Archive for category: Training methods

Having in mind that employee’s training is worth the investment, what to do next? 

You need to develop a training plan, with options for customization to match situations faced by your team members. The flexibility as well, allows you to better match the persons’ skills, experience and even the gaps among team members.  

Conventional or technology–based training, this is your choice, but the training solutions you will use has to keep the pace with changing market. When I say, changing I also include the fact that HR people and teams have front of them employees, colleagues with changing expectations, in phase with their lives and living styles. That’s maybe why, I naturally tend to use the word ‘learning’ over ‘training’… an interesting perspective to have 🙂

The leverage, companies have with an inspiring learning strategy can’t be neglected, there are so great benefits. Often underestimated, your asset is your people, and they have to be at the centre of your business strategy and not just a cost in your P&L. I know what you think when reading that but believe me I have met and discussed with many HR directors and CEOs in different industries. And unfortunately, many of them considered really HR and even employee’s fluctuations as simple figures at the bottom of their P&L. Once, I met the ‘frustrated’ HR director of a company with 7500 employees in CEE and 35% employee fluctuation who clearly said: ‘we have it booked in our P&L, the board take it as cost, but not as an issue to solve! ‘…. This is a reality, and this one was only few years ago.  

Imagine the cost of employee’s fluctuation!  

With one fewer worker: 

• Your company’s productivity slips.  
• Sales decline.  
• Your current staff members are required to work more hours.  
• Morale may suffer.  
• To find a replacement, you spend time screening and interviewing applicants.  
• Once you hire someone, you need to train that person.  

The cost of staff turnover adds up. Figures vary, but that is a heavy price to pay for not training your employees. 

Therefore, it is a key and priority focus to make sure your employees understand your company promise and visions. Often described as the company ‘WHY’. This concept developed by Simon Sinek was inspiring any strategies from HR, PR and sales we implemented in our company. I have to say that it helps to clarify why you do what you do, why employees work for you, and more than everything: it fosters a common and spontaneous team engagement for the benefit of the company. 

A book I highly recommend reading.

This concept, when used to explain the company DNA, core values, visions and business approach during talent onboarding sessions will decrease your fluctuation of the first hiring months. Because the ones who stay are the ones who match your company ‘WHY. 

With that approach which helps employees to better engage in the same direction you still need to be sure that every employee understands what their role is about. Mainly what their role is in every situation, every encounter, and every action making the company life. Your learning strategy will ensure your employees know how to deal with your targets whatever they are i.e. your company global vision, sales figures, product development, brand recognition etc… 

 

 

This is the typical example of a sales strategy between the companies which are able to increase concretely their sales after implement learning strategy and the others with minor or no success at all. 

Yes, of course the working environment, market pace, products or services have to be taken into account, but PEOPLE make the differences.  

So, you can help your sales team to build higher confidence in reaching higher expectations with short learning sessions, structured (see our blog Don’t be a bot! – here).  But keep in mind that learning is not about books memorization; it’s about listening to your clients, using complaints to train on issues resolution and delivering outstanding service in every encounter. Therefore, the key is how your employee understand and how they could exceed your client’s expectations, so you truly create the best client’s experience. 

For that when creating your micro-learning sessions. 

• Be the company ecosystem keeper and driver. It means your message content, the way you build your questions and speeches need to reflect your company core values, DNA, visions (explained above with the ‘WHY concept’). All that is possible thanks the technology–based learning solutions. 
• Help your employees to understand at first what your client’s expectations are.  
• Create experience. By themselves, employees can learn how to exceed client’s expectations and that is possible. Using communication methods, simulation-based scenario, your employees will experience to go out of their comfort zone, better manage their stress to face client’s meeting/calls. What a frustration to hear from salespersons that your client hasn’t answer to their emails. ‘Hey! Here, why you haven’t called the client? ‘ Any recalls of such experience?  
• Indirectly and naturally, they will learn how to exceed your client’s expectations, thus you truly create the best experience for them 
• Encourage your employees to resolve issue on the spot when possible. By experience, we all know that employees who are empowered are able to take action, to respond confidently and quickly to complaints or concerns (client, supplier or from team members) 
• With better understanding of client typologies, make your employee experience client’s side of business life. Include what their typical day is like, how and why they enter into discussion with your company, the business barriers they face and the reasons why they would choose your competition. 
• In addition to understand how to communicate, design learning sessions on listening and caring. The complaint diminishes in importance when someone listens, cares about the details and identifies an agreed upon plan of action. Simple to create role plays between your employees with the avatars of your eLearning solutions. 
• Show your employee that caring means as well to follow-up with your clients. You can include that as the last part of a learning session related to ‘problem solved’. Unfortunately, client follow-up is often associated by employees as ‘time consuming for nothing’.  Learning and experience will hopefully show them that, follow-up will help them to build a trustworthy client relationship.  
• Use lifelike descriptions in learning sessions, using different immerse environment, creating situations and even making the avatar acting with different personality types. 

Nowadays thanks to what technology offers the best in learning solutions, we are facing so great opportunities to make better, to improve and create employee’s true learning experience. 

 

All the best! 

Christophe Beaujard 

But how to train your team about change management or prepare them for ongoing changes when they are remotely managed? Take the advantages of VR micro-learning to turn it into an effective learning tool for inspirational change management learning sessions. 

When a change happens, we all react according to the very same pattern. See here the Kübler-Ross change curve. 

What varies is the time it takes to accept the change and the magnitude of the depression phase. 

Acceptance of the change remains the key focus of all persons who decide to implement and communicate about something new & impactful. Being aware of how to initiate the move will help you to implement or to support a major company transition. For that, micro-learning sessions could be a useful tool to have to reduce the gap between the shock and the acceptance of the change. Consequently, that will help to provide the most positive feeling possible to a maximum of employees at the same time toward the communication of a coming change. 

 

 

It’s all about communication. 

Communication strategy and the content itself of the communication you want to make, can be prepared using the different concept. It has to be built taken into account the personality types of your team. You can map the personality type of your team using different methods such as: and not limited to: 

• The DiSC® built upon the foundation of what William Moulton Marston identified as four primary emotions and associated behavioural responses. Those are Dominance | Influence | Steadiness  | Conscientiousness. Often explained and used associated with birds, animals or metaphors/things related to the concerned business or specific situations 
• Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI®) and its 16 personality types – very interesting method which allows to get a better understanding of how to communicate with team members according to team personality mapping and situations. 

Then to increase the chance of change acceptance, why it is interesting to investigate in creative solutions? 

Because: 

• it will generate positive energy within your team, organisation and company. 
• it will give opportunities to some of your people to embrace the change quickly and help others who would need some extra support: which also contributes to reinforce team spirit and team cohesion. 
• it reduces the inertia to implement changes and keeps brains available for other key topics rather than to fight against the change. 
• and above all, leaders need to keep their working environment safe and positive for their team members. This will help people to enjoy their working days. With a direct impact on an increase of loyalty and overall business growth. 

 

 

Creativity in everything you say and everything you do… 

A nice sentence to write, as it is like writing the first words of a long story on a white paper without borders 🙂 … but indeed it is a challenge to fulfil. We have to be business realistic and keep that creativity within the corporate guidelines, internal rules or simply based on higher management recommendations. 

But still, I strongly believe there is space for achieving the necessary creativity for successful change management training.  

1. The key is to keep your concept, whatever the method used, to SIMPLICITY and CLARITY. When communicating or more precisely when training about change management, this will help to better build people’s confidence in the topics. Doing so you avoid confusions, unclear statement, and additional worries on top of the ones initiated by the change itself.
2. To have effective communication when experiencing remote teams is definitely a challenge. When changes are concerned, the topics are critical and often complexed to approach even on a face-to-face meeting. With one or few team members, it is obviously better to keep it the usual online meeting, but still keeping in mind the overdose of online meetings.
3. Having a learning format with embraces team member’s engagement, and motivation to learn.  

Here in my opinion, the advantages of technology-based training can’t be challenged. And VR learning solutions, whatever the format, are the best to inject creativity into your strategy. The efficient of immersed base training has been case-study proved by many companies. And one major case-study was the one published by PWC US.

With enough means, financially and in terms of organisation, I would go for VR headset solutions. Nonetheless, it requires a bigger investment, a longer time of implementations mainly with the development of VR scenarios and environments.  

Alternatively, if the training strategy requires a fast, flexible and cost-effective deployment for any company scale, learning solutions on the mobile app. would be the best approach. 

So, if you want to be creative when writing your ideas on your white board, and to make in a pragmatic and safe way your learning strategy a factor of success, just remember: 

• Communication method 
• Creativity 
• VR learning on mobile

 

All the best! 

Christophe Beaujard 

You and we don’t want that to happen. So, let’s get some tips about e-learning implementation in companies to be sure to get all the e-learning benefits.

It was a time when it was simply SIMPLE, to just approach a colleague, or have a chat with an employee and be able to express the needs of training. During that kind of interactive meeting HR team had the opportunity to better assess and to interpret people’s needs through the conversations, body language, face expression… and spontaneity of reactions when exchanging ideas of new learning needs.  

All that was giving space for the colleagues, employees to feel safe in engaging in the learning process, understanding the outputs without feeling a top-down pressure, a must-to-do order. 

E-learning definitely changed that into a more formal way to approach learning needs i.e. receiving a push-notification or an email to register to a training session, with a direct impact on employee’s engagement to learning.  

According to a survey made by LO Magazine market research, a mere 20% of employees were willing to engage in e-learning sessions a few year ago. This is the painful percentage knowing that e-learning had been part of company digital transformation, involving a lot of changes and investments. 

One key change was for HR people to gain the e-learning culture to better understand how it works – here I don’t speak about features but how to approach and build contents which bring all the benefits e-learning could bring to their learning and development strategies. But, then they had to face a poor reality: remote workplaces, and e-learning participated to break that particular link HR people built over the years with the employees. That relationship or we could say true connection established when explaining the benefits of a training, face to face, listening to the employee’s reactions. 

And at the same time, employees lost the safety space they had for interaction when speaking about their needs for self-improvement, career path, skills to improve etc.  

No more buffers, direct e-requests for training, optimisation of training KPI, automatic training reminders… creating new employee feelings. Exactly the type of employee’s feeling against e-learning, HR professionals didn’t expect to generate. The feelings of employees to be always controlled, under pressure for achievement learning sessions on top of the daily business pressure… making them reluctant to achieve more in their learning engagement. 

 

 

I am not sure there is one unique solution to change that and to still take the benefits of the e-learning solutions.  

But I am sure that the experience of the lockdown brought us, somehow, an understanding of how to improve that kind of situation. 

At worldwide scale, a big number of companies lost part of their company DNA and team spirits just by keeping the old way of communicating, without highlights on people true needs facing that unprecedented situation. Then, another big number of companies, proved to take advantage of the e-learning tools to turn them as the right vehicle to keep cove values and key messages spread. This gives the advantages to interaction versus obligations i.e., interaction allowing more employee feedback, initiating ideas and creativity, versus the obligations to achieve courses. And one more approach for those latest group of companies, was and still has been to make the more inspiring connection (so seen as learning session still keeping the learning angle), and respectful of people needs, creating back the safety space employees need to engage. 

For any HR professionals, learning manager or company trainers, the experience viewed from the learner is therefore key to how to approach an effective way to implement employee learning and development strategy. 

It is not the way to say ‘yes’ to learner’s expectations to make this happening.

But to create the right cocktail between:

• The needs to have session KPI – so to have less but different KPIs than what they used to be, may help to unload the way learning sessions are presented and followed-up 
• The time dedicated for a learning session – shorter will be far better, bringing more flexible for people to arrange their time with the motivation to have more small sessions than one long. This is related as well to the information retention. See my blog ‘Small to achieve more: this is the secret of micro-learning’.
• Gamification as defined here. This could be achieved by the content itself, the format of the e-learning you use. 
• The novelty of the solutions you use…. Here it is not the point to spend more money, but it is to have an e-learning solution which is in line with what people have easily access to in their personal life in terms of technology and formats. This is even truer for millenniums but should be applied to all generation and genders of employees. For ones, it will be considered as normal, for others as inspirations, and for the latest as a challenge to take to move-on. 
• The mobility of the support. Don’t put more time to your employees front of their computer, give them this kind of freedom smartphone and tablets offer, it means flexibility of whenever wherever. 

Ready to take the challenge and get all the benefits of the e-learning solutions.

So, all the best to prepare your right cocktail? 

All the best! 

Christophe Beaujard 

Some chats at the coffee-machines, when it was still possible 🙁 , between learning developers and content designers, one said that’s how micro-learning was born few years ago.  

Learning experts motivated by some key facts bet on that move from classical e-learning sessions to micro-learning.  

But at that time, the ‘shape’ of micro-learning was not appealing enough for corporates, still engaged in heavy investments to implement classical LMS and e-learning solutions. Those solutions which were just digital versions of the typical classroom learning concept: too much information to digest (the feeling all trainees after sessions), too many data to follow-up, and all that during too long training sessions…  

All that built on past educational practices, established conventions, or assumptions about the learning process. 

This could explain why after a training session of several hours: 

• 42% is forgotten after only 20 minutes,  
• 66% is forgotten after 1 day,  
• 75% is forgotten within a week!! ¨ 

We are not machines! 🙂

But still most of corporates keep their approaches to learning… is it because micro-learning looked too small, too simple?? 🙂

So, what are those key facts that initiated the micro-learning concept? 

They go simply from how we are made or more precisely how we remember things, and also how our society is changing. 

 

1) Our brain 

Decades ago, people thought that it is because you are intelligent that you can learn!  

Neuroscience findings prove the opposite. Learning is effective improvement factors of our working intelligence, and how our brain works. 

And thanks to the development of neurosciences, big steps were made in the understanding of learning process, resulting of brain-based learning approach. 

Brain-based learning refers to how teaching and learning content are designed using the basic of how our brain works. And some of the key outputs in successful learning practise are a) shorter content b) frequent session c) interaction 

To make it simple without being a brain expert: we all know that it is far easier to remember one page of text and to remember the content of one page by repeating short learning sessions than to have a full book to read and to remember. 🙂

 

2) Our society 

Our society is changing or to be accurate: e-learning doesn’t fit to millennials’ ways of learning, not modern? 

New generation learners have grown with and are used to access to on-demand services, to have the choice of personalisation, to evolve in an informal environment. 

Great to create employers branding to catch millennium talents, to offer flexibility in their working environments, but how to keep them engaged in a learning strategy. 

And to approach efficient and qualitative learning, the findings show that micro-learning suits to our capacity and attention spans. 

 

Micro-learning means: 

• Shorter content. This is a convenient way to offer easy accessibility and flexibility to learners. Learners take control of their learning process setting their own pace and agendas. This is resulting in an increase of engagement. 
• Straight to the point! Formatting content to micro-learning pushes the trainers to rethink the way content is shared keeping the focus on what is relevant. Doing so, the chance of memory losses as mentioned earlier is reduced. It means higher retention conversion. 
• Quality learning. With the right focus on few topics only, making explanations relevant and limited to the topics, self-confidence in learning is increased together with more takeaways. 
• Cost savings and productivity increase 

Yes! this is how we could say: A learning solution which saves costs!  

 

 

According to experts like Ray Jimenez in his book 3-minute eLearning, short learning sessions which are the core of micro-learning, bring concrete operational savings for the companies. 

Indeed, development costs can be reduced by 50% and increase the speed of development by 300%. 

As mentioned by our client:  

‘’MindBox allows us to save time in managing learning sessions. When you are clear about the topic you want to train, creating a training session in Mindbox cloud-based platform takes a maximum of 30 minutes. It is also obvious that we make important savings in costs related to e-learning platforms, training room rent and our commuting time to train 500 employees in the region’’ – HR responsible for training 

Benefiting to both the company saving strategy and employee learning engagement, micro-learning brings the right balance. On a stand-alone solution or integrated to existing LMS or e-learning, micro-learning is not only a format to apply, but a learning culture to change and adapt… 

‘’We are not defining learning outcomes as retention, completion, coverage, certification or performance of some tasks while in the e-Learning process. Here, we define learning outcomes on the basis of how fast and how easily a learner is able to apply knowledge and skill to given tasks.’’ Ray Jimenez 

 

Christophe Beaujard 

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