Brian Vanderjack is an award-winning business instructor who has spoken at organizations such as Northwestern’s Kellogg Graduate School of Business, University of Chicago’s Graduate School of Business, and Microsoft. He earned his MBA in Finance from DePaul University. You can learn more about him on LinkedIn and at LeadPresenter.com.
Q. Brian, here’s a question straight out of a Business 101 textbook: If high employee turnover limits an organization from getting things done, what can trainers do to help combat employee turnover, especially if they’re responsible for on-boarding initiatives?
Two key components in accomplishing tasks in an organization are process and personal skills.
The first way to assist in effective continuity as employees migrate out of key business functions is to have well-documented processes in place, and then invest in ensuring that the process documentation is updated regularly so it accurately reflects the work that is getting done.
The second issue is that personal skills come into play when actually getting day-to-day tasks completed. The trick here is to understand what the core personal competencies are in those who are currently successful in their role.
To explain, the personal skills that support success can be identified. For example, is the reason the current employee successful due to an ability to work with numbers, ability to negotiate, etc.? Techniques to get a handle on this are personality assessments, 360-degree surveys, interviewing the person or persons currently doing the job, and interviewing the key stakeholders to the process. The bottom line is once a common thread of success is identified, to either look for people with similar personal skills, or people who can be educated and/or trained to possess those skills.
In summary, once the road map is in place (the process) and the skills identified that have proven to support the process (personal skills), the adverse impacts of employee transition should be lessened.
Q. What are some practical solutions for corporate trainers trying to combat turnover?
I teach for the largest MBA program in the nation. As a part of helping my students to be successful within their organizations, I teach them personal skills that enable a higher rate of success in business. For example, in addition to the required teachings, I teach them team management skills, time management skills, and key communication skills. I break these skills down into processes and then provide hands-on experiences to encourage effective learning. Students have shared back with me that they have used these skills to improve their day-to-day operations at their day jobs.
For example, one student whose job was to get food stamps to people, used the time management skills to increase the number of people he was able to process in a week (this meant more people who were able to have dinner last night). And another student was able to use the team management skills, as taught in class, to successfully deal with three vendors (one from off-shore) who were not cooperating with a major software implementation. This particular event was at a large diversified company that you have heard of.
To explain, in both of these events these companies had processes in place; however, through improving core personal skills, overall effectiveness was increased for the good of their organizations.
Q. In some ways, you function like a coach for your students. What are your thoughts on online mentoring, especially the usage of social networking and “online learning communities” to facilitate mass coaching?
A key to knowledge transfer is personalizing the delivery. That is, either provide the knowledge when it is needed, or explain why the knowledge will be essential. I see the future of online learning moving to an on-demand nature, with access to expert educators who explain how newly-provided information maps to daily needs. It’s best when a hands-on experience can be coupled with training and education.
Unfortunately this is very difficult to do with a virtual audience. Therefore, the task of knowledge transfer is made even more difficult, but can be offset, to great extent, by taking meaningful steps to personalize learning events.
Q. With virtual audiences and online learning communities filling the 21st century, how might the role of corporate trainers evolve?
We are in the midst of an exciting transformational event. The barriers that formerly restricted information exchange and job sharing across great geographical distances are currently being eliminated. This is due to the ease at which people can communicate both documents and ideas via the internet.
To help organizations adapt to this new world, it is essential that we understand that there are cultural differences between different geographical locations. Once accepting and understanding that different cultures react to situations differently, the key is to educate employees how to add value to their endeavors through this new access to geographical diversity.
Q. That’s a great point: corporate trainers will need to have a global mindset and help facilitate cross-cultural exchange. Brian, thanks for sharing with our readers—your students are very lucky to have you. Before we end, could you recommend some literature for our training and development audience?
I highly recommend The Adult Learner by Malcolm Knowles, Elwood F. Holton III, and Richard A. Swanson. It outlines a method of teaching that is geared to the adult learner—referred to as “andragogy.” Basically an adult needs to feel that information is important in order to engage them to a point where effective absorbtion and adoption of class material takes place.
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