by Brian Clark | culture, leadership
Leading remote employees is now a fact of life. Over 80% of teams and 90% of projects have at least one member not physically located with the rest of the group. In addition, a recent study from GlobalWorkplaceAnalytics.com showed that the number of employees who telecommute more than one day per week increased over 79% from 2005 to 2014.
While the principles of effective leadership and team management haven’t changed, maintaining peak performance and keeping employees engaged when separated by miles, time zones and culture is a tall task for any manager or organization.
Let’s be honest—leadership of others is already hard enough when they are down the hall or on the shop floor. When you add in the challenges of them being remote, it gets harder—and more stressful.
- How do we communicate successfully?
- How can we make meetings (that are already painful in person), work using technology?
- How do we build the relationships and trust with the team—and help them do that between each other?
- How do we present ideas, change and more at a distance?
- How do we coach and give feedback successfully?
- How do we deal with the unknowns? After all, we can’t see what they are doing, how they are doing it and if they are ever working?
If have ever struggled with even one of these questions, you know what we mean. Leadership is hard…doing it remotely is even harder. We have partnered with the Remote Leadership team to create bite sized e-learning courses that build the skills needed to successfully lead and manage a virtual team. With 18 courses, covering six topic areas, remote leaders now have the tools they need to be successful leaders, no matter where their employees work in the world.
To get a copy of our latest e-learning catalogue email us.
by Brian Clark | 70:20:10, capability, development, e-learning, learning and development
Here is a list of the five best practices e-learning courseware design elements, that when used together, can help your learners make the transition from the formal e-learning space to application on the job—thus moving you closer to achieving 70:20:10 in your learning mix.
Specific Instructions
Rather than rely on simulations or exercises in your courses or workshops, which is still part of the 10%, provide the learner with step by step instructions on how to apply the course on the job.
This will eliminate the issue that David V. Day mentioned in his article about “happenstance and ad hoc at best.” The structure and guidance on how to handle the situation is provided—nothing is left to chance. The learner will know exactly what to do.
Keep Courses Short
Most e-learning courses tackle more than one topic. Here is an example, communication skills training. Communication skills training covers numerous topics ranging from listening skills to non-verbal communication skills to knowing your audience and so on.
Instead of one long communication course, an alternative training method would be to provide short courses also known as micro-learning, chunked learning, or bite sized learning.
They all mean the same thing: learning content that is broken down into small bite sized chunks or one single learning topic or learning objective per course.
This allows the learner to select the exact course to meet individual need at the time of need. When too many topics are addressed at the same time, the learner wastes time getting to the point in the course that applies to their particular need.
Employees and leaders have no patience for wading through information, thus wasting their time. This can lead to low e-learning course utilization.
Job Aids
Provide the learner with job aids they can use on the job in conjunction with the step by step instructions.
Job Aids make it easy for the learner to complete the exercise. Removing barriers to completing the exercise will help your learners start and finish the on-the-job exercise.
Mobile
To help your learner complete the instructions on the job, in an actual work situation, the learning content needs to be able to be accessed on a hand held device.
Each step that the learner needs to go through to access the information acts as a barrier. Eliminate as many of them as possible.
Self Assessment
Most e-learning courses end with a quiz that measures knowledge acquisition. This is appropriate in formal training.
However, if you are designing courses that provide structure for the 70%, add an assessment that asks the learner to reflect on his/her experience and the skill building activities after the step by step instructions.
As Charles Jennings suggests, this is an important component to learning in the 70%.
David Patterson, a director of Learning Light, which owns the E-Learning Center and provides advice and help to organizations using e-learning and learning technologies to improve their business performance, explained:
“It’s now well accepted—and research shows—that 70% of development happens on the job, 20% happens through coaching and mentoring, and the last 10% comes through formal learning, including e-learning and instructor-led workshops.”
“Vado’s courses are the only off-the-shelf courseware that helps learners to make the transition from the formal learning environment to applying that learning on the job.”
He continued, “Basically, Vado not only espouses the 70:20:10 model but its e-learning courses embody the model’s principles, using the 10% to deliver the 70% and thus, make the learners and the organizations they work for more productive and profitable.”
Incorporate the Best Practices
Combine these five design elements to create e-learning courseware that will help the learner apply on the job to….
- Leverage the natural way a person develops
- Provide structure to the 70%
- Lower your training and development costs
- Increase personal performance
- Increase organizational performance
70:20:10 in Action
To see an employee soft skill development or management development course created using the five design elements listed above, contact us and we will give you a demonstration.
by Brian Clark | DOTS LMS, DOTS webinar
Join us for our first webinar of 2015. These webinars are offered monthly on a range of topics to help you get the most out of your DOTS LMS.
Webinar Invitation for Tuesday 24 February:
12.00 pm AEDT (Sydney, Melbourne, Canberra)
11.30 am ACST (Adelaide)
11.00 am AEST (Brisbane)
9.00 am AWST (Perth)
Is your organisational structure accurately reflected in your DOTS LMS?
Do you need to update your organisation structure and user data?
Join us for our first webinar in 2015.
We are going to show you how you can update your organisational structure and update your users and the process to minimise any data integrity issues and risk.
Our webinar will show you:
• The benefits having an organisational structure to manage your users
• How to know what you may need to change based on 2 scenarios –
o I just need to add a couple of departments and move some users around
o I need to start from scratch because “it’s a mess”
• What other considerations you need know before you get started
• How to minimise any data integrity issues and risk prior to performing any actions
We are focused on helping you get the most out of the DOTS LMS. We know how hard it is to juggle the demands of your position as well as knowing all the features and tools in DOTS. We are giving you an opportunity to take 60 minutes out of your day to learn and refresh your knowledge in using DOTS LMS.
This webinar is hosted Kathleen Bosworth.
Block out one hour in your calendar on Tuesday 24 February.
You may have received an email invitation with registration details. If not, please contact our office on 1300 726 708 [Int’l +61 7 3220 2229]
After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the webinar.
by Brian Clark | Employee Engagement
There is a case to be made that this final tactic is the most important. Feedback is critical to employee engagement, yet for some reason feedback is often done so poorly it is harmful if it is done at all. I take a broad brush to defining feedback.
Feedback is collaborative, open, honest, recorded and linked to further actions. Feedback can be ad-hoc/informal or more formal in scheduled meetings with agendas. I have listed some forms that feedback may take and how they are implemented in an organisation.
Performance appraisals and reviews are the most common formal means of delivering feedback. Performance appraisals are often despised by both managers and employees. Some appraisals are complicated with scoring schema, formulae, and complex questions. Whether electronic or paper based, appraisal completion rates in some companies may be as low as 30%. If there is no follow up or corrective action taken this form of feedback, performance appraisals destroy engagement and culture.
Annual performance appraisals are not sufficient as an effective feedback mechanism. You either increase the frequency of the appraisals or implement the next tactic; weekly review meetings.
Weekly individual and team meetings are one of the key planks to my recommendations to improve productivity and execution. I recommend using an agenda, note taking and next action lists linked to workflow management tools. These meetings should also include project teams. I recommend the managers conduct the meetings on a set weekly schedule. Here are some ideas for an agenda:
- Ideally each person is working on tasks and projects aligned with the organisational strategy, [line of sight].
- Each person updates on the progress towards completion of their tasks and objectives.
- Next actions are identified for each tasks and projects.
- Priorities can be assessed and adjusted as needed.
- The manager asks each person for feedback.
- Each person has the opportunity to request help from the manager in removing ‘roadblocks’ to progress.
Some attributes of effective feedback:
- Feedback must be delivered for both positive and negative events and behaviours.
- The feedback must be honest and truthful. It should never be cloaked in politics or other agendas.
- Make sure your feedback is consistent and continual. It must be part of the managers’ modus operandi.
- Feedback should be conversational and not a monologue one way delivery.
- The manager should invite feedback from the employee and make the session reciprocal.
- Timeliness is essential. Delivery of feedback should be as close as possible to the subject of the feedback.
- In these days of global workforces, face to face feedback is not always possible. Although it may feel uncomfortable at first, use video calls to get as close as possible to a face to face conversation.
If you would like to explore some options for building and sustaining a ‘feedback culture’ please get in touch.
by Brian Clark | Employee Engagement, engagement, performance management, Uncategorized
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.
