Is Your Organization Playing a Role in Employee's Poor Performance?
Stressed Out And In Pain
Very often, poor performers are the "victims" of organizational factors which they are forced to cope with in some way. At first glance it appears that employee performance is poor, but in reality, they are doing their best to be successful.
Organizational factors can present themselves in many ways, such as new management or revolving door management which results in frequently changing expectations; an impending layoff or merger which can spur individuals to take their eye off their current responsibilities in order to look toward their future employment; or a completed merger which contributes to folk's not knowing their role anymore.
Other organizational stressors can be found in global organizations which have to "translate" communications, operating procedures, and goals across time zones and functions. Even centralized or decentralized training can impact successful performance on the job.
Example: A charitable organization created its own CRM in-house and transitioned away from the commercial product they had previous used (which provided training and support). After going-live with their home-grown system, the programmers stayed in the call center area for one week to provide training and answer questions. At the end of that one week the programmers - who had all been contractors - were let go. In six month's time no one was using the software correctly, records were incomplete and erroneous, and both donors and managers were irate.
When the organization sought training help, the request came in the form of "they need training. They need to know how to use the software the way it is intended to be used and not the way they are using it now," (through trail and error, work-arounds, and best guesses).
Despite the organizational factors working against them, the workers did a fantastic job of completing their jobs with a limited amount of knowledge, training and skill. This was a company that did not understand the importance of documentation, training or support.
Before fulfilling a training request, step back and consider what organizational factors might be playing a role. Very often the workers are doing the best that they can given the circumstances under which they have to perform.
Training Design with Adults in Mind
There are a few techniques you can use to make learning easier on your workplace learners:
Structure - helps learners to keep track of detail; give them an agenda to follow-along
Known to unknown - Flying a plane to flying a helicopter
Easy to difficult - Painting with a brush to painting with a roller to painting with a power painter
Problem to solution - Getting lost to learning to read a map or compass
Frequent to infrequent - Running weekly payroll to running monthly invoices to running yearly W-2's*
Overview to detail - This is how government works to this is how an election is conducted
Theoretical to practical (big picture to doing your job) - The importance of eating right to planning menus
Order of importance or performance - Checking safety of machinery before operating it
Steps in a sequence (chronological) - Filling out a form; validating customer information
How participants would most likely interact with material - Teach blackjack by sitting at a blackjack table, not reading a manual
Exercises - are very effective, unless...
"Unusual" or complex exercises interfere with learning - learners may miss the point
Adults don't like far-fetched or artificial exercises - respect their maturity
Need some challenge (but not too much) - remember to keep the environment safe
Stories-are "sticky" - stories help learners to remember. Anytime you are about to go in to lecture mode, ask yourself, "Is there a story I could tell that would illustrate this just as well?" and then, at the end of the story, ask your learners "So what is the moral of this story?" THAT is when the true learning comes about; give the audience time to process the point of the story and draw a conclusion - otherwise it was an interesting story that happened to somebody else.
Keep 'em active! - nobody sits for hours on end at the job - don't expect it in training either.
Interview with Learning Expert: Will Thalheimer
Measuring Learning Results
T/D: You've written a research in practice report called Measuring Learning Results which is an understanding of learning and focusing on measurement. Can you tell us more about that?
Thalheimer: Over the years I've been immersed in learning and looking at the research on learning. One of the things I noticed in our field is that there are some leverage points - things that affect the whole field, things that drive us to do what we do. One of those is measurement. How we measure affects how we practice instructional design. So I'll share with you a couple of things that I found. One thing is that smile sheets aren't good enough.
T/D: Right, don't we know that at a gut level?
Thalheimer: We may know it at a gut level, but we keep doing it. I did some research with the e-learning Guild and we looked at how it's the most popular method, after completion rate, for an e-learning program. So they've done like a research meta-analysis on this, and they found that smile sheet ratings don't even correlate with learning results.
T/D: Interesting.
Thalheimer: They correlated like 0.09 - which is…
T/D: Negligible.
Thalheimer: Negligible. Smile sheets don't correlate with on the job performance either.
T/D: What does your opinion have to do with your performance? Nothing.
Thalheimer: Right, so that's intriguing. So one of the things we're trying to do when we measure stuff is to get better. There are really three reasons that you might want to measure learning - one is to support learning, to give the learners feedback. The other thing is to improve the learning interventions we create. So improve our learning designs. The third thing is to prove our results to our organization; our certification, grading, that kind of thing. So three main reasons there. If we're going to improve our learning designs one of the things that we need to do is make sure that our learning metrics are predictive of people's actual performance. If our smile sheets aren’t predictive, then they're no good at doing that, they're no good at giving us good information.
I've been playing with trying to improve my own smile sheet so I'm going to recommend a couple of things. One - let's not ask people just overall questions. Let's put in some real learning points that we wanted to get across, because people aren't very good at remembering everything after a session, right? So if you ask them in general did you like it you're going to get general responses. Instead; this is one of the learning points that we talked about, how valuable was that to you?
Then I ask them - what's the likelihood that you're going to use this within the next two weeks? I have from a zero to 100% in 10% increments.
T/D: That's brilliant.
Thalheimer: I also ask them - what's the probability in the next two weeks that you'll share this with one of your co-workers? I also really focus on the open ended comments. I find that those are really some of the most valuable feedback that you can get to improve your course. I've gotten a lot of bad feedback too, but I've gotten some really good feedback on smile sheets that has told me - you really need to improve that exercise. Or, have more stuff going on in the afternoon that's fun because people were tired - stuff like that. Okay, you hear that over and over - you better change it.
Thalheimer: Another thing I do with smile sheets is I also like to follow up two weeks later. I follow up and I do a couple of interesting things. One is I ask the same question on the same six point scale about how valuable you thought the training was. Now they've gone back to the work place. They now really know how valuable it is. So it gives a better anchoring.
I’ve learned a couple of other things from looking at measurement from a learning fundamental standpoint. One thing is, if we measure learning right at the end of learning, what is it we are measuring? We're measuring the learning intervention’s ability to create understanding. Which is fine, that's good, but we're not measuring the learning intervention’s ability to minimize forgetting. You have a full day session or you have an e-learning program and you measure people right away - everything is top of mind.
T/D: You should be able to recall it.
Thalheimer: You can easily recall it and not only that, but you feel confident that you can recall it. So that's a really biased way to get information. That's one of the reasons that make it a bad proxy for your ability to remember it on the job.The final mistake we make is to measure something in the same context that people learned it. That context is going to remind them of what they learned and because of that they're going to get better results than if we measured them in a different context. So we need to do one of two things - we either need to know that our results are biased because we're in the same context that they learned in. Or we need to change the context and make it more like the real world context so that it's more realistic. It's more predictive of that real world environment.
T/D: Great points! Thank you Will.
Will Thalheimer founded Work-Learning Research which is a consulting practice that helps clients build more effective learning interventions. He’s been in the learning and performance field since 1985. His professional focus is on bridging the gap between the research side and the practice side
The Key to Outstanding Learning Outcomes: Design Learning Processes
Designing training programs can be an arduous process if you take on the responsibility for designing all the content yourself. You can lighten your load and also achieve a much greater learning outcome by designing learning processes rather than learning content.
In this article we will share three ways to design learning processes.
1. Use real work.
Learners prefer to accomplish real work while they are in the learning process. So rather than create a contrived situation or a case study scenario that is “representative” of real life, instead have the learners work on real work tasks. For instance, a financial services firm wanted to teach its sales people to read financial statements in order to find cross-selling opportunities in their current client-base. Rather than teach the sales people how to read “generic” financial statements and then leave them to transfer that knowledge and skill to their own client's financial statements, the learning session required them to bring the annual report from two of their current clients. While they learned to read a financial statement (such as a cash flow statement or a profit and loss statement) the learners were working and reviewing the actual financial statements of their own clients. This not only resulted in a better understanding of the learning but it also resulted in the learners being able to have actionable findings be the end of the training class.
2. Create the learning in real time.
Rather than teach your learners a new concept or skill in a large block of time and then expect them to be able to transfer all of that information to their real work responsibilities, break the training up into smaller, actionable learning objectives and on-the-job tasks. That will allow them to implement their new knowledge and skills in smaller chunks and result in more successful implementation on the job.
For example, a sales organization was training their sales people to listen for cues from prospects to better gauge if they could ask for an appointment or not. After a period of time in the classroom, in which the sales people/learners learned the 5 types of responses which would either open a door for them or not, they were then given an hour to return to their desks and make up to 10 phone calls from their personal prospect list; making notes about types of conversations they had and whether they were able to secure an appointment or not. This approach not only allowed the salespeople to accomplish some real work during the training process, but also created a rich discussion upon returning to the training room because they each had real-world experience implementing their new skills and were able to compare and contrast their outcomes and ask additional questions of the instructor.
If they had simply completed the training and then returned to the job to (attempt to) implement what they had learned, when would they have ever had those rich discussions that serve to cement the learning for adults?
3. Have the learners contribute the content.
A third sales organization wanted to teach overcoming objections in relation to a very complex product that their sales people sold. Rather than try to anticipate all the objections and give the sales people pat answers in reply, the training was designed to first solicit the “5 toughest objection you've encountered when attempting to sell xyz” and then a game was created, dividing the larger group into 3 teams and giving each team the opportunity to craft an appropriate rebuttal to the objection.
The learning process went like this
Team A stated an objection to Team B~Team B had a period of time to craft an appropriate response~Team C had the opportunity to challenge Team B's response~Team A chose what they thought to be the best response and awarded a point to either Team B or Team C accordingly.
This learning process continued in a round-robin style, with Team B next sharing an objection, Team C getting the first opportunity to reply, and Team A being given the opportunity to “challenge” team C’s response, until all of the 15 toughest objections in regard to that topic had been addressed.
This process allowed the learners to share their real-world problems and to get the best and the brightest to assist them with being better prepared the next time they heard that objection.
The next time you are attempting to design learning content take a step back and see if instead you are able to design a learning process that better assists the learners in working with and assimilating that content.
Learning processes can often lead to greater learning outcomes because the learners are more engaged with the content, identify with it more clearly, and have less trouble transferring what they learned in the classroom to what they do on the job. An added bonus, from a logistical standpoint, is that designing a learning process requires much less updating in the future should the content itself change.
1 Day a Week Dealing with Poor Performers?
Managers spend nearly 17 percent of their working hours dealing with poor performers, according to a report from staffing firm Robert Half International. That’s nearly a full day a week that could have been spent being productive!
This is a pretty shocking statistic. We have to wonder what role training plays in this. Can the managers categorize the poor performance? Is it the same for everyone? Unique to each individual? Is it knowledge, skill or personality that contributes to poor performance? Are people with inadequate skills hired-in to begin with and training fails to bring them up to an acceptable level? Did they have the appropriate skill(s) at one time, but then they diminished over time? Could ongoing performance support have prevented that?
The Training Doctor would LOVE to do a follow-on study with the same managers polled for the Robert Half report to find the answers to these questions.
Paying workers to learn? Yes! Great idea!
Now here's a twist - and a good one at that. Okanagan College (British Columbia) is offering free training for retail and food service workers. Upon successful completion the learners get paid $500.
The curriculum includes: exceeding customer expectations; powerful sales systems; productivity and efficiency; product knowledge; effective communication; problem solving; accountability and ownership; and workplace health and safety.
The retail employees will have their own "track" as will the food service workers. There are four days of training (9a - 4p) as well as six hours of self study.
Learners must be presently employed in the industry and have no college degree.
What a win-win-win - the employers get free training provided to their employees (and lots of it! How many organizations give 24 hours of training to retail or food service workers?); the employees get enhanced business knowledge and skills that can be put to use immediately as well as being an important addition to their resume; and the local region has a pool of well-trained individuals which can only help the local economy as a whole.
Quotable: Donald Kirkpatrick
There is general agreement that the same approach should not be used for appraisals aimed at salary decisions and those aimed at improving performance. But in both approaches, an appraisal of performance IS necessary. The main difference is that performance appraisal looks back, and the training looks ahead.
Quotable: Dr. Donald Kirkpatrick, Professor Emeritus University of Wisconsin and Honorary Chairman of Kirkpatrick Partners