Back to Basics | September/October 2018

SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2018

SETTING NEW HIRES UP FOR SUCCESS | 16 Components of Effective Onboarding

WHEN EXPERTISE ISN’T ENOUGH | 28 Equipping SMEs with Communication Skills

WINNING THE BATTLE FOR THE CUSTOMER | 40 Evolving Your Sales Training Strategy

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PERSPECTIVES - KE N TAY LO R

Oh, the shiny things! We are all attracted by the latest, flashiest (no pun intended) tool or technique that will cure all the issues with our death by PowerPoint event. This edition of Training Industry Magazine is intended to bring us back to a discussion of what’s most important when we are developing and deploying training to the organizations we serve. At Training Industry, we believe strongly in the notion that any training investment must impact business outcomes. However, this is much easier said than done.

It is my belief that we must focus on four key attributes of the program. Does it support a business goal? Is the content relevant, current and consumable? Is it delivered in the best way at the time of need? And do we have a sustainment strategy in place to ensure the new skill or obtained knowledge gets applied on the job? Pretty simple, but in many ways often difficult to execute upon.

Training Industry has recently been conducting research around the nature of training programs in the corporate context, looking at modality preferences by the learner to understand the optimal blend of on-the-job training (O), social learning (S), and formal training (F). While the research is telling us a lot about the relationship between the learning and the

methods employed, my biggest takeaway from the research is that context for learning matters. What I mean by that is access to learning is becoming more of a given. There are almost too many opportunities for employees to find sources to help them close a skills gap or find knowledge to a question.

MY BIGGEST TAKEAWAY FROM THE RESEARCH IS THAT CONTEXT FOR LEARNING MATTERS.

But, the context for learning based on job role differs across organizations and industries. What does context mean in this line of thinking? I see it as a combination of need (when do I need to know something or how to do something), environment (can I even learn where I am performing my job), nature of the role (am I even allowed to practice on the job, is it perhaps too risky), and what I know and how that differs from peers also doing the role. This challenge of understanding the context within which learning takes place will change the structure of the learning we design to support the team.

As always, we would love to hear your thoughts about the point of views shared in the magazine and any topics you would like us to tackle in future editions.

Ken Taylor is editor in chief of Training Industry Magazine and president of Training Industry, Inc. Email Ken.

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CO N T E N TS

TA B L E O F VOLUME 11

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I

ISSUE 6

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SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2018

FEATURES

16 KEEP NEW HIRES COMING BACK

28 WHEN EXPERTISE ISN’T ENOUGH

40 WINNING THE BATTLE FOR THE CUSTOMER

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HOW TO ROLL OUT THE WELCOME MAT TO KEEP NEW HIRES COMING BACK

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CAN MARKETING REALLY HELP YOUR PEOPLE TO LEARN?

By Nina Redding

Engage employees and give them a purpose with a simple recipe for new hire orientation.

By Stephanie Morgan

Effectively communicate the benefits of learning by adding marketing into the learning strategy.

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ASYNCHRONOUS TRAINING: BENEFITS, PITFALLS AND MUST-HAVES FOR A QUALITY EXPERIENCE

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WHEN EXPERTISE ISN’T ENOUGH: EQUIPPING SUBJECT MATTER EXPERTS WITH COMMUNICATION SKILLS

By Elsa Powel Strong & Chris von Baeyer

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BUILD COMPETENCE. INSPIRE CONFIDENCE.

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TWO FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS L&D STAKEHOLDERS SHOULD ANSWER TO IMPROVE LEARNING

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By Daniel Cummins

Enhance skill development in employees with the help of on-demand training.

Set subject matter experts up for success by identifying and closing skills gaps.

By Renie Cavallari

Drive high performance and confidence in employees with a learning and competency model.

By Dr. Eric A. Surface & Dr. Kurt Kraiger

Change the approach of evaluation to empower stakeholders to engage in the process.

WINNING THE BATTLE FOR THE CUSTOMER: YOUR BUYERS HAVE CHANGED – WHY HASN’T YOUR SALES TRAINING?

By Steve Andersen

A shift in mindset is required for salespeople to continue meeting the needs of buyers.

A NEW TALENT COMPACT: STRIKING A NEW DEAL WITH YOUR EMPLOYEES

By Sean Stowers

Increase engagement and productivity in employees by focusing more on talent development.

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I N THIS I S S U E

THOUGHT LEADERS

3 9 11 13

PERSPECTIVES

By Ken Taylor

Focusing on business impact can help learning leaders avoid the “shiny things.”

GUEST EDITOR

By Chris Cassell, CPTM

Incorporate experimentation into instructional design for measurable results.

SCIENCE OF LEARNING

By Srini Pillay, M.D.

Make learning more relevant by tying it to organizational goals.

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BUILDING LEADERS

By Sam Shriver and Marshall Goldsmith

Learning that is relevant and engaging will increase profitability and retention.

SECRETS OF SOURCING

By Doug Harward

Managing a high-performing organization is accomplished by sticking to the basics.

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LEARNER MINDSET

58

CLOSING DEALS

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COMPANY NEWS

By Michelle Eggleston

Develop training and a positive learning culture to combat workplace distractions.

PERFORMANCE MATTERS

By Julie Winkle Giulioni

Defining a learning destination can provide a more focused path.

INFO EXCHANGE

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CASEBOOK

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MEASURING IMPACT

Atrium Health created a comprehensive evaluation plan to track the ongoing impact of training.

Define and track critical behaviors and key results to influence behavior change after training ends.

CONNECT WITH US

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A B O U T OUR TEAM

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EDITOR IN CHIEF & PRESIDENT Ken Taylor

SENIOR DESIGNER & ART DIRECTOR Scot Williamson

EDITORIAL DIRECTOR Michelle Eggleston

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MISSION Training Industry Magazine connects learning and development professionals with the resources and solutions needed to more effectively manage the business of learning.

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JUDI BADER Senior Director of Learning Arby’s Restaurant Group

SCOTT NUTTER General Manager, Research, AQP & Development Delta Air Lines

MICHAEL CANNON, M.ED. Senior Director, Head of Learning & Development Red Hat

MATTHEW S. PRAGER Executive Training Manager U.S. Government

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LORNA HAGAN Chief People Officer OnDeck

MARC RAMOS Vice President, Chief Learning Officer Sitecore

BARBARA JORDAN Group Vice President, Global Learning & Development Sims Metal Management

KELLY RIDER Vice President, L&D Content Strategy & Experience SAP Learning & Development

CATHERINE KELLY, MA, BSN, RN, CPTM Director of Learning Programs Brookdale Senior Living

DR. SYDNEY SAVION General Manager, Learning Air New Zealand

ADAM KUCERA Director of Sales Training & Support DISH

KERRY TROESTER Director, North America Sales Training Lenovo

PUBLISHER

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NATASHA MILLER WILLIAMS Vice President, Talent Engagement & Development Nielsen

Training Industry Magazine is published bi-monthly by:

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You know what great training looks like.

Unfortunately, most corporate training isn’t that great.

We can help.

Visit www.niit.com/greatlearning.

GUEST EDITOR CHRIS CASSELL, CPTM

MEASURE TO IMPROVE Training measurement is positioned repeatedly as a means to gain seats at tables and more money. Although ideal outcomes, they should not be the initial focus. We are in the business of problem solving, performance improvement, and development of learning culture, so it is hypocritical to focus on the seat or the budget rather than using analytics to be better business partners.

If measuring impact beyond reaction was easy, more practitioners would be doing it. It takes process rigor and the spirit of continual service improvement, requiring a change in attitude from both training and the business.

IF MEASURING IMPACT WAS EASY, MORE PRACTITIONERS WOULD BE DOING IT. Therefore, training functions need to stop hesitating and dive in by piloting with a single team or initiative. The results will provide actionable data that will likely prove the unreliability of surveys, uncover training gaps, reduce training waste, and create more opportunities.

One way to do this is to employ an interpretation of the scientific method to examine cause and effect of training initiatives.

ASK QUESTIONS AND OBSERVE Do a proper needs assessment – ask why training is needed and what needs to be done differently, how performance is currently measured, etc. The questions may not be easy to answer if the stakeholder is not used to it, so be patient and coach. This is how

the business becomes an accountable partner rather than an impatient boss.

from your pilot may expose serious gaps not captured by feelings.

Next, work with SMEs and thought leaders to outline applicable knowledge, skills and attitudes while gaining a deeper understanding of department and business strategy. Once sure that the problem can be solved through training, then summarize, report, recommend, and agree on the goals.

For example, evolving needs of the business required a change in behavior from a support group not initially hired for sales acumen. I adhered to the process outlined above to create a rudimentary sales skills class.

FORM A HYPOTHESIS Key performance indicators may vary, but all are influenced by workforce behavior. Form a hypothesis that if certain behaviors are changed, the outcome will affect the metric positively.

Then, write the learning objectives, assessment questions, and delivery strategy that will train the required applied knowledge and skills.

If there is no current way to measure performance on the job, work with the business to create it.

By this time (prior to content development), the measurements and targets for all four Kirkpatrick levels should be defined and agreed on by the stakeholders – otherwise there is no strategy, just an array of potential and accidental outcomes. Keep in mind that ROI and VOI can be calculated later.

TEST THE HYPOTHESIS This is the easy part (we are already good at this). Develop and deliver the content based on the appropriate modality. To get super rigorous, set a control group.

Careful and objective analysis of just pre-test and post-test data (Level 2) led to the conclusion that: • Learning objectives were appropriate and assessment questions were reliable and valid, but the content of module four failed to deliver positive results • The survey results were positive because the content was good – for relevant comprehensive role play scenarios based on the previous three modules – but not for the module four learning objectives • Pre-test scores were very low for module four, so that should have been the focus This is an incredible amount of actionable data to use … and just from analysis of Level 2. Think of the value you can bring to an organization with a similar analysis on transfer and results.

Repeating this process will strengthen partnerships and reduce training waste, eventually and naturally earning executive consideration in the big decisions.

ANALYZE RESULTS If you are used to receiving positive Level 1 survey results, the data gathered

Chris Cassell, CPTM, is a sales training manager at Align Technology. Email Chris.

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BE AN EXPERT Training Industry research analysts seek insights that benefit you—the training leader.

From understanding the unique process capabilities that differentiate Great Training Organizations™ to exploring the components of the Modern Learning System, gain greater understanding of the training industry through our vast research library.

This research explores questions and insights about the popular 70-20-10 model and how it relates to today’s corporate realities.

TITLE

This research investigates learners’ preferences for various training delivery methods in order to understand what learners want and need and what they are actually experiencing.

This research investigates what executives think about how L&D supports business goals and meets the needs of the company in the face of business challenges.

We do the work; you gain the expertise. www.TrainingIndustry.com/research

SCIENCE OF LEARNING SRINI PILLAY, M.D.

WHY LEARNING EFFORTS ARE LOST IN TRANSLATION TO WORK ENGAGEMENT There are a lot of theories about how to engage employees in learning: tell stories, make the class interactive, connect the learning to purpose, use graphics, etc. Yet, despite these new trends in learning, only 13 percent of employees worldwide are engaged in their work. From this, we might conclude that formal and informal learning is not translating into workplace engagement.

If we are to go back to basics, we need to examine why this translation is not occurring. Below are suggestions of basic learning strategies that could help learning leaders translate their work more successfully.

Integration of learning: When learning leaders operate outside of the C-suite, they compromise the relevance of what they are offering. Also, if you view the organization as a collection of brains, it does not work well when the strategic powerhouse has an agenda that is separate from the people who will execute on this mission.

Potential solution: Explore whether learning should be a separate function from “human resources” and educate senior leaders on why learning matters.

Ensure that all learning is tied to organizational goals and design a strategic flow that is coherent for the entire organization. Also, organizations should allocate resources for this mission, or they risk recycling ineffective content and approaches.

Address the dreariness of work tasks: Even when work is “okay” or “do-able,” it can be very tiresome. When the brain responds in this way to work, work will not get proper attention. In the many

requests I have received, among them being workshops on managing change or burnout, or building resilience or creativity, I have not encountered learning leaders asking for “how to deal with work when it is dreary and unrewarding.”

LEARNING IS NOT TRANSLATING INTO WORKPLACE ENGAGEMENT. Potential solution: For many leaders, the work can be engaging and interesting, so they expect everyone else will feel the same. Also, leaders do not understand that the psychological dynamics around authority also translate into decreased work efficiency when employees feel that their dreary lives are not recognized.

Having a workshop that addresses this topic with a view to finding solutions may start to address the issue.

Set a separate learning agenda that addresses the subconscious: Learning leaders often leave subconscious interventions to therapists, not realizing that being a learning leader means that you have to also master subconscious obstacles that impact the organization.

In fact, in the human brain, factors outside of conscious awareness play a major role.

Potential solution: Hold workshops and design interventions that address subconscious factors that impact workplace engagement. Ask questions like, “What are the subconscious factors impacting engagement?” or “What are the subconscious factors impacting team alignment?” By asking these questions and tying the content to

realistic outcomes, learning leaders can develop a culture that is less obsessed by conscious factors and more engaged in understanding the underlying psychological and functional drivers within an organization.

Connect learning to employee health: Depression and anxiety are highly prevalent within organizations, yet learning leaders often ignore this.

Both of these factors impact brain function and productivity, so being in denial of these factors can impact the effectiveness of learning interventions.

Potential solutions: Work with employee health to design screening events and educational tools for mental health.

Include this in the overall design.

Use video resources such as LinkedIn Learning to learn the basics about depression, anxiety, stress and burnout.

And expose employees to these tools so that learning does not occur in a psychological vacuum.

When learning exists in a vacuum, it’s difficult to tie this to organizational goals.

When learning is tied to organizational goals structurally (through the C-suite), realistically (by addressing boring work), psychologically (by addressing the subconscious), and humanely (by addressing psychological issues), the learning design will be more relevant and impactful.

Dr. Srini Pillay is the CEO of NeuroBusiness Group. He is also assistant professor (parttime) at Harvard Medical School and teaches in the executive education programs at Harvard Business School and Duke CE. Email Srini.

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CONGRATULATIONS

TOP 20 COMPANIES

Check Out Our 2018 Watch List Companies

The Top 20 Companies are a service provided by Training Industry, Inc. Due to the diversity of services offered, no attempt is made to rank the “Top 20s.”

PERFORMANCE MATTERS JULIE WINKLE GIULIONI

LEARNING OBJECTIVES SHOULDN’T BE OBJECTIONABLE

If I were to be brutally honest, I’d have to admit to a conflicted relationship with learning objectives. My earliest instructional design training established these as the non-negotiable cornerstones of any development effort. And I dutifully began each project accordingly.

about learning outcomes altogether.

With nearly unlimited resources just a click away, it’s tempting to get to the fun work of curating content around topics with little regard for how those topics must be applied within the context of the learner’s job.

But over the years, a few things began happening that conspired to undermine this commitment to learning objectives.

First, what started out as a straightforward task became increasingly convoluted as terms and permutations on the idea evolved. Learning outcomes. Performance standards. Conditions and criterion.

Cognitive outcomes. Behavioral objectives.

Affective outcomes. It all started to feel complex and over-engineered.

A THOUGHTFUL LEARNING OBJECTIVE CAN INFORM AND SERVE MANY PURPOSES.

Add to this the evolving speed of business.

Business cycles have shrunk dramatically.

Strategic plans – once laid out for five, 10 or 15 years – now operate in months.

Regular and rapid innovation are table stakes for staying in the game. And the half-life of technical skills has become shorter, demanding more and faster training than ever before.

This accelerating pace and the need for learning and development to keep up with – if not get ahead of – the business curve exacerbates our natural bias for action. By the time a training need emerges, it means that someone somewhere is already falling short of what’s needed, and that vital work is not being addressed appropriately.

And finally, in today’s informationrich environment with such a focus on microlearning, it’s all too easy to forget

And so, I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s precisely because of these pressures and the pace that learning objectives may be more important today than ever before. We can’t afford to lose valuable time developing training that doesn’t deliver results. Slowing down really can help us go faster in the long-run.

Articulating the ‘destination’ is the first step in heading down a focused and productive path. And learning outcomes can define the destination. What’s needed today is something more agile and actionable than what might have served us in the past. But this requires that we think and approach things a little differently.

No more splitting hairs. Let’s worry less about what we call these things and more about how to transform them into powerful tools that support development and learning. And while the words on the page are helpful, they are less important than the quality of the conversations you have with learners, their managers, stakeholders and SMEs. The first step

is for learning professionals to deeply understand the audience and internalize business needs and the changes that are required. Once that happens, objectives become your guardrails and guideposts for action … and a lot less ‘objectionable.’

Substance over syntax. Frequently when it comes to crafting objectives, we focus too much attention on the vocabulary (what’s the right verb form) versus the value that objectives can offer. We make it formulaic rather than building a framework that works as hard as you do at guiding development efforts and participant learning. It boils down to defining what people need to do and what they need to know. Keep it that simple. Keep the list short enough that it’s doable. Tailor it to what makes sense for you, the content and the learners.

Make objectives work.

Creating objectives shouldn’t be something you complete, cross off the list, and tuck away.

Make your investment pay off beyond your development effort. Use what you put together to socialize the learning effort with executives and others. Incorporate the text into descriptions and invitations.

Leverage it for evaluation and assessment instruments. Consider incorporating it into the performance appraisal process. A thoughtful learning objective can inform and serve many purposes.

Julie Winkle Giulioni has 25 years of experience working with organizations worldwide to improve performance through learning. Email Julie.

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Create a High-Performing Organization Through a Development Culture No matter what you call it, a development culture is the key ingredient to recruit, engage, and retain that scarce talent.

-Jay Jamrog, Co-Founder of i4cp Tuesday, October 30th | 8:00 a.m. - 4:30 p.m. | Chicago, IL Register Now: www.dx-learning.com/dx-symposium/ Use Code: 'TI2018' for 20% off your ticket

@dx-learning www.dx-learning.com

BUILDING LEADERS SAM SHRIVER & MARSHALL GOLDSMITH

THE PRACTICAL IMPACT OF AN

UNFETTERED APPROACH

Andrew Burns is the CEO and chief investment officer of a company called Hamilton Point Investment Advisors, LLC. Among many other things, he publishes a blog that we find both entertaining and educational (qualities we both admire and secretly envy). In perusing his March installment, we considered this particular line to have far reaching utility: “When faced with competing options or theories, one should consider the least complicated one.”

This wisdom is credited to a 14th century Franciscan friar named William Ockham.

While friars undoubtedly had several functions to perform in their day, chief among them was thinking. Supported by the charitable contributions of villagers, friars dedicated a significant portion of their time to thoughtful consideration.

They read. They prayed. They searched for wisdom. And, when they stumbled across some, they documented it and passed it along to practitioners (with no reasonable expectation that wisdom would remain in active discussion some 700 years later).

Andrew “unpacks” Friar Williams’ advice in his blog by referencing a recent metaanalysis that has been conducted by the Journal of Business Research. The study reviewed 32 papers that compared 97 simple and complex methods of forecasting future events. The primary conclusion: Complexity adversely impacted accuracy and increased forecast error by 27 percent.

We infer from this that effectively employing a strategy that you can intuitively grasp, significantly increases

your probability of success. This point has been reinforced over (and over again) by learning mentors we have been fortunate enough to cross paths with during our careers.

Peter Drucker is universally admired for his brilliance (rightfully so). From our perspective, the essence of that brilliance is his ability to take the dynamic, multifaceted forces that constitute leadership and present them in a manner that all of us can not only understand but put into practice — likewise with Paul Hersey. Early on, Situational Leadership® was criticized because it failed to account for a number of variables that leaders encountered as they attempted to influence others.

In response (and sometimes rather aggressively), Dr. Hersey would respond with something like this: “Situational Leadership® is a practical model … that people can actually use! If you are looking for a model that mirrors the complexities presented by the real world … just use the real world!”

To us, this is really kind of the whole point.

Effective learning takes complicated things and makes them simple. It breaks them down. The resultant impact is that learners get it! More than that, they not only get it, they see themselves being able to take what they have just learned and solve a problem, right a wrong or take advantage of an opportunity. As they apply the skills they’ve learned (post-training) in pursuit of those goals, the experience they gain — in combination with the coaching and feedback they receive —

provides the foundation necessary for more intricate application.

So, in that regard, and in an effort to provide targeted perspective that accurately reflects our combined experience in the learning industry, we have two interrelated points of consideration for today’s learning leaders:

EFFECTIVE LEARNING TAKES COMPLICATED THINGS AND MAKES THEM SIMPLE. 1. Keep it relevant: The more a learning experience accurately reflects the current reality of the learner, the higher the probability that learning will produce desirable changes in behavior.

2. Keep it engaging: Level 1 feedback matters! The more learners like the learning event, the higher the probability they will retain and use what they learned.

If this advice sounds simplistic, we feel we are in good company! Never underestimate the practical impact of an unfettered approach. Or, as Leonardo Da Vinci offered many years ago, “Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication!”

Marshall Goldsmith is the world authority in helping successful leaders get even better.

Sam Shriver is the senior vice president of commercial operations and product development at The Center for Leadership Studies. Email Marshall and Sam.

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How to Roll Out the Welcome Mat

By Nina Redding In 1950, Eileen Barton sang the hit “If I Knew You Were Comin’ I’d Have Baked a Cake,” which nearly 70 years later echoes the sentiment about how many organizations are welcoming new employees. All too often new hires are disillusioned on their first day of a new job when they are met with disorganization. After being wooed in the hiring process, they seem forgotten when no computer is ready for them, their hiring manager is “busy,” and they are left to fend for themselves. This breaks what John Kotter deemed in 1973 as “The Psychological Contract” between what the organization promised and what the new employee expected.

Since we knew they were comin’, their onboarding and orientation should not be an afterthought.

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A simple recipe to make the new hire feel valued and glad they joined your company exists. When mixed together properly, Dr. John Sullivan suggested in “The New Hire Orientation Toolkit,” it can increase new employee retention by as much as 25 percent. The learning team at the Alberta Motor Association (AMA) took the five basic ingredients noted by Angela Heyroth in her research on the “Best Practices in New Hire Orientation” and whipped up a successful orientation program that keeps new hires engaged.

1 Welcoming and Enfolding The feeling of leaving a known place of work for something new is often met with mixed emotions from excitement to worry, and sometimes dread. Designing an onboarding/orientation experience that welcomes the new hire and their family before they start can alleviate these emotions. It’s easy to create a celebratory atmosphere that raises enthusiasm and makes people feel they

are a productive part of the organization from the start.

This could be as simple as calling with a friendly welcome and letting them know what to expect on their first day.

Sending a “welcome package” to their home before they begin with gifts to share with their family includes them in the celebration and builds support for the new organization. Managers can send an email that shows how glad they are they joined the team, or include the new employee on an email to the whole team announcing their arrival and what skills they bring.

Post personalized posters/banners to greet them as they arrive, or have a welcome card signed by their new team waiting for them at their desk. Send them an invitation to the orientation event and present them with their name tag or security pass to show you prepared for their arrival. Give them a tour of the building and introduce them to key

to Keep New Hires Coming Back people. Ensure their computer, email, logins, phone, and systems are ready for them to be instantly productive.

Hiring managers should also check in with them daily during their first week to see what’s working and what’s not.

2 Engaging The last thing you want your new hire saying is “I left my old job for this?”

Skip the boring PowerPoint lecture and design an active orientation that engages the body and senses in learning.

To leave them feeling happy they joined the company, make their first day a wellstructured orientation day event that isn’t rushed and includes taking them to lunch.

Use accelerated learning techniques that appeal to visual, auditory, somatic, and tactile learners.

Break down content into bite-size chunks so as not to overwhelm them, and only cover the basics new hires need to master to make them successful. Tie together the big picture view of the company to instill pride in joining a worthy organization.

ONBOARDING AND ORIENTATION SHOULD NOT BE AN AFTERTHOUGHT.

3

Create a Shared Vision

Research shows that the “first minutes are critical in new-employee orientation,” and when done right, can lead to happier, more productive, engaged workers. An effective way to create a shared vision with a multigenerational workforce is to focus first on what the new hire brings to the organization and how it fits with the company culture.

To do this, design a scalable orientation to run whether there is one new hire or 20, and hold it at company headquarters to familiarize new employees with the corporate culture. Engage facilitators with an enthusiasm and thorough knowledge of the organization’s story, values and culture. Share the company history to connect new hires to the roots of the business and its key strategies.

Align new employees and their skills with the company mission, vision and values, and show how important their roles are to the overall business.

Additionally, display an organizational chart with pictures of senior executives so they can avoid a gaffe by recognizing them.

4

Involve Senior Leaders

While experienced learning professionals deliver the orientation program, involving senior leaders in visible roles from the start elevates the program and makes new hires feel valued. To create

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buy-in and help the new hire affirm their decision to join, ensure the CEO welcomes new employees and their families in a note that arrives in the welcome package or invite an executive member to lunch with new employees.

You could also create a video greeting from the CEO or schedule an appearance at orientation that involves senior 5 SIMPLE QUESTIONS TO CONSIDER ABOUT YOUR ORIENTATION

1. What emotional takeaway do you want to create?

2. How welcoming and engaging is your orientation program?

3. What are you doing to ensure new hires matter?

4. How are you designing bite size information from the new hire perspective?

5. What stories are you using to help new hires see the big picture?

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leaders in a short, two-way conversation with new hires about the company’s culture or core business.

5

Part of an Onboarding Process

New hires respond favorably when they are part of a process that displays the culture through recruiting, interviewing, the job offer, the pre-orientation materials, orientation, the business unit knowledge transfer, and the follow-up activities. Orientation can begin before employees start when companies allow access to an intranet site that lets new hires know about benefits, dress code, where to park, how to enter the building, places to eat close by, and transit information to the office so they don’t feel lost in a new environment. Before orientation, train hiring managers on the onboarding/orientation process and setup an intranet site with downloadable materials to make welcoming new employees easy.

Additionally, assign mentors or buddies to guide new hires through their first week. Give them an infographic of a

new hire learn-track that continues through their first week, first month, 90 days, and six months. Seek continuous improvement by sending an anonymous evaluation of the onboarding/

INVOLVING SENIOR LEADERS ELEVATES THE PROGRAM AND MAKES NEW HIRES FEEL VALUED.

orientation process after their first week, and conduct HR stay interviews at the vulnerable six months point.

Create a manager checklist that’s a dummy’s guide to onboarding and begins before the new hire starts and carries through their first month. Or create an infographic to help managers understand the whole process a new employee goes through and emphasizes what the manager is responsible for doing at each stage.

50 percent higher turnover rate than those attending. The first days send a message. A thoughtful orientation with targeted goals designed with purpose can affirm the new employee made the right decision to join your organization.

The result is an engaged employee with a purpose that contributes to the overall organizational success. This simple recipe helps design a program that truly values what the new employee brings to

the team and sets them up for success; after all, you knew they were comin’.

Your New Hires Won’t Succeed Unless You Onboard Them Properly

By Allison M. Ellis Learn why hiring managers and new hires should work together to make the most out of the onboarding experience.

13 Questions to Maximize Your Onboarding Efforts

By David Lee Identify the key questions to ask before deciding to upgrade your onboarding program.

First Minutes Are Critical in New Employee Orientation

By Carmen Nobel Learn why new employee orientation should shift the focus from being company-oriented to the employee’s personal identity.

The Checklist Manifesto: Summary: A Book by Atul Gawande

By Atul Gawande Uncover a new meaning of expertise and how detailed checklists can lead experts to success.

The New Hire Orientation Toolkit

By John Sullivan Learn how to make new hires feel welcome in order to utilize their skills and talents to benefit the organization.

Results It takes a tremendous amount of organizational collaboration to onboard and orient new hires successfully, but it is well worth the effort. After employing many of these suggestions in a new orientation program, AMA saw a 56 percent reduction in new hire turnover and those new employees who did not attend the orientation day had a

Nina Redding has over 30 years of experience in designing and delivering learning events and is a senior learning resource consultant at the Alberta Motor Association (AMA) where she created and now manages the orientation program. Email Nina.

5 ADDITIONAL RESOURCES

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TAILORED LEARNING SOLUTIONS

UNDERSTANDING FIRST A strategic, consultative approach to learning is one that understands your key challenges—and delivers outcomes to support your critical objectives. This is what targeted, data-driven learning solutions are all about. This is how Raytheon Professional Services will impact the performance of your people and your business.

rps.com @RaytheonRPS Raytheon Professional Services

© 2018 Raytheon Company. All rights reserved.

“PEOPLE ARE TOO BUSY TO LEARN.” SOUND FAMILIAR?

Many of us in learning and development (L&D) will have experienced this problem at some point in our careers. And many of us have counteracted by creating learning solutions that are tailored to meet our people’s busy schedules.

Thanks to advancements in digital technology, we have been able to make learning more accessible and on the go than ever before.

But despite designing solutions that meet the demands of an agile workforce, we are still struggling to get our people on board with learning. For many L&D departments, the problem has nothing to do with the learning itself. Technology has enabled us to create fantastic, accessible, and more effective learning solutions than ever before.

So, we have the right solutions … we just need our people to want to learn.

In order to encourage our people to learn, we need to do a better job of promoting the benefits of learning. If your people don’t know “what’s in it for them” they simply won’t be engaged or interested in the learning solutions offered.

Promoting the value of learning can have a drastic impact on learner engagement and can help to create a learning mindset. When your learners really understand what’s in it for them, they are more likely to become excited about the learning and development opportunities offered. And luckily, there is a simple solution that can help your people understand those benefits.

I’m talking about sales and marketing.

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Adding sales and marketing to your learning strategy can help you to effectively communicate the benefits of learning to your people. Once they can answer “what’s in it for me?” they will be knocking down the L&D door, wanting a piece of that learning for themselves.

Ultimately, by using marketing techniques, you will help your people engage with learning on a new level, completely transforming the learning culture in your organization.

MARKETING AND L&D – A MATCH MADE IN HEAVEN? Many learning professionals are now realizing that marketing and L&D are a match made in heaven. In the recent Towards Maturity benchmark, a staggering 95 percent of learning professionals listed marketing as a “priority skill” for them to learn in the coming months. This shows us that, as an industry, we are finally starting to connect the dots and understand that marketing and L&D are trying to achieve something very similar. Both are aiming to: • Engage and drive interest with a busy and potentially indifferent audience • Instigate a behavioral change – whether that’s buying a product or understanding the value learning has to offer In fact, by applying marketing techniques to your strategy you will introduce a host of benefits to your organization – a lot more than simply improving learner engagement.

It can help you to transform your people’s attitude towards learning for the rest of their careers. Just imagine if all our learners really understood and valued what learning could do for them.

Your organization could have a ‘pull’ learning culture in no time, where your people are actively looking and asking for learning opportunities.

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This is all really positive stuff. We know what we want and where we need to go. But how to actually apply marketing techniques to our learning strategy is proving to be a bit more of a challenge. The same benchmark that reported 95 percent of organizations prioritizing marketing, also showed that only 50 percent of learning departments had the skills needed – that’s a huge disparity in the skills we have versus the skills we need.

A lot of it simply comes down to confidence and knowing how to work with what you’ve got. A lack of budget is another setback, but there are several techniques that have little or no cost.

Really knowing your people is the foundation of your marketing process.

I’m lucky enough to work alongside a top five marketing agency, and so we put our L&D and marketing heads together to create a simple seven-step process for how you can start to apply marketing techniques to your learning strategy today.

1. KNOW YOUR AUDIENCE

Really knowing your people is the foundation of your marketing process.

In today’s modern on-the-go, always on society, successful marketing has become more consumer-focused compared with ever before. Think about business models such as Netflix, Uber, or Deliveroo. They are successful because they are based on what the consumer really wants.

In L&D, we are brilliant at understanding the needs of our learners. But knowing your audience is more than just understanding the learner’s workload, learning styles and learning preferences.

It’s about knowing what really makes them tick, and asking yourself questions such as why they are working for your organization? By understanding the mindset of your people, you will be able to present your learning solutions in a way that hooks them in and makes them interested in your learning solutions.

2. WHAT IS YOUR BRAND?

The second step is all about understanding and developing your identity as an L&D department. It’s important to think about how your brand as a department fits in with the overall organizational brand, what its personality is and what it stands for.

It’s likely you’ve never considered developing a brand for your L&D department, but it can have a fantastic impact on how your learners engage with you. Think about it like this: by developing a brand that is appealing to your learners, you are more likely to get your learners involved with the solutions you have to offer.

3. WHAT IS YOUR MESSAGE?

Why should learners engage with your solutions? The more work you do creating your brand and understanding your audience, the easier it will be to craft your message.

A good starting point for creating a great message is to consider what motivates your learners, what their goals and challenges are, and how your learning could help achieve and/ or overcome them.

By pushing a message that answers “what’s in it for the learner?”, you will grab their attention and motivate them to engage.

4. MARKETING MIX

Marketing tools can help you to amplify your message and engage with your audience at appropriate times and in different ways.

You should have more than just a landing page on your intranet – that is not ‘job done!’ What else could you do? Posters might seem old fashioned, but a strategically placed poster with a great message can work wonders.

Regular email campaigns or newsletters are a low-cost but effective way of communicating your message with the whole organization, keeping your learning front of mind.

There are a range of tools you can use to attract your learners to your learning solutions, including storytelling, social media, PR and roadshows.

Using marketing techniques will help your people engage with learning on a new level.

5. PLAN THE CAMPAIGN

There is an abundance of marketing blogs and tools on the web, ranging in cost and helpfulness! To help get you cut through the noise, here is a list of free resources that can help you on your journey: HubSpot Academy A fantastic marketing blog where you can go to gain tips and tricks for your campaigns.

Bitly Create custom links and track them so you can see how many of your learners are engaging with your content.

Social media tools Twitter analytics and scheduling tool Tweetdeck are free from Twitter, and LinkedIn has a pretty great analytics tool.

Gimp Need to get creative? Gimp is one of many free design tools, so you don’t need to break the bank.

first time, you need to repeatedly whet their appetites until they sign up.

6. EVALUATION

Many of us in L&D are quick to accept that measuring ROI in learning is tricky to do, but evaluating performance is essential in a marketing toolkit.

Marketing is never a one-off activity.

Start to think about the next quarter at least, but preferably further ahead if you can. What key skill, topic or challenge do you want to address in the next quarter? Perhaps it’s improving meetings or maybe it’s developing presentation skills.

If you test and retest what aspects of your campaign do and don’t work, you will gain a better understanding of what resonates and works with your audience. That way you will constantly evolve and improve how you engage with your learners.

Now consider how you can offer a range of solutions and have a marketing mix that promotes them over a longer period of time. Remember, hardly anyone buys

There are many marketing techniques you can apply to your learning strategy, and this process simply picks out a few to help you get started. By applying just

a few of these techniques, you will be well on your way to creating a culture of learning in your organizations, where your learners are fully aware of “what’s in it for them” and are excited about what L&D has to offer.

I’m a strong believer that becoming more consumer-focused is a vital step to creating a successful modern-day learning strategy. It’s not just about delivering learning anymore – L&D needs to know their people inside-out and be able to sell effectively to them.

Only then will your people make the time to learn.

Stephanie Morgan is the director of learning solutions at Bray Leino Learning. She is an expert in developing learning strategies that lead to engaging learning cultures.

Email Stephanie.

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By Daniel Cummins Asynchronous training is a simple concept: a student accesses training content at a different time than when it was originally delivered by the instructor.

But when that real-time studentinstructor relationship isn’t available, it’s critical to create an environment that fosters skills development.

managers still expect high-quality training, instructor feedback, practical labs and group interaction all while

THE EXPECTATIONS OF ASYNCHRONOUS TRAINING ARE THE

Training, especially technical training, has traditionally been in a classroom environment; however, training has evolved. Budgets are getting slashed.

IT staff are getting busier. Technology is getting more complex. Learners now require a training solution that is able to be viewed when and where they want.

Asynchronous, otherwise known as ondemand, training is that solution.

keeping costs low, productivity high and course information accurate and relevant.

The expectations of asynchronous training are the same as traditional classroom training. Students and

At the end of the day, if the student doesn’t develop the skills from the training, three stakeholders lose: the

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SAME AS TRADITIONAL CLASSROOM TRAINING.

student, the organization who needs its people to have the skills and the training company.

This article outlines the benefits of asynchronous training, how to avoid common pitfalls and four crucial components to research when looking for training.

BENEFITS OF ASYNCHRONOUS TRAINING A learning experience that fits your busy schedule One of the primary goals of on-demand training is to make learning more convenient. Learners are forced to juggle their regular work-life balance along with training, so giving them a selfpaced, web-based experience is integral for a successful delivery method.

Self-paced training allows a learner to focus on their daily responsibilities at work and at home and complete training as their schedule allows. When a course is created, the content is aimed at the lowest experience level of the desired audience. Those learners that have more experience can pick and choose which topics to study and which to skip at their own discretion.

Consumable content that can be easily updated To support the learner’s self-paced progress, the course should be divided up into small, digestible topics, allowing them to watch as much or as little as they would like. While this is of great benefit to the learner, it also provides strategic update options for the course.

Technology changes rapidly. Some topics and the related labs, slides and videos will need to be updated with new information while other topics will remain the same. Micro-segmentation of the course allows for modular updates to certain videos without touching others. In order to do this, the video lengths should be less than 15 minutes whenever possible.

Save money on travel expenses Having the training web-based allows the learner to access their training where it is most convenient. With the widespread use of cloud services, learners can access courses on any browser, on any computer, and on any network. The user experience may even be configured for mobile access. This translates to more than just convenience, too. Managers are forced to watch their budgets carefully so it is more challenging to arrange for out-of-town travel to attend a training class. Not only is the learner spending thousands of dollars on training, they must add potentially hundreds, maybe thousands, more dollars on travel; and they are not in the office working. Webbased training eliminates much of this expense allowing managers to train their employees based on need rather than money.

TIPS TO AVOID ASYNCHRONOUS TRAINING PITFALLS What works in the classroom may not translate to on-camera Choose your on-camera talent carefully because not all instructors work well in front of a camera.

ASYNCHRONOUS TRAINING CAN SAVE LEARNERS A LOT OF MONEY* *Costs are estimates only

Travel costs • Hotel: $500 - $1,000 • Flight: $200 - $600 • Rental car: $200 – $400 • Food: $200 - $400

Course costs • Live in-person training: $2,000 - $4,000 for one week of training • Asynchronous training: $500 - $1,000 for six months of training Learner productivity • Costs vary by learner role

Here are three traits to look for when casting:

1 | Extremely articulate, 2 | Is able to compose full sentences extemporaneously, and

3 | Has the proper poise for on-camera work.

While it is ideal to have an SME teach to the camera like they would teach to a live class, a less skilled instructor could read a script on a teleprompter. This individual just needs to be sure they can read conversationally.

Limited resources available to clarify topics If a learner does not understand the explanation in a video, there are limited resources for that learner to get an alternative explanation. The on-camera instructor should strive to explain things in a way where the most people can understand it. The learner support functions should provide opportunities for those who need further explanation.

Self-discipline and motivation There is always the challenge of learner self-discipline and self-motivation. If the learner is weak in either of these traits, they may not learn well in an asynchronous environment.

Demonstrations can fill-in for hands-on practice Another challenge that can be difficult to overcome is the natural limitations to technology.

Some concepts, such as those that require hands-on practice, do not translate well to an asynchronous environment. A suitable substitute to hands-on practice may be a demonstration by the instructor on video. Technology also can limit the delivery of on-demand training by

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way of critical infrastructure failures.

Asynchronous training relies on other infrastructure like network providers, regional power grids and learner computer equipment, which are all out of the trainer’s control.

FOUR MUST-HAVES FOR SUPERIOR ASYNCHRONOUS TRAINING EXPERIENCES To ensure you’re receiving the best asynchronous training experience, look for the following four components and make sure they have been properly implemented by your training provider.

1 | Intuitive web interface The front-end user experience should be easy to learn and allow the user to focus on the course topics, not learning a complex interface. The back-end should have some kind of advanced learning management system (LMS) to manage all of the course content. The LMS is responsible for publishing videos and text, providing access to labs, accepting questions and feedback from learners and tracking learner progress.

2 | Quality video A majority of asynchronous learning is through watching prerecorded video.

It is not enough to set up a camcorder on a tripod in a classroom and just

TECHNICAL TRAINING IS INCOMPLETE WITHOUT A WAY FOR LEARNERS TO PRACTICE WHAT HAS BEEN TAUGHT.

press “record.” The instructor should be in a studio with high-quality recording equipment, a professional set or green screen and quality audio. Make sure videos recreate the engaging classroom experience and communicate the requisite knowledge.

3 | Virtual labs

2 | Quality Video (and Audio)

Technical training is incomplete without a way for learners to practice what has been taught. Virtual labs are not new. Training organizations have been developing various methods of producing quality lab environments for years using virtualization. By setting up virtual machines (VMs), labs can be more easily maintained and students can reset a lab environment by simply reloading a snapshot.

3 | Virtual Labs

4 | Learner support

4 | Learner Support

Since there is no live instructor, there is no SME to answer your direct

4 MUST-HAVES FOR A QUALITY ASYNCHRONOUS EXPERIENCE 1 | Intuitive Web Interface

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question. Make sure there is an “ask your instructor” method or some other type of interface where questions can be submitted via email. Various instructors (perhaps on a rotation) will review the question and provide any necessary answer or feedback. Another option is to set up a sort of forum where learners can post their feedback, comment or question to the larger community of customers, which can be monitored

by SMEs to answer questions that are more complex.

ASYCHRONOUS TRAINING IS THE WAVE OF THE FUTURE While it will not eliminate the need for live instructor-led instruction, asynchronous training is a vital part of any training provider’s product portfolio. To keep up with the demands of customers, be sure any on-demand training you are looking for has a user-friendly, webbased interface, is supported by a strong LMS, contains quality video and audio, includes asynchronous virtual labs and supports the learner. The training should be self-paced and modular and taught by an instructor skilled in on-camera work.

With all of these components, you will be able to enjoy high-quality, instructorled training where and when it is most convenient, saving your organization money in the process.

Daniel Cummins is a technical instructor with Global Knowledge Training, LLC, based in Raleigh, NC, and has participated in several asynchronous recording projects as both author and on-screen instructor.

Email Daniel.

COMMUNICATION SKILLS AND ABILITIES

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WHEN EXPERTISE ISN’T ENOUGH EQUIPPING SUBJECT MATTER EXPERTS WITH COMMUNICATION SKILLS

By Elsa Powel Strong & Chris von Baeyer

Preparing to leave his desk, Kai gathers his data, his detailed analysis and findings, and his airtight PowerPoint deck. Ten years in, he’s now the head analyst on the team, and he’s ready to share his findings with the executive board. He enters the conference room on cue and launches into his presentation, giving all the details he thinks will help them make their decision. However, instead of heads nodding with agreement, he sees confusion and, in some cases, indifference. Somewhere along the way, Kai had lost them.

It’s a familiar scene, played out in organizations around the world: when an expertly trained, highly experienced subject matter expert (SME) can’t quite seem to effectively communicate their expertise. Recent research by CareerBuilder identified that 62 percent of employers rated soft skills as very important, yet the Wall Street Journal conducted a study showing that 89 percent of executives are struggling to find people who have these skills.

Whether it’s an introverted personality, an organizational obstacle, or the inability to find common ground (i.e., “talking over everyone’s heads”), it seems as if the skills that get SMEs into the big meetings aren’t enough to keep them there anymore.

Picture the frantic scientist at the beginning of the classic disaster movie— they clearly know the material, they know the risks that everyone should look at, they obviously have passion, but still, no one is listening.

The changing role of the SME As organizations change, SME roles change—but are the people in those roles changing themselves, too?

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You’ve heard it before: we’re in the midst of a digital revolution. Organizations are being asked to deliver solutions to their clients involving extremely advanced analytics and algorithms. At the same time, the roles of SMEs are changing in order to compete in leaner, more matrixed organizations. In order to cut out the need for excess roles, many organizations invest internally and expect their SMEs to do the job of advisor in addition to conducting complex analyses.

As a result, that same SME now needs to understand the client need, pull the appropriate data, form it into an idea or product, sell it to the client, and, ideally, serve that client relationship as a trusted advisor. As more technically trained experts are expected to step out from behind the scenes, the inability to move from data specialist to advisor is a noticeable, and risky, skill gap. This is especially true when these professionals are tasked with presenting to or partnering with clients, C-level executives, or other high-profile stakeholders.

key takeaways As today’s organizations get leaner, more matrixed, and embrace the digital revolution, the SME role is evolving. To stay relevant and advance their careers, SMEs need to: • Present themselves and their data clearly and vividly • Ask the right questions and authentically listen for problems to build relationships • Engage in relevant discussions about their information • Shift their mindset to truly see themselves as advisors

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Why is there such a dramatic skill gap for SMEs? It’s difficult enough for someone not trained in influential communication to engage others in a strategic dialogue, let alone someone who is used to having a strictly behind-the-scenes role. Compare the level of experience with high-stakes presenting that a business school graduate would have with, say, someone specializing in computer code. The soft skills required to build and strengthen relationships take work to develop, and the balancing act that most SME jobs require doesn’t always allow for this development.

This problem also begs the question: what skills are needed for SMEs to bridge that gap and become valued thought leaders? How does one establish the ability to effectively develop and deliver, and then act as a resource about, highly technical material so they can transition from a vendor to an advisor role? Findings suggest that it’s not one or two communication abilities, but actually a hybrid of interrelated skills and a true mindset shift that prepares people to provide value to their clients, stakeholders and partners through expertise, influence, listening, insight, and guidance.

their findings? Can they draft emails that translate the complexity of the situation into something that can be consumed by the reader? They need to be confident, prepared, clear and credible.

While one element of this skill is simply devoting enough time to preparation, it is also fundamentally important for them to recognize the importance of being audience-centered (i.e., having a communication style that adapts to the style of those to whom they are presenting). SMEs need simple rules for themselves when it comes to communication—things like boiling their main message down to one sentence and having a method of delivery that’s effective, adaptable and authentic.

Take the time to know yourself, your role and, most importantly, your audience.

2. Ask the right questions What do SMEs need to succeed? A and listen authentically “ladder” of communication skills It might seem natural for an First, recognize that development is a long-term process, and each organization is uniquely specific. Think about the SME role: they are inherently paired with someone who is not an expert, who needs their help and expertise, and asked to clearly communicate extremely complex data to that person. There is no one magic skill that will help them do this—today’s SMEs need to develop a whole host of skills.

1. Present themselves clearly Can SMEs put together accessible, understandable messages that explain

SME to believe that heading into an initial client meeting with a robust, developed perspective on the client’s problem is the best use of everyone’s time. But let’s flip that idea on its head: what if the SME considered every meeting to also require next-level-needs identification?

What if they considered themselves a consultant at every level—asking the client questions not because the SME themselves didn’t know the answers, but because the client didn’t yet know?

A huge part of the new SME role is the ability to draw information out of others.

SMEs need to head into the meeting

with the mindset that it’s a conversation, not a monologue.

3. Tell a story with the data Make data vivid—show the meaning in a way that beginners can understand.

Consider a story as a means to get complicated messages across.

Every client has different needs. The conversation is less about what the SME has found and more about what their client needs to know. Beyond this, SMEs need to be presenting their client with a solution, not simply findings.

4. It’s a dialogue: engage in discussions about data So the SME has presented their research, but are they ready for the give-andtake that comes after? They need to be prepared to engage with their client about implications, options, or push-

back. This kind of dialogue requires a balance of soft skills like empathy and a deep understanding of their data and how it relates to the client’s need.

5. Shift their mindset from expert to advisor This idea goes beyond what you might call role clarity. Understanding their own role is a critical part of being an effective SME, of course. But there’s more weight to it than just that. SMEs need to lose the idea that they are the “data person,”—not to say there is no such job as a pure analyst, just that the job description is no longer consistent with the role of SME. SMEs need to elevate themselves to going beyond the data by being advisors to their clients and embracing everything that comes with that, which is what today’s clients need.

SMEs need to be presenting their client with a solution, not simply findings.

The SME role is now about contributing As it turns out, the fix isn’t just about “speaking up” or “dumbing down.”

It’s about listening, contributing and making a true impact. Without deeper, relevant communication skills and the appropriate mindset, even the most renowned expert can find themselves in the room, but without a seat at the table or a chance for their voice to be heard and their influence to be felt. That kind of rut won’t only have a negative impact on an individual’s career (sorry, Kai), but the lack of communication and lost insight can result in a number of missed opportunities for their entire organization.

Taking it back to the example above, if that frantic scientist knows how to connect with the audience and speak to the room at the level they need to comprehend, disaster can be averted.

So, what does this all mean for up-andcoming subject matter experts? Know your material. But also take the time to know yourself, your role and, most importantly, your audience. There’s value in recognizing and acknowledging individual communications gaps and helping SMEs realize that understanding is not mastery.

If knowledge sharing is critical to your business, then so is communication. As a leader, making your SMEs as masterful at communicating their expertise as they are at practicing it is a path to growth— and, ultimately, success. But the key part is finding and applying an approach that increases comfort, understanding and confidence and ensures that once they’re in the room, they can make their voice effectively heard.

Elsa Powel Strong is the director of learning solutions for Ariel. Chris von Baeyer is an actor, educator and consultant who specializes in the integration of theater and human development. Email Elsa and Chris.

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BUILD COMPETENCE. INSPIRE CONFIDENCE.

BY RENIE CAVALLARI

Training ensures people are competent at their position. And where competence lives so does confidence. Confidence breeds the pride and enthusiasm necessary for outstanding performance, constant and never-ending improvement, and the momentum that fuels an aligned organization.

To play at the top, we must go beyond great strategy, product differentiation and innovation. High-performance teams have these three elements in common:

1. Inspiring leadership: Leaders that engage the human spirit inspire their teams to greatness.

2. Talent alignment: Strategy comes to life only when everyone is working for a common goal.

3. Training as a strategic competitive advantage:

of training as an organizational strategy.

Often it is viewed as a tactical obligation.

When we change our perspective and think of learning as a key component of strategic advantage, we begin to discover how to make our talent (our greatest expense, risk and challenge) into a market differentiator nearly impossible to duplicate.

Behavioral change is challenging on many levels, as most humans like things to stay the same. They may want change, but they want you to change, not themselves! It is a reality that training leaders deal with daily.

Learning that engages and changes human behavior is the fuel behind great teams.

Competencies that Drive Results

We all know we need solid training programs, but few organizations think

Thousands of hours of study, research, modeling, and analysis of organizational

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behavior resulted in a method for coaching people to their potential.

Through this study, three critical components were identified that predict competency potential and determine a team’s ability to deliver results.

This goes against conventional wisdom where competency models are pages long; but when we look at competency with these three elements as the focus, training becomes more manageable and targeted to affect the behaviors (skills and processes) that consistently drive results. Ensuring competency is the most significant step we can take as we shift training programming to be an integral piece of our overall strategy. Training isn’t a department, it’s a culture.

Mindset. The first and most important piece of ensuring competency is mindset: the positivity and commitment

THE LEARNING MODEL POWERED BY ASPIRE KNOWLEDGE

COMPETENCY

Intellectual understanding

Improving competency creates consistency

APPLICATION

CONFIDENCE

Understanding how the knowledge is applied and used

Confidence is a derivative of competency

DEMONSTRATION

PRIDE & ENTHUSIASM

When you can demonstrate it, you know how to do it

to doing the job. If a person’s head isn’t in the game, no amount of training will ensure this performer rises above mediocrity. People with the wrong mindset never reach their potential and mediocre teams lose market share.

Skill Set. The skills required to do the job are vital to competency. This is why so much training is dedicated to skill development. And yet, skills are secondary to mindset. A person can master even difficult skills with the right mindset.

Process Set. Process gives us sustainability and improves productivity. It allows for improvement and drives efficiency as we determine what processes need to be utilized and how they affect other positions or departments. Process changes are the dominoes that minimize mistakes, decrease error costs, and eliminate redundancy issues. Process gives us a sense of confidence in how to deliver or approach a given task.

The competency model’s three essential components ensure you build training that uses the foundations necessary to inspire confidence and drive high performance in your team.

To build an organization of truly outstanding performers who play “all

Confident people have pride & enthusiasm

in,” we must go beyond hiring the right people. We have all been there—hiring someone we believed would become a successful player on our team and yet they didn’t pan out. Sometimes it’s a bad hire but many times it is how we onboarded them or failed to set them up for success that was the root of their taking too long to “get it.”

A coach needs to evaluate performance to move the learner to their next level of competence. Just like riding a bike, you must start with the basics and build from there. Helping a person become consciously competent is a gift you give a learner as it takes time, thought, and the patience to encourage as they trip and fall along the way.

It’s surprising that organizations are willing to spend weeks hiring the “right person” and less than a week onboarding them to ensure their competency. When it comes to talent, we all want competent people.

Four Levels of Performers

How People Learn When developing our people, how they learn is as important as what they learn.

Think of each element of training as if learning to ride a bike. Knowing the parts of the bike, and even how they work, isn’t enough. Actively getting on the bike is key. The Learning Model (see sidebar) allows you to systematically integrate each job function’s skills and processes, so a person becomes competent and therefore confident. Just like riding a bike, the Learning Model is a series of steps designed to build competence, and therefore confidence, for sustained learning and success.

Independent primary research has shown that when it comes to performance in a specific job, there are four levels of performers broken down by percentage of each in the average organization studied.

Outstanding performers (4 percent) are the best of the best. They are at the top of the game and consistently deliver the highest level of results. Having tapped into their passion, their fanatical focus allows them to take their strong skills to another level as they endlessly raise the bar.

Top notch players (17 percent) are still “A” players with high levels of skill and focus. They have a learner mentality and consistently deliver as high achievers with the right mindset. To move them to the outstanding level of performance requires

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connecting their higher purpose to their work, awakening their passion to fuel their desire to learn even more.

Naysayers (7 percent) are energy suckers. They blame and shame others and exhibit a lack of responsibility for delivering results. They undermine the team, finding what’s wrong and focusing on problems rather than solutions.

They are difficult to coach and the best approach for dealing with them is an exit strategy.

The mediocre crowd (72 percent) consists of a variety of performers and at 72 percent of the average organization, it is definitely a crowd. Why might people perform at a mediocre level? They may be new or learning a new job; they may have been promoted so they are learning their new responsibilities; or they may be bored with their current position. Maybe they have been there too long or aren’t being challenged to take their work to another level. In any case, they are not inspired, which is key to their turning on their own motivational switch. A person who is motivated to perform always performs at a higher level than a person who is not.

It is clear that the true opportunity for any organization to outperform its competition is to focus its efforts on moving the mediocre crowd for higher performance.

Three Key Tools to Moving the Mediocre Performer 1. Inspire them.

Show them how their work integrates with the organization’s overall mission. Ask them how they see their work impacting the customer, team, or end user and why that is important to them personally.

2. Help them find and turn on their motivational switch.

When our head isn’t into our work, we will never perform to our true potential.

That limits our competence and hence our confidence. The more engaged a

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WHERE COMPETENCE LIVES SO DOES CONFIDENCE. A PERSON CAN MASTER EVEN DIFFICULT SKILLS WITH THE RIGHT MINDSET. person is, the more motivated they are to perform at a higher level.

3. Coach them.

The coach’s job is to help people become competent. Most leaders manage people more than they coach. Management is the facilitation of people, product and process. In contrast, coaching is optimizing performance through engaging the human spirit, building skills and establishing accountability.

Accountability is a derivative of responsibility and when it comes to coaching, learning is not the coach’s job.

The coach’s job is to create responsibility “in the chair over there” (with the learner).

This means it is not your responsibility as the coach to take notes and tell people what to do. It is your responsibility to help them understand the deliverables and to clearly and interactively share the skills and processes they need to know to perform. A great coach applies knowledge through demonstration, so the learner can model and apply the information. The coach then creates an environment that allows the person to demonstrate the skills.

People learn best when they feel safe and trust that you sincerely want them to become successful. Fear is a common barrier to growth. Coaches decrease fear and increase positive emotional engagement.

At a fundamental level, training is the ability to change human behavior.

When we think from this perspective as a leader and coach, we have more empathy as we all know change is hard.

Learning takes time and changing behavior takes even longer.

There is no greater gift than helping individuals find their confidence.

Confidence unlocks potential and builds a higher level of commitment to the organization. It’s no secret that the more committed people are, the better the work. Then the real math kicks in.

Now we are talking strategic weapon.

about

a

Renie Cavallari is founder, CEO and Chief Instigator of Aspire and an award-winning international marketing and leadership expert. Email Renie.

FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS L&D Stakeholders Should Answer to Improve Learning

By Dr. Eric A. Surface & Dr. Kurt Kraiger

ANSWERS WITHOUT RELEVANT QUESTIONS AREN’T USEFUL During recent conference presentations and webinars focused on analytics, big data and evaluation, we noticed audience members asking, “What questions should I be asking [and answering with evaluation data and analytics]?” Speakers typically answer these questions one of two ways: either by recommending collecting specific types or “levels” of data (e.g., business impact), as if all relevant questions for all learning and development (L&D) stakeholders (learners, co-workers, managers, C-suite executives, etc.) should be immediately identified and addressed; or by recommending collecting and tagging as much data as possible so the data analysts figure it out, as if the important questions will only emerge from analyzing all the data after the fact.

Both perspectives can be made to work, but neither completely satisfies. Both advise by emphasizing answers (i.e., collect these specific answers or collect all the possible answers) from overactively asking questions to guide and tailor evaluation. Neither provides L&D stakeholders with much agency in the evaluation process. Neither identifies how L&D stakeholders can ask questions that, when answered through the evaluation process, provide relevant, actionable and timely insights they need to do their jobs well and have an impact.

“The answers you have are only as good as the questions you’ve asked.” – Rebecca Trotter

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We need a better approach to address the question. One that empowers all L&D stakeholders to engage in and tailor the evaluation process. One that empowers all L&D stakeholders to act on relevant data to make a difference.

L&D evaluation and analytics should focus on building value with data.

We need to ask meaningful questions to guide evaluation planning and practice so each stakeholder gets relevant, actionable insights, at the right time, to act and create value.

We believe effective evaluation and value creation depend on asking and answering two fundamental types of questions. These questions align each stakeholder’s actions with their roles

“SUCCESSFUL PEOPLE ASK BETTER QUESTIONS, AND AS A RESULT, THEY GET BETTER ANSWERS!” – TONY ROBBINS

(i.e., their opportunities to impact the process and/or its outcomes) and with the organization’s strategy to develop the capabilities needed to execute its objectives, strategy and mission.

FOCUS ON VALUE BY ASKING TWO QUESTIONS In our 2017 Training Industry Magazine article, “Beyond levels: Building value using learning and development data,” we focus on how L&D professionals can establish value by first asking “what is of value to whom,” not “what level to measure.” This acknowledges that various L&D stakeholders have different roles and responsibilities, different opportunities to influence the L&D process and its outcomes, different subjective judgments of value, and different data needs. Value can only be created when stakeholders use relevant data to act and improve a process or outcome important to their role. What is measured should result from asking and answering questions relevant to each stakeholder’s role and area(s) of opportunity for impact in which the

stakeholder has agency to act. We introduced two questions to focus evaluation on creating value from the perspective of any L&D stakeholder.

While different stakeholders contribute to the organization and L&D in different ways, they all can ask and answer the same two types of questions to guide evaluation practice, have impact and create value within their role in the L&D process: How well did I do?

How can I do better?

The first question is an example of an effectiveness question. The second an example of an improvement or diagnostic question. Together these questions focus stakeholders’ efforts on the areas they impact.

Effectiveness questions focus on an individual, group, or program’s standing on an important metric.

Answers to effectiveness questions allow stakeholders to decide if desired standing on the metric has been met and if “praise” or “change” (improvement) is needed. “Levels” are appealing because they can provide answers to effectiveness questions.

Did the trainer’s learners pass the certification exam? How well did the training transfer? What was the ROI for training? Effectiveness questions

must match the stakeholder’s needs, and the answers provided must allow stakeholders to judge effectiveness.

Importantly, answers to effectiveness questions do not provide guidance on how to improve. They only identify gaps between desired and actual outcomes, not solutions. For example, a training manager who learns that a high percentage of learners failed the certification exam (here, pass rate is a program effectiveness criterion) cannot diagnose and address the issue without additional data.

Improvement questions focus on identifying the factors that stakeholders can address to improve the outcome or close the gap identified by effectiveness questions. The aim is to find a lever to pull to “change” (improve) answers to effectiveness questions. Improvement questions are only asked if there is a need to improve. They can be general to prompt stakeholder reflection on what needs to change, or specific to provide data on diagnostics factor to guide changes or interventions.

For example, trainer instructional performance impacts trainee learning, and trainer performance can be improved through performance feedback and coaching. Often, diagnostic factors are not proactively measured and must be incorporated into the evaluation plan after an effectiveness issue is detected.

Proactive organizations continuously monitor and improve their L&D

APPLYING THE TWO QUESTIONS 1. Ensure application aligns with your organization’s L&D strategy.

6. Select the evaluation design to answer the questions.

2. Determine focus: on a specific need or on continuous monitoring and improvement.

7. Determine what data are needed to answer the effectiveness question(s); what data are diagnostic of effectiveness.

3. Decide the evaluation purpose, objective and scope within focus and strategy.

8. Determine if data exist already and/or need to be collected to answer the questions; if data do not exist, determine collection feasibility.

4. Identify the relevant stakeholder group(s) and their roles and objectives.

5. Identify the effectiveness questions and related improvement questions for each stakeholder group.

9. Decide how insights will be generated (analysis) and provided to stakeholders.

10. Decide if you have sufficient resources to implement the plan.

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functions by planning to measure the most likely diagnostic factors associated with learning and transfer.

“BETTER” QUESTIONS ARE STAKEHOLDER-FOCUSED To support value creation, every evaluation should be tailored to the purposes, objectives, roles and needs of one or more stakeholder groups.

This tailoring results in relevant and actionable questions aligned with a stakeholder group’s opportunity and ability to impact the process and its outcomes. The two questions approach works because the effectivenessimprovement questions are customized to the stakeholder group’s context and information needs every time.

The two questions can be general or specific and can take different forms and perspectives, such as the trainer’s role to facilitate learning: How well did my learners perform on the practice certification exam? Which learners need additional preparation for the certification exam? How can I help the learners who need additional preparation?

Two stakeholders can share the same effectiveness/improvement questions but from different perspectives— the trainer questions above could be asked from a learner’s perspective.

Multiple stakeholders can use the same data to address similar effectivenessimprovement questions. For example, different stakeholders have different scopes of responsibility—learners focus on themselves, trainers focus their learners, and program managers focus on all learners. The data are aggregated to address the questions as you move up the hierarchy from learner to CLO. The two questions apply to any training context, analysis level (individual, group, program, or organizational) and type of outcome (learning, transfer, performance, results, and value metrics).

By carefully thinking through each stakeholder group’s evaluation needs, the two questions can be crafted to drive effective evaluation practices

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that generate relevant data and lead stakeholders to use it to build value.

TWO TYPES OF INSIGHTS In asking questions, we seek answers we hope will provide insights to inform our decisions and actions. There are effectiveness and improvement insights to match the questions. Effectiveness insights involve deciding whether the desired amount/level/value of the metric specified in the effectiveness question (e.g., certification exam pass rates) was sufficiently achieved or met.

If not, related improvement questions must be asked. Related improvement

VALUE COMES FROM PEOPLE ACTING ON RELEVANT AND TIMELY DATA TO MAKE A DIFFERENCE.

insights identify the drivers (levers) of the effectiveness metric that can be modified to impact the effectiveness.

An insight is an informed judgment or interpretation of the data that can be used to guide decisions or actions, made by placing the data in a context.

The questions asked provide context but often more information is needed for a full interpretation. A stakeholder can reflect on the meaning of the data in their context based on experience, then gain insights. Or, the data can be compared to historical or normative data to create a context for interpretation.

For example, when interpreting the effectiveness of a class’s certification results, comparisons to results of other classes past and present can provide context to answer, “did they learn?”

Comparisons to norms, standards and goals, as well as multiple sources (360 feedback) are common. The historic relationships between diagnostic factors and outcomes can guide improvement efforts and be used predictively to decide when intervention is needed.

APPLYING THE TWO QUESTIONS The two questions can be applied to evaluations focused on a specific issue or need; on continuous monitoring and improvement; and of any scope from narrow (e.g., one learner) or broad (e.g., all programs). Establishing clear linkages among the strategy, focus, purpose, objective, scope, stakeholders, questions, evaluation design, and data collected leads to success. Only address questions for which a stakeholder group will receive the answers in a timeframe and format that allows for use to make better decisions or to improve the process or outcomes. Our experience demonstrates people participate in evaluation and view it positively when they believe the data are used to make changes that benefit them, their team members, or the organization.

FINAL THOUGHTS When you start with relevant questions rather than levels, your evaluation practice is more targeted to your organization’s needs and will be more effective as it was designed to generate insights useful to your stakeholders in making better decisions and acting to improve the learning process, learning itself, or learning’s impact on performance and organizational outcomes. The real power of the two questions is in empowering stakeholders; value does not come from following “levels” or collecting data, it comes from people acting on relevant and timely data to make a difference.

Dr. Eric A. Surface is president and principal scientist at ALPS Solutions. He recently launched ALPS Insights to provide evaluation, analytics and insights via a new software platform, ALPS Ibex. Dr. Kurt Kraiger is a professor of psychology at Colorado State University. He is also a co-founder and principal psychologist for jobZology, a career development company. Email Eric and Kurt.

Winning the Battle for the Customer: Your Buyers Have Changed – Why Hasn’t Your Sales Training?

By Steve Andersen

Despite the significant expenditures that continue to go into training salespeople to “close the deal,” many sales organizations struggle to meet and exceed their targets, and here’s why. Customers have gone through a significant evolution and transformation since the dawn of the new millennium, but the people selling to them have not. How do we know this? Our work with many of the world’s largest sales organizations over the past two decades has validated that much of the sales training available in the market does exactly what it purports to do: it equips salespeople (to one level or another) to focus on a sale after they learn that the customer might buy something.

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WHAT SEEMS TO BE THE PROBLEM?

Perhaps on the surface, this doesn’t sound so bad. After all, when it’s time for the customer to buy, most salespeople are ready to spring into action. But this is precisely the problem. In the book, “Beyond the Sales Process: 12 Proven Strategies for a Customer-Driven World,” research shows that the customer is only spending 1 to 2 percent of their time actually buying something from you or your salesperson. Despite this conclusion, sales training continues to focus primarily on this narrow slice of the customer’s time, at the expense of engaging effectively the other 98 to 99 percent (which, more and more, is heavily impacting the 1 to 2 percent).

In a hurried world busily trying to keep up with emerging trends in digital transformation, the internet of things (IoT) and artificial intelligence (AI), the customer is likely to spend even less time in the future executing their actual buying process due to the increasing speed of business and the ready availability of more information to equip and enable their purchases. This, in turn, means that if we are focusing only on making the sale and “closing the deal,” the result to the salesperson and their organization over time will be less relevant to the customer.

The answer is to evolve sales training to be more about customer value cocreation and measurable business outcomes, which requires a mindset

shift to focus on engaging effectively with the customer before, during and after the sale. This approach enables effective, proactive engagement with the customer after their last purchase, during their current purchases and before their next decisions to buy. But getting there will require a change of perspective and behaviors in both the salespeople that are engaging with the customer, as well as the managers EVOLVE SALES TRAINING TO BE MORE ABOUT CUSTOMER VALUE CO-CREATION.

and leaders who are coaching their sales performance. Tomorrow’s most successful sales organizations are evolving their training of salespeople to be more than just “sales training.” Here’s how they’re readying themselves to “win the battle for the customer!”

HOW DO YOU SEE YOUR CUSTOMER?

Every company, sales organization, sales manager and salesperson has a choice to make when it comes to how they “see” their customers. Some companies see their customers as their primary source of valuation while some sales organizations see their customers as their primary source of revenue.

Accordingly, some sales managers see their customers as their primary source of quota relief while their salespeople see their customers as their primary source of commissions.

Hence, if we engage our customer looking at them through any of these lenses, we get a “view” of them that is really about us. Oftentimes this view of the customer is exacerbated even further as we begin to also see them through the lenses of our products and our offerings. This means that our perspective of the customer originates with what’s most important to us and becomes even more distorted when we try to orient ourselves to what matters most to the customer, a question often missing in sales training.

Is this because we want to see the customer from our vantage point, or is it because many of us have been trained to use whatever sales tips and tricks we can get our hands on to win and close the deal? The sales landscape is changing rapidly and companies and salespeople that fail to evolve to a more customer-focused approach to their sales training are running a significant risk of being deemed less relevant by their customers. Providers that are authentically interested in co-creating value and delivering desired business outcomes to their customers can get a jump on their competition by helping their salespeople see their customer through the lens of what matters most… to the customer.

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THREE IMPORTANT WORDS TO KEEP IN MIND

By taking a value-focused, longer-term view of the customer, organizations can begin to shift mindsets by transitioning their sales training to be more about the customer, what matters most to the customer and the value that the customer gains by doing business with them. How can you initiate this sales training evolution? One way to start is by keeping three very important words in mind when selecting, acquiring and deploying sales training.

Success Everybody wants to be successful, including customers.

Yet many interviews of client customers have proven that very few salespeople truly understand what success looks like to their customers. Further, when asking customers what percentage of salespeople ask them to describe what success looks like to them, the overwhelming majority respond with “very few,” if any. Most will agree that it’s much more likely that a customer will want to hear about a provider’s offerings after the provider invests the time and attention to understanding what matters most to the customer they are engaging.

To be effective, sales training must ensure that the salesperson is focusing their attention, best practices and resources on first understanding how the customer expects to be successful as a result of working with them, and second on how

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their solutions and value will enable this customer success. This understanding requires conversations with the customer about the external pressures being placed upon their organization, the business objectives they are deploying to address these pressures

IF WE KEEP DOING WHAT WE’VE DONE, THEN WE’LL KEEP GETTING WHAT WE’VE GOTTEN.

and the internal challenges that they are encountering as they execute their objectives. Sounds obvious, but this mindset shift has proven to be difficult (if not impossible) for organizations that see their customers simply as sources of revenue, deals or commissions.

Momentum Success in sales breeds success in sales, and yet again and again stories are told about salespeople who are working with existing customers and accounts and are engaging with them as though there is no history, no track record and no past

proven value. If the salesperson and organization have previously helped the customer successfully address their external pressures, meet their business objectives and overcome internal challenges and obstacles, then there is proof that value has been realized in the past, and reason to believe that it can, indeed, be realized again in the future.

To win the battle for the customer, sales training must equip and enable salespeople to understand where they have been successful in the past, with the customer they are engaging with and selling to, as well as with other customers who may be comparable in terms of their pressures, objectives and challenges. By doing so, salespeople enter their next sales opportunity with momentum from their previous opportunities, and these successes speak volumes to the contemporary customer who is under stress to make a selection of a provider (or partner) that can help them mitigate their risk while driving business outcomes and results.

Trust Time and again, sales celebrations (or post-mortems) provide evidence that the victorious salesperson had developed a trust-based relationship with the customer that was a factor in their selection and ultimate win of the business. But if the focus of sales training is driving and closing deals and the customer relationship factor is ignored (or treated lightly), then it’s only logical to assume that we’re training salespeople to largely rely on

their products and solutions rather than also building and leveraging trustbased relationships that bring the two organizations into greater alignment.

When you hear story after story about salespeople who win business with a product that wasn’t necessarily the best or a proposal that wasn’t the least expensive, and the reason for the outcome is attributed to the investment of time in developing and growing a trustbased relationship with the customer, it becomes clear that trust-based relationships that bring organizations into greater alignment really do matter.

Sales training that focuses on value cocreation, trust-based relationships and customer/provider alignment are the most effective, and position salespeople to win in competitive markets.

KEYS TO MAKING THE SALES TRAINING MINDSET SHIFT

Buyers have changed and will continue to change, and your sales training has to keep up with this change. This requires a mindset shift by salespeople, their managers and their companies and a commitment to see the customer differently. It also requires a mindset shift by those who are training this and the next generation of sales professionals.

If we keep doing what we’ve done, then there’s every reason to assume that we’ll keep getting what we’ve gotten…and this is not a recipe for sales success in today’s disrupted and time-challenged world.

To facilitate this change and shift in thinking, consider the following as you evaluate and select sales training courses

and curricula for your organization. By focusing on customer success, leveraging momentum from past successes and building trust-based relationships with customers, an organization can establish itself as a leader within its market and gain advantage against competition through more effective engagement with customers. It’s all about advancing one opportunity (and customer success) at a time, and nothing is likely to impact this more than the sales training that is provided to those who are leading the charge to win the battle for the customer.

Steve Andersen founded Performance Methods, Inc. following a successful 20-year technology career that included multiple appointments as chief sales officer. He is the author of “Beyond the Sales Process: 12 Proven Strategies for a Customer-Driven World.” Email Steve.

THE SALES TRAINING MINDSET SHIFT FOCUS OF SALES TRAINING: PAST

FOCUS OF SALES TRAINING: FUTURE

Me

Customer

My goals, quota, commissions

Customer pressures, objectives, challenges

My product

Customer value co-creation

My success

Customer success

Size of the sale

Customer business impact

Closing the deal

Opening the relationship

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T C A P M O C T N E L A T A NEW EMPLOYEES STRIKIN

O Y H T I W L A E G A NEW D

OW

BY SEAN ST

The U.S. is experiencing historically low levels of unemployment. As a result, learning and development (L&D), talent management and human resource (HR) thought leaders are declaring that the war for talent is over. Talent has prevailed.

Even with historically low unemployment, consider this: • There are an estimated 6.6 million jobs currently going unfilled in the U.S. • There are over 70 million individuals in the U.S. with either some college education but no degree, or without a high school diploma • These same individuals currently work in jobs with a high likelihood of being impacted by automation

UR

ERS, CPTM

• By 2020, 65 percent of all jobs will require some form of post-secondary education and training beyond high school This doesn’t sound like either side won.

To prevent another declaration of war for talent, L&D must create a new compact for talent. We need to strike a grand bargain with our employees and offer them a new deal.

Ed Baldwin, an HR strategist, suggests doing away with the concept of “at-will” employment and striking a compact that is worthy of reciprocation for both employee and employer. Additionally, Evan Hackle, CEO of a leading training development company, believes that we must provide career planning for every employee and transparency to where they stand in the talent pipeline.

With all of this as a back drop, I would like to propose that there is a new compact to be had with talent, and as L&D leaders, it is within our grasp to strike this grand bargain. This new deal for talent requires L&D to deliver on three main points.

1

WE WILL ENSURE YOU HAVE THE SKILLS YOU NEED TO SUCCEED IN YOUR ROLE.

Now, for many of us, this may feel like what we are already doing. We provide what we think is role-specific training or tools to our employees to help them be successful in their current job, but in many industries, like hospitality, retail or quick service restaurants, the lack of foundational skills, literacy, numeracy, and even fluency in English, is holding workers back from achieving their potential.

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STRIKING A NEW DEAL WITH EMPLOYEES STARTS WHEN L&D PRIORITIZES WORKFORCE DEVELOPMENT.

As a learning and talent leader, we often lament when our front line does not take the programs we push out. But what if the obstacle to taking these programs is a language barrier or not having the personal technology devices or Wi-Fi to assist them in consuming these courses?

Research shows 30 percent of the workforce falls into this latter bucket.

Forward-thinking organizations like Brinker International have recognized this. In January of this year, the parent company for Chili’s and Maggiano’s launched an innovative, voluntary employee education benefit Best You EDU™ to all hourly and salaried team members that begins with foundational education all the way to college.

2

WE WILL INVEST IN THE DEVELOPMENT OF YOUR SKILLS TO ADVANCE YOUR CAREER.

Imagine being told you had $3,000, $4,000, or $6,000 a year that you could spend on developing your skills and advancing to your next role. How would you spend it?

As I talk to learning and talent leaders across a wide spectrum of companies, and we talk about the cost of turnover especially in front line worker roles, replacement costs can equal $2,0004,000 a year for roles making on average $10/hour.

What if we flipped the model and instead of accepting this as the “cost of doing business,” we focus it on developing the employee for their next role – inside or outside of the company.

For each year you stay in your role and have satisfactory performance, we will invest the value of turnover that year into your personal development. Talk about worthy reciprocity.

The Amazon Career Choice program is an example of this type of approach. Amazon invests up to $3,000 per year, up to a total of $12,000, for warehouse workers to reskill to their next role – largely outside

of Amazon – for jobs in high-growth areas such as health care, technology and the skilled trades.

Imagine a world in which companies with programs like Career Choice are connecting their talent ecosystem to companies that are looking for that particular skill set, seamlessly moving talent from one organization to the next.

3

WE WILL PROVIDE YOU WITH THE TOOLS AND RESOURCES TO DETERMINE HOW TO INVEST IN YOUR SKILLS.

How do we trust individuals will make smart investments in their skills development? This new deal is about providing tools and resources to help them make those investments. In my view, this is about career advising, academic advising and success coaching.

It may seem foreign to think about these types of services or roles in the context of your traditional talent management team.

But giving your employees the resources and tools to plan their career requires these types of roles. The traditional backoffice educational assistance program is not providing this level of support or strategic alignment to your talent strategy.

KEY CONSIDERATIONS TO OFFERING YOUR EMPLOYEES A NEW DEAL FOR DEVELOPMENT • Know your stakeholders. Educational Assistance Programs have tended to sit in the benefits department, and outside the traditional L&D organization. There are a number of stakeholders to consider when considering changes to the EA policy – including HR, learning, total rewards, benefits, talent acquisition, payroll, and corporate tax.

• Review your organization’s Educational Assistance Policy. Your policy has likely been in place for a number of years and has not been reviewed in at least the past five years. Many of these policies have been written as a one-sizefits-all policy, and often do not take into consideration the unique needs of the different populations in the workforce.

• Know your employees. Surprisingly, most organizations do not know the educational make up of their employees.

Talent acquisition is a great place to start on understanding the educational background of your employees, but also consider conducting an Educational Attainment Survey to find out where your employees are on their educational journey and what might be most important to them.

• Move beyond the discounts. There are many institutions that will offer your employees discounts to attend their programs. However, if you do not value the brand of that institution in your hiring, why let your employees spend their educational assistance dollars with them? Give your employees the tools to make sound decisions about how they invest in their learning.

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What if you could reduce turnover by 20 percent in your organization?

What is the value of that reduction, not only in turnover cost, but also in increased productivity, revenues and customer satisfaction?

A STARTING POINT

AS LEARNING AND TALENT LEADERS, THE BUSINESS CASE IS OURS TO MAKE. This means moving away from the fallacy that our managers are effective at guiding career planning conversations. Sure, they can conduct performance reviews, but most managers have limited capacity, few tools at their discretion, and minimal training in guiding an effective career planning conversation.

Success coaching is important to front line workers who are returning to learning for the first time. Success coaching is there to monitor and support the employee through their learning experiences. This should be required of every educational provider the organization works with – or a service provided by a third party.

A great example of this is an insurance company located in the Midwest.

As part of its talent management organization, they have individuals who help coach internal candidates through their talent management process – from understanding a job posting, to preparing a resume, to submitting the resume to the hiring manager,

to prepping for the interview. Their commitment to helping their employees understand internal talent mobility is a defining part of what it means to be an employee for that company.

Many will say “This is not possible. This would be too expensive to fund. I could never get this approved.” Yes, this is a departure from the norm, but consider the following: • Several studies by the Lumina Foundation have shown a return on investment (ROI) for up to 140 percent for organizations that strategically use their educational assistance programs. What learning programs do you currently offer that show that level of ROI to the organization? If you could demonstrate that level of ROI to your CEO and CFO, what would their reaction be?

• Turnover of employees is a major cost to organizations and a drain on an organization’s results and resources.

As learning and talent leaders, this new deal starts when we prioritize workforce development. It starts when we move programs, like tuition assistance, out of being a benefit and into being a strategic tool for investment. It starts when we begin to look at our educational assistance policies and begin to customize them to the workforce. It starts with equipping your employees to make good decisions about how they develop their skills and invest in their development. It starts with removing the roadblocks your employees have in order to utilize these programs.

According to Gallup’s 2017 State of the American Workplace Report, 33 percent of the workforce is actively engaged and fully productive. That means that 67 percent of our workforce is looking for a new deal – better opportunities for development, opportunities for advancement, opportunities to be the best version of themselves. Gallup estimates that for every $10,000 in salary, a disengaged employee cost the company $3,400 per year. As learning and talent leaders, the business case is ours to make. The impacts are ours to make. This grand bargain is within our reach.

It is time for L&D professionals to strike a new deal with talent – a deal that is good for organizations, employees, and for the communities in which the business operates. A deal that is truly worthy of reciprocity.

Sean Stowers, CPTM, is the director of client success with Pearson’s Accelerated Pathways business, where he works with organizations that believe learning is a strategic imperative and a crucial component of the employee value proposition. Email Sean.

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CASEBOOK

FINDING VALUE: A JOURNEY TO ESTABLISH A COMPREHENSIVE TRAINING EVALUATION PROGRAM

BY ANDY TUCKER

Training professionals must be able to demonstrate training’s value to the organization. How does training impact business results? What is the return on expectations established by our clients? Whether an external consulting service that specializes in training development or a department within an organization who services internal learning needs, the correlation between learning results and business results must be clear and evident to our business leaders. We can’t assume that our executives see those connections.

Worse, we run the risk of being seen as superfluous if those connections are not visible and emphasized. If that is the case, the next stop for us may be the unemployment line.

As training and development professionals, we are on a quest to prove that the learning we deliver meets the immediate needs identified by the project sponsor and aligns with the operational and strategic objectives of our business. To assume that these correlations are apparent or to neglect making this alignment explicit is to undersell our value as critical assets

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to our organizations’ mission and values. But how do we go about tying the immediate results of learning to sustained on-the-job performance and business impact?

Most practitioners measure learners’ reactions to training and learning, and many organizations strive to measure training’s impact to on-the-job behaviors and business results. However, we struggle to do this because of time pressures, access to performancerelated data, an absence of clear metrics recording, or any number of obstacles that stand in our way of finding measurable results. I am sure that my team, Atrium Health’s IAS Education team, is not alone in this situation.

WHAT WE DID Our team’s desire to align our work with Atrium Health’s mission, vision and strategic priorities led us to consider what such an evaluation program would look like. Where do we start? What tools might we use? And where do we get the metrics that can show how learner

performance impacts business results?

With these questions as catalysts, my team set out to develop an evaluation program that could provide clear correlations between the learning that we foster and the impact of learner performance on key strategic priorities for Atrium Health.

ATRIUM HEALTH Mission: To improve health, elevate hope, and advance healing - for all Vision: To be the first and best choice for care STRATEGIC PRIORITIES: • Growth: Growing as the most connected and convenient system of care • Value: Excelling at delivering highvalue, person-centered care • Affordability: Increasing the affordability of care for our patients.

Our first step was to research evaluation and find models that could help us conceptualize our own program. Donald Kirkpatrick, the father of training evaluation, provided a framework for us to consider with the Four Levels of Evaluation. In the recent update of his original model, his son James Kirkpatrick and James’ wife, Wendy Kayser Kirkpatrick, provide meaningful suggestions on how to link our learning goals to broader business outcomes using Kirkpatrick’s traditional approach: Reaction, Learning, Behavior, Results.

As I read the first few chapters, I could see that this was something our team should read. We structured our study as a “book club,” in which team members volunteered to lead the discussion of specific sections and provide prompts. This sort of “do-ityourself” professional learning served as the foundation of our evaluation program development, helping us to

see and fill in gaps in ongoing learner support, such as tools that managers could use to monitor, reinforce, encourage and reward skill retention.

THE CORRELATION BETWEEN LEARNING RESULTS AND BUSINESS RESULTS MUST BE CLEAR AND EVIDENT TO OUR BUSINESS LEADERS.

Our local ATD chapter was also hosting a one-day workshop with Jim Kirkpatrick.

Three of our team members attended and came away with a map of criteriabased outcomes that could link our training to the organization’s highest-

level result, the ongoing achievement of Atrium Health’s mission: To improve health, elevate hope, and advance healing – for all. As part of this exercise we constructed a “flags up the mountain” illustration (see Figure 1) to map our leading indicators that would usher us to the highest-level desired result that awaits at the top of the mountain.

With our study and our “map to the mission,” our team then considered how we could build on our current evaluation strategy. As part of our training, we were capturing Level 1: Reaction data from our learners, in both our instructorled courses and our virtual and online offerings. This data proved critical in our efforts to make training more flexible and individualized for learners. Additionally, we were evaluating learners’ skill proficiency through performance assessments administered at the end of courses. At first these were observationbased scorecards that facilitators used

Figure 1: Map to the Mission

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to monitor specific tasks completed by learners. More recently, we have partnered with some of our internal applications specialists to create autograded assessments that record those same tasks that were initially observed by facilitators. This change has yielded more time for facilitators to work with individuals who may need additional practice to master specific skills. It also introduces a greater measure of objectivity in the assessment, as observations can vary depending on facilitators or situational factors.

particularly if we could collect metric data, such as time and money, to correlate with improved performance.

Until recently, we struggled to collect data on the sustained behavior change demonstrating skill improvement in our learners and the business impact.

We work primarily with newly hired employees and existing employees only when application upgrades occur.

We had not established a system by which we conduct follow-up work with our learners, and once they completed their new hire applications course, they may not return for additional training.

Therefore, we needed to establish methods to collect performance data that are minimally intrusive on our learners’ daily work. Doing so would provide us with information on sustained, applied behavior on the job (Level 3) and enable us a way to begin linking that performance to Atrium Health’s broader mission and values,

Given our starting point, our team has made significant headway in developing a comprehensive training evaluation program. Here is a glimpse, per Kirkpatrick’s Four Levels, of where we are.

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OBSERVATIONS CAN VARY DEPENDING ON FACILITATORS OR SITUATIONAL FACTORS.

WHERE WE ARE

LEVEL 1 We continue to collect and use feedback to make enhancements to our learning environments, such as providing dual monitors to view training and practice in the live training application environment and moving courses to a blended model in which parts of the training are completed asynchronously off-site prior to our instructor-led skills labs. As such changes are made, we will continue to check the pulse of our learners to

see how we can shape the experience in ways that impact skill competency, confidence and commitment to apply skills learned.

LEVEL 2 We continue to make more of our performance assessments automated so we can leverage facilitators as guides to learners who need additional practice to reinforce skills that are taught. In addition, data collected from the performance assessments are used to inform training updates so that we can offer additional resources, such as practice exercises, that enable learners to perform the skills that make them proficient. Tracking patterns in the learning results also enables us to proactively target areas of the electronic medical record (EMR) that are inherently difficult. These target areas influence the ongoing support, such as job aids or toolkits, that we offer to new hires as well as existing employees.

LEVEL 3 We have developed a Level 3 evaluation rounding form to observe and rate learner performance after the initial training (three to six months). We have on-site assistance called the Canopy

Advanced Support Team (CAST) and the Clinical Informatics Coordinators (CICs), who provide physicians and nurses with at-the-elbow support for the EMR. The IAS Education team, specifically the facilitators, are partnering with them to use the rounding form, to collect metric data on users’ efficiency (accuracy + speed + quality = efficiency) using a one to five Likert scale. The rounding form also asks the teammate to note anecdotal information, such as what a user documented accurately and quickly, or inaccurately and slowly. This qualitative data will help our team make training adjustments and improvements, in the same way that the Level 2 learning data shape changes that we make to the learning components. At the same time, the IAS Education teammate will work alongside CAST and CICs to recommend performance improvements to the physicians and nurses, thus enabling a continuous learning paradigm.

LEVEL 4 This is the area in which we have the most work to accomplish. We are working to establish partnerships with teammates across the organization who are responsible for collecting data related to our strategic priorities, operational excellence initiatives, and financial health indicators. While we

have an organizational scorecard that is updated monthly, it is important for us to know what the tools for measurement are in order to correlate those with the

WE HAVE THE POTENTIAL TO IMPACT THE QUALITY OF CARE EACH PHYSICIAN AND NURSE PROVIDES. training that we offer. What questions are asked? What numbers are used to arrive at specific calculations? What factors affect a percentage? Once we have a clear understanding of these metric sources, we can build strong correlations between the behaviors that our training impacts and the outcomes that are being systemically measured.

That alignment will help us to show how our work contributes to the improved outcomes at the foundation of Atrium Health’s mission.

WHAT LIES AHEAD At Atrium Health, the IAS Education team supports learning as it relates to the EMR. In doing so, we have the potential to impact the quality of care each physician and nurse provides. Our

role is to ensure that those physicians and nurses are masters of the most efficient methods used to document patient care. While we will continue to make improvements in our collection of learner reaction (Level 1) and learning (Level 2) data, our biggest opportunities lie in the measurement of sustained skills application on the job (Level 3) and the impact those individuals who are performing efficiently have on Atrium Health’s measured outcomes (Level 4) to improve health, elevate hope, and advance healing – for all.

Once we establish strong partnerships with the strategic and operational data owners and apply the work we have done in aligning our leading indicators with those strategic and operational priorities, this initial journey of creating a comprehensive training evaluation plan will have “paved a (metaphorical) road.” This will make it easier to track the ongoing impact our training has on individuals’ use of the EMR and how our training affects the business in our efforts to be the first and best choice for care.

Andy Tucker is a senior instructional systems designer at Atrium Health, based in Charlotte, North Carolina. Email Andy.

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MEASURING I M P A C T

TRAINING VERSUS HUMAN NATURE: IT DOESN’T HAVE TO BE A BATTLE

BY JAMES D. KIRKPATRICK & WENDY KAYSER KIRKPATRICK

If you define yourself as a training or learning leader, you have imposed a limitation that will make it difficult to be successful. Why? Training alone yields behavior change only 15 percent of the time, on average. Eighty-five percent of training graduates fall prey to a myriad of factors that influence them to do something other than what they learned, including the on-thejob environment, the direction of their supervisor, the influence of peers, the availability of resources, time pressures, and the basic human nature to do what is most convenient at a given time.

So, training is the easy part. The more difficult part is influencing what happens after training and creating a favorable environment for people to do what they learned and produce the intended outcomes. The 85 percent majority needs to be addressed for any initiative to yield a reasonable level of results, but seemingly, no one really wants to claim it.

If the training function claims influencing behavior change as part of their territory, game-changing outcomes can occur.

Instead of being a learning leader, you could be a learning and performance leader. Or better yet, a strategic business partner. There are ways this can be accomplished, even from a distance.

The four levels comprise a framework that is useful for this approach:

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Level 4 Results: The degree to which targeted program outcomes occur and contribute to the organization’s highestlevel result.

Level 3 Behavior: The degree to which participants apply what they learned during training when they are back on the job.

Level 2 Learning: The degree to which participants acquire the intended knowledge and skills based on their participation in the training.

Level 1 Reaction: The degree to which participants find the training favorable, engaging and relevant to their jobs.

THE END IS THE BEGINNING The first step in changing behavior is taking a step back to determine very specifically what result you are trying to accomplish. Your goal is to discover and understand the underlying problem that generated the training request, and what would indicate that the problem has been solved.

In a leadership development program, for example, you may be trying to reduce turnover, increase employee morale and influence key financial or organizational metrics such as productivity, sales and profitability.

The more specifically you can define the desired outcomes, the better target

you have to focus your efforts. You will also want to ensure that the stated outcomes are at the organizational level.

For example, “Train our new leaders on effective communication skills,” is not an outcome. You need to know if new leaders use effective communication skills, what kinds of positive outcomes would occur?

VALUE MUST BE CREATED BEFORE IT CAN BE DEMONSTRATED When you are clear on the desired outcomes, find out what would need to happen for them to occur. This may sound very basic, but it is often overlooked.

Countless people have participated in leadership development programs with clearly defined outcomes and a robust curriculum, but no specified actions the training graduates are supposed to take.

This approach is a recipe to accomplish 15 percent of the intended program results, because only mind-readers and extremely dedicated training graduates will figure out on their own how to accomplish the program goals and hold themselves accountable to doing it.

Increase the odds of program success by engaging in a two-way conversation with experienced supervisors and managers about exactly what training graduates need to do on the job to produce the desired outcomes. A small number of clearly defined critical

behaviors should result. This is a process in which you define in literal, observable and measurable terms, exactly what people should do on the job to make the desired outcomes most likely to occur.

You convert an abstract concept like leadership into tangible, trackable tasks.

For example, in a leadership development program, you might determine that new leaders should conduct daily team meetings to discuss the status of key projects and address any challenges to accomplishing milestones and goals.

Perhaps they should meet regularly with direct reports to discuss their role in key projects and identify where additional support might be required.

MONITOR AND REPORT ON PROGRAM PROGRESS Once you have defined these critical on-the-job behaviors in observable and measurable terms, you have something to monitor and support. This puts you in a position to influence and maximize performance and results, instead of waiting for a period of time after training and simply measuring what happened.

This is part of how you cross the bridge from being a training provider to a business partner. Instead of simply providing training and leaving the rest to someone else, you become part of the team that drives performance from start to finish.

This is not to say that training is solely responsible for monitoring and encouraging performance of critical behaviors on the job. Rather, roles and responsibilities during this critical time period should be discussed and included in the program plan.

For example, senior managers could require new leaders to report at the end of each week the team meetings and individual sessions with direct reports

they held, the duration, and key topics addressed. The IT group could provide online templates and tools to make this easy. Training could assist new managers who, for whatever reason, are struggling to hold the meetings, or to keep them focused.

Capture this information and provide it to their supervisors and senior leaders in an aggregated, anonymous fashion, and if possible, participate in a discussion about how these issues will be resolved.

EXPLAINING HOW

Using the four levels in reverse provides a straightforward process to build training that works and elevate yourself to a position of learning and performance leader.

CHALLENGES WERE OVERCOME IS A MORE COMPELLING STORY THAN SIMPLY SHARING A SUCCESS.

AND NOW…YOU CAN BUILD YOUR TRAINING CONTENT Once the desired on-the-job critical behaviors and the key business metrics you hope to influence are defined, the outline of your training curriculum has been created. Build content that will prepare people to perform the defined behaviors on the job. Allow them time to practice and discuss the importance and meaning of what you are asking them to do.

Introduce job aids and allow training participants to practice using them.

Explain what type of support to expect when they return to work, and how they will be held accountable for performing the specified tasks.

It is also important to build in time for open discussions about any concerns participants have about what they are being asked to do, and to surface any anticipated roadblocks that need to be addressed for them to be successful.

MAYBE IT ISN’T SO DIFFICULT AFTER ALL

If these ideas sound daunting, select the most important, mission-critical program on your plate. Try to gain leadership support from an executive who sees the value of the program and will act as a champion. Treat the program as a pilot and try different methods to see what works.

Spending time talking with and creating trusted working relationships with your program sponsors and line managers will show them that you are working towards being a true strategic partner. Communicate both successes and setbacks as you go. Sometimes admitting challenges and explaining how they were overcome is a more compelling story than simply sharing a success. It builds trust, and it will build a team of core believers.

As the team of believers grows, an organizational evaluation strategy will develop. Soon, every important initiative will have critical behaviors and desired results defined and tracked, and outcomes will be maximized. Simple in concept, and maybe in due time, not so difficult in practice.

Jim Kirkpatrick and Wendy Kirkpatrick are co-authors of the book Kirkpatrick’s Four Levels of Training Evaluation. Email Jim and Wendy.

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SAVE THE DATE

June 17-19, 2019 // Raleigh, North Carolina “I loved the size, the choice of workshops, and the fact that the workshops were mostly presented by people like me, sharing best practices. I walked away with so many ideas for my organization that I can use, and some great contacts. I am taking my team of training supervisors to TICE next year.�

- TICE 2018 Attendee

Learn more at TICE2019.com.

SECRETS OF SOURCING DOUG HARWARD

THE FUNDAMENTALS OF MANAGING THE TR AINING FUNC TION

There continues to be a lot written about the need to transform the training function. And for good reason. Many training leaders are looking for ways to improve the training function and to make it more economical and effective.

DON’T EXPECT TECHNOLOGIES TO BE A SOLUTION WHEN THE BASIC PROCESS IS NOT SOUND. Much of the discussion is focused on digital transformation and how to use technologies more effectively. I believe we are not talking enough about what we should be transforming our training function to. Are we managing the function correctly and what behaviors should we be displaying? These are the basics, or what I like to refer to as the fundamentals of managing the training function.

At Training Industry, we study the practices of high-performing training organizations to better understand what and why some organizations achieve better results than others. We’ve learned that great training organizations focus on the basics of training management: strategic alignment, content development, delivery, administration, technology integration, portfolio management, reporting, and diagnostics. From many of my conversations with leaders of training functions that are not performing well, most believe they are focused on the same capabilities.

So, what then makes some organizations perform better than others? It starts with leadership. Managers of great training organizations practice fundamentals

and understand they don’t need to jump on all the new fads and trends in the industry. Trends tell us a lot about where the industry is headed but may not always be best for that organization. From where I sit, managing a high-performing training organization is more about sticking to the basics – the principles of learning and training management that stand the test of time.

Here are seven fundamentals to help learning leaders in achieving great results.

1. Focus on performance. Training is a performance organization, not a classroom or events management activity. The focus of the training organization is to help the business and individuals within the business to perform better. Our responsibility to the learner does not end when the course is over. It ends when an individual achieves a targeted level of performance.

2. Design learning solutions for jobs or tasks – not for topics. Training is about helping a learner perform a task or a role, not providing them with information. Yes, courses that communicate information help us understand what we should be doing, but our training must teach a learner how to do a job, not what doing a good job looks like.

3. Be process excellent. Good processes beget good behaviors.

High-performing training organizations are an integration of many processes. If your training processes are well-designed and managed, then those who perform the processes of training will deliver a better training experience.

4. Performance improvement takes time. Training is not a single event.

Ebbinghaus taught us that learning best occurs over an extended period of time (spacing effect), not when we consume large amounts of information in a single setting.

An effective learning solution integrates all aspects of learning – from onboarding, formal training, reinforcement, and evaluation.

5. Design practice into daily job routines. It is a well-understood truth that the best way to learn something is to do it. Practice is doing and should be deliberate.

Design practice into the learning experience, and that includes onthe-job routines. Make practice an ongoing improvement routine.

6. Reinforce good behavior. Ongoing performance improvement comes from the reinforcement of good behavior and best practices.

Reinforcement should be an ongoing activity, whether it be from access to timely information or reminders of what is expected and needed on the job.

7. Technology is an enabler. Tools and technologies for learning are not solutions chasing a problem.

They are enablers that help us do the fundamentals effectively and more efficiently. Use technologies to help with the learning experience, but don’t expect them to be a solution when the basic process is not sound.

Doug Harward is the CEO of Training Industry, Inc. and a former learning leader in the high-tech industry. Email Doug.

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LEARNER MINDSET MICHELLE EGGLESTON

HOW TRAINING CAN PROVIDE FOCUS AND MINIMIZE WORKPLACE DISTRACTIONS

Today’s workplace is full of disruptions.

From the shift to more open, collaborative office environments to emerging technology at our fingertips.

In theory, collaborative workspaces should promote a breeding ground for free-flowing ideas and innovation. But the unforeseen consequence of these types of environments is frequent, ongoing distractions – whether it’s from

DISTRACTED EMPLOYEES REPORT INCREASED STRESS, FRUSTRATION AND LACK OF MOTIVATION. loud conversations from co-workers, where you inadvertently become part of a conversation against your will, or general elevated noise levels across the office.

Technology is only compounding the issue by distracting an already distracted employee. The abundance of emails and meetings just add to this dilemma. Meetings are supposed to increase efficiency and streamline communication, but they can quickly become a huge waste of time and resources. According to a research study by Udemy, the top meeting disruptions are small talk and office gossip, side discussions about other projects, late arrivals/early departures, and technology/connectivity problems.

How many of us have been in meetings where all four of these disruptions have occurred? I know I have.

Companies need to be aware how workplace distractions can impact

employee morale and retention.

Distracted employees report increased stress, frustration and lack of motivation.

Unengaged employees are less productive and less motivated to stay at the company.

Open office environments and technology are not going away. So, what can organizations do to help employees stay focused and productive? If you are waiting for your employees to come to you and share their concern over workplace distractions, then you might be waiting awhile.

According to the same Udemy research, 70 percent of respondents believe that training can help block out workplace distractions, but nearly the same percentage of people who want training have never talked to a manager about it. That’s nearly three-quarters of your workforce who are suffering in silence. Employees are not confiding in managers for a number of reasons – whether they feel their disclosure would not help to improve the current situation or they don’t want to share something that could be construed as a sign of weakness in the eyes of their boss.

Employees are trying their best to cope with distractions on their own. When faced with distractions, employees are turning their phone off during work hours, playing music to drown out the noise, practicing meditation techniques, or focusing most of their time on completing tasks that don’t require too much focus. Instead of leaving employees to combat distractions on their own, learning and development can help.

LEARNING TO WORK SMARTER While training alone won’t solve the distraction problem, developing a learning culture can create an atmosphere where employees feel encouraged to admit when there are issues impeding their development. Managers must strive to create an environment where employees feel supported to grow and develop and not feel ashamed for sharing their limitations.

To help employees cope with workplace distractions, L&D can develop training that emphasizes how to work smarter.

Training could include how to use technology more efficiently at work, mindfulness practices to stay focused and on task, time management skills, and leadership skills to take control of a meeting. As technology continues to evolve and organizations adapt and change practices, employees will continuously be confronted with disruptions. L&D must move beyond developing functional skills to developing practical soft skills as well.

Employees must learn how to focus in the middle of chaos, lead effective and productive meetings, utilize resources to stay organized and focused, and select appropriate communication channels for the need.

The modern workplace is facing an absurd amount of distractions, and the momentum is just gaining steam.

Helping employees succeed in this paradigm is critical to engagement and retention levels across the business.

Michelle Eggleston is the editorial director for Training Industry, Inc. Email Michelle.

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CLOSING D E A L S

UPSKILLING FRONTLINE WORKERS USING THE BASICS OF MOBILE LEARNING

BY TARYN OESCH

Over 56 percent of the workforce reads below a sixth-grade level, and onequarter is illiterate, according to Jessica Rothenberg-Aalami, Ph.D. That’s why she created Cell-Ed, a mobile learning solution for low-skilled workers that recently raised a $1.5 million seed funding round led by Lumina Impact Ventures. The company was also named one of five finalists in the Dollar General Literacy Foundation’s $7 million Barbara Bush Foundation Adult Literacy XPRIZE. While it may seem strange to consider mobile learning a “basic” training modality, Rothenberg-Aalami says it’s using “something they already have in

TRAINING IS A GREAT WAY TO IMPROVE ENGAGEMENT. their pocket” – and it doesn’t need WiFi, which can be a barrier to training for many people. Automated texting and phone calls provide literacy, English language learning and onthe-job training to frontline workers in industries such as restaurants, hospitality and health care and organizations including AT&T, the state governments of New York and Texas, the Service Employees International Union, and Stanford Medicine.

Cell-Ed launched with a two-year research study, which resulted in 75-percent completion rates and 80-percent faster skill acquisition, Rothenberg-Aalami says. The company will use its new funding to grow its course offerings and reach and

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continue to build its partnerships with universities and workforce assessment and training providers. “It really takes all of us coming together to bridge this gap in the market for low-skilled workers, and meeting them where they’re at is a daunting problem.”

For instance, one challenge many frontline workers face is the level at which most online courses are delivered – above the levels of their literacy and job skills. They are also often inaccessible; most of the learners served

by Cell-Ed’s customers don’t even have email addresses to sign on with. Another challenge is the high demand for literacy and job skills training; “waitlists are everpresent,” Rothenberg-Aalami says, “and there are often not enough trainers to reach the frontline.”

In addition, because unemployment is so low, upskilling current employees is more important than ever. Especially with automation, mobile learning can help organizations upskill their frontline workers at scale. “We can reach 300 one day and 300,000 the next with the same platform and service,” Rothenberg-Aalami says. Because the platform uses two-way communication with automated and live coaches, it can personalize the training it offers each learner.

“What if we listened to the worker and designed for them, rather than take a curriculum that’s online or in a classroom and then just make it available over mobile phone?” asks RothenbergAalami. “What if we’re mobile-first and design for the worker at that level and created a platform and solution that was constantly responsive?”

The other finalists for the XPRIZE are Amrita CREATE, an edtech initiative that provides personalized learning and adaptive assessments; AutoCognita, an app that teaches basic literacy, numeracy and life skills; Learning Upgrade, which provides mobile learning for English, reading, writing and math; and PeopleForWords, which uses a mobile adventure game to teach literacy. The running theme across finalists is that personalized and mobile learning is an important way to give low-skilled workers the tools they need to improve their lives, especially at work.

“Service workers,” according to Gallup research, “are among the least engaged in the U.S.,” with their engagement levels decreasing as levels for other job categories have increased. Training is a great way to improve engagement.

In an article for Forbes, Beth Benjamin and Emma Sopadjieva point out that in addition to the direct benefits employees and organizations experience with improved engagement, communicating better with frontline workers supports a relationship in which employer and employee learn from each other.

Two-way communication using something that many workers already have – a mobile phone (with or without wireless internet or even a good data plan) is a great way to support skills development and employee engagement. It can also create an organization that listens to, and learns from, the people who know their customer best – the employees on the front lines.

Taryn Oesch is an editor at Training Industry, Inc. Email Taryn.

C O M PA N Y N E W S

ACQ UI S I T I O N SAN DPA RTN E R SHIPS CeriFi, a Leeds Equity Partners portfolio company, announced the acquisition of Pass Perfect, the leading provider of Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (“FINRA”) license exam training to the financial services industry. This acquisition furthers Leeds Equity’s strategy of building the premier education, training and certification provider focused on the financial services industry.

ITA Group, a worldwide leader in corporate engagement solutions, has announced its acquisition of experiential design and production company Hartmann Studios. This acquisition will allow ITA Group to bring experiential design and production completely inhouse and enhance synergy between strategy and execution.

OnCourse Learning announced its acquisition of Total Training Solutions, a leading provider of educational training webinars for banks, credit unions and mortgage lenders. The inclusion of these training webinars to OnCourse Learning’s current video course library for banks and credit unions provides financial services customers with a wide array of educational content.

Alchemy Systems, a global leader in frontline workforce training and communications announced that Intertek Group plc, the Total Quality Assurance provider to a range of industries world-wide, has acquired Alchemy from The Riverside Company.

This acquisition will help companies mitigate safety risks and increase operational effectiveness through effective training, communications and operational programs.

Thought Industries, one of the fastestgrowing online learning companies and creator of the first Learning Business Platform™, announced the launch of CustomerGauge Academy by CustomerGauge, a Software-as-a-Service platform that helps clients improve and monetize the customer experience.

CustomerGauge will utilize the Thought Industries Customer Learning Platform™ to focus and scale their efforts.

Upside LMS, a leading provider of learning-technology solutions to organizations worldwide, added new ready-to-use, off-the-shelf courseand video-based training content to its business portfolio as a part of its partnership with BizLibrary. Through the global partnership, UpsideLMS will offer BizLibrary’s entire suite of training content to its client and prospects across the world.

INDUSTRY NE WS BEHAVIORAL CHANGE TO BETTER WORKPLACE PERFORMANCE AND HUMAN BEINGS

Over the next five years, BetterUp, the first digital platform to bring personalized development through one-to-one coaching for employees at all levels of a company, will invest $15$20 million in BetterUp Labs, a first-ofits-kind behavioral research lab bringing together business, academia and science to fund research to enable people to be their best selves, and to arm companies with insights and tactics to assist.

A UNIFIED, CONNECTED EXPERIENCE FOR EMPLOYEES

Dell Boomi™ (Boomi) announced the Onboarding Solution Accelerator designed to help companies more quickly add new employees into the organization and effectively support them from Day One. The new

solution connects both systems and people to drive rapid and effective employee onboarding, resulting in better experiences and faster time to employee-effective productivity.

PREPARING FOR THE FUTURE OF WORK

Guild Education, a leading education benefits platform, helps the Fortune 1000 prepare for the future of work with $40 million in Series C funding led by Felicis Ventures. The financing round will support Guild’s growing footprint in the Fortune 1000, helping leading companies offer education as a benefit to their workforces.

NEW PLATFORM TO UNITE REMOTE PROCTORING METHODS WITH INDUSTRY-LEADING SECURITY

solutions for examinations in any learning environment and credentialing programs, announces the launch of its new online proctoring solution, PSI Bridge. PSI Bridge brings live remote proctoring and record and review proctoring together in a single system that can be customized to an institution’s needs and easily connected to any learning management system (LMS).

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PSI Services LLC (PSI), a leading provider of secure online proctoring

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