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Growth Human Resources Personal Development

How to Tell the Difference Between Training that Is Frivolous and Training that Gets Results

Let’s take a look at two professional trainers. In today’s post, we’ll call them Joan and Jack.

How Joan and Jack Are Similar

Both Jack and Joan are energetic trainers who get their audiences laughing quickly. They will both do whatever it takes – using props or quacking or asking trainees to do silly things – to illustrate a concept or get them engaged. And when trainees leave at the end of the day, they feel energized and happy.

How Joan and Jack Are Different

A few weeks after training is over, the performance of the people who trained with Joan has really improved. The performance of the people who trained with Jack hasn’t. They quickly went back to “business as usual.”

In other words, Jack’s training is frivolous. Joan’s isn’t, because it gets results.

How to Avoid Wasting Money on Frivolous Training 

Define outcomes and make sure your trainer can reach them. Do you want your salespeople to contact 25% more new prospects? Do you want the people who deliver and install appliances for your store to give true “white glove” treatment to customers? Or do you want your hotel front-desk staff to delight guests with exceptional service?  Your trainer should explain his or her plans to break those processes down into individual steps and address them directly through training.

Help your trainer know who your trainees are. A good trainer will want to know about their ages, prior experience, educational level, current jobs, and all other factors that can be leveraged to engage them more fully in training.  A concerned trainer will also want to be aware of any factors that might cause them not to engage.

Work with your trainer to develop meaning metrics. If you work together to define what you will measure after training is completed, chances are good that your training will accomplish much more, because its goals are well defined.

Monitor sessions and make sure that training stays on track. If you are a company training director or a member of senior management, you might not want to attend sessions, because your presence could put a damper on trainees’ ability to relax and learn. If that is the case, ask a few trainees to check in with you at lunchtime or other breakpoints to tell you whether the trainer is hitting the benchmarks you created. If not, a quick check-in with the trainer can often get things back on track and avoid wasting time and money.

It’s All About Getting Your Money’s Worth and Getting Results 

If you are a training director who wants to record serious results from serious training, it’s important to work closely with professional trainers who don’t only entertain, but educate.  That’s the difference between training that’s frivolous and training that offers a good ROI on your investment.

About Evan Hackel

Evan Hackel is CEO of Tortal Training, a leading training development company, and principal and founder of Ingage Consulting. He is the host of Training Unleashed podcast, and author of the book Ingaging Leadership. Evan speaks on Seeking Excellence, Better Together, Ingaging Leadership, and Attitude is Everything. To hire Evan as a speaker, visit evanhackelspeaks.com and follow Evan on Twitter @ehackel.

Categories
Growth Leadership Personal Development Technology

Is Training Putting Your Company Data at Risk?

Data security has come a long way since December 2005, right? That was the month when somebody popped open a car trunk and stole a laptop that contained the records of 230,000 Ameriprise Financial customers.  Suddenly, data security became a big concern, executives heard the word “firewall” for the first time, and companies scrambled to protect themselves.

But how much has computer security really improved? You have to wonder. Only a few years ago, the records of 74,000 current and former Coca-Cola employees were compromised when laptops were stolen from company headquarters in Atlanta.

That’s really bad. But the most pressing question is, how secure is your company data? And because we are a training company, we need to ask . . .

Are your training platforms exposing your company to attacks from hackers?

It’s a troubling question, especially if you deliver training to employees in multiple locations:

Your trainees are logging onto Wi-Fi in Starbucks and other public places across the country. Does that expose you to risk?

You’ve got a powerful new distributed system that lets employees do their training on their smartphones. But is that safe? What if one of your trainees loses a phone? Does that put your company data at risk?

You maintain stringent security in company headquarters, but what’s going on in your regional offices? Can you be sure that laptops and workstations are secure? Remember the hard lesson that Coke learned when company laptops were lifted in Atlanta.

Proactive Steps to Take

It’s reassuring to know there are ways to make sure remote laptops, tablets and phones do not give hackers access to your company data. Here are some defenses to keep in mind:

Remember, the cloud can be a great defense. When your training materials reside in the cloud – in effect, on servers that are maintained by your training company, not by you in house – it is virtually impossible for hackers to use them as entry-points to get into your company’s servers or company records. And if your training modules are organized in separate “silos” so that trainees can access only one training area at a time, you have even more security.

Be sure that trainees are using two-step encrypted passwords to log into your system. “Two-step” means that each trainee must enter two individual credentials to start training – such as a username and a strong password that passes muster. “Encrypted” means that the username and password are “scrambled” so they cannot easily be copied over Wi-Fi or by remote hackers. Also, let trainees know that they are required to log off as soon as they complete different training units. That prevents phone thieves from stealing phones and having easy access to your training materials.

Make sure robust security protocols are being followed in all company locations. You know your company and its structure better than we do, so you know the obstacles you might be facing in this area.  To make sure that protocols are followed, you might have to deliver regular security training to divisional or regional supervisors. You might also need to have your training director take on the role of security officer by making sure that company security directives are being followed.

Prevention Is Better than Fixing a Breach

One certain thing is that it is much better to take preemptive steps to protect your security than it is to repair the damage after a breach has taken place. When selecting a training development company for distributed training, the best course is to choose one with the expertise to build security defense into your plans from day one.

About Evan Hackel

Evan Hackel is CEO of Tortal Training, a leading training development company, and principal and founder of Ingage Consulting. He is the host of Training Unleashed podcast, and author of the book Ingaging Leadership. Evan speaks on Seeking Excellence, Better Together, Ingaging Leadership, and Attitude is Everything. To hire Evan as a speaker, visit evanhackelspeaks.com and follow Evan on Twitter @ehackel.

Categories
Growth Human Resources Investing Leadership Personal Development

Are You Sure You’re Training the Right Things?

Not long ago a training consultant got a call from a sales manager who said, “We need sales training!”

The consultant answered, “Are you sure?”

The caller explained that some of their customer service reps were doing four times the volume of others. It had to be because they were better salespeople … right? So, they needed sales training!

The consultant agreed to help, but insisted on observing the company’s top performers to get a better understanding of what sales techniques they were using.

As it turned out, the top producers weren’t better salespeople at all, but rather had developed a more effective method for processing customer transactions. Once the consultant recognized that, it was easy to document their techniques and build short training interactions around them. The result was an almost instant uptick in sales across their entire customer service rep population.

The message? To get the results you want, you need to understand the reality of your situation. Here are some non-obvious, commonsense steps to help you do that and avoid wasting time and resources.

Step One: Get Real Information from the Right People

A modified version of DACUM (which stands for Developing a Curriculum) can be effectively used in situations like that one. DACUM, which was created by educators to design courses, analyzes what people really do and what they need to learn.

In stark contrast to getting only the leadership team or training department heads in a room, training designers should invite the “boots on the ground.” These are the top performers, the gurus, and the go-to people everyone in the organization knows and relies on. A facilitator leverages a process by which they can extrapolate all that delicious institutional or “tribal” knowledge that exists only in their heads.

Diversity of perspective is key here, so don’t be afraid to have a mix of people. Here’s a sample group:

The new person who really gets it! – That person on your team who’s been in a role for six months to a year and really seems to get it. He or she provides a fresh perspective.

The go-to person who has been there forever! – He or she can be described as having forgotten more about the job than most people will ever learn. They provide historical knowledge about how the role has changed over the years.

An adjacent collaborator role – Don’t be afraid to bring in someone who is not in the role, but “close” to it. This individual can provide an outsider’s perspective and bring knowledge and experience to a different role.

Key stakeholders – This group is essential because they need the results. They are often your champions who need to understand the process and often support your budget.

Step Two: Create an Occupational Definition – Prime their Minds!

Get everyone in the room focused on the role and get discussions about leadership, work ethic and good communication out of the way. You can use a simple quadrant matrix to document:

  • Reporting lines – Who does the role report to up, down and laterally.
  • Critical knowledge and skills – What specific skills are essential to doing the job well?
  • “Nice to have” abilities and traits – What type of person tends to perform well?
  • Learned but wasn’t taught – What were those “a-ha moments” your group had on the job?

Step Three: Define the Body of Knowledge for Peak Performance – The Meat and Potatoes!

A Duty/Task Matrix can be used to define the body of knowledge necessary to perform in the role. You only need some big post-it notes and sharpies. Get the information on the wall so everyone can see it. Put duties down the left, and tasks going across left to right. Here are the definitions and some examples:

  • Duties – This is a something that is top-of-mind for the role. It doesn’t have a beginning or an end. It is ever-present while on the job and usually ends in –ing. Some examples:

Restaurant Manager. Duty: Maintaining food safety

Automotive Maintenance Manager. Duty: Selling products and services

  • Tasks – These are processes or procedures that have a beginning and end. They usually can have a metric associated with them. These roles fulfill duties by repeatedly completing a series of tasks, usually four or more. A defined task requires an object, verb and qualifier. Some examples:

Restaurant Manager. Task: Wash hands properly

Automotive Maintenance Manager. Task: Write a customer-facing estimate

When you identify all the duties and the tasks required to fulfill a role, you’ve documented the entire body of knowledge used by your experts in the room. You’ve also just blown your LT away, because they had “no idea!” your people did all this stuff!

Step Four: Understand the Gaps and Criticality

Your Duty/Task Matrix stands before you and now you need to know where the information is and what tasks have the highest impact on performance. Here are steps to follow:

Draft a Gap Analysis – Go task by task. Where is it documented how to perform this task? In HR? Marketing? Sales? Ops? Or is it in one of your expert’s head? Has it been passed down over time? If it’s the latter, it’s a gap!

Consider criticality – Everything in your Duty/Task Matrix is important … but what’s most critical? Use a simple rubric and define the impact to the business, performance, individual or team upon failure. Ask the question: If the worker fails to perform this task, does anyone notice? Does it create some rework—possibly a lot? Will you lose a customer? Will someone get hurt?

Step Five: Build Your Plan

You now have all the information you need to build your plan. You know what the role looks like, contained in your Occupational Definition. You know the body of knowledge that needs to be learned, as described in your Duty/Task Matrix. You know what exists and what doesn’t, laid out in your Gap Analysis. And you know what information is critical to performance, as summarized in your Criticality Analysis.

You can build your Learning Maps for the role, from beginner to expert. You can start to design and develop training around the gaps that really impacts performance. You can map these duties and tasks to competencies and leverage them in cross-team training interactions, and make decisions on the right method for delivery

Now you are armed, much like a marketing department, with an analysis of your customer base and potential for results based on empirical data and not simply feelings. Now you can go to your LT with a plan that justifies a budget and will deliver results. Oh, and you’ve done it all in two days. Good luck!

Categories
Best Practices Growth Human Resources Leadership Skills Technology

How Gamification Can Alter Our Behavior

During this unique period of technology-driven transformation, the education sector has so far been slow to embrace the power of digital tools that can be used to accelerate learning. Spending time, energy and money protecting and defending conventional teaching methods only postpones the inevitable and keeps the transformative power of digital disruption, when used wisely, from taking training and education to a new level of success.  

The problem is that whether it’s a child in a classroom or an adult in a corporate training environment, the young and old have one thing in common. Our attention span is now officially lower than a goldfish now that external stimulation from digital, social and mobile access has reshaped our world.

Recent studies have shown that the average smartphone user checks their phone over 100 times a day. Checking any one of our four to five screens for emails, messages and notifications every few minutes is finally starting to take its toll on our ability to focus on a task at hand. This is forcing a dramatic rethink of how we can help people of all ages learn, comprehend and retain the knowledge they need to take their lives and careers to the next level. In a world littered with distractions, it seems that providing a dynamic, immersive, engaging and social experience is the key to accelerating learning.

One powerful way to accelerate learning for both business and education is to add gaming elements (gamification) to teaching and learning. Why gaming? When you play a game, you are not alone; there is a social element combined with a competitive element that forces you to both engage and concentrate, and that is a powerful combination if you want a student to learn something. It is also a way to make education and training fun as well as creating a personalized experience.

In the past I have written many articles about implementing gamification elements into learning, especially for younger students who grew up playing video games. In this article, I want to take a look at how gaming can be applied in a simple way to both change behavior and achieve goals—in this case, the success organizations are getting from the use of a simple wearable, the Fitbit activity tracker.

On its own, wearing a wristband that counts your daily steps is relatively simplistic, and some would even say uninspiring. But, when it comes to technology, it’s not the tool, it’s how we use it. In this case, by setting up internal contests within organizations that are not only competitive but also have prizes, in some cases as simple as virtual badges for walking a certain amount of miles a week, seems to create positive and healthy behavior changes. One large organization is currently having a competition for its employees to climb Mt. Everest in the steps they take and track their progress with their company-provided Fitbit. There is a virtual map that shows where each employee is along the journey. A major health benefit is that employees are losing weight, lowering their cholesterol levels, and some are getting off their medications to lower their blood sugar levels.  

I have also run across a few organizations that have taken this a step further by allowing employees to add friends to a leaderboard, and once again it’s all about snatching glory by rising to the top on a cold dark Wednesday evening that is helping both Fitbit and its users lose weight and achieve their performance targets.

Most of us are naturally competitive and can’t resist comparing ourselves to others. When a company hosts a walking competition and measures their employees’ performance and progress with a wearable activity tracker, it’s usually the “who will finish at the top of the leaderboard” aspect that typically captures the imagination of everyone involved.

The success of Fitbit alone is a testament to how this simple form of gamification has become very big business. Being assigned goals and then being rewarded for achieving them with a virtual badge or small prize illustrates how even this simplified principle can produce fantastic results in changing behavior. There is even an argument based on some early research that indicates momentary gratification from screen-based media can increase our visual-spatial intelligence.

Over the years we have been told that television and even calculators would make us stupid, so we shouldn’t be too surprised to see many pointing the finger of blame at technology again. It’s true that for many low-level jobs, employees no longer need to know how to add or subtract, much less multiply and divide, not to mention reading a map. Our smartphone can deliver answers almost before we even think about the question. In reality, technology is not stopping us from thinking, but it is changing the way in which we look for, process and retain information.

We might not want to admit it, but thriving on instant gratification and frequent rewards has almost become a way of life. As we drift from screen to screen on up to five devices, we shouldn’t be too surprised to learn how we increasingly need to visualize content to digest fully or comprehend subject matter.

I often hear people even likening their work experiences to that of a video game. Many find parallels with gaming characters by learning and mastering skills so they can “level up” in life just as they would in a video game. If these unconventional methods can engage audiences but also teach persistence and resilience, is that such a bad thing?

In this fast-paced digital world, classrooms often run the risk of feeling uninspired, dull and dare I say boring to students of any age. Engaging with users to provide a fun, personalized learning experience that is also interactive, game-like and competitive is the secret recipe to capturing our attention.

Gamification is often misunderstood or seen as either too complex to implement or just another gimmick. But these examples of using a simple form of gamification to accomplish a goal illustrates that it is possible to start small and learn to walk before you run. The next time you’re in a meeting, take a quick look around the room and notice how many already have wearable tech attached to their wrists as they discuss achieving fitness goals and even winning company competitions.

It is estimated that 13 million wearable activity tracking devices will be integrated into employee wellness programs by the end of 2018, and most will involve a competition to get increased engagement. Has your organization created a competition to achieve a group or individual goal by using a wearable like a Fitbit or Apple Watch yet?

Categories
Best Practices Entrepreneurship Management Marketing Personal Development

Why Your Elevator Pitch Still Matters

If you want to attract an investor, get a job, get a raise, or maybe even get a date: you’ve got to have an elevator pitch. Or, more accurately: The NEW Elevator Pitch.

Some might think of the elevator pitch as a throwback to a long-ago era, before technology became commonplace. And that’s true: the elevator platform has been replaced with the social platform.

While it’s true that you can swipe right to make a connection, that’s only the start of the conversation. An employer might be interested because of your LinkedIn profile. But sooner or later, someone is going to say,

So, tell me a little bit about yourself. What do you do?

The online conversation can only take you so far. According to this article in Harvard Business Review, over two-thirds of managers are uncomfortable communicating with employees. Are we losing the ability to have an effective conversation?

The need for a new kind of conversation has never been greater. The influx of technology is crippling our ability to interact, and that old-school “facetime” conversation is now stilted, awkward and uncomfortable. Why?

  • We still need to persuade others, and get them enrolled in new ideas
  • Investors still want to hear from you, personally, before they part with their money
  • Hiring the best and the brightest means being able to share your story quickly – clearly – concisely

When you want to persuade and influence the people that matter most (whether that’s your life partner or business partner), you’ve got to understand these key components of a new kind of conversation. That conversation is what I call the NEW Elevator Pitch.

  • If it doesn’t matter to your listener, it doesn’t matter: Have you ever met someone who can only talk about themselves? I know one guy who was out on a date and his conversation starter was, “So what have you heard about me?” Wow. Yikes. Ouch. And for entrepreneurs, the problem can be just as challenging: focusing on your business, without looking at the impact for the investor, is deadly. Sure, you’ve worked hard, and your life experiences make you who you are, but at the end of the day: what matters most? Is it your past…or your potential? Ultimately, you have to turn what you’ve done in the past into what you can do for others. Otherwise, what matters to you won’t matter much.
  • Create a “Tell Me More..”: If you want to know if you’ve got a great pitch, remember this: the best ‘pitch’ isn’t a pitch at all. It’s a conversation. A conversation that makes your listener say, “Tell me more.” Those three words – tell me more – let you know that you’ve started a dialogue. That’s how you know if someone is interested. And if you’re wondering, “What’s the opposite of ‘tell me more’?”, the answer is: “So what?”
  • Include an invitation: The NEW Elevator Pitch is a persuasive conversation. In other words, you want someone to take action. That means that just providing information isn’t enough. Information is everywhere. I know, because I just googled it. Information doesn’t always lead to action. Think about it: you know you shouldn’t eat that second donut. But there it is. Your knowledge can’t stop you from snarfing down that delicious chocolate covered donut. What is it that makes people want to take action? This video can tell you more, but basically: you’ve got to remember to include an invitation. An invitation that’s easy to say ‘yes’ to. An invitation that’s logical, simple and clear. If you don’t offer a next step, how can people know what action you hope to create? And more importantly, how can someone learn what kind of outcome you might be able to achieve, together?

 

You don’t need to be an entrepreneur to be in the market for a great pitch. You just have to have an idea worth sharing. All you need is a story to tell. You have ideas you want to share. The NEW Elevator Pitch can help you to deliver your message.

My question for you is: do you know how to bring your ideas to life?

For more resources that can help you to access your authentic story, take a look at my YouTube channel. And, if you would like some help with your pitch, don’t hesitate to reach out to me here.

New results could be just one conversation away.

 

About the Author

A coach to entrepreneurial leaders on four continents, Chris Westfall has helped transform brands across the globe. His clients have appeared on Shark Tank, Dragons Den in Canada and also Shark Tank – Australia. Recognized as the US NATIONAL ELEVATOR PITCH CHAMPION, he regularly provides guidance to C-Suite executives on powerful communication skills.  Follow him on twitter or Instagram, and check out over 200 videos on effective communication, via his YouTube Channel.