How To Get What You Pay For |
Don’t stop investing in trade shows, training, meetings and conferences. Just do it wisely. Here’s how
by Caitlin Crawshaw
When the economy experiences a downturn, many people’s knee-jerk reaction is to slash marketing and training budgets in an effort to curtail expenditures. You may think it’s a reasonable instinct. But when the economy turns, so the logic goes, the companies that maintain a market presence will be better off; when customers have money to spend again, they’ll come calling. A similar argument is made for training – keeping employees’ skills up to date will make the company more competitive, especially in tight markets. The key is in your strategy. Plan right, and you’ll see a solid return on your investment in any event.
A Training Meeting
The goal: To inspire and train employees to reach new levels of productivity.
The reality: Sitting in a dark boardroom (or should that be bored room?), the participants fall asleep to the presenter’s monotone, explaining the intricacies of some new software program. They aren’t sure why they’re there or what those PowerPoint slides are getting at – he lost you at “hello.”
The fix: Bryan Schaefer calls this common scenario “death by PowerPoint,” and it’s rampant in the business world. An unskilled facilitator clicks through PowerPoint slides without explaining the purpose or goals of the meeting, or allowing learners to engage with the information. People turn off, still don’t understand the software, and managers start to view training as a waste of time.
It’s hard to justify pulling people away from their jobs for hours or days at a time, especially when they’re not learning. And yet, cutting training altogether is never wise. “People recognize the need… to develop and to continually grow, professionally and personally,” says Schaefer, who owns the Edmonton-based learning and development consulting firm Custom Learning Solutions Inc.
The key is to create a “laser-targeted” training meeting in which the material is efficiently absorbed. Research shows that lecture-style training fails to teach adults much of anything. Twenty-four hours after the training meeting, employees will retain 5% of the material. With visual demonstrations of a concept, a learner will remember 30%; practising a concept raises that percentage to 75%; and when the learner teaches others about a concept, they will retain 95% of the material.
To make a training meeting valuable, the facilitator can’t rely solely on the lecture approach. Schaefer uses a five-step model:
- Before participants arrive at the meeting, ensure they know what the rationale is behind the meeting, including how it will help them do their jobs.
- Communicate the objectives of the meeting, including performance objectives, which must be measurable. This should take into account the fact that sometimes it will take six months to apply a newly learned concept on the job. Sprinkle the meeting with a variety of learning activities, discussions and presentations to appeal to a variety of learning styles and keep people engaged. To demonstrate the importance of listening, for instance, try a role-playing activity in which one person plays a distracted boss.
- It’s important to evaluate how well people are learning the material, either casually (like asking the group if they have questions) or formally (with a quiz or questionnaire). This should happen throughout the session, not just at the end.
- Offer people regular feedback so they can determine how well they’re learning. This can be either corrective, when they’re making an error, or confirming, in the event that they’re correct.
- Followup may be the most important part of the puzzle, particularly for managers sending employees to off-site training. All of the learning that takes place in the session is useless if the company doesn’t follow up to ensure the material is being put to use.
Businesses without an on-site learning and development person particularly need to apply strategies that make learners accountable. Managers can use strategies such as having the employee teach the material to co-workers to reinforce the lessons learned.
Final message: The key to planning a successful training meeting is appropriate preparation and post-meeting followup.
