Category: Training

I’m for any method or technology that increases learning effectiveness and can help organizations operate more productively, inclusively and legally. However, within the past two years or so, I’ve been hearing learning specialists say they’re driven to employ new technologies because that’s how millennial workers feel comfortable learning.

That’s where I have a problem. It’s not that I’m anti-technology or anti-millennial. My wife will tell you it would be a high risk adventure to try to pry me from my iPhone, iPad or laptop. And my children and other family members are millennials, or close to that generation, as well.

The problem is that how students, regardless of generation, want to learn may or may not align with methods most likely to help them absorb, retain and apply key principles. Letting students determine what delivery systems work best for them when there may be other more effective ways for them to master critical knowledge and applications is an abdication of leadership responsibility.

Imagine conversations like these:

• I want to be a surgeon but I don’t want to spend years watching others before I start handling operations on my own. I’d get bored. Let me view some procedures online, practice a few and then turn me loose. This is how I’ve always done my best work.
• I don’t have patience for reading or problem solving. Games work best for me. Let me go through as many online simulations as you have and then I’ll be ready to fly for the airline.
• I have a short attention span and I want to learn when I want to learn and when I need to learn. Give me some basic stuff, put me in the nuclear operator’s position and I’ll figure the rest out as I go along.

Of course, no one would take those conversations seriously. They’d be quickly dismissed and the student[s] would be advised to either learn in the manner determined by the organization or learn elsewhere.

Unfortunately, in the area of compliance and workplace behavioral issues, leaders talk about how they must deliver learning via new technologies to match the preferences of their workers without considering whether they will be effective in changing behaviors. As they do this, they are essentially saying these topics are of secondary importance as they’d never apply the same approach to the kind of knowledge transfers considered above.

When delivering learning on topics like compliance and workplace behavior, let’s first determine how important those topics really are. As far as possible, let the best way to learn drive decisions rather than learner preference.

Do you really want to be a passenger on the plane if the pilot’s learned his skills his own way? Probably not. Do you want your key business decisions made by individuals who’ve absorbed information the way they wanted to but not the way it was most likely to be effective? If your answer to that question is also no, then don’t give millennials and others what they want, give them what they need.

Dear On the Sidelines:

Developing a culture of success—one built on continuous learning and stronger customer relations—is admirable and necessary in today’s pressurized business climate. It certainly is an initiative HR is equipped to lead.

Start by making the business case to your management team that your HR group has what it takes to drive this culture change forward. Present your initiative in a way senior leaders will readily understand, using language and facts that resonate with business impact.

For instance, consider the following example of how to make your business case:

“Our turnover rate of 20 percent is twice the level of the industry average. At a replacement cost of $150,000 per employee, we are spending $15 million more than our competition to maintain our workforce levels at optimum capacity. We need to focus on engaging and retaining our valued employees through continuous learning and a ‘customer-first’ focus. What could we do with an additional $15 million that would delight our customers? The HR team recommends (insert solid ideas here).’ ” Get the picture?

Lay out the concrete objectives human resources wants to achieve. Start with bottom-line issues, build in the supporting detail and conclude with the expected business results.

Be prepared to succinctly explain the actions HR will take to make this culture change a reality. Ask senior leaders to support HR’s efforts, partnering with them to define and outline their specific role(s) in the culture change program. Build a timeline and define the anticipated outcomes.

Present your case in this context and you will gain the confidence of top management to spearhead needed and beneficial changes.

SOURCE: Sandi Edwards, senior vice president, AMA Enterprise, New York

LEARN MORE: Learning Needs to Be Simple Enough to Make It Stick

The information contained in this article is intended to provide useful information on the topic covered, but should not be construed as legal advice or a legal opinion. Also remember that state laws may differ from the federal law.

Dear All Ears:

You have made me think about my own three decades of work in this field, particularly in our own niche specialties of engagement and development. I find that reinforcement from the designer of the learning solution is critical. We do this with a variety of “sustainers” that are added to the solution itself. However, it doesn’t work if the client is not willing to add some teeth to the process and hold the participants accountable also.

If both of these are done, the chances increase that there will, in fact, be a return on investment in the learning.

It is a shame that human resources/training must do all of this simply to hold participants accountable for putting the training to use. Given all the pressures on learners these days and how full their plates are, it makes the old saying—paraphrasing here—”folks will do what is inspected, not just expected” easier to understand. That still seems to be case in these rushed times.

As to research materials: Calhoun Wick, Roy Pollock and Andrew Jefferson co-authored “The Six Disciplines of Breakthrough Learning: How to Turn Training and Development into Business Results.” It lays out (in great detail) a model for all the components of training design, including reinforcement.

SOURCE: Bev Kaye, Career Systems International, Scranton, Pennsylvania

LEARN MORE: Well-Trained Managers Can Curb Attrition.

The information contained in this article is intended to provide useful information on the topic covered, but should not be construed as legal advice or a legal opinion. Also remember that state laws may differ from the federal law.

I’m writing this blog as I sit in a cavernous auditorium with 14 other Georgia attorneys.

The lawyer in front of me is doing a crossword puzzle; the lawyer to his left is scanning her Kindle Fire. Several are sending emails; one’s reading a crime novel, another, a newspaper. One is soundly asleep.

The remaining three or four people are watching a panel of distinguished attorneys discuss regulatory issues via a live video feed. The presentation reminds me more of a college lecture than a professional seminar.

Most of us in this room are scrambling to complete our compulsory legal education hours for 2011. By the end of the day, we will have accrued six hours of course credit, half the number we need to maintain our deeply valued bar licenses.

Each of us paid $200 to attend this session, which is being delivered at 19 other sites. Assuming roughly the same turnout at each location, we will have collectively paid $60,000 and invested about 2,400 hours or so of time today, a solid work year for a productive attorney.

Just in Georgia, thousands of lawyers go through this drill every year. We’re like millions of employees who plant their bodies in front of a droning instructor, an online click-through course, or a remote broadcast needed to complete required programs and qualify for bonuses or perhaps even just remain employed.

This experience reinforces my belief that a lot of required training wastes money, time and attention. How much? I’m not sure.

But according to the American Society for Training & Development’s 2011 State of the Industry report, employers spent $171.5 billion on all employee learning and development in 2010. About 10 percent went for compliance and mandatory learning.

If even a small percentage of that training is ineffectively delivered, American businesses are wasting a massive amount of resources and missing vital opportunities to mitigate risk. Maybe part of the fault is with learners like me who find it difficult to pay attention to droning professionals. But those who require others to complete such training should bear responsibility of providing an opportunity that is meaningful and engaging.

I’ve spent the last hour wondering what would make this a better experience, cost less and help lawyers (or others going through similar training) actually apply the key principles more effectively on the job. Today’s lessons confirmed what I’ve thought for a while:

• Learning must apply to real responsibilities and risks rather than obscure, abstract contingencies.

• If learners need to absorb raw information, make it available in written form (online or hard copy). Have them document receipt. Follow up with periodic reminders and provide ways for them to ask questions and get answers. This will keep concepts alive better than a single yearly event.

• Figure out a few key themes for any lesson. Repeat them during the event and later so participants remember what’s most important.

• Skill and follow-up are needed to avoid and fix real compliance problems, not just legal or regulatory knowledge. Build learning sessions so participants observe and practice key behaviors rather than passively receive information.

• Keep learning alive after an initial event by providing participants with:

—Periodic reminders about key risks or main issues addressed in the training. It’s easy to forget danger signals and stay trapped in old ways of doing business. Reinforcement will help people maintain the new skills or processes you want them to be using.

—Handy demonstrations or simulations showing how to apply key skills.

Aren’t most of our key workplace lessons based on a few key principles that we’ve been taught and then had reinforced on the job? That’s how mandatory training should be designed, too.

Stephen Paskoff is a former EEOC trial attorney and the president and CEO of Atlanta-based ELI, Inc., which provides ethics and compliance training that helps many of the world’s leading organizations build and maintain inclusive, legal, productive and ethical workplaces. Paskoff can be contacted at info@eliinc.com.

I hadn’t seen my business colleague for a year. We met again recently for the same annual review we had in 2010.

He had worked all weekend and looked worn down. I asked him if he had a lot of year-end deals closing. The good news is that business has picked up. But a different deadline kept him in the office. As he did last December, he had to complete a library of compliance modules by mid-month to be eligible for his annual bonus. So he did.

I asked him what he recalled from last year’s courses. His quick, blunt answer: “Nothing.”

I asked him how it went this time. The answer: “No different.” However, this cycle he noted that the courses had recommended lengths and each one had a timer on the screen metering his progress from section to section. Someone could track how long he spent going through each course. If he raced through a program to finish fast, maybe his too-quick pace would stand out.

He realized he had three objectives: get through the curriculum, get his bonus, but not get in trouble. He and his friends figured out the solution: They started each module then minimized the screen. While the timer kept moving, they did a few other things, moved back to the course and then completed each section at their own pace while “honoring” the recommended time frame.

This may have helped him get his bonus and his employer, if needed, build part of a legal defense. As I’ve written elsewhere, this kind of learning design distorts the point of compliance programs which are intended to prevent, detect, and correct problems. Just this past year, we’ve seen the results of compliance breakdowns that failed to stop or uncover misdeeds or discoverable hazards.

In many instances, required tests, courses and forms proved as worthless as blank paper or, more currently, terabytes of unused storage capacity.

Within the past month or so, MF Global collapsed and billions of customer assets have disappeared. It’s possible that their funds, supposedly immune from diversion to cover institutional losses, were applied for that purpose.

Ananda Radhakrishanan, director of the division of Clearing and Intermediary Oversight at the Commodities Futures Trading Commission, responsible for monitoring MF Global, commented: “We can’t be at every firm overseeing every activity. We have to expect people to understand the rules and adhere to them.”

My colleague is a person of character, integrity and values. He doesn’t need to click through scores of screens to follow key standards he already knows and works by daily.

While he had motivation to complete his coursework, he lacked even a smoldering—much less a burning desire—to learn. Somewhere else, though, there are others who will get their bonuses after mindlessly but successfully clicking through module after module.

They’ll learn nothing—though they will have needed to—and dismiss what had been delivered, complicit in the true spirit in which their “training” had been presented. But what we really should be concerned about are organizations that subvert the purpose of compliance even unwittingly from getting things right to getting things done.

As Hamlet said, “Aye, there’s the rub,” for we will pay the price.

Stephen Paskoff is president and CEO of Atlanta-based ELI Inc., a provider of ethics and compliance learning solutions. He can be contacted at info@eliinc.com.

Dear Newbie:

Performance appraisals are a useful means to identify training and development needs for staff at all levels. There is actually a dual purpose to appraisals. The customary purpose is to have an equitable basis for rewarding effective performance that has occurred during the past year. The second purpose, however, has been increasingly important in light of the rapidly changing work competitive demands of an evolving marketplace. That purpose focuses on the future by leveraging employees’ strengths, addressing deficiencies in skills or knowledge, and most important, by guiding future individual and team development.

Most, if not all, performance appraisals have a section on individual development. However, experience suggests that these developmental actions are rarely tracked or followed up to ensure implementation.

Most appraisals will evaluate both what the employee contributed to the organization (e.g., accomplishment of work objectives) as well as how they accomplished that work. The “how” is often reflected in an organization’s competency model, which defines the factors required for effective performance in specific jobs or job families. Increasingly, organizations are using the same competencies to select, appraise and train. Quarterly or even monthly performance reviews, commonly used in sales positions, are now being used for other functions. More frequent performance appraisal allows managers and subordinates to track learning, changed behavior and development. It also allows for small “wins” to be recognized, which is important to help sustain behavior change.

Also, when an appraisal targets competencies an employee needs to be effective in a specific organization, job or job family, it helps to structure how people in that organization see themselves and others. The competencies are clearly defined, and corresponding behavioral statements that exemplify the skill are individually rated as well. These provide a picture of the employees’ strengths and learning needs on a scale of novice to expert. The more precisely defined these behaviors are, the more targeted the training that can be developed for addressing those needs.

Probably the best advantage of leveraging your appraisal process is that it already exists and is part of the regular management practice. It is also directly linked to job performance.

SOURCE: Jan Margolis, managing director, Applied Research Corp., Metuchen, New Jersey

LEARN MORE: Learning means little if it doesn’t result in the desired behavioral changes, writes author Stanton Heister.

The information contained in this article is intended to provide useful information on the topic covered, but should not be construed as legal advice or a legal opinion. Also remember that state laws may differ from the federal law.