by Brian Clark | Employee Engagement, engagement, performance management
It used to be a joke that if you had a job title change to ‘Special Projects’ you were headed out the back door of your employment. Maybe the joke still lives. However, I have met plenty of very talented problem solvers having a job title the same or similar to ‘Special Projects.’
This tactic requires a bit of a mind shift on the part of some leaders and managers who are wedded to the traditional job description without flexibility. It is time to re-consider how we structure work in our organisations to enable people to more fully utilise their skills, creativity, problem solving and decision making. How do we do this? Projects.
Projects is a big word with a huge spectrum of complexity. For the purposes of this tactic you can control the size, scale and complexity of projects based on your organisation and the people you have on your team. I like this definition of ‘project’ I found when I ‘Googled’ the word,
‘an individual or collaborative enterprise that is carefully planned to achieve a particular aim.’
People at all levels of your organisation can work on a project basis. My clients have struggled at times to structure a position into a project framework. This problem is commonly encountered with jobs involving repetition and reactive work; office administration, personal assistants, reception, manufacturing, warehousing etc. For these types of positions, I recommend looking at option 3 in the list below.
The entire job description is documented as projects –
- Full project descriptions, plans and resources
- Project titles/outcomes are included in the position description and the employee creates the project plan and resources
- Projects are added to the job description based on current skills or skills that are to be developed.
I have included a short list of some of the attributes and benefits to an organisation and its people when the project framework is applied to job descriptions.
- Provides a sense of personal responsibility to be accountable for project outcomes.
- Projects can enable employees in repetitious and/or reactive positions to have a ‘release valve’ to tap into their interests and develop their skills. This is definitely a boredom prevention strategy.
- There is less risk of ‘task’ and ‘focus’ drift with defined tasks, milestones and completion dates.
- Projects are conducive to manager – employee collaboration to address performance hurdles, roadblocks, training needs and other important relationship building interactivity between managers, supervisors and team members.
- Project methodology leaves less room for vagaries in an individual’s or team’s performance.
- Successful execution of projects creates positive momentum in a person’s career and often contributes to a greater sense of meaning about their work.
This tactic can be implemented in a pilot roll out for selected positions within your organisation or for new inductees. By implementing as a pilot you can devote some time to testing and evaluating new work flows, reporting and performance systems. The manager and supervisors impacted by this pilot will likely require some training and coaching to facilitate and support these changes.
If you have the opportunity you should check in with your ‘C’ level and/or senior management to learn how they structure their work. You should find that they are all outcomes focused and often their work plans are very close to project methodology. If this is the case you have a golden opportunity to garner support for this and other engagement tactics.
Would you like to explore this tactic in more detail? Get in touch and we can help you get a plan together.
by Brian Clark | crm, customer relationship management, DOTS LMS, internet marketing, Marketing, Performance, social marketing, social media, strategy
Based on a quick survey including some of our clients and other RTOs, the biggest issues facing these businesses are:
- Attracting and retaining high value clients.
- Managing AVETMISS and other compliance requirements.
- Managing staff and contractors.
These businesses use enormous resources to support administrative functions to manage and execute key business processes. Many are also facing enormous competitive pressures due to commoditisation of their products and services. Commoditisation is making it harder for many RTOs to differentiate themselves to prospective clients and increase their sales revenue.
Here is a short list of some solutions that we have implemented for clients and were found to be effective.
- Get very clear on your target market[s] and your ideal client profiles.
- Adjust your ‘messaging’ and communications to fit your market and ideal clients. One size does not fit all.
- Get some help with your internet marketing. Unless you have some spare time or a resource available to do this critical work. Internet marketing includes your website, social media, search engine and content marketing.
- Automate as many processes as possible. Our clients use DOTS LMS as a multi-faceted business management tool for compliance, client and staff management. You may already have the tools to do this effectively but have not leveraged them effectively.
- Use technology to personalise the client and learner experience. Our clients have the option of creating unique learning management environments for their corporate and government clients. You may not have the resources for a comprehensive LMS but you can still set up online resources for your clients that cost little or nothing depending upon your objectives.
- Start having regular meetings with staff and contractors on a team and individual level. Create an agenda and use these meetings to make sure you are touch with every element of your business. Regular one on one meetings with staff that review goals, performance and roadblock issues are much easier than one big performance appraisal every 6 – 12 months.
- Use technology to support your sales process from prospect to client stages. If you have a system use it well and if you do not have a system look for one that is easy to use and includes reports. This type of software does not need to be super expensive.
If you have any questions about these points or you are interested in exploring some ways to make your RTO more successful in 2014, you are welcome to get in touch using the contact details on this website.
by Brian Clark | capability, Innovation, Knowledge Management, learning and development, performance management, social media, strategy
In the spirit of the New Year and all the hoped for changes we have planned in our personal and working lives I thought about how some of our clients might be thinking of transforming their professional endeavours to a whole new level.
If 2013 went by quickly for you then there is little chance 2014 will be any different. We are living and working in environments that are changing so quickly that often we may not recognise change until it has already occurred. Organisations are facing challenges dealing with change both within their workforce and outside in the macro environment in which they compete.
I had a discussion with a CEO of a state based Association. He was lamenting the fall-off in memberships and the struggles they are having finding new ones. He indicated they are certainly not alone in facing these challenges. When you begin to analyse the issue you can see some of the reasons they are facing this predicament.
- The demographics of their membership are changing fast. The older members are retiring and the younger ones have not ‘grown up’ with a concept of what associations are or what they do. Similarly in organisations there may not be the loyalty or sense of deep commitment to an organisation ‘out of the box’ with younger workers.
- The associations are competing against so many other choices for spending time. It is harder and harder to get a person to come to a face to face sit down meeting after a hard day of work. Do workers want to take out a half or a full day to sit in a room for training? If the training is aligned with a personal interest or identified real benefit yes, if it is intangible or unidentified then no.
- People still want learning and development but they want it delivered more flexibly and not necessarily involving travel away from home. Most associations offer learning and development as a core service to their members but when was the last time they asked the members what they wanted? What they are interested in? Are there some courses of interest that have nothing to do with the association but are still of interest? The same goes in any organisation. The courses that fit in the budget are those that are typically aligned with a strategy or initiative or compliance requirement. Few companies consider other dimensions of their employees’ lives when considering interesting content to offer.
There are a few of these issues that could have at least some part of a resolution using technology.
What does this have to do with Learning and Development? Everything. The same challenges confronting my friend in his association faces business leaders across the board. How do you engage effectively with other people in a process of learning, development, collaboration and performance improvement? I believe this challenge is one that the Learning and Development Professional is ideally suited to address with the right resources.
Whether it is an association seeking members or an organisation seeking to attract and retain great people, these are some ideas I have about transforming L & D from a department to a catalyst for change.
It is one thing to have an LMS, it is altogether another to use the LMS platform to enable personal learning journeys. You need not cease the compliance management but you can add so much more to enable people to chart their own course to development. I believe feedback using surveys and personal assessment tools enable greater insight into how people are working together and making decisions.
Collaboration and knowledge sharing platforms can be so powerful to communication vision, ideas and best practices. Some of the systems I have seen are obviously imbued with fear as they have less than optimum levels of participation and even less honesty. There is plenty of ‘vanilla communication’ but nothing approaching open and frank sharing of ideas and concerns regardless of title and status.
The catalyst for change can include inviting other persons to contribute and participate from outside your organisation. The best examples I have seen of this include a focused approach that invites persons who have expertise or experience in topics of interest. Of course if your collaboration/communication system is healthy you can measure interest in certain topics.
There are business people, entrepreneurs, academics, physical and mental health professionals, and so many others that are out there right now contributing in the ‘social media universe.’ You can provide some amazing learning and networking opportunities for your people by inviting thought leaders into your organisation. I have seen this work with short webinars, PowerPoint presentations converted to e-learning content, informal and formal coaching and engaging via the normal platforms such as Google + and LinkedIn.
These are just some ideas I felt I had to write down after conversing with my friend. I meet so many learning and development professionals who demonstrate thought leadership, proactivity and innovation all the time. It is the wise CEO and executive team who encourage and promote learning as both a means of attaining competitive advantage and encouraging people to become the best they can be.
by Brian Clark | capability, competency frameworks, DOTS LMS, learning and development, learning management systems
This is a guest post by Cindy Pascale, CEO of Vado Inc.
As a teenager, my first job was working at a Dairy Queen making ice cream cones, sundaes and shakes. On my first day, my manager showed me how to make the famous DQ swirl that sits on top of all DQ cones. First, he showed me how to make a cone identifying all the minor movements that need to be made to create the perfect ice cream cone. Then he handed the controls to me. The first few were sloppy and lopsided. He told me to keep practicing and practicing until I got it. And I did. Within a short while, I was able to create the signature swirl.
Without giving it a name, my manager had me develop my skills to create the perfect DQ swirl by practicing and developing my skills on the job.
Most learning and development professionals can quickly recite these statistics “70% of development happens on the job; 20% through coaching and mentoring; and the final 10% through formal learning.” So this leads to the question, what are companies doing to develop their employees on the job?
Job skills are pretty easy to develop on the job. For instance, managers, technical trainers and front line leaders show employees how to run a piece of equipment. They then have their employees practice until they can run the equipment at the required level of productivity and quality requirements. Yet, in a recent study from the Towards Maturity Benchmark Study 2012 – 2013, they found that while 94% of learning and development leaders seek to speed up the application of learning back into the workplace, only 23% believe they achieve this.”
It is much harder, though, to develop employees’ soft skills through on the job application. That is why training and development leaders turn to Vado. Vado is the only off the shelf e-learning courseware that provides a step by step Implementation Guide to help the learner apply skills on the job to develop their behavior based competencies. The Implementation Guide helps the learner make the transition from the formal learning environment (the e-learning course), to application, by walking the learner through each step of the process to develop on the job and leverage the natural way a person develops.
Companies win because instead of having employees sit in an e-learning course for long periods of time, over 95% of the development time of Vado’s courses is the application on the job. The results are accomplishing two goals at one time: development while doing work that needs to be done.
You can get more information on the large range of modules available here. Request a full catalog of modules and a 3 month pilot by contacting us here.
by Brian Clark | competency frameworks, DOTS LMS, Innovation, learning management systems, LMS
The LMS is not often thought of as a platform directly supporting or driving innovation but it should be. There may be differences in how your LMS may support innovation based on what features it has, however I will offer some generic ideas that should be applicable to most LMS software.
- Set up a course catalog specifically for innovation content. There is plenty of off-the-shelf courseware on innovation but I encourage you to consider creating some ‘home-grown’ modules that align with your business specifically.
- Create a competency framework for innovation. You may wish to start with specific user populations but this framework can be extended throughout your organisation. Remember you may have different tiers to the competencies to ensure they are relevant to the person’s position and strategy horizon.
- Include the innovation competency framework[s] in the performance management process. When your competency frameworks are integrated with courseware and development planning this becomes a powerful tool to encourage innovation in your culture.
- Set up groups of users that are ‘outside’ the normal organisational structure. This works very well to encourage communities of practice and thought leaders. Ideally the groups will have content authoring permissions as well as other collaborative tools such as a wiki, discussion forum and blog. These can be external tools accessible via links in the LMS interface.
- If you have established some innovation processes using other platforms that capture ideas and include polling and commentary, link the platform to the LMS. I have seen specific software as well as more common tools such as Microsoft SharePoint and Citrix Podio. Most of these are very easy to link to and if you add access via the LMS interface you will have a learning support system operating in real time.
- Select some reports to measure innovation focused learning and collaboration in your LMS. You should measure the enrolments in your innovation courses, assessment results [if you use assessments], identify users with high and low participation, competency gap analysis based on the innovation frameworks, and others depending upon your system and your innovation objectives.
Innovation occurs in all parts of an organisation and all tiers of positions and job titles. When you introduce learning support for innovation you will go a long way toward breaking through the misconception that innovation is some ‘activity’ undertaken only by senior positions or positions focused on product development, marketing and so forth.
Please get in touch if you would like some more information on innovation and learning. I am also interested in hearing from persons who have integrated an LMS or other platform to support innovation.
