Your Best Employees are Your Best Trainers 

Samudra Neelam Bhuyan on June 4, 2016

Best Employees - Mindtickle

Your team is awesome. Each member is doing what they need to do to get the job done. However, over time you’ve come to realize that the even amongst your awesome team members, the differences in the way they approach their tasks to lead to varied results. E.g. the way Patrick completes a project is very different from the way that Veronica completes it. Also, Patrick and Veronica occasionally miss the mark on achieving the results you believe they should be achieving. On the other hand, when top performer Karen does a project, you are ecstatic. Karen gets amazing results to the point where the clients write rave reviews about her. You are now convinced – everyone needs to approach their projects more like Karen.

Your top employees have the knowledge, understanding of company culture, and the personal touch that can help make your business more successful. The key is to unlock the potential of the best and brightest ideas from your team. With just a little effort, you can enlist the help of skilled employees to uplift the rest of the team to a new level of excellence.

Imagine how standardizing your processes according to the best practices pioneered by top performers like Karen could help your employees work more efficiently and improve the performance. When your organization is quickly growing, and your team is doing ad-hoc solutions, it becomes increasingly difficult to make sure that the best ideas are diffused across your organization. This becomes ten times more challenging when you have multiple offices.

Benefits of getting your top performers involved in the training process

Getting your team involved in the training process will reap the following benefits:

  1. Effective application of the material. You can ensure that the employee not only gets the information but that they are also effectively applying it to their specific role when you have your top employees helping to train them. Getting the day to day application knowledge first hand from the people who use it daily is, quite simply, the best way to get them to hit the ground running.
  2. A more engaging experience. You are offering your team a more engaging learning and bonding experience when they can have a hands-on experience with a team member that currently knows the ins and outs of the company. It builds a more cohesive team for the employees to be learning from each other.
  3. Easier evaluation of employees. It is easier to evaluate the progress of employees when your established team members help with the training process because your experts know how the role should be performed and can clearly see any performance gaps in their trainees.
  4. Adds additional structure to the learning experience. It is also vital to involve your top employees who are already performing the job in the training process. One of the most effective ways to learn is to engage in intelligent conversation with an expert on a subject. Mentoring and shadowing are an excellent supplement to research and independent learning.
  5. Connects knowledge seekers to knowledge creators.You can tap into your top employees’ experiences by seeking their feedback in creating a training program that is specific to their function. They should also share their best practices and tips with the team.

A word of warning – expert employees don’t automatically make expert trainers

You might initially conclude that your most experienced employees would automatically make your best trainers. However, that is not automatically the case. Over time, we can develop what is referred to as an unconscious competence. We become so experienced that we can expertly accomplish the task without even thinking. E.g. we all seem to be able to type our passwords correctly without even having to think, but when we have to think of the password, it takes us a minute to remember it. Once you reach that level of unconscious competence, it can be difficult to train others. That process could be frustrating to both the trainer and the trainee. There are, however, ways to help turn expert employees who might not naturally be expert trainers into some of your company’s best training resources.

How to help your expert employees be excellent trainers

In order to properly utilize your employees as excellent trainers, you want to ensure that your employees have the following skills:

  • They know how to perform the necessary tasks.
  • They know how to explain the tasks.

Both of those points are necessary in order to have your current employees truly be beneficial to your training program.

If your expert employee knows how to perform the tasks, but is not fully prepared to explain the tasks you can:

1. Have your employee participate in mock training sessions with their team members. These mock training sessions can help your employee gain valuable training experience and help to make them more comfortable with the training process. Also, it helps them understand their unconscious competence, and become aware of their own best practices that they have become habituated to.

Action Item: Your expert employees can practice training others within their department different aspects of their role until they feel comfortable training on the same material.  Your employees can also provide valuable feedback to one another based on these mock training sessions.

2. Seek the feedback of your employees to determine the strength and weakness of each potential trainer.  If you have employees that perform similar roles, you can have each employee train only the portions of the material that they both know how to perform and know how to explain.

Action Item: If you have two-star employees that both perform sales, you can have each employee explain what they are comfortable teaching and have them train others together. This helps each of your star employees focus on their strengths with the safety of having their colleague there to help train on the things that they may not feel as confident about.

3. Leverage psychology to help your current employees become expert trainers.  The issue may not be that your employee lacks the skill to be an excellent trainer, but that they lack the confidence or motivation to do so.  Leverage psychology to spark the internal drive of your employees.

Action Item: Consider integrating game mechanics and social engagement such as points, medals, badges and leaderboards, social tools profiles, comments, chats, and walls. Your trainees can collaborate making learning more efficient, effective and delightful.

Your best employees have the potential to be your best trainers. By utilizing your top employees, you can grant your organization access to the most efficient and successful ways of serving customers. How do you currently use your employees for training programs? Do you have any tips that you want to share? Leave your comments below!


Why is Engaging New Hire Training Important

Samudra Neelam Bhuyan on April 30, 2016

Engaging your employees from the beginning will get your new hires off to a great start!Ask yourself, is your new hire training everything it needs to be to prepare your employees for today’s business challenges? If you have a feeling that your new hire training could be even a little bit better, consider these sobering statistics.

According to the Wynhurst Group, the cost of losing an employee in the first year is estimated to be at least three times their salary. What’s more, 22% of staff turnover occurs in the first forty-five days of employment. For any business, training is an investment in your resources, money, and time. If your training isn’t engaging, it will have a detrimental impact on your business. It could lead to lower employee productivity, high turnover, and lower customer satisfaction.

If you haven’t considered engaging your trainees with content created with thoughtful consideration of their onboarding journey, now is the time to begin. Let’s explore the benefits of an engaging new hire training program and how you can get started with creative, engaging programs and materials.

Benefits of an Engaging New Hire Training Program

Beyond the significant cost savings and the productivity gains, there are many benefits to investing in adding more engagement to your new hire training. With a more engaging new hire onboarding program, you’ll help employees deliver better results and be prepared to manage future challenges.

An engaging new hire training program can have numerous benefits to both your company and your new hires. These benefits include:

1. More Productive Employees. If an employee is properly engaged during new hire orientation, they are more likely to pay close attention to their work and ensure that all procedures and processes are being properly followed and that they are performing to the best of their abilities.
2. Loyal Employees. Investing in your employees by properly training them is extremely important when trying to build a long-term relationship with a new hire. If your new staff member feels like they have been properly trained and supported, they are more likely to feel emotionally invested in your company. This not only increases employee loyalty, but it also can aid in decreasing your turnover rate. Many companies fail at this initial step because they think that training only means setting up the new hire’s workstation.
3. Better Information Retention. When new hires are truly engaged in their training, they are less easily distracted and hence retain more information.  This is valuable because it means that re-training is less likely, and new hires who are more invested in their new positions are also less likely to add to your turnover rate.  While your new hire training does not necessarily need to be a carnival of entertainment, it should incorporate the unexpected – and that means providing a training curriculum that strays off the beaten path.

Ideas to Make Your New Hire Training Program More Engaging

Now that you see the benefits of engaging your new hire, it’s time to step up your training program. No more delivering training that causes new hires to nod off to sleep or miss most of the content because they view it as monotonous and boring.

A few ways to engage your new hires during training include:

  • Start engaging your new hires early. Investing the time to engage your new employee beyond the first several weeks will help them feel valued and appreciated. A mistake that is often made with new hire training is that the introduction to company policy and the procedure is done within a small time frame. With all of the information that they need to absorb, it can be like trying to drink from a fire hose. New hire training cannot be adequately accomplished in a matter of hours or even one eight-hour day and instead should be done slowly and over time in order to properly engage your employee.
  • Incorporate Quests and Challenges as Part of Your New Hire Training Program. Take your new hires on an online learning adventure.  By taking your new hire on an online learning adventure, you can create a landscape that will help your new hires feel involved in the material that they are learning and increase their enthusiasm for both the material and your company.
  • Create Videos and Mix them in With Your Powerpoints. Videos have the power to engage all of our senses – it is the most powerful medium available to us. Although it can be more expensive to create video content, there are many ways to keep your costs low. If you are stumped on how to create fresh video content, you can even repurpose your old presentations into awesome new training videos.
  • Create New Hire Mentorship Opportunities. New hires need to see and experience what they learn in practice. Assign your new hire a mentor who can guide them through the initial onboarding process. This mentor can be someone whom your new hire can reach out to if they have questions about company policy or who they should address specific questions to. The personal relationship with the mentor during the new hire training will make your employee feel more connected and invested in the company from the start.
  • Establish Goals. Goals give your employees something to reach for. As they achieve one set of goals, new goals should be established. This step-by-step process helps them feel they are making progress and that inspires them to keep moving forward. Don’t forget to reward new hires for doing a good job. This may sound simplistic, but positive reinforcement is powerful.
  • Foster Intrinsic Motivation. Use internal incentives to foster a more holistic approach to learning. Implement the principles of autonomy, mastery, and purpose in your training program to start building a better performing organization from the inside out.

If your new employee is engaged and encouraged to participate during their training, they will be more likely to retain the information that is presented to them and they will be ready to excel. A well-trained employee is one that is prepared to succeed in their position. The best way to help an employee become prepared to succeed is by engaging them during new hire training.

How to Measure the Impact of Your Training Program

Samudra Neelam Bhuyan on April 24, 2016

You’re sitting in your office after the big training initiative you just launched and wondering: “How do we know that they understood the material? Was the training effective? How do we measure the impact of sales training?” Perhaps you sent a survey to your attendees to get feedback on the training and everyone loved it! But is a survey really enough?

Ultimately you are relying on your team to drive performance and to sustain your company’s competitive edge. So how do you know your training’s contribution to building your organization?

The question at the core of sales training performance measurement

You, your manager, director, and the powers that be want to know: Did your training result in benefits to the organization? This is the core question at the heart of training evaluation because training must contribute to building your organization.

Training is the mechanism by which investment is made in ensuring competence and efficacy of employees. The results of training must, therefore, be measured/evaluated in the context of impact on your organization. A good place to begin is to ask: How do I know that the training resulted in benefits to the organization?

Don’t fall Into the trap of reporting for the sake of reporting

While it may seem like we’re stating the obvious, many managers leap to delivering performance metrics forgetting WHY they are delivering training in the first place! Don’t fall into the trap of reporting metrics just for the sake of reporting.

Measuring enables you to:

  • Identify what the organization gained
  • Determine costs versus benefits of the gain
  • Determines justification for continuing training

Measuring the worth of a sales training program

Regardless of how impressive or popular training programs appear to be, outcomes rule the day and they must be measured in systematic and quantitative terms. This boils down to two areas: 1. costs and 2. results. The standard formula for calculating your training ROI is ROI (percentage) = ((Monetary benefits – Training Costs)/Training Costs) x 100. ROI can also be measured in terms of decreased product cost or time. Let’s take a look at how you might calculate your training costs.

1. Establish sales training costs

According to this Inc.com article on establishing training costs: “Once all of the relevant factors have been isolated and supported by data, it is much easier to decide when and how the training will be conducted, if at all. Similarly, with the right data the decision to conduct training in-house or by an outsourcer can be determined.”

Evaluating training costs can be challenging without having a system in place. Here are some areas to consider when building an all-inclusive training cost analysis framework:

  1. Development costs – e.g., salaries, benefits of personnel, and equipment.
  2. Direct implementation costs – e.g., training material, technology costs, facilities, travel, communication and marketing of the program, instructor’s salary, and benefits.
  3. Compensation for participants – e.g., the salaries and benefits costs that will be dedicated to the time spent on training.
  4. Lost productivity during training – e.g., cost of time spent away from work.
  5. Learning curve cost – e.g., cost of time needed for your employees to adapt to new practices and ways of working after the training program.
  6. Company culture shift (change management) – e.g., cost of incentives (tangible and intangible) put into place to foster wanted behavior after training.

2. Assess the results

  • Significant changes in cognitive outcomes, such as the amount of information learned as evidenced by improved work processes
  • Changes in skill-based outcomes, such as improvement in quantity and quality of production
  • Changes in effective outcomes, such as higher levels of motivation and positive attitude

How do know whether or not your training made an impact? Donald Kirkpatrick, past president of the American Society for Training and Development (ASTD), pioneered what is referred to as the four levels of evaluation for training programs.

We will consider each of these levels one at a time. As we move up the levels, it becomes more difficult to measure the results. But at the same time, it becomes more aligned with the business objectives. While it is tempting to focus on the higher levels of assessment straightaway, it is imperative that we first focus on getting the maximum insight out of the lower levels and properly implement their measurement.

Let’s consider how we can take actionable steps to improve the quality of your sales training at each level.

1. Reaction

This involves how your participants feel about the training program. This level may not be an immediate or obvious link to ROI. That being said, if your trainees feel positive about the training program, this will have an impact on how they will perform. This could result in a future impact on your bottom line.

Action step:

This level of performance is all about your employee’s reaction to the training program. Level one training data is easy to gather and analyze. Start the feedback process by delivering post-training surveys or getting a verbal reaction from trainees. Online learning programs also enable you to build short questionnaires into your training that will allow you to gauge the “temperature” of your program all the time. For instance, with the Mindtickle online learning platform, you can get analytics about how many people are getting stuck at a question or a topic, how many people have skipped a question, as well as how many people liked or disliked a video. Having access to this level of granularity is very helpful for you to get actionable level 1 feedback about your training program.

2. Learning

This level of evaluation involves any skills, knowledge, or change of attitude that resulted in the training. In practical ways, this can be measured through tests or some form of demonstration of skills/knowledge.

Action step:

With a little planning before your training program begins you can conduct level 2 measurement. Prior to your program, consider what are the skills that you want your team to master? You can then use assessments or tests before and after the training to benchmark performance changes as a result of your program. Level 2 performance assessments are relatively easy to establish if the skills you are trying to teach are readily quantifiable. When using quizzes and other assessments, remember to keep them engaging and fresh to ensure your learners absorb the material fully.

3. Behavior

In many ways, this is the practical (and long-term) application of level two assessments. This involves measuring how your trainee applies what they have learned in the workplace. This would be done mostly through observations, interviews, and constant monitoring.

Action step:

Measuring performance changes at level 3 is an extension of level 2 in that you are not just wanting to inspire a one-time change in your employees. Instead, you are striving to establish lasting changes that boost performance and impact your business’s bottom line. To measure at level 3, set up a plan to conduct observations and interview employees in ongoing ways in order to evaluate the sustainability of the skills you want to instill. This will typically involve coordination with your management team in order to get access to speak with their direct reports. In order for you to be able to measure the impact at this level, the pre-requisite would be that you should have created the training while keeping in mind the business objectives and the skills gaps of the employees in the first place.

4. Results

This level is the most closely linked with ROI. For example, have there been significant sales increases after employees have gone through training? Has there been a noticeable boost in productivity? These are tangible areas that can be measured by looking at the before and after stats.

Action step:

Before you get started with level four measurement, it is important to already have established a system for management and reporting employee performance over time. Your measurement system should clearly define goals and costs and have a way to attribute clear accountabilities to both. Once those criteria are met, you can analyze the correlation between the goal attainment levels and the training that employees underwent.

Measuring results helps build your case

Taking practical steps to measure the ROI of your training will help you make the necessary adjustments in your training program and allow you to rest assured that your investment is a sound one. Being able to speak to the data to back up the stellar experience you provide is empowering and enables you to build a credible business case for funding. Also, there are organizational benefits like increased output, time savings, improved quality control, and reduction in error rate. These benefits can be converted into dollar values to indicate their worth to your organization! And if you’re still not convinced, check out this eBook on how sales enablement best practices can help you get there.

Training and development is a substantial investment of both money and time. You need to know the value of training programs, specifically whether or not they are worth pursuing or sustaining. What steps will you take to make sure that your performance metrics are meaningful?

How to Use Quizzes for Effective Online Training

Samudra Neelam Bhuyan on March 19, 2016

When was the last time you heard someone say, “I can’t wait to take that exam!” Unless you travel in an especially ambitious group of friends, you’ve probably never heard this. In fact, many of us have come to associate tests with pressure and apprehension.

While most people may not be eager to take a test, the fact still remains that quizzes and tests provide numerous benefits- especially in the workforce. Quizzes and tests are an essential part of online training, but they should be implemented with careful consideration in order to provide the most benefit to your employees.

Why quiz at all?

Effective online training depends, in large part, on the quizzes that are administered. Before finding out how to successfully build quizzes, it’s important to understand their benefits. Quizzes help motivate your employees to work on concepts or areas that they don’t fully understand. They also show them the topics that they have mastered, which can provide them with confidence as they perform their job.

Quizzes also encourage your employees to recall information that they have learned and can help them to better retain this information in the future. These tests also benefit those who are in charge of training by helping them assess what the team has learned and what still needs to be taught.

What’s wrong with the way we quiz?

If you ask most people what their quiz or test experience has been like, they will likely say that it was unpleasant. On top of that, sellers often forget the knowledge they learned in sales training. Even worse, there is no consistent reinforcement for sellers once the training session ends. Here is what’s wrong with your typical test:

  1. No variety – There is little to no variety in the types of questions that are asked, making the exam dry and hard to focus on.

  2. No self expression – Because quizzes are often multiple-choice or true/false questions, they don’t allow expression.

  3. No collaboration – There is no way to collaborate and learn with others as you would do on the job.

  4. No access to resources – Quizzes assume that in a working situation you would not be able to access resources to help you find the answers you need.

  5. No guidance – You are penalized for getting the answer wrong and are offered no guidance or support.

  6. No scenarios – Quizzes don’t allow for the assessment of learning in different scenarios. In reality workplace challenges and opportunities are not just black and white; they are far more complex.

How to make better quizzes for effective online training

Assessing the knowledge of your employees does not have to be a negative experience. With a little thought, you can offer a much better experience. Here are some ideas to help you create better quizzes:

  • Be relevant – Coming up with the questions to include on quizzes can be difficult. For effective online training, the best method for doing so is to first have defined learning objectives. Focusing on these objectives gives you a good starting point for creating questions that will challenge employees. It also helps ensure that the quiz covers key concepts.
  • Explore free response – Online training provides an extra opportunity to learn more about how your employees think and process information. This opportunity can at times be lost in the confines of a direct multiple choice question. By providing free response questions, you are allowing employees the opportunity to demonstrate their personal perspective and approach. These types of responses work especially well for measuring soft skills via situational questions where there are multiple “correct” approaches to solving a complex challenge.
  • Consider group challenges – One of the most important and vital skills for your employees to possess is the ability to collaborate and work well with others. That said, it is only logical that this would be a skill you would want to include in your online training program. While group testing is not widely used in academic settings, it can make great sense to use in a work setting. Consider providing a part of the test where employees must work together to solve a challenge. This portion could culminate in a group presentation or written paper that they must submit. Allowing people to work with others will increase their engagement with the content, broaden their perspective, and greatly decrease test anxiety.
  • Add diversity – Multiple choices might be the most common type of question on quizzes, but it’s not the only option. To create the most effective quizzes for online training, use different types of questions. Having a variety of question types keeps employees engaged and provides a more challenging assessment of their knowledge. Using sequencing questions to see if employees fully understand certain company processes is a great way to add diversity. Be sure to include enough steps to make the question challenging, but don’t go overboard and give them too many minute steps to arrange. Or if you want to keep it simple, mix up “fill in the blanks” questions with “match the answers” and “hotspot” questions.
  • Provide guidance – Part of the reason that the game show “Who Wants to be Millionaire?” is so entertaining is that there are a variety of options to help a learner answer challenging questions. For instance, if the contestant gets really stumped on a particularly tough question, they can “ask for a lifeline” or “phone a friend”. A great way to provide guidance on a test or quiz is to provide hints for struggling learners. For example, when a question is answered incorrectly, you can link to reading material on the correct answer. This allows the learner to absorb the material while the sting of getting an answer wrong is still fresh in his mind (which leads to better learning)!
  • Allow multiple attempts – Getting the wrong answer should not intimidate your employee. There are always ways to make quizzes harder, but you don’t want to make them so difficult that employees feel discouraged. It is key to find the right balance between testing their knowledge of concepts that are relevant to your business, without making the questions unfairly challenging. Just like everything we learn in life, sometimes it takes a few tries to get it right. Allow them to re-attempt the question or scenario without being penalized and you’ll allow them to really explore the challenge.

Providing employees with well-crafted quizzes in online training can be a highly effective learning technique when done correctly. The key is to consider the quiz itself as part of the learning process. When you approach developing quizzes this way, they become instructional aides rather than a tedious and pressure-laden task for your employees to complete.
 

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