Month: February 2015

Learning that Lasts: The Three Secrets to High ROI Training

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You believe in developing your employees.  You know that investment in annual training is the right thing to do. But you’re not seeing the change you want.  The vision of a healthy, high performing company still seems far off.

Jim Franks, Strategic Advisor/Coach for Alber Enterprise Center

Jim Franks, Strategic Advisor/Coach for Alber Enterprise Center

We’ve all experienced this.  “The workshop was great.”  “The speaker was engaging.”  You leave with a feeling of exhilaration that things are really going to change this time.  But after a few weeks you realize that things are back to the way they were before the workshop.

To address this very common problem, let’s discuss two things: 1) Why it happens and 2) What to do about it.  

Why training doesn’t stick

We are creatures of habit.  Our habits are engrained with years (sometimes decades) of repeated behaviors that have worked for us.  The conventional wisdom is that it takes three months to change a good habit and six months to change a bad one.  Change is not automatic.  Here’s the good news.  We all have the potential to change – even radical change.

Unless we constantly reinforce new skills over 3-6 months it is unlikely that the change will stick.  There needs to be a way to reinforce the desired change on a regular basis.

We are surrounded by others who are also creatures of habit.  When we come back from a workshop, ready to change, others around us are used to the old way of doing things.  They naturally resist change and impact you by virtue of their close proximity.  They will act in ways that reinforce the old habits.

These influences (your own habits and others), make up the culture of your organization.  Changing that culture begins with you.  You must intentionally persevere against this inertia until the change becomes permanent.

So how do you do this?  What follows are the three secrets to permanent change and finally getting a high ROI on your training investment.

How to drive permanent change

Start at the top.  The first key to getting a high ROI on your training is to get the buy-in and application by your senior executive team.  Otherwise the initiative will go into the category of the latest workshop of the month.  Here are some tips for executive involvement:

  • Have them kick it off with a strong statement of its importance.
  • Actions are more powerful than words. If it truly is important then they will take the time to attend.
  • There is nothing more powerful than a senior executive admitting how they are learning and growing based on the new approach learned from the workshop.

Follow-up coaching.  Visibility and examples from the top are key, but not the whole story of a successful implementation.  Each employee must have someone to remind him or her of the need to apply the new approach regularly.  This is where coaching comes in. This is the secret sauce that makes it really stick.

Over the past decade, professional coaching has quietly become the state-of-the-art method to develop professionals.  It works because it syncs up with how we are designed to change – with repetition and over time.

Here’s how it works.  A coach comes alongside the employee on a regular basis to remind them of the new skills and hold them accountable for putting them into practice.  Each attendee will inevitably face challenges applying the material and will need someone outside the organization to help them overcome these challenges.  The coach is not subject to the inertia of the old habits, but will remain steadfast and hold each employee accountable for change.

As a professional coach I’ve seen this work at organizations large and small and across many industries.  Training + Coaching works.

Peer Accountability.  Have each team member give account to their peers for their new behavior.  Do quarterly assessments that measure the new behavior to show progress – or lack of it.  Many think they are making progress only to find that others don’t agree.  Change doesn’t count unless others see it too.  The only way to know is to commit to it and measure progress.  Then act on the feedback until others agree.

There it is.  This works.  Guaranteed.  If you do these three things, the desired change will happen.  If it doesn’t, one of these three steps wasn’t done.

To learn more about this, watch for a White Paper on the OSU Alber site!

Jim Franks is a Strategic Advisor/Coach for the OSU Alber Enterprise Center (AEC).  He is passionate about helping leaders build healthy, high performing companies.  For more information about how the AEC can help your organization implement the solutions you want leading to the success you need, please call (740)725-6325 for a no-cost, no-obligation needs analysis.

Three techniques in boosting your organization’s capacity

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Continuous Process Improvement Graphic

Environmental and Quality Management Systems Consulting-Continuous Improvement Process (ISO-14001-2004 EMS & ISO 9001-2008 QMS)

When starting a continuous improvement (CI) project, the simplest and the most important thing to do is to communicate to your organization and clients that you want to continually improve the services provided.  State this intention through strategy reviews and team briefings.  This is the most effective way to get the CI culture moving.

Environmental & Quality Management Systems Consultant for Certified Environmental, Inc and JAS & Associates of Ohio, LLC

Larry W. Sheppard, Environmental & Quality Management Systems Consultant for The Ohio State University’s Alber Enterprise Center, Certified Environmental, Inc. and JAS & Associates of Ohio, LLC

To help us improve faster than the competition we should aim to empower the team to make improvement directly.  This has the advantage of boosting your improvement capacity; it also allows for far more hidden improvement opportunities to be realized.  Some organizations may tend to channel improvement activity through dedicated improvement teams or individuals.  This approach can be limited due to the lack of improvement capacity.  All team members can be encouraged to engage in improvement activity, maximizing the volume of change and improvement that can be achieved.  To achieve total team empowerment, a robust but simple change process should be introduced that allows all team members to make changes.

The focus should be on allowing all team members to make controlled changes by following a well-designed change process.  Improvement culture can be measured by the number of improvements identified and actioned by the organization.  It’s good practice to routinely report on CI progress back to the team and clients; this can underpin the organization’s commitment to continual improvement activity.

There are obvious commercial advantages that can be gained from a healthy and robust CI culture. However, it should also be pointed out that an empowered team will tend to be more productive due to the direct input from the owners into the business’s success.  Team moral can be greatly improved by encouraging their involvement.  Managed correctly, this team member responsibility can further improve an organization’s responsiveness and change of pace.  CI organizations are nice places to be, where team members are more likely to use their full potential.

There are many tools and techniques that can be used to help boost your team’s improvement capacity. Usually these require some training to be effective.  But it should be pointed out that specialized tools are not necessarily required to enable a successful CI culture.

3 Steps in Revamping Your Business Culture:

  • Kaizen:  Kaizen, or Continuous Improvement Teams can be encouraged to evolve to tackle specific improvement opportunities.  Groups can be trained to be more effective, but teams can also evolve organically without specific training.
  • Lean:  This training will help your team to become faster and reduce costs.  Lean training allows staff to identify and reduce wasted effort.  Usually deployed within an organization or group, this is the perfect training to support an established CI culture.
  • Six Sigma:  Six Sigma is best used to improve the standard of products and services by reducing output variation.  Six Sigma should only be used following good Lean and 5S development.

CI can be developed into any organization relatively easily and with little cost.  

Good management and leadership is the key to success.  By following the three simple steps above an improvement culture can flourish in your business.

Most CI projects require little or no cost.  An accumulation of several small improvements are sometime better than one large improvement.

Larry W. Sheppard is an Environmental & Quality Management Systems Consultant for The Ohio State University’s Alber Enterprise Center, JAS & Associates of Ohio, LLC, and Certified Environmental, Inc. His expertise is in implementing Environmental and Quality Management Systems for companies, preparing companies for their ISO Standards third party certification, providing Internal Auditor training and much more.

Visit our Contact Us Page or call 740-725-6325 to find out how our team can assist you or your organization in reaching your optimal success.