We’ve had wall-to-wall meetings this week with clients, discussing improving their training and I realized there were some common themes. I thought I’d jot them down before the weekend when… well… you know what happens when you have a brilliant thought on Friday and wait until Monday to write it down!

10 Strategies to Improve Your Training

#1: Respect people’s time. If you’re going to ask people to spend the time and (possible) money to attend a training session, it should go beyond valuable to indispensable. Use the in-person format wisely.

#2: Utilize online learning. This relates to #1. Using online learning wisely allows you to make the most of your in-person training. Remember, there are four different types of learning: information delivery, knowledge application, skill development and performance mastery. The appropriate delivery method is based on this plus the topic plus the learner’s style and aptitude.

#3: Invest in an LMS. There’s really no excuse not to have an LMS. There are too many good, inexpensive options out there right now not to have one. Seriously, this should be #1, #1a, #1b and #1d. It can be that important.

#4: Don’t overwhelm. You know why M&M’s are great? Okay, yes there’s the chocolate but it’s also because you can eat 5 or 50. They’re so small that you can decide how much you can handle. Same with training. Break it into itty-bitty bits. If people want more, than can always combine bits.

#5: Spread it out. Related to #4. Eating a whole bag of M&M’s in one sitting might make you sick (who’s up for some hands-on research?!). A person’s skills build, so should your training.

#6: Be holistic. I don’t mean eating tree bark to cure a cold. I mean develop a strategy for your training based on your employees’ needs and create a curriculum plan utilizing multiple delivery methods. Don’t slap together several workshops from outside experts and call it a day.

#7: Speaking of outside experts, how about inside experts? You will be amazed, shocked and stupefied by how much your people know, if you just ask them. Trust me on this.

#8: Social media. Yes, you’ve been told that social media can cure every ill that ails your company but in the case of training, it is a powerful tool. That doesn’t mean it needs to be complicated. Do you know what social media is? Knowledge Sharing. Do you know what knowledge sharing is? Bob has a problem. Julie has a solution. Julie tells Bob the solution. Done. I’ve seen it in action and it’s amazing.

#9: Pick your projects according to the cost vs benefit. Said another way, what’s going to give you the most bang for your buck. You don’t have an unlimited budget, right? So the training you offer has to be carefully chosen. There are a whole bunch of factors to determine this including: the number of learners, the impact of the training, the volume of information, the delivery method, etc.

#10: Training should not be fun. I always get grief when I say this, but being successful in business is hard work and so should training be. I think what people mean when they say this is… Training should not be boring, agree. Training should be useful and relevant, agree. Training should be engaging and experiential, agree. If this happens to be fun, fine, and there’s nothing wrong with some levity. But I don’t see a lot of medical students or law students giggling in class.

There’s of course more to it than this but small bits, right? No go buy some M&M’s (and no I’m not a paid endorser of the M&M/Mars company).

Many employers have lofty visions for their employees… they craft vision statements and values; they long for their employees to be “engaged” and “2.0″, and spend hours deliberating the company “culture” that each employee should display.

So then why are so many employees not engaged, 1.0, go against the culture, and fail to behave in accordance with the values?

Because too many employers play “catch up” with their employees – meaning they wait to communicate such guidelines (or simply never communicate them) until it’s too late and the employee has been there long enough that their bad behavior is set, and will take twice as long to change.

Imagine saying to an employee who has been at your company for three years, “You are not acting according to our values.” In many cases, the employee’s response? “What values?” or “I’ve been doing it this way all along.” It’s like trying to introduce wedding vows at a 3-yr anniversary. Chances are you’ll be unsuccessful (if the marriage even lasts that long!).

What’s an employer to do? It’s simple actually. Instead of trying to correct undesirable behavior after-the-fact, start the new employee out with the ideal behavior in the first place.

The reality is that all the buzzwords companies talk about today work better if they are instilled the first day the employee walks through the door, in what is known as the onboarding period. “Culture” begins at onboarding; “Engagement” begins at onboarding; “2.0″ only happens if your onboarding is 2.0.

Yet so many companies do a poor job of onboarding a new employee and – worse yet – set a precedence that projects the exact opposite image than what they are trying to. How can you expect an employee to behave “collaboratively” if you throw your new employee into his or her job with no collaboration.

We’ve worked with companies, improving the way they onboard new employees and invariably what we develop ends up benefiting existing employees as well, because no one took the time when they were new.

A study done in 2008* suggests that new employees of companies with highly-rated onboarding programs are:

- 52% more likely to understand the desired conduct of an employee.
- 95% more likely to feel part of a team.
- 48% more likely to feel a strong sense of commitment to the organization.
- 23% more likely to remain at the company after six months.

Next time you are considering an initiative whose goal is to change employees’ attitude or behavior, start fresh rather than playing catch-up! By first improving your onboarding, your employees will more consistently live your ideals because they’ve never known anything else. First impressions and precedence do mean that much.

For information on ways to improve your onboarding, shoot us a note at info@novitaunique.com.

* 2008 national study. Copyright Novita. All rights reserved.

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?

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.