by Brian Clark | capability, culture, Employee Engagement, engagement, learning and development
When you were taught how to swim did you experience the shock and awe of being forced to enter the water while consumed in fear? Or were you first coached on the pool deck and acclimated psychologically and physically for the inevitable entry into the unknown environment of a large body of water?
If you have been in the workforce for some years, chances are you have experienced the shock and awe and/or the coaching method of training and development. If you have been around as long as I have you have probably experienced both to differing degrees.
Training and development is not an optional tactic – it is a critical component to your engagement strategy. It demands its own structured strategy and measurements to ensure it is delivering results for your organization. The training and development starts on day one [or before] with an effective on-boarding program and continues thereafter in a roadmap of personal and professional development that enhances a person’s ability to contribute to the organization and grow as a human being. Lofty? You bet.
Here are a few prime elements that I have found contribute to a solid and effective training and development tactical component to your engagement strategy.
- There is a linkage between a person’s position or job title to at least one of their learning pathways. This is often compliance based.
- The learning and development has a mix of modalities and these do not need to be concurrent – they can occur at different times and for different purposes. For example:
- Quality online self paced learning programs.
- Webinars, seminars and discussion groups.
- Targeted coaching programs with agendas and feedback.
- Mentoring programs – particularly effective for succession planning.
- The business owners and/or leaders are engaged and committed to the learning and development activities in the organization.
- There is alignment between the organisation’s strategy and the learning and development programs down to the individual level.
- Learning activities of employees are visible to managers.
- Learning and development is included in the performance management strategy.
- Learning for personal development and interests is included in the offerings for all employees. [I cannot count how many clients initiate an LMS implementation with compliance and corporate learning the only pathways].
I realize I could go on and on with this list. Give me a call or email me and we can share some more ideas. If you are seeking some ideas or help in developing or implementing an engagement strategy, I can help you out.
by Brian Clark | Business Process, Knowledge Management, learning and development, performance support
Performance support is not instructor led or e-learning. Performance support is all about providing easy access to knowledge and information that people need to execute their roles. Performance support delivers information at the point of need. Performance support must support traditional learning but neither is a substitute for the other.
The case for performance support is being made globally. The competitive and environmental stressors facing organisations are varied and expanding in size and impacts. As most other competitive advantages decline and blur, people and teams are still primary to sustainable growth and success. If you understand the competitive advantages that learning and development can delivery then you will also understand increasing the pace and pertinence of shared knowledge in an organisation results in benefit flows within and outside the organisation.
Some key realised benefits in our clients who are in the process of a performance support implementation:
- faster response times to client help enquiries.
- higher productivity levels of all client facing teams.
- greater cross-team sharing of best practices.
- emergence of thought leaders within the organisation.
- less resources committed to instructor led training and issues with retention of information.
To further distinguish performance support there are three characteristics of performance support:
- Information is available within a ‘workflow’ and available with a minimum of navigation.
- The information is directly relevant by being contextual to the work being performed by the individual.
- The user accesses enough information to get the task done without too much information or opportunity for distraction.
Performance support may be digital or analog. There are plenty of examples of paper ‘ready reckoners’ or ‘quick start’ guides that qualify as performance support in an analog format. Paper based content tends to be less easily accessible and searched. The most common place you will find analog performance support material is pinned to a cubicle wall.
Digital performance support takes many different forms in different media across many different delivery channels. In many cases the content is accessed from a computer, tablet or mobile phone from a platform of some type; for example MicrosoftSharepoint, in application contextual support, Google sites, Salesforce Libraries, deep links to an LMS, OneDrive, Dropbox,Box, among many others. We have worked with all of these tools as well as some more social style channels includingHootsuite, Yammer, Lync etc.
Performance support needs a change program to be successful. A learning culture must not only exist in the organisation but a shift to adopt performance support changes the way information is shared and sourced. Performance support demands a self serve, self reliant mind set removes any anxiety around finding the right information and applying it quickly. There are always those that prefer asking a question to solve a problem over sourcing an answer via search.
There are some key planning measures that are critical to success, among these are:
- Understand the different ways people learn and catering for this diversity.
- Ensure the means of accessing information is simple.
- Choose simple, easy to use technology platforms.
- Use search technology.
- Your content must be fit for purpose; fast to read and easy to comprehend.
- Performance support requires ongoing commitment and administration.
by Brian Clark | capability, competency frameworks, learning and development, performance management
9 Tips for Improving Performance Management
1. Performance management is a process and not an event. Include performance management in one-to-one meetings between managers and employees throughout the year. This can include discussions on barriers to execution, lack of clarity on projects/tasks, resource availability, learning opportunities among many others.
2. Create easy to use and easy to understand performance appraisal forms whether they are online or paper based. I have seen some that include scoring formulas and ranking scales that are way too complicated.
3. Ensure there is ‘line of sight’ between an individual’s goals and the organisation’s strategy.
4. Offer coaching and interpersonal communication skills development to managers who may need this training to conduct better performance appraisals and strengthen interpersonal relationships.
5. Include competencies in the appraisal as one means of structuring development plans.
6. There must be follow up actions from the performance appraisals. Too often appraisals are filed away never to be seen again.
7. Ensure the whole performance management processes are on the radar of the management team. Performance management should be a regular topic in meeting agendas dealing with organisational health, succession planning, tactical and strategic decision making.
8. Perform some quality control by undertaking interviews with selected employees to gain feedback on how satisfied they are with the performance management process. Look for some common feedback and ask some good questions to learn how the process can be improved.
9. Your performance appraisal process should include at least one face-to-face meeting with the manager and employee present. At the very least this could be an online meeting with cameras turned on. Believe it or not, I have worked with one company that had a performance appraisal process that only included inputs from the manager and employee entered separately.
Performance management has had a bad reputation for too long based on lousy design, planning and execution. I think the term ‘performance management’ is pretty bad as well but at this point it is a commonly understood term. When done well, performance management can be a positive contributor to organisational health and employee engagement. If you are interested in more information and ideas on how to make your performance management processes more effective then you can get in touch and we will help you out. performance management processes more effective then you can get in touch and we will help you out.
by Brian Clark | e-learning, learning and development, LMS, Webinars
All of our clients are receiving invitations to our first round of v11 webinars to help showcase our latest version of DOTS LMS. There is a lot to show and we will follow up this first round of webinars with focused sessions for each of our existing clients and the new clients coming on board in the next few months. Our growth this year will be topped off with our v11 release and helping our clients leverage new features and tools to further improve organisational performance with learning, compliance, performance support and management. It has been a big year so far for DOTS Talent Solutions with expansion into new industry sectors not previously represented in our client community. We hope to foster even more collaboration among our clients during our v11 roll-out.
If you are one of our clients and have not received one of our invitations, please get in touch with us.
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.
