“I think our training program is working well.”

It’s a phrase we hear often from franchisors. When asked the following two questions, however, is when things get interesting….

1) What do your FRANCHISEES think?

After all, isn’t the training designed for them? The answer to this is usually a) I don’t know or b) Our “smile sheets” tell us they like it. Those are those forms you fill out at the very end of a training session, rating it from 1-5. But when franchisees go back to their location is usually when the “gaps” in a training program show themselves, and by that time the franchisor has usually moved on. There needs to be a mechanism in place to 1) Capture more useful and actionable information and 2) Capture it continuously and at a time when it’s most relevant.

2) What are you doing about scalability?

Your training program isn’t all about your franchisees. You matter. After all, you’re the one who has to build it, deliver it, maintain it, etc. So if things are “working well” now (according to smile sheets), what about when you double your number of locations? Most ’sors think about little else than selling more, more, more, but not often think about how their operations will have to change to adjust to the new scale – including their training.

If your current training program consists of in-person, week-long, PowerPoint fests, that may work when you have six locations (though it’s still not the most effective method for ANY number) and can hold the ’sees hand for weeks or even months afterward. But what about when you have 12 locations? 25? 125? You don’t have enough hands to hold all of theirs.

Scalability… it’s a word not often considered in franshisee training but it should be and RIGHT NOW – when you are still small. The very nature of franchising means distance learning, yet so many ’sors are still stuck in the “classroom” mindset. I’m not saying in-person classroom sessions aren’t necessary, but your current and future training program needs to be more “just in time” and “on demand” – giving ’sees the information they need, when they need it.

It doesn’t cost a fortune. In fact, you will end up SAVING money, and in some case can even MAKE money. But it starts with answering these two difficult questions.

I must have the worst elevator speech because when I tell people that I work at a training firm, they immediately assume that we know how a company’s employees can do their jobs better. There is an assumption – founded or not – that in order to learn, the knowledge must come from the outside.

We take the exact opposite approach. You hire good people, don’t you? Smart people who can do their jobs pretty well. And if Bob doesn’t do skill A very well, I’ll bet Sue down the hall does that skill pretty well and can teach Bob – or better yet, the organization (or us) can work with Sue to develop a training program around that knowledge in order to raise Bob’s and all other employee’s performance up to hers. I contend you can take this approach for 80% of your company’s development and performance issues.

Some people call it knowledge sharing. We take it one step further and call it D.I.Y. training. Organization, heal thyself – if you allow the reference.

It may seem like I am talking my company out of work, but many organizations don’t have the expertise, time or manpower to be able to find the knowledge that exists in people like Sue, extract it and build an effective training program to disseminate it to the proper audience using the best delivery method.

What do you think?

For the many service providers whose revenue is based on the success of the companies they serve, 2009 might not be a textbook example of ‘trickle down’ economics, and has compelled some to rethink their approach – even those who have not fared so poorly.

“We had a pretty decent year,” says Robert Bilotti – Managing Director of NovitaTM, an employee development firm that helps organizations more effectively onboard new hires and improve the performance of all employees through training “As for our clients, some remain strong. Others have suffered setbacks. All are spending more prudently.”

In an effort to save money, many companies are attempting to do more for themselves, rather than relying on outsiders. In a survey Novita conducted, 73% of employers responded they are taking this approach. Why? 81% said they were working with less budget dollars.

Bilotti explains, “Doing it yourself – or D.I.Y. – is big right now. Just ask stores like Home Depot. More people are buying paint and donning their overalls instead of hiring a professional painter. The same can be said for organizations.”

Even with smaller budgets, however, employees of those organizations still want and need to learn, develop and grow. Billotti says, “Regardless of the economy, those needs haven’t changed. So we did.”

This past summer, Novita introduced SpringboardTM, what Bilotti calls the first ‘Do-It-Yourself’ Onboarding Bootcamp. He says, “Not every homeowner knows how to properly paint, just like not every employer knows how to properly orient a new employee. Springboard teaches them how.”

Over the three-day workshop, attendees are guided through the process of building a comprehensive program that addresses their new employees’ needs, as well as those of the management and staff. Templates and worksheets are included so that employers can do it themselves – with a little help. “We let them cheat a bit,” explains Bilotti with a smile. “We’ve been doing this for years, so there’s no need for them to start from scratch.” Creating an effective program can be overwhelming, evidenced by the fact that a typical new employee completes as many as 300-500 tasks. Says Bilotti, “With the tools we give them, they can simply add-in their own content.”

The D.I.Y. approach can also be used for employees who are not new, yet still want to improve their performance. Instead of a workshop, Novita helps the organization train its employees itself, rather than bringing in an expensive outside trainer.

Says Bilotti, “There’s a great deal of knowledge that exists within any company in the form of best practices. We help them find it, extract it and develop training around it, thus raising the performance of all employees up to that of their star performers.” According to Bilotti, such an approach can be used for any topic, including management and leadership development.

The response to Novita’s D.I.Y. methods has been very positive. Dates for the Springboard Bootcamp are set for next year, and the firm is currently working with several companies on D.I.Y. training efforts, including those who are prospering. “It’s not just clients who may be struggling that are interested,” says Bilotti. “D.I.Y. means any size organization with any size budget can have world-class onboarding and training for their employees.”

For more information on Springboard or D.I.Y. Training, visit www.novitaunique.com

Survey Results: Are professionals taking more of a Do it Yourself (D.I.Y.) approach at work? How are Providers Responding?

With the shaky economy, one growing segment has been stores such as Home Depot that service the “Do It Yourself” crowd (DIY-ers). Instead of hiring a plumber or painter, more people are buying the pipes and paint, and dusting off their goggles.

Is this paradigm shift holding true when people don their business suit versus overalls? Are professionals at work doing it more themselves for things which they used to hire an outside company? According to a survey recently conducted by Novita – an employee onboarding and training provider (www.novitaunique.com) – the answer is a resounding yes!

When asked the question – “In your job, are you doing things now more or less for yourself versus working with external vendors? – over 73% responded ‘yes’.

What prompted this change? 81% said they were working with less budget, while 31% were worried about dwindling future budgets. A quarter said they had more time than they used to, and 32% wanted more control over the process. Downsizing is also an issue, as one responder wrote: “We lost half the people in our department. I didn’t want to, but was forced to become a DIY-er.” Another added, “D.I.Y. is fast becoming a money-saver for many businesses. In this economy, it’s a must.”

On the flip side, of the 17% who responded that they were, in fact, doing things less for themselves (said another way, they were using outside companies more), 56% said one of the reasons was the skills needed did not exist within their organization, while 33% answered that they got better results using an outside expert.

So what does this mean for providers who make their living helping others? According to Robert Bilotti, Managing Director at Novita, it means finding more collaborative and creative ways to help their clients. “If you want to stay in the picture amid shrinking budgets, your paradigm also needs to change. The days of bloated budget with little oversight are gone – if they ever existed.”

As an example, Bilotti cites how his company has changed the way they offer their onboarding services. “We still offer our full-service package to those who want us to do everything soup-to-nuts, but we’ve also rolled out what we call Springboard, which is a D.I.Y. Onboarding Bootcamp (www.novitaunique.com/files/onboarding.pdf). In it, we teach Human Resources and Training professionals how to build their own new employee program.” Bilotti explains that though some may want to do it themselves, they might not know how to go about it. So Novita starts them off and running. Bilotti says, “This is a low-cost alternative so that any size organization can have world-class onboarding – regardless of budget.”

Other providers are working with companies to build solutions that meet their needs, including if those needs change. Robert Watson, Marketing & Account Manager for Sencia Canada Ltd, says, “We’ve developed our Learning Content Management System (www.informetica.com) with a very ‘open’ architecture. In this way, the system truly becomes their own, without having to invest hundreds of thousands of dollars and employ additional IT personnel.” D.I.Y. LMS management.

Eric Bergquist, President of The Employment Vault, a Software as a Service (SaaS) company (www.theemploymentvault.com) that allows organizations to automate incoming employment verifications, hasn’t so much changed his company’s offering, but the way clients use the service has. “We’re seeing more employment verifications for temporary employees and contractors. So while using non-permanent employees is one way organizations are doing things more for themselves, there are still services necessary to do so, such as ours.”

In a more drastic response, some providers are shifting their efforts entirely to other industries; ones they feel offer more of an opportunity under the current economy and political environment – such as governments and their suppliers.

Such a move may not seem so radical when you consider that, when asked when the economy rebounds if they will go back to the way things used to be, 30% of respondents said ‘no’ they will continue using the D.I.Y. approach. And while 39% weren’t sure of the approach they will take, they revealed they will not be going back to business as usual. One respondent added, “Before using an outside vendor or contract supplier, we ask, ‘can we do it ourselves?’ The answer is sometimes yes and sometimes no. But we never used to ask.”

This may be a wake-up call to providers that the landscape has changed; in some ways permanently, but according to Bilotti, there is a silver lining. He says, “I think this has forced people to get back to basics, maybe shed some of the excess – which can be good. Companies may have narrowed their focus, but there will always be a call for providers who supply a needed service or expertise, and who provide good value while delivering results. The bottom line is, companies can’t do everything themselves, nor would they want to.”

If you’re like most franchisors, you make money when your franchisees make money. Which means every minute they are not focused on making money takes money away from you. Yet each new franchisee starts off with an inherent disadvantage and – what we call – a profitability gap. What’s that mean? It means that starting a new franchise is an overwhelming and – for many people – nerve-wracking experience. There are too many unknowns to list, and what might take a veteran franchisee X amount of time to do something, might take a new franchisee X times 10 amount of time to do the very same thing.

Think we’re exaggerating? Try this. You’re probably sitting at your desk. Look at your watch and time how long it takes you to pick up the phone and dial up a vendor that you do business with. Okay go… How long? Maybe five, ten seconds? Now imagine you are a new franchisee. Dialing that same person brings up several questions… what’s the number? Is there a directory somewhere? Do I need to dial a #9 first to make an outgoing call? Is this person located in the same time-zone as me or should I call later? Is this their direct number or do I need to ask for them? Who exactly is this person? What’s our relationship with them? Not so easy after all. It might take this person 30 second or more – three times as long as it took you! Now multiply this activity by the several hundred activities that a new franchisee must complete and you can begin to see how much time is ‘wasted’ and not spent on productive activities.

So how can you properly train your new franchisees, thus reducing the ‘profitability gap’? It starts by knowing your audience and presenting the information from their perspective, not the perspective of a veteran like yourself. It also means anticipating their needs, which is a little like trying to read their mind.

One advantage of working with an outside training firm to develop your new franchisee training is the firm’s ability to take an objective, detached approach. You might be too close to it. Many clients (before they become clients) say to us, “How can you develop training for our franchisees when you don’t know our business?” To which we respond, “Neither do your franchisees… yet.”

I was reading an article in the Chicago Tribune this morning about Ford and its hope that the new Taurus model will resonate with the American consumer. The goal was to do a better job of understanding what the American consumer wants and needs in a car? A better job? How – after 100+ plus years of making cars – does a company of this size and who spends hundreds of millions on R&D, NOT know their audience yet??

Forget tariffs, forget out-of-control union wages, Ford, GM & Chrysler all have the biggest home-court advantage of any industry and that is that people WANT to buy their products over the foreign competition. Made in America still means something and, often, people begrudgingly purchase products made abroad – simply because they are better. My father drove American for 30 years before he bought his first Nissan, and do you know what he said? Why didn’t I do this sooner? The car met his needs and wants.

My first reaction to the article was amazement. How could the carmakers be so out of touch? And then, as I often do, I tried to draw a comparison to my industry – training, and you know what? It’s the same thing. I can’t tell you how many times my firm gets hired to develop training for a company’s employees and the story the people in corporate HR tell me is vastly different than the story the actual employees tell me. How well do corporate training departments know their audience? Or what’s more, if they don’t know, how many of them are recognizing it and taking steps to correct the problem?

Believe it or not our clients are sometimes surprised when we say that – before we develop anything – we’ll want to speak to the people for whom the training will address. To me it seems an obvious part of any analysis – it’s something we do with every project. And more often than not, the scope of the project changes after we do.

I don’t feel qualified to fix Ford’s woes, but I do know that your training initiatives will be infinitely more successful if you spend the time figuring out what your employees need. Do it in surveys… do it in interviews… do it by allowing employees to contribute random ideas through some knowledge-sharing mechanism or social network, but do it. You have a home-court advantage with your employees. Don’t make them begrudgingly take part in your training.

I’ve talked before about how powerful knowledge sharing is and how cost-effective it can be to begin your efforts in this area. One simple way is something we all have used and benefited from… FAQs or Frequently Asked Questions. I’m sure you’ve seen them in product manuals, technical support sites, even sales literature and company web sites.

Why are they so powerful and why should you incorporate FAQs into your organization and learning? From the user standpoint, it’s a fast and easy way to get answers to commonly asked questions. It’s also “self service”, which means no wasted time waiting for someone to respond. From your standpoint, it’s an effective time-saver. Why answer the same question from 30 different people, when you can answer it once?

It’s also powerful in its reach – beyond the 30 people. If 30 people are asking the same question, there’s a good chance 300 people are thinking it, because we all know only a small fraction will take the time and effort to actually ask.

So how can you begin to harness the power of FAQs? First, you need the questions. That can be as simple as beginning to document questions as you receive them; giving priority to the number of times you get questions of a similar nature. Once you have your list, you need to post it (with the correct answers, of course!) somewhere for the masses to access. Bulletins that are sent out are fine. Intranets, web pages and learning ports (LMS) are even better. Finally, allow users to submit questions (and answers) of their own. Before you know it, you’ll have a robust user-driven knowledge exchange!

There are several ways to increase training effectiveness, retention and application, and it starts with the content of the training itself. It needs to be relevant. I know that sounds obvious but so many companies roll-out training (particularly training they bought “off-the-shelf”) that just doesn’t speak to the employees or their needs.

The easiest way to avoid this is to involve people inside your organization in the development of the training. These SME’s (subject matter experts) are a vital link between the users of the training and the developers of the training.

Secondly, “chunk” the training into “bit size” bits. Again, seems like a no-brainer, but too many companies try to fit as much training as they can into however long they’ve allocated because that’s “as much time as we can have people away from their jobs.”

There are alternatives. We recently developed a program for a client that was hour-long weekly sessions spread out over ten weeks. The retention and application shot up (as measured by assessments as well as business metrics) because it is much easier for people to apply one or two concepts per week rather than ten at once.

What this also does it makes the training more “reference-able.” Think about it… How many employees are going to leave a classroom with a binder bigger than their arm and ever open it again?! Not many. If it’s in smaller chunks, it can be posted somewhere and be more easily searched.

Thirdly, create reinforcements. For the same program above, we created an audio CD that each participant listened to in their truck (the audience for this particular training was a group of service technicians). The CD contained a track for each week, filled with “fellow” service technicians talking about how they successfully put the learning concepts into practice. Not only did this reinforce what was learned, but employees are always more apt to believe something is possible if they know their colleagues have done it – especially if they are hearing it right from them! The motivation factor of this is also unbelievable. People are competitive. They want to do as well or better than their peers.

The above is an example of knowledge sharing – our fourth technique. Employees helping other employees is one of the most powerful tools an organization can put into place – and not just for training. You have many, many bright and successful people working for your company, yet most times their “knowledge” stays with them – or worse, leaves the organization if they do. Become a knowledge-sharing company. You can start out small with internal email blasts and work your way up to a full-blown knowledge-sharing network or application. No matter what you do, the idea is the same: get employees communicating about their successes and failures!

Fifth… it’s been said before and it’s true (at least to some degree), managers are key to making training “stick”. They need to believe in it (or at least know about it! That happens more than you think, where managers don’t even realize their employees are being trained). Managers may not be – in my mind- the be-all-end-all that others make them out to be, but it’s important that they are trained first and then become champions of the ideas being presented.

Finally, no training is ever perfect, especially right out of the gate. You need to continuously revise and improve the training – based on feedback and assessments you gather. We normally try to build into a training program “touches” every three months that reinforce the concepts, measure the employees’ understanding and application, and gather feedback.

It goes without saying that all this is predicated on the training you put forth being of a high quality and professionalism. Easier said than done, I agree, but the effectiveness, retention and application depend on it.