management cannot answer all the questions employees are asking. But it is surprising how often there are opportunities for company leadership to work to improve morale, to really build that “we’re all in this together” approach, but they truly underestimate the strength of feeling, and the magnitude of the concern, their workforce is experiencing. Or they assume that certain issues are the ones to focus on, when dealing with other employee concerns could have a major impact on employee attitudes and performance.

Unfortunately, in many companies the training function hears a great deal of the general frustration and specific complaints of the workforce, but never passes it on. Or it ends up bottled up in HR, but that’s about it.

Communication is most effective as a two-way street. Your leadership team needs to know about employee morale, and they need to be aware of specific opportunities where they can take steps, even in tough times, to address employee concerns.

So pass on what you hear . . . and don’t sugarcoat that, either.

Does Your “Sales Force” Know Your Business Plan?

will kenny — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 16:11:39 +0000

Will Kenny, Best Training Practices

Last time I wrote about the need for a true business plan approach to running your internal training function. Since training departments rely on funds from the rest of the company, almost a form of external financing, I suggested that most departments could benefit from crafting business plans similar to the ones small, independent training companies take to their creditors and investors.

Here’s one more lesson from small training companies: In a successful small business, everyone in the company knows the business plan. Every employee is aware of the goals, the target market, the key strategies that drive the company.

Why? Because the “sales force” in a small company is everybody. Every time someone inside the company interacts with someone outside the company, that is an opportunity to promote the business, to build relationships that help them reach their goals.

Your training department doesn’t have a dedicated band of “sales representatives” who go out and beat the bushes to drum up customers. Your department head does a lot of the formal selling to the leadership team, especially during annual budget discussions.

But informal selling can make a huge difference to the support you enjoy across the company. And broad recognition of the benefits you bring to the company is built up—or weakened—with every interaction between a member of your training department and anyone else in the company.

Unfortunately, in too many training departments, employees leave the “heavy thinking” to management; they just “do their jobs.” They see winning budget battles, getting access to resources, building cooperation among other company functions they serve as something the department leader does.

A clear business plan can be a huge help in turning all of your staff into your sales force:

Your plan should clearly identify the relationship-building, or “selling,” function as a part of every single employee’s job.
A formal business plan should be shared with everyone in the training department, with a strong message that everyone on the staff is expected to be able to articulate the key elements of that plan.
For the best results, especially if this is a new approach for you, give the staff some explicit training in responding to questions, sharing the plan, and recognizing opportunities to promote the plan. In other words, train your staff to respond to conversations and interactions in new ways, routinely weaving department messages for their “customers” into their communications with the rest of the company.

The power of your business plan can be simply, and accurately, gauged by the number of people who routinely express its key components. If only the department head knows what the business plan is, you are throwing away countless opportunities to “build a brand” that it is more resistant to downsizing and budget attacks. Just as importantly, a well respected “internal brand” opens new opportunities, developing a more sympathetic audience within your organization when you want to try something new.

If all the staff in your department regularly include elements they learned from the business plan in their working conversations with others, you have a much larger and more effective “sales force” working for you.

And when you have delivered your key messages so relentlessly, so consistently, that people in other departments start using your favorite phrases from the business plan to describe your training function, you know you have the support to maximize your contribution to your organization’s success.

You Need a Business Plan for your Corporate Training Department

will kenny — Mon, 10 Nov 2008 21:12:36 +0000

Will Kenny, Best Training Practices

As we all know, there are many small companies offering various kinds of training services. They may deliver standard seminars or provide coaching. They may offer content development, step in to facilitate internal discussions of various kinds or create delivery tools such as online courses. They may be one-person shops or small organizations with several employees. And almost every one of these small training consultancies has something that is rare in the departments of their corporate counterparts—a business plan.

They have formal business plans for both philosophical and practical reasons. Philosophically, a business plan helps focus efforts on the opportunities, resources, and practices that lead to success. Practically, a business plan is required to get a loan or raise any other form of financing.

These business plans don’t have to be very elaborate. Simple answers to a few key questions will do most of the work:

Who is your market, your audience?
How many people will you serve and where?
What are their needs? How will you meet those needs?
What resources do you require to meet those needs—funds, equipment, people?
Where else can they get their needs met?
How will you generate revenue? Why will they buy?
How do we know the business leadership knows how to succeed in this business?
What potential threats do you see, and how do you plan to overcome them?

Apply those questions to the corporate training environment, with an internal training department, and I think you’ll find few people in most training departments who can begin to answer them. In many companies, the training function “just is,” and the fundamental questions are rarely asked . . . at least by management within the training function. More importantly, every employee in the training function needs to understand these questions and know the answers to them, especially as questions like those may be hinted at by other departments when budgets get tight.

Those small consultancies know that unless they tell their story effectively, they aren’t going to get the loans they need to expand their business. And internal training functions are really in much the same situation. They don’t generate enough revenue from per-person fees for their courses to pay for their operating costs. They live on “credit” from the rest of the organization, on what they get from “investors” elsewhere in the company.

It makes perfect sense, then, to be able and ready to present a business plan that supports that financing. You may already have a lot of those answers in your department objectives, budget documents, training catalog and so on. Even so, a true business plan provides a somewhat different focus. It’s the difference between:

Talking about what you do, what your activities are, how you manage your resources; and
Talking about how you help, why and where you are needed, what benefits justify investment.

In other words, the first approach talks about you and your department. The business plan approach talks about your customers and investors, the organization you serve. Formalizing that outward-looking perspective helps you focus your conversations on the benefits your “business” brings to the rest of the organization. It also helps you make better decisions about where to apply resources or where to look for additional support, crucial decisions when the budget is under pressure.

Your business colleagues truly appreciate a business-like approach. Run your business better, with a clear business plan, and you are likely to pick up a few more “wins” in the budget battle.

Stretching Your Training “Meals” With Wraps

will kenny — Mon, 27 Oct 2008 20:29:09 +0000

Will Kenny, Best Training Practices

Go to just about any kind of restaurant these days and you’ll find a “wrap” on the menu. Much less common even a decade ago, all kinds of entrees are rolled into a tortilla now (or sometimes, in my part of the country, into lefse!).

The ingredients—what is packed into the wrap—are often the same as they were before wraps became popular—a stir fry, perhaps, that might have already been on the menu. But the simple addition of that wrap changes how you eat something you have had many times before. It changes the experience.

For the restaurant, since wraps are so popular now, a very inexpensive addition to an existing dish, the tortilla, may make it possible to charge more for the same entree (or even for a smaller portion of the original entree). They can get a better outcome from the same, or perhaps reduced, resources.

In the training business, unfortunately, there is a huge bias toward just plopping the entrée—a course or event—in front of employees without any “wrap,” without very much to hold it in place or to make it easier for the trainees to consume. What holds together the content of training, so that it truly has an impact on how employees do their jobs, on whether they work in alignment with the leadership’s strategic goals, is what comes before and after the core event.

A little lead-in, and even better, a good bit of follow-up can make your training meals more nutritious, helping them “stick to the ribs” so that employees actually use what they have learned back at their desks. The good news is that you can enhance the impact of what you offer without requesting additional funds or other resources.

It just takes a few more contacts with individuals registered for your programs. Before they get to the heart of your event—online course, webinar, meeting or conference, seminar, or self-study packet—send them a reminder about it, not just the “when and where,” but a little bit of “why.” Send them another message with suggestions for questions to think about before beginning the training, or “case studies” they might like to consider from their own experience, on the chosen topic.

After they have completed the training, follow-up can make all the difference. While your trainees are working away at learning the material, whether on their own or in a live class, their in-baskets and to-do lists are piling up. When they get back to their regular posts, catching up with all of that obliterates any thought of applying what they just learned.

So give them a nudge, once a week for a few weeks, say. Remind them of some key points, the most crucial themes, from your training event. Suggest simple ways to apply a few of the ideas you covered. It may not seem like much, but returning their focus to what they learned from the training, once they go back to their original environment, can make an enormous difference to whether they really use what you tell them.

All this can be done very effectively through existing channels, with e-mails, voicemails or interoffice mail. You can even write the lead-in and follow-up messages in advance, and then just have administrative staff distribute them around the schedule for your event. (You can experience a simulation of that approach here.The effort and cost are minimal, but the payoff is substantial.

In the end, a tortilla doesn’t cost much, but it transforms the meal, how it is presented, and how you consume it. A little “wrap” of contact, a few nudges before and after your training event, can do wonders to stretch your training budget for maximum impact on employee performance.

Hire Complements, Not Clones

will kenny — Thu, 16 Oct 2008 18:42:13 +0000

Will Kenny, Best Training Practices

With the current downturn in the economy, many training functions will be looking to outside help to complete essential projects. When crucial training has to get done, or key employee communications must be developed, contracting the work with outsiders who require no benefits, payroll taxes, etc. can be quite cost effective.

At the same time, some departments will still manage to fill staff positions where the need is recognized by the company. It’s harder to do in these times, but it will happen.

And whether it is outside help or new staff, many of those people will be selected to work on projects mainly for one reason, although no one will ever say this is the reason: because they are similar to the people making the hiring decision, making for easy conversations on both sides.

In other words, there is a natural tendency to clone ourselves when hiring, whether filling a staff position or selecting a consultant.

Unfortunately, a clone is not what we usually need. We go looking for help because something is missing, because we lack a skill or body of knowledge to carry out a training project.

Let’s imagine you are launching a new product developed by your engineering department, or by your clinical staff, or by your programmers. And along the way, you realize that the experts who developed the product are not, by themselves, going to do a great job of guiding your employees in playing their roles, in launching and supporting the new product.

It isn’t because these internal experts aren’t smart, obviously. And they are no doubt enthusiastic, even passionate, about the new product.

But they may not be good at explaining things to people who don’t know as much as they do. We have all encountered experts who simply can’t seem to get their basic ideas across to us.

Once the need for help in effective communication is recognized, you are likely to see this selection process unfold:

A list of potential “helpers” (outside resources or job applicants) is identified and screened.
The finalists meet with a committee working on the launch, dominated by the experts who “own” the new product.
The experts choose whoever sounds most like them!

We all are more comfortable talking to people who are a lot like us. That’s why the engineers will pick the outside trainer who used to be an engineer, the programmers will pick someone who worked as a programmer and so on.

Picking people who know what we know and sound like we do isn’t filling in the gaps in a team, it is duplicating existing skills and resources. And there is always the danger (which I have seen played out many a time) that because the added resources sound and think like the experts, they won’t really improve communication, won’t break out of this expert box to connect with ordinary front-line employees, any more than the original experts did.

This is an easy trap to fall into—we aren’t even aware that it is happening. That’s why an important role of the training professional is to step back and be a little more objective about the candidate being hired. We have to notice when everyone is just staying in their respective comfort zones. We must speak out to advocate complementing the team’s skills and knowledge, hiring what we do not already have.

Of course, previous experience in the field can be very valuable. But it’s a big mistake to assume that is it enough, to take that experience as sufficient to generate results in employee communication situations.

If the people we hire don’t bring something new to the party, don’t offer something we lack with our current resources, those hiring decisions sacrifice enhanced effectiveness for a little comfort.

The Cart and the Horse: Engaging Leadership Support

will kenny — Wed, 08 Oct 2008 13:41:21 +0000

Will Kenny, Best Training Practices

To promote key messages and crucial best practices that ensure success for your company, you are probably working to get the management visibly involved in your training activities, whether through some kind of public endorsement or by actually participating in the delivery of information.

This can be a powerful boost to the impact of your employee communication and training efforts, but not just because of how statements from top management affect employees and how they do their jobs.

Public statements about “how we do things around here” can have an equally powerful impact on the managers making the statements, and how they do their jobs!

The common practice is to build support with management, to work on them until you are confident they are committed to the training message and then have them come in and display that commitment in front of the employees. We tend to look down our noses at executives who make appearances only because it is expected of them, who may work in ways, within their own functions, day to day, that are inconsistent with what they say in public.

That may be getting the cart before the horse. Get the executives in front of your audience, with the right message, and worry about their personal commitment to the cause later. You are likely to find that as time goes on repeated utterances in favor of a policy or best practice will evolve into supporting it with actions.

A recent article in The Economist (Aug. 30) focused on turnaround specialist Greg Brenneman, most recently credited with bringing the fast-food chain Quiznos back from the brink. One of his practices was to send out a voicemail to all franchise holders every Friday morning, updating them on what was happening in the business.

Naturally, the primary purpose was to improve communications with franchisees, as relations had been rather toxic (including lawsuits) before he took over. But he pointed out another benefit to this practice.

Brenneman said, “If someone gets on a voicemail and promises something to thousands of people, that person will do it.” In other words, whatever his level of commitment to follow through on a given behavior before the massive public statement, afterwards he pretty much had to live up to his words.

And I’ve worked the same “trick” among my own clients. In one instance, what was then a large regional bank (now grown into one of the largest banks in the country) had some core training to spread the best practices they wanted applied consistently in every state where they did business. The regional managers in those states, on the other hand, liked to do things their own ways.

That presented the usual problem all trainers have encountered: The official message delivered at training got undermined went employees when back to their desks in their own locations. In their own states and regions, the senior managers were willing to deliver the approved message to employees, perhaps knowing that it wouldn’t matter what they said, since they could greatly influence how employees worked afterwards.

The solution? Company-wide conferences, where all the state-by-state managers appeared together to deliver the training message. Having publicly supported the corporate best practices in front of their peers (and their own bosses), they found it much more difficult to veer away from those practices in their own operations.

In other words, don’t wait for corporate leaders to believe what they are saying before you engage them in your training events. Get them on the broadest, most public platform you can devise. The more publicly they say the right things, the more likely they are to do the right things privately, in their own fiefdoms.

Economic Meltdown Points to Power of Training

will kenny — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 02:52:31 +0000

Will Kenny, Best Training Practices

Sometimes companies treat training and employee communications as a “nice to have,” as a luxury. Oh, they don’t come out and say that, but the eagerness with which they cut budgets for these functions in a downturn reveals much about their perceived value to the organization.

Ironically, the current economic crisis gives powerful testimony to the impact of training and employee communications!

Think about all that you have read and heard about this economic downturn, including the practices in the mortgage industry and other financial services. Some of what you have seen recently probably has you asking, “Why in the world did they behave that way?”

On the level of the individual employee, they behaved that way because that is how they were told to behave!

Remember, the news has not been filled with reports of rogue employees. From time to time, in financial services, somehow an individual manages to go against all the principles of the business and bring it to its knees. But there is no indication that has happened this time around and it certainly didn’t happen at all these different companies. What did happen was that many organizations adopted poor business practices, and they adopted them so effectively, they communicated them so well to the front lines, that they are now out of business.

Obviously, I’m not blaming the training or internal communications functions for the current crisis. They simply delivered management’s message very well—in each instance—and that’s the point.

When you encounter internal resistance to the notion that training and communications can really make a difference to how an entire company performs, just point to this economic crisis.
If training doesn’t make a difference, how did all of these employees in all these businesses just coincidentally travel down the wrong paths? How did so many people follow the same business practices, especially if they turned out to be bad for business?

Really, it is the ultimate test. Truly effective training and employee communications change the way employees do business. If what is communicated is a series of great business practices, the company is more likely to flourish. If what is shared with employees is a collection of bad business practices, the company is headed for trouble.

But putting the actual message aside, nothing makes it clearer that you can influence employees than these recent events. Companies managed to build cultures, to instill and reinforce habits among their employees, to establish consistent ways of doing business. Their cultures were ill-conceived, as everyone can see now, but they were strong and pervasive.

And if an organization can influence all of its employees to adopt business practices that will eventually lead to the organization’s demise, can’t the same tools, resources, energy and focus ensure that good business practices, the pathways to success, are engrained in the work habits of our people? Surely we can be just as good at cultivating healthy business practices as other companies have been at nurturing bad ones!

If you, your management or the other departments who are looking at your training budget with hungry eyes, don’t believe that training and employee communications truly impact how staff on the front lines do business, just talk to the former employees of any of the big firms that recently collapsed. When they say, “I just did what they told me to do,” you’ll see, firsthand, just how powerful internal messages to employees can be.

Goldilocks Teaches Us About SeatS At TableS

will kenny — Fri, 26 Sep 2008 20:27:31 +0000

Will Kenny, Best Training Practices

You all remember our old friend Goldilocks, who, like so many of the chief learning officers and training directors I have encountered, was looking for “a seat at the table”. Now, we are all inclined to think that Goldilocks was a bit fussy about things, such as the temperature of her porridge, but she did find a seat that was “just right” along the way.

Goldilocks, of course, was an individual, while the Three Bears were more like an organization. They had different seats suited to different “levels” of the organization, namely, the Papa, Mama and Baby Bear levels. And that organization was happiest, no doubt, when all the seats were in use, along with all the bowls of porridge, each seat the right size for the bear sitting in it, each bowl of porridge the preferred temperature.

If you are engaged in training or employee communication functions for a company of reasonable size, I’d encourage you to take less of a Goldilocks approach and more of a Three Bears approach. Specifically, don’t get too focused on one seat at one table!

Sure, it’s good when the head of training is regarded as a peer among executive management. But there is a limit to how much impact you can have on an organization solely from the executive suite.

If you truly want to influence how employees do their work, on how they contribute to carrying out the executive vision—and that’s where the return on investment in training actually comes from—you need relationships with other functions in the organizations. And having a seat at the table at the highest level is not, in itself, a relationship between functions.

Take a trip down your company’s organization chart to:

Make sure you know the key players at the next level down in other functions and departments;

Identify corresponding level players in your own training unit; and

Make sure that real conversations are going on, between your department and the others, at all levels, not just at the top.

Then, “rinse and repeat,” that is, have your staff carry this exercise down “recursively” through the next lower levels of the various departments.

As with the Three Bears, there is furniture of every size in a large organization, and not everything happens at the Papa Bear table. If “your people” aren’t regularly talking to “their people,” you are really doing things the hard way.

And you are probably leaving yourself vulnerable to the whims of external events and internal changes of philosophy. If the other Papa Bears aren’t hearing good things, often, about the training function from the lower levels of their own departments, they just aren’t going to support you as you would like when you try something new, or compete for resources in tough economic times.

My own view is that it takes more than just a Papa Bear to produce a happy household. An obsession with winning influence at the highest level—where it may be a fragile, all-or-nothing connection—may do less to build a truly lasting impact on the success of the organization than a patient, consistent and pervasive effort to integrate training concerns and good employee communication practices at more levels, more locations, more functions.

Only one seat was “just right” for Goldilocks, but all of the seats were “just right” for their original purposes and owners. Make sure that all the staff in your training department are working hard to hold comfortable seats at the right tables, and the entire company will be better off.

Training Tradeoffs III: Experts—What They Know, What They Can Do

will kenny — Tue, 16 Sep 2008 18:07:26 +0000

Will Kenny, Best Training Practices

One of the most valuable contributions you can make to your company (or to a client) as a training professional is managing your experts!

Whether you are rolling out a new procedure or introducing a new product or service, there’s a good chance that you will be working with Subject Matter Experts (SMEs), either from within your organization, or from outside. These individuals are naturally respected for their in-depth command of the facts and figures, their mastery of the details of your topic.

Problems arise when “experts” are revered as “EXPERTS,” if you will, when you step back and give them roles in the project that exceed their capabilities. The role of the SME is to provide an accurate body of knowledge on a given topic. The role of the expert communicator is to take that knowledge and process it into a message that will have an impact on employees.

The most common mistake is equating vast content knowledge with the ability to share that knowledge effectively.

Now there are certainly experts who are also great communicators. But let’s face it, they are a delightful surprise.

Did you ever have a brilliant math teacher who did very little to help you understand mathematics? Or a language teacher who spoke fluently, but didn’t produce students who could speak the language? Have you ever met a doctor, an engineer, a programmer, or, for that matter, an insurance agent who knew what he or she was talking about, but couldn’t get it across to you? Do you find the guidelines to your medications, written by clinicians (and lawyers) helpful? Are the help files and manuals you get from your software vendors packed with clearly written explanations that are easy to find?

As an expert yourself, in reaching and influencing employees, you have to be willing to make some hard calls. You have to challenge the assumptions that the expert knows best what employees need to know, and that the expert is the best person to share that information.

Experts love their own subjects. They are fascinated by details that make a difference in product performance or efficient execution, and that is good for your company.

But one of the secrets of effective training is providing the optimal level of knowledge, in the most effective way, to influence how employees work. That is quite different from the maximum quantity of information, which is where the expert lives.

That means it is up to you to look at the volume of material available from your experts, and to make the tough decisions about what to leave out. Distilling a wealth of potential information into a core of useful information is the work of a true communication professional.

Besides not knowing what needs to be said, many experts are weak at knowing how to say it, especially when they are dealing with people who are not themselves experts. It isn’t that most experts have no communication skills: engineers can communicate very efficiently and effectively with other engineers, programmers with programmers.

But programmers may not be very good at explaining to clerical staff how to use the 20 percent of software features that produce 80 percent of the benefit. Designers of new products may have very little idea of how to talk to a sales representative about the benefits of their products bring to ordinary, real-world users.

That’s why the training professional has to be willing to work both firmly and creatively with SMEs when these experts actually play a role in delivering the training.

And that will be the subject of next week’s post.

All Aboard! (II): Go Granular!

will kenny — Tue, 09 Sep 2008 20:46:10 +0000

Will Kenny, Best Training Practices

Is your “onboarding” content a giant block of granite, a monument to “the way we have always done it”? Even if you are just now developing your message to new employees, providing basic orientation and explaining essential values and processes of your organization to new hires, it is all too easy to stay at the “big picture” level when a more granular or modular approach—working in smaller bits and pieces—could dramatically increase your impact.

Your company wants to run as lean as possible, which means getting new employees up to speed quickly. And efficiency means avoiding the most costly approach of all—having to redo training and communications around topics that don’t “stick” the first time.

Take that massive pile of information for new hires and cut it down into modules, along these lines:

Break the content into the smallest units possible, each one focused on a single idea that new hires need to understand. If you’re having a hard time tackling your existing “syllabus,” start with the schedule and cut it into one-hour, or even half-hour, blocks that will help you see the components of your message.
Associate each unit with an outcome. What will an employee who completes that unit do differently than one who doesn’t? How will that contribute to the organization’s success?
Identify units with weak outcomes, or no outcomes and eliminate them! Sometimes you have to be brave about this. Take that wonderful half-hour on the beloved founders of the company. If that unit directly connects their early experiences to values or practices in the company today, perhaps it is valuable. If that unit is just a sentimental tribute to the past, consider dumping it.
Rank order the remaining outcomes, starting with the ones that make the greatest contribution to the company’s success. In second place, put the units that are “prerequisites” to the highest ranking outcomes, units you have to understand to tackle the units that deliver the biggest payoffs.
Design a communication/training module at the level of each unit. Remember that delivery is a design issue, and put effectiveness before efficiency for the highest ranking outcomes. If a content unit makes a big contribution to your organization’s success, more live, personal approaches to training may do more to produce the behaviors you are looking for, from your new hires, than will self-study or online training. Don’t sacrifice impact to saving a few bucks on delivery, where the outcome is truly important. Save your most efficient delivery for outcomes that are less crucial to the company’s bottom line.
Identify units that absolutely must be delivered exactly the same way, every time, everywhere. For example, training that helps you avoid lawsuits, regulatory action, ethical problems or public relations crises often depends on a fairly precise understanding of “the rules of the game.” For those units, a combination of “canned units” (online, printed manuals, podcast/video recordings) that ensure consistent delivery with a strong, personal endorsement from the leadership can be your best option.

Effective onboarding is a delicate (and constantly changing) balance, a balance between impact and efficiency, a balance between crucial content and other subjects that are helpful, but less essential. A key step in achieving the right balance, and in eliminating wasted time and effort that few companies can afford to lavish on new hires, is to cut the content into sufficiently “granular” units to allow you to assemble the pieces, not into the biggest, most complete picture of the organization, but into the optimal picture to drive results.