Let’s Talk Training! » Best Training Practices

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.

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.

All Aboard!

will kenny — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 19:38:27 +0000

Will Kenny, Best Training Practices

How do you turn new hires into long-term, valuable employees? Getting off to a good start can make a big difference and whether you call it orientation, a core curriculum, onboarding or something else, that first round of communication and training can make a significant contribution to the company’s bottom line.

Why, then, do I often see programs of this kind being cobbled together without the detailed attention, the serious application of professional resources, the rigorous evaluation and improvement, which is routine for other training provided by the organization?

That first round of training is often neither efficient nor effective. That’s always a concern, but it is particularly worrisome when the economy is down and resources are tight. What’s missing from many onboarding initiatives?

Clear, Modular Objectives: Look at post-onboarding training for specific functions within an organization and you’ll usually find a nice list of clearly defined desired outcomes, along with plans for objective measurement of the results. Does your onboarding scheme boast the same? More often than not, objectives for this crucial initial communication are very broad, if they exist at all. Not only do you need tighter goals for your onboarding efforts, you need to break the content down into smaller units and develop objectives at a much more granular level. (I’ll have more to say about that in my next post.)

Investment Perspective: For most training, we look at ROI in terms of higher productivity, fewer errors and similar factors, all translated (when possible) into more tangible benefits for the organization. Those returns apply to breaking in new employees, but don’t leave the retention benefit out of the equation. In making budget decisions about the components of an onboarding program, don’t just compare what employees will know, or what they will be able to do, with or without a particular training module. Compare the investment in initial training and communication with the cost of finding, recruiting and hiring replacements! Helping your new employees fit into the way the company works more comfortably, smoothly and rapidly pays significant dividends when you factor in higher retention and lower turnover.

Shared Responsibility: Don’t let that essential first step with the new employee become solely a human resources responsibility. HR and training staff should play a professional role in helping the leadership team and department/function heads make sure that employees know “how we do things around here,” not do it all themselves. Without the ongoing involvement of functional units of the organization, the transfer of knowledge and skills from your onboarding programs to actual job performance is going to be greatly reduced.

Balance Between Efficiency and Effectiveness: In most orientations or introductory curricula I see, some chunks of information should be delivered more efficiently and some should sacrifice efficiency to maximize effectiveness. Key company values (ethics, compliance, respect for other employees, customer service) must take root from the first days of employment. Often the personal touch can make all the difference in modeling these values and helping new employees to embrace them, having an impact that even the best constructed online courses or reading assignments aren’t likely to equal.

In the eyes of your new employees, the first round of training they experience sets their expectations, their standards, for the more specific training they are bound to take later. How many rave reviews do you get for that first training all employees receive when they are hired? How many cheers do you get from management for the results your initial efforts produce from new hires?

Make sure your organization applies the highest possible standards to the quality and impact of this initial experience, equal to anything you do in any other training activities you offer.