What your employees really care about

What your employees really care about

A hefty bonus affixed to the last paycheck of the year may do wonders for employee productivity, but to really motivate your workforce, you may need to think a little harder about what your staff truly values. Doing so will help ensure that their interests are aligned with company goals, says Jay Lorsch, professor of human relations at Harvard Business School in Cambridge, Mass., and faculty chairman of the college's Executive Education Corporate Governance Series of classes (http://www.exed.hbs.edu/programs/).

"Individuals come into these jobs with certain motivational sets, and what you've really got to figure out is how to take advantage of those motivational qualities, and align [the motivations] to what you want [employees] to do for the firm," Lorsch says. To accomplish this, he says you need to start with a clear understanding of your workers. That could mean starting off with a personality assessment, but it also could simply mean having the kind of understanding that comes from regular interaction with employees.

Face time with workers can be kept casual, but it might help to keep a mental checklist of questions you'd like answered about them. "I think it's got to do with really listening to them in the broadest sense," Lorsch says. "Who are they? Why are they working there?" For example, he points out that beyond a fatter paycheck, a flexible schedule can be a motivator to a worker trying to balance home and work life. For others, the right motivation may be the opportunity to learn, he says. So, giving them assignments that keep them stimulated would be essential, and a tuition reimbursement program might even be worthwhile.

Once you know what really moves your workers to push themselves, they can more easily be motivated to meet company goals such as maintaining your corporate culture. Rewards can be established for those who exhibit the behavior, or work practices, the company has communicated as its ideal. "What people feel rewarded for will reinforce the culture," Lorsch says.

If you can't get employees to get to work on time, for example, try taking away all the reserved parking spots and make it first come, first served. Or, if being a "team player" is important to your company, make it one of the criteria formally evaluated each year in your workers' performance reviews. "If you're going to talk to people about the culture and teach the culture, you can't just talk it, you've got to live it."

Sourfce: INSIDE TRAINING – Training Magazine

The Good Part About It Being a Jungle Out There

The Good Part About It Being a Jungle Out There

For all those who have likened a co-worker to a snake, or couldn't help but picture their new parent company as a swarm of rapidly descending locusts, there's some heartening news. Though your fellow employees are often guilty of acting like the flying monkeys from the Wizard of Oz, there is much to learn by the jungle example when it comes to workforce management. Larry Dressler, president of Boulder, Colo.-based leadership and organization development company Blue Wing Consulting (www.bluewingconsulting.com) and author of the book Consensus through Conversation: How to Achieve High-Commitment Decisions, has culled a slew of management tips from his experiences in the Amazon rainforest.

The "jungle out there" has given the real thing a bad rap, but in actuality there's also a lot of cooperation going on in the wild, says Dressler, who lived in the Amazon for a year in 1994, and goes back periodically. "In rainforests, cooperation is rewarded," he points out. "When you walk into a tropical rainforest, you don't experience it as a place where species are competing, per se. You see a system of really diverse and very interdependent players." Dressler, who also operates Batavia, N.Y.-based One World Projects, a company devoted to bringing the crafts and goods of local Amazonians to market in the United States and Europe, says symbiosis is a way of life in the jungle. For example, he says a tree may produce a kind of sap that attracts a certain kind of ant, whose presence then protects the tree's bark from fungus and other kinds of insects that would harm it.

Similarly, workers can be taught a corporate culture that emphasizes cooperation rather than competition, Dressler says. "Biologists have found nature favors cooperative traits over competitive traits," he explains, "because cooperation takes less energy, so if you think about how organizations work, how much energy gets sapped up by [being territorial], by internal competition or by withholding information and resources?" To remedy the sense that workers are pegged against each other, Dressler recommends assigning them group projects that force them to collaborate to be successful. And so much the better if the teams draw workers from other business areas. "I'm a huge advocate of cross-functional conversations—not the usual suspects winding up in a room together to talk about new ways in which their disciplines, their resources and their goals could come together to create something entirely different than existed before when they operated independently."

Companies also can learn from the positive role played by change in the rainforest, Dressler says. "What we learn from nature is when we spend too much time in our comfort zone, we die," he says, explaining that the nearly constant environmental change of the rainforest forces species to adapt or die off. The same is true of the business world—organizations that don't adapt to changing times will eventually lose profitability, and employees who don't acquire new skills will find themselves out of work. For this reason, he says, employees should be challenged with new assignments that encourage them to acquire new competencies. "As a trainer, the thing I have to ask myself is, 'How do I create an impetus for people to be positively disturbed?' " he says.

One course Dressler and his team teaches, "Fierce Conversations," forces workers to constructively discuss touchy subjects. Instead of "role-play," he calls this "real play" because participants are asked to bring real situations to the table, such as a worker's dissatisfaction with her boss' micromanagement, or another employee's frustration with a co-worker who keeps falling through on group projects. Or, a worker might express his feeling that the business needs to change its approach to a particular challenge.

"If we don't have this constant tension moving us toward change," he says of the need for a dynamic corporate environment, "we're not growing."

Sourfce: INSIDE TRAINING – Training Magazine

working with SME

SME HELP

"One of the most difficult challenges I face is working efficiently with subject-matter experts (SMEs) to create online courses," says a reader. "I'm constantly trying to identify better ways to work with new SMEs, to motivate them, and to make their task of communicating the necessary content easier." Can others offer advice, insights, and/or tips regarding how to work effectively with SMEs?

Here's your advice:

"I spend a lot of time working with SMEs," says Paul Hart (paul.hart@dynamex.com). "I usually encounter reluctance to get involved; perhaps the individuals don't want to share what they know because they feel threatened, or they are too busy and don't see the value in making the effort to help."

To combat this, Hart takes a "holistic, three-pronged approach" when soliciting help from SMEs:

1. Be firm and clear regarding the reasons for the intrusion into their work life -- that is, to capture their skills and experience to train on processes and procedures; how their job impacts other teams in the organization; and how the organization will function better if everyone understands the role of others in the "big picture."

2. Offer an avenue for improvement. There may be disconnects in their current tasks, and you can help SMEs out by bringing their suggestions for improvement to those that can affect change. Training, remember, has a unique role in the organization: It can interface with many groups and bring them together.

3. Go for their ego! Massage SMEs' self-image ("but be subtle!") by explaining that they possess valuable information that the rest of the company needs to know.

"I find myself building communication bridges among many roles within the organization. In the end, everyone has a clearer understanding of how we work together to improve."

Hart is an instructional designer at Dynamex Inc., a courier and transportation company in Mississauga, Ontario, Canada.

FIVE KEYS

At Greg Friese's ( gfriese@eps411.com) company, five keys for engaging health-care SMEs to develop rapid e-learning include the following:

1. A shared vision about the content format, production process, and the SME’s role.

2. Templates, which serve as a map for the SME regarding how to develop the topic.

3. An asset library, which includes clip art, images, audio and video that can be inserted into the content.

4. An assigned spot in the process for the SME, which is depicted within a clear process map for the entire project.

5. Honoring time demands by engaging SMEs at one of three spots in the process, including content review and comment; expert interview; or content development.

www.elearningguild.com
Click on the above link to view a session Friese presented recently for the eLearning Guild Rapid E-learning Online Symposium. See session 701: "Engaging Healthcare SMEs to Deploy Rapid E-learning."

Friese is president of Emergency Preparedness Systems LLC in Plover, Wisc.

Source: Online Learning - www.vnulearning.com

WIKI WIKI: THE LEARNING LAB EXPERIMENT

WIKI WIKI: THE LEARNING LAB EXPERIMENT

Unable to join the Wiki clinic at Training magazine's Training Directors' Forum earlier this month in Palm Springs? No problem! You can still take part in the Wiki-Wiki Learning Lab Experiment.

In a keynote presentation at TDF, Bryan Chapman, a learning strategist at Brandon Hall Research in Sunnyvale, Calif., explained that a wiki is a group Web page were readers also become content contributors. In the onsite clinic at TDF, 20 participants built a group Wiki and added examples of training "best practices" to it -- either from their own company or from examples that were shared during conference sessions.

To view the Wiki and to add your own examples to it, visit http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Training_Best_Practices.

Chapman notes that there is a link in the introduction section where users can go to download instructions on how to edit the Wiki and add their own information. "Please note that this is work in progress," adds Chapman. "You may click on a topic, only to be taken directly into the Wiki editor. That's because the page doesn't exist yet. It's waiting for you to build out the content. The table of contents was built around the major Training Directors' Forum themes, but you can even add you own topics."

Source: Online Learning www.vnulearning.com

TRAINING ON PODS

TRAINING ON PODS

A reader delivers sales training to a group of approximately 130 sales and customer-service representatives and is considering using podcasting to broadcasting product-development updates, time-sensitive information, content that is subject to change, and other items. "If successful, we might even do a monthly 'radio talk show' broadcast focusing on items that are important to the field."

"Is anyone out there doing this in a corporate setting? If so, what are they using it for? What equipment are they using? Did they purchase a high-end system, or did they use freeware and an inexpensive microphone with their existing PC? What are their lessons learned/success stories?"

www.vnulearning.com/learninggroup/search/index_taxonomy.jsp
We ran responses to this query in our last issue. Here are more:

DON'T HIGHJACK YOUR CASTS

A number of sales organizations are podcasting successfully to their reps, including EMC, Xerox and Prentice Hall, says podcasting vendor Anders Gronstedt (anders@gronstedtgroup.com).

"The reason (podcasting) hasn't grown more (in popularity) is that many training organizations hijack this medium for time-shifted lectures, which is a sure route to failure."

The most successful podcasts, he says, are carefully crafted "edutainment" shows that sound more like talk-radio programs than training sessions. "The casts can be 'theater of the mind,' complete with field reports, exotic imaginary locales, humorous 'commercials,' inspirational vignettes and subtle spoofs on the competition. Some programs we custom-develop for sales organizations feature running themes, jokes and cliffhangers that make reps look forward to the next program."

Among his other tips?

• Don't take a course approach; make it a regular program.
• Don't hide podcasts in your learning management system (LMS); make them available on a blog to transform them into a two-way, listener-driven medium.
• Don't expect your reps to use their own players; give them each an iPod or other MP3 player.
• Don't put out audio books and other generic content; custom-develop the casts for your organization. "Generic off-the-shelf programs only work for generic off-the-shelf companies."

www.gronstedtgroup.com
Gronstedt is president of The Gronstedt Group Inc. in Broomfield, Colo. Prices for the firm's custom podcasts typically range from $1,000 to $3,000 for 30-minute programs.

PODCASTS GAINING GROUND

In the two years since Duke University pioneered the use of iPod learning, the medium has caught the imagination of both the academic and business sectors, says Mark Aberdour (markab@epic.co.uk).

"It has become clear that digital music players are being used by learners to listen to much more than just music, with spoken-word content becoming firmly established on the iPod. Education and learning have become common categories on Web sites such as Podcast.net, and many major universities have signed up to Apple’s iTunes University to deliver podcasts on everything from campus life and current affairs and events to faculty lectures and books. iPod learning is now widespread."

For sales and product training, Aberdour suggests considering personal digital assistant (PDA) delivery -- "particularly for product-knowledge topics where graphics and animations may add value. (Flash on PDA is coming on in leaps and bounds.)"

At Epic, where he works, Aberdour has seen the corporate world moving "enthusiastically" into the wider mobile learning space over the past 12 months, and the company has completed an increasing number of PDA and iPod learning projects for clients. "Some projects have been prototypes for clients evaluating new learning ideas and devices in their organizations; others are for wider rollouts where mobile devices already are well-established." Management, sales, product-knowledge and compliance content, he says, appear to lend themselves particularly well to PDA and iPod delivery.

Finally, some advice: If the reader wants podcasts to supplement his or her PC-based e-learning and instuctor-led training, a good deal of thought must go into achieving the right blend of content for each type of delivery. On the equipment side, the reader mentions wanting staff to record their own podcasts. "In my experience listening to (these) podcasts, the quality can be poor (e.g. low volume and muffled), but I will happily listen to a low-quality podcast if the content is thought-provoking and engaging." Development of some simple guidelines for staff to follow on effective audio-recording techniques, he says, should enable decent-quality podcasts with a fairly low-end kit.

Aberdour is a technical producer at Epic, a learning consulting company in Brighton, U.K.

Source: Online Learning www.vnulearning.com

Training Cuts Waste

John Wieland Training Cuts Waste
Atlanta-based homebuilder John Wieland Homes and Neighborhoods looked beyond its financial and accounting divisions to training when it wanted to control costs. The company began teaching financial management as part of its Signature Builder certification program. By teaching builders to avoid wasteful spending and control margins, Wieland's average margin per built home rose by 9 percent.

John Wieland Homes and Neighborhoods ranks #34 in the 2006 Training Top 100, Training magazine's annual ranking of organizations that excel at training and development.

Source : INSIDE TRAINING – Training Magazine

Must-See (Training) TV

Must-See (Training) TV

E-learning from home, or the office during a worker's spare time, is undoubtedly efficient, unless, of course, the employees in question lack the requisite computer skills. With the fast food/casual dining sector so heavily populated by recent immigrants, a good portion of whom are Hispanic, Minneapolis-based TV Trainer (http://tvtrainer.tv/), a company specializing in providing culturally targeted training via video and DVD, has come up with a New Hire Kit to speed up the transition to American work life.

The product, in the form of three DVDs and VHS cassettes, allows learning to occur from employees' TV sets, with no Internet connection or computer necessary. A handset with a remote control through which learners can interact with the programs is also included. Each New Hire Kit costs $399, "but we're assuming in quantity, they'll [the kits] get down to around $250 each," says Craig Evans, chief marketing officer and co-founder of TV Trainer. Besides its simplicity of use, the fact that the programs are viewed from the Latino living room may help with your company's future recruitment efforts, he explains. It is likely, Evans notes, that more than just the employee new to your payroll will be trained. Centering training in the heart of the household allows those surrounding him or her to get a positive introduction to U.S. work life. "We're not only training them. We're training their family, their relatives and neighbors who come over," Evans stresses.

There is a primer on safety and hygiene, focusing on sanitary do's and don'ts in the kitchen, for instance. "It's very important to set a precedent upfront that there's a difference between cleaning and sanitizing," Evans points out, "and what constitutes contamination, how long you should wash your hands and what you should do if you cut yourself."

Developed over the last year, the programs highlight the expectations workers will be faced with in their new job. In addition to a tutorial on work schedules and pay periods, the message is imparted that employees will be expected to keep themselves busy even after their assigned task has been completed. Workers learn it's OK to take the initiative, Evans says, and that's how they'll get ahead in their new country.

Source : INSIDE TRAINING – Training Magazine