A solid, initial storyline helps establish key message points and a brand identity…without it, they are just parts of a whole with holes…

One of the best ways to open a dialogue with someone is to tell them a story. Stories that are created by one individual remain isolated to that individual until they are shared. Too often, companies believe that testimonials are the best way to market a product once it is on the market. While this helps, the company is relying on the credibility of some person in some small community who happened to share a few words, instead of the marketing team they are paying to work on a strategy. Executives can become frustrated if the product or service doesn’t sell.

Operators may focus their attention to other lines, other thoughts, or other concepts. Training may decide not to exhaust their training time and budget on something that doesn’t have clear message points. If a story doesn’t create clear message points, a behavior change will not occur. If a behavior change does not occur, your return is less than possible.

Start your story with the vision of the company or product. What does it represent? How can customers connect with the product? Research possibilities. Listen to the stories of internal and external partners to craft the meaning of the item. Key message points are just an outline or summary of your story. Both of these create and support your brand. Strong brands last because of the stories behind them.

Internal buy-in and understanding are signs of a good marketing strategy…

Our employees are our customers whether we like it or not. Whether we sell things employees need or sell only to specific agencies, if the employees buy into the packaging of the product, they can ensure our customers of its quality. If they do not, the product will not sell itself for an extended period of time, if at all. We can create the best device, software package, or process. Without the support of all of our partners, we just have a product.

Projections, for the most part are short-term, short-term in the respect to the life of the company. Storylines and key messages can be reinforced at a later time while new material is created to encourage buy-in and increase positive impact. Phased timelines allow for measures to be taken at key moments of the products lifecycle. These measures are based on the key messages and branding efforts that have been developed. Measurements should not be based on arbitrary satisfaction points as this would only provide satisfaction with the company not necessarily the product or service itself.


Strategy without values sway slightly as the breeze of change shifts with the expectations of solutions…

Improving on decisions is best for the company…

Leaders within an organization make decisions everyday, some good, some questionable. You are always told that if you do not support a decision once it is made, you are not a “team player.” If you are not considered a “team player,” your opportunities within the organization may decrease. It is OK to have an opinion, really. It is how you choose to share your opinion that becomes the challenge.

Deliver on the decision that has already been made, and do so to the best of your ability. Share your solution-oriented feedback. Increase awareness of the vision and importance of your organization with your teams and peers. Set the example. Understand that the solution you are supporting is just the first step in a successful business.

Executives or decision-makers in organizations may not have enough time or even enough information to plan the full implementation of a project. This is your opportunity to take ownership and improve on the decisions already made. This is your opportunity to demonstrate that you are there to deliver by reinforcing content, operating efficiently, and increasing awareness throughout your scope in the operation areas.


Solutions are just as liquid as the problems they are meant to dilute…

Reinforcing learning is the most important component to changing behavior…

On-the-job training and application is essential to understanding what needs to be accomplished for a role. In fact, adults learn effectively by doing. With on-the-job training, a skilled person shares his/her knowledge with an unskilled person within certain responsibilities. The results of this situation are positive in the short-term only if the person who shares the knowledge is available to consistently answer questions about the tasks needed to be accomplished.

As a leader, you will need to understand the resources available to you and your team. You will need to remind them of the importance of their tasks. You will need to reinforce the content within their training. Work with training and/or your communications teams to create job-aids or key messages to share with your staff at planned intervals after the initial training takes place. These resources should center on gaps identified in knowledge and skill assessments as well as application assessments.

This is the importance of each step within the evaluation process. Take part in and encourage your team to take part in all aspects of the measurement process. By supplying information to the training and marketing teams as well as your
executives, your job becomes easier. The executives will be able to adjust their expectations. The training team will be able to work on continuous learning projects rather than focusing on the get-them-in, get-them-out philosophy. The marketing team can share more of the story or reinforce the key messages about the item. This helps increase knowledge and enables you to lead your team rather than managing resources.

Agreement, if stated in a vacuum,
gets whirled around and dusty just like the rest of the debris..

Trainers are expert trainers….

Trainers know the content of their training enough to apply it effectively. They can tell you or any member of your staff why you conduct one process before another. Trainers can demonstrate the ideal patterns of usage for the content they train. They can also help reinforce the messages of the organization with you.

However, trainers are experts in training and learning. If you pull them to “help” the customers, who is helping your staff? Who is helping you? Customers always come first. However, by focusing on the numbers rather than the quality, you will negatively impact your customer satisfaction in the long run. Busy periods are the best times for the trainers and leaders to spend time with the staff to listen and learn about the flow of the process. Using your trainers to reinforce the content of training and how it connects to the business objectives and marketing plan can help you operate more efficiently. You build the skillset of your staff so that they can handle more customers, more effectively.

If you use trainers to act as expert front-line staff, you will watch the skills of the actual front-line staff decline and your customer satisfaction level out, and even begin to dip over time. You will also see your training quality decline over an even longer time
as your trainers become burned out. They will not consider themselves qualified trainers. They will, however, feel like glorified front-line staff. For those who enjoy the learning process, this will not be enough. Eventually, you will lose your best trainers because you didn’t respect them and the skills they bring. Remember, if you are not respecting your staff and your partners, your customers will eventually feel the same way.


Expertise is a funny creature…
it often disappears when another like beast enters the lair…

Customer satisfaction is key to increased profits…

You can serve customers through marketing, sales, and returns. Just because you tell people about your company, doesn’t mean that they will purchase your items or services. Just because your company sells products or services, doesn’t mean your clients will not return the item itself, or ask for their money to be returned. Ideally, the more customers that purchase your products, the higher your profits should climb. Higher sales, however, do not always equal customer satisfaction.

If you focus on delivering quality to your customers, they will help increase your profits. Word-of-mouth marketing is worth more than a 30 second spot in any major sporting event. In order to understand what your customers need, you should listen to your teams and reinforce their listening skills. When you listen to them, it demonstrates a positive behavior and encourages your team to do the same for the customers. These comments should be shared with partners in training and marketing.

Assessments measure knowledge of learners…

Knowledge and skill assessments should be based on the learning objectives for the class. The questions should be distributed proportionally across the learning objectives based on the percentage of content for each objective. The learning objectives themselves are best aligned with business objectives to determine the importance and priority of focus. The business objectives will need to be identified and developed prior to creating learning objectives.
Knowledge and skill assessments are a good source to measure what knowledge the participants have when they leave the learning environment. However, unless you conduct a pre-assessment, it can be difficult to determine if they learned it from the training or enter the class with the knowledge. Participants may not communicate their knowledge effectively in a pre-assessment even if they know the content, especially if the questions still need to be tested for construct (can the knowledge be used effectively) and criteria-related (is the knowledge being used by top performers) validity.

Application evaluations become more difficult when you try to educate a group who might be familiar with the content. How do you know when behaviors stem from a class or learning event you devised? How do you know that your content didn’t trigger an approach participants learned at an earlier stage in their careers? At times, we may not know if someone’s past experience aided him/her in understanding material better. All this should be taken into consideration before a level of competency, application, and ROI are calculated and set.

Optimal learning comes in different formats…

Needs assessments are almost a necessity these days in any training environment. Designers, analysts, and leaders can devise a plan to hold dialogue sessions, focus groups, or focused dialogues with specific questions around the topic at hand. This same group may also align the gaps identified within these sessions to the goals of the organization. They will even develop a class, a tool, or an event to address these gaps.

However, in order for optimal learning to occur, different formats must be created. Using the expertise of an instructional designer and possibly an analyst, you can determine which format is right for the initial training and what may be a better fit for follow-up sessions. You may determine that there are too many questions to be answered with an online resource and start with a classroom setting. However, as your population begins applying the learning, you can introduce a web-based class for reinforcement with various checks for understanding built into the tool.

Integrating a gap analysis approach into your delivery methods will help increase your ROI through connections made within the learning itself. This shows the importance of the events and the organization’s investment in the people rather than the product, service, or system. Integrated learning indicates an investment itself rather than a point in time.

Sometimes, when alignment is out of sorts, it creates all sorts of alternate sometimes…

Satisfaction results are summary points…

After a training class is complete, the first thing we need to do is examine the satisfaction surveys…or, at least that is what so many training professionals do. You may skip to the end and read the comments. Or, look at one particular question or set of questions to determine if your training was successful. This would be a daunting task for even the most mathematical minded among us.

Unless you can calculate correlations and build scattergrams in your head, understanding the success of your training based on quick glances at pieces of paper will probably not occur. What does happen, however, is that we create an imaginary summary and decide to change our approach and sometimes, even modify the content for the next class. This can be hazardous to your training and driving your positive ROI.

Remember to recognize the impact of your approach, delivery, and design. If training is changed constantly and the content shifts, you will lose the largest group of reinforcement you may have…the learners themselves. You may also create more work for yourself, as the job-aids will need to be different from class 1 to class 20. It is a good idea to conduct pilot classes and change content from there. Remember though to bring backthose people when the final class structure is set. Every time you change, you have to determine what influenced the change. Basic statistics can help with this. However, you will need to decide when to use it. Is it in the revision of the training for a new hire class? Or, is it within your reinforcement plan? The goal is to minimize impact and maximize application in this situation.

People ensure learning will be successful…

By aligning your training objectives to business objectives, you help fill gaps in content from a learning perspective. You can conduct multiple needs assessments and analyze the data until the cows come home…however, since most live in a city environment now, you may be analyzing an awful long time. You can even make sure the content aligns proportionally to the greatest and least need of your organization. This still will not ensure success. It only helps it along.

Learning is a challenging task and it takes people to make it work well. Sure, you can have online, web-based, PDA learning events, but someone, somewhere, has to put the event together. An even greater number of people are needed to hold things in place after participants engage in the learning. As adults, we have to link some importance to content before it replaces something else in our short-term or long-term memory. People, whether they are leaders, trainers, or executives, need to connect the dots for us after we attend a learning event by talking about how it relates to our everyday work.

We can look toward measurements to help integrate the learning experiences. Through satisfaction measurements, we are able to understand what marketing of the training needs to take place for the next group. Through knowledge assessments, we are able to revise or reinvent how content is delivered to a group after they attend the initial training so that we can build off of it. With Level 3 surveys, we can recognize the impact of our efforts and minimize the effect of work-arounds or lack of focus on our ROI.

Measuring what is not applied creates more work for those who are measuring…

Optimal learning comes in different formats…

Needs assessments are almost a necessity these days in any training environment. Designers, analysts, and leaders can devise a plan to hold dialogue sessions, focus groups, or focused dialogues with specific questions around the topic at hand. This same group may also align the gaps identified within these sessions to the goals of the organization. They will even develop a class, a tool, or an event to address these gaps.

However, in order for optimal learning to occur, different formats must be created. Using the expertise of an instructional designer and possibly an analyst, you can determine which format is right for the initial training and what may be a better fit for follow-up sessions. You may determine that there are too many questions to be answered with an online resource and start with a classroom setting. However, as your population begins applying the learning, you can introduce
a web-based class for reinforcement with various checks for understanding built into the tool.

Integrating a gap analysis approach into your delivery methods will help increase your ROI through connections made within the learning itself. This shows the importance of the events and the organization’s investment in the people rather than the product, service, or system. Integrated learning indicates an investment itself rather than a point in time.

Sometimes, when alignment is out of sorts, it creates all sorts of alternate sometimes…

Creating A Skill-Based Organization - Culture

Culture:
Culture will be impacted by a change itself. As the criteria and compensation change, so will the culture.

Progressing through Change:
The progression of a culture is determined by the ability of the organization to manage change effectively. In order to do so, the following items are recommended prior to implementation and even some points of development:

• Class for leadership on change management
• Discussions with leaders around impacts of change to the individuals, teams, and partnerships
• Class for leaders on communication
• Opportunities for the leaders to demonstrate the ability to adapt to change and lead their teams through change while managing resources

Initiating Continuous Learning:
While criteria for pay and employment may change, one piece should remain constant, the employees ability to learn. As the criteria expands to include skills outside the current expectations, new learning opportunities should be developed or researched in order to accommodate a continuous learning process. The following is a recommended path to facilitate this process (we are already headed here):

• Conduct a needs analysis of organization to determine:
  * Learning styles (Complete)
  * Commitment to organization (Complete)
  * Commitment to learning (In progress)
  * Desire of individuals to advance within organization (In progress)
• Provide a learning plan for each individual that covers the grouped competencies within each role
  Measure success of initial implementation through focus groups with specialists, leaders, leader-of-leaders, and executives.
• Share impact of set learning plan with organization
• Provide training and facilitated discussions to leaders helping them create individual learning plans for themselves. (This is a partnership between our organization and OD…OD started down this path during the last Leadership Summit.)
  Request leaders share plans with their teams and have individuals create plans using the leader plan as an example.
• All training/learning events and assessments should be tracked through a common system (i.e., OnTrack). This would include all new hire, reinforcement, and leader training events.
  * Naming conventions for classes are needed for each Competency and location
  * Responsibility for class creation, tracking, and reporting should be assigned to one member of the local teams and a global resource
  * Rosters for each class should be generated prior to class and closed within 48 hours of the event.

Compensation:
Compensation has a bigger impact on culture than it does on performance. Professional compensation analysts and Human Resource professionals, skilled in budgeting, research, and the current job market should be used to determine what will:

• Encourage applicants to apply
• Provide candidates the opportunity to advance
• Allow for the most effective labor budgeting to occur
• Increase internal transfers
• Decrease external attrition