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Avery

February 2020 - TD Magazine

A Very Different Model

Christopher M. Avery

With modern technology, accurately measuring the impact of virtual training programs is a very real possibility. When used properly, this kind of measurement catalyzes change in industries like healthcare, financial services, consulting, manufacturing, and others that rely heavily on effective training programs. But the ability to measure doesn’t guarantee success. You also need to know what metrics to track, how to avoid bias, and how to get buy-in from stakeholders and instructors.Let’s examine how best to use data and automation to save instructors and administrators time and improve the learner experience.3 Top Challenges to Effective AnalysisWhile there are several things to consider when implementing the most effective measurement program for virtual training, let’s take a closer look at three top challenges that we recommend tackling first, as well as our tips for clearing these hurdles with ease.1. Difficulty quantifying engagement. Look for a virtual training measurement platform that collects and analyzes the data for you, assessing factors like tardiness, the number of minutes instructors speak versus learners, and the number of learners raising their hands and using customized reactions, to name a few. Once you start measuring, set benchmarks based on your historical data, setting ambitious yet realistic goals for improvement. 2. Unintentional bias using qualitative measurement.Those responsible for measuring the effectiveness of training programs shouldn’t completely ignore qualitative methods of judging engagement, but must also introduce data to reinforce the findings of qualitative measurement to ensure accuracy.3. Lack of instructor focus on measuring engagement. Put plainly, the onus should not be solely on instructors here. The introduction of technology and data can be a welcome solution. Teachers can focus on teaching while reliable tech measures the results in the background, helping tell a complete story.Use Results to Improve InstructionTo improve instruction, it’s critical to analyze various metrics like total class time, instructor speaking time, participant speaking time—including the total number of times participants spoke as well as the average speaking time from all participants—and the total number of times participants raised their hands or gave feedback through the platform. Technology solutions can help compile all these metrics into one easy-to-digest dashboard and allow you to view results for an entire session, as well as drill down into individual participant results. Use the insights from your results to inform the changes you make to your training programs, and continue to iterate as more results come in.Technology can also automate time-consuming tasks like attendance recording, time in, time out, and tardiness, which both increases the accuracy of this data and frees instructors up to focus on quality education, improving the learning experience overall.Demonstrating Program EffectivenessIf you’re trying to effect change in your training programs by determining what’s working and not working, having quantifiable results and trends can go a long way in showing stakeholders the impact. Remember to utilize automation in your reporting technology, which can help expand reporting efforts and demonstrate effectiveness at a larger scale. When you’re communicating the value of your reporting to stakeholders, it also helps to have a framework for your metrics that’s backed by research and proven success. The Kirkpatrick Model for evaluating learner engagement lends itself perfectly here. This model distills training evaluation down to four distinct levels: The reaction of learners, including their thoughts on the training experienceThe learners’ increase in knowledge after the training experienceThe learners’ behavioral change and performance after applying the skills learnedThe results the learners’ performance has on the business or organizationMake sure whatever metrics you’re tracking to measure effectiveness follow a similar model to the Kirkpatrick Model. The key is persistent tracking to evaluate success at several points in time, allowing you to present a complete picture with your results.Access to accurate data and smart automation is the backbone of a successful training program. A powerful virtual classroom platform that’s purpose-built for learning and development, like Class, ensures that you can always keep your finger on the pulse of how your programs are performing, allowing you to focus on innovating and providing the best possible education for your learners.

Measuring the Impact of Your Virtual Training Programs

Today’s economy is … challenging. On top of that, some organizations are still adapting to the changes caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, like distributed teams, remote meetings, and hybrid offices. The need for strong leaders is more significant than ever in light of those obstacles.Strong leadership skills are essential for managers to build and lead engaged, innovative teams prepared to handle today’s challenges. And the key to being a strong leader might be different from what you think. In an ELB Learning webinar, Kristie DeLoreto, SVP, Client Solutions, and Laura Doerr, VP, Operations at ELB Learning, demonstrated why empathy matters in leadership.Empathy in leadership is the ability to relate to and connect with people to inspire and empower their lives. However, it’s important for leaders to understand the difference between empathy and sympathy. “It’s a very gray line,” said DeLoreto. “I think you either kind of understand it, or you need to practice to get better at being more empathetic or knowing the difference between those two.”Lack of Empathy vs. EmpathyYou may have worked in environments where the first second somebody has performance problems at work, the automatic response is to say, “You’re out.”That is an example of a lack of empathy. Unfortunately, this can be fairly standard in our business world. Someone walks into your office and says, “Your numbers have been down for the third quarter in a row. You have to pick up your numbers. Otherwise, I can’t guarantee what the future will look like.”How inspired is that person going to be at work the next day? On the flip side, here’s the empathetic approach.Someone walks into your office and says, “Your numbers are down for the third quarter in a row. Are you okay? I’m worried about you. What’s going on?”We all have performance issues. Maybe someone’s kid is sick. Maybe they’re having problems in their marriage. We don’t know what’s going on in their lives, which will affect their performance at work. Empathy means being concerned about the human being, not just their output. Most people don’t want to be bad performers; they want to do a good job. Leaders must remember this.Exercising empathy can help leaders build teams, hire employees, and work with clients.Building teams. According to a 2022 Gallup report, employee engagement has dropped over the last several years to 32 percent, and 17 percent of employees are actively disengaged. Recognizing and respecting your employees’ emotions—even the negative ones—is a powerful way to connect with them. Empathy lays the groundwork for mature leadership and connecting with your workers as people.Hiring employees. Empathy is also important in the hiring process. It gives insight into another person’s motivations and helps you judge whether a candidate is right for a position. “If you look at your candidate with empathy, you can see the person and the human they are. And if they’re going to bring that to the table and bring those right skills and the right fit culturally, and all those other pieces just by thinking about that,” said DeLoreto. Working with clients. By employing empathy in your conversations with clients or subject matter experts, you can better understand their pain points and get on the same page. Having an open, thoughtful, empathetic conversation—especially with difficult clients—where you align and get on the same page will improve your relationship. In addition, empathy allows you to understand how another person is likely to behave, which can be powerful in negotiations.Why Leadership Training Can HelpDuring the webinar, DeLoreto polled the audience, asking who had worked for a leader who lacked empathy at any point in their career. The response was a resounding 95 percent “YES.”Effective leadership training needs to include soft skills training such as empathy. While there will always be a demand for training on hard skills, at ELB Learning, we’re seeing more and more clients come to us for manager and leadership development.

Most Important Skill for Leaders Is Empathy—Here’s Why

When making the leap from individual contributor to people manager, you quickly learn that your existing skill set doesn’t automatically translate to success in your new role. And it’s the same when you’re learning to manage a hybrid or remote team. This new(ish) way of working brings its own set of challenges. Hybrid work doesn’t appear to be going anywhere—83 percent of workers say they prefer a hybrid model versus working in an office full-time. This means that it’s essential to be aware of the common pitfalls of managing hybrid teams and be intentional about avoiding them. Here are some tips from Udemy instructors on managing remote teams.Common Challenge #1: Proximity Bias Proximity bias is the (often unconscious) preference we give to people who work onsite simply because we see them more often and work more closely with them. Think this isn’t a problem? Gartner finds that 64 percent of managers say onsite employees are higher performers than remote employees, and 75 percent say onsite employees are more likely to be promoted. It’s easy to see how these beliefs could create a self-fulfilling prophecy, where managers think remote employees aren’t as worthy of promotions, so they don’t advocate for them as equally or provide the same opportunities as those given to people working onsite.How to overcome it? Consider how you’ll attempt to limit this form of bias both in everyday activities and during critical points of the employee lifecycle, like performance reviews and promotions. Udemy instructor Hassan Osman suggests making meetings more equitable by asking all participants to call in from their laptops (even if they’re working out of the same office) and using tools like chat and polls to keep it interactive. For more tips from Hassan on leading a hybrid team, see his course, Better Virtual Meetings.Regarding your team members’ performance, Alexis Haselberger recommends several tactics such as intentionally advocating for your remote workers, highlighting their work in public forums, and regularly auditing who’s being promoted or rewarded, so it doesn’t skew toward in-person employees. For more tips from Alexis, see her course, Essential Skills to Lead From Anywhere. Common Challenge #2: MicromanagementMost people don’t set out to be micromanagers—they simply care about meeting deadlines and quotas and delivering high-quality projects. But somewhere along the line, they stop trusting their team members and start feeling compelled to follow up with them excessively or check their work far too often. While micromanagement is a threat in any work environment, it’s much more likely to occur when we have less visibility into what our team members are doing every day.How to overcome it?Alexis Haselberger recommends establishing explicit working and communication norms. For example, does your team observe core working hours? When and how should team members share updates? What is an acceptable response time to an email or instant message? Any time you assign someone a task or project, discuss the expected timeline and check-in points at the outset. This way, they can be responsible for sending you updates, and you don’t need to interrupt their work by asking for ad hoc progress reports. Udemy instructor Axel Rittershaus recommends relying on digital documentation so all team members can see that everyone is working on their tasks and making progress. Using project management tools like Trello or Asana makes it easy for anyone to get a high-level overview of a project’s progress. You can also reduce the need for progress update meetings when everyone has access to this information through shared tools. For more tips from Axel, check out his course, Leading & Working in Hybrid Teams/Remote Teams. Common Challenge #3: Burnout Burnout is a very real concern in the workplace. McKinsey finds that 49 percent of employees are experiencing burnout, but the real number may be much higher since those who have experienced the worst burnout have likely already left their roles.Burnout is even more of a concern in a hybrid or remote setting because we often need clear boundaries. When does our workday start and end? Should you respond to “one last” email or message? It can be difficult to balance our desire to appear productive and helpful with our need to care for our families or ourselves.How to overcome it?As a leader, look for ways to model good boundary behaviors. Alexis recommends taking vacation days (and not working during them!) and avoiding sending work emails or messages outside of regular work hours. If you can only find time to look at emails late at night or on weekends, make sure you use the “schedule send” feature so it arrives in your team members’ inboxes at a reasonable time, and you don’t create the expectation that they should respond outside of the usual workday.Axel says leaders have a responsibility to pay attention to their team members’ behavior. If you notice any changes—like a lack of enthusiasm, excitement, or participation—make sure you check in and encourage them to take some time off to rest and recharge.Common Challenge #4: Social and Professional IsolationWe gather a lot of information and build a sense of belonging when we share the same workspace as our team members—even if we’re not doing it intentionally. We might overhear a bit of a conversation and join in or run into someone while grabbing a snack and sharing a quick update. These types of serendipitous encounters are much harder to replicate in the hybrid setting, making it easy for people to feel left out in terms of social interactions and the information needed to do their jobs well. Gartner research finds that only 33 percent of organizations practice true information transparency, so we can’t just assume our team members automatically have access to information.How to overcome it? It’s become a bit of a cliché to host a Zoom happy hour, and many workers are over this trend, says Alexis. Luckily, you can do plenty of other team-building activities with your distributed team, including playing virtual board games, taking virtual classes together, or attending a virtual food or beverage tasting with an expert guide. Axel says there are four main categories for team building: Space and time for informal conversationsPlaces to chatVirtual team-building eventsIn-person team-building events Aim for a balance between each of these types of activities to best support your team. You might also offer optional ways for people to connect casually, such as through a watercooler channel in Slack, chat roulette where people get paired with a random coworker and have a virtual coffee break, or even a silent working hour where people can call into a Zoom meeting and work together quietly.When it comes to information sharing, it’s important to have clear documentation and processes, so people know exactly where and how to search for the answers to their questions. Many managers create “working with me” guides to share with their direct reports and encourage every team member to make their own version.Prepare Managers for the Challenges of Leading Remote and Hybrid TeamsThe companies that best adapt to remote and hybrid work are the ones that will maintain a competitive advantage in the future. When asked what they’re looking for in the future of work, most employees are hoping for better work-life balance and flexibility for day-to-day work. When done well, hybrid work has the potential to deliver both of those outcomes.Managers don’t just automatically have the skills that make them good leaders in today’s challenging work environment. Help your managers prepare to face the challenges of leading remote and hybrid teams through cohort learning from peers and other leaders. 

Avoid These 4 Common Challenges When Managing Remote Teams

To create a valuable and connected learning experience, it’s important to consider the range of learning styles and roles people play in an organization throughout the learning life cycle. Identifying different types of learning moments, learners, and learning facilitators enables us to take full advantage of our assets and own the learning process.Moments of Learning NeedWe should frequently consider the resources we make available to employees during a learning experience, but the process shouldn’t end there. We need to consider the moment of need learners are encountering.The concept of “moments of learning need,” developed by Conrad Gottfredson and Bob Mosher, is a powerful learning-centric perspective that focuses on when and under what conditions a performer needs to learn something to drive a desired outcome.The moments of learning need are:Learning for the first timeLearning moreApplying and refiningAdjusting to changeReacting to failureEach of these moments has different requirements. When someone learns a concept for the first time, they build a new foundation that they can apply to get better at a pursuit. In this context, learners need the most structure and scaffolding.If adjusting to change or reacting to failure, however, they will need more performance support in real time. If they’re trying to fix or address an issue, they don’t need the same level of history and context as when learning about that subject for the first time; they just need insight on how to fix or change current performance to achieve a desired outcome.There are two emerging moments of need outside of Gottfredson and Mosher’s work that are crucial to consider.The emerging moments of learning need are:InnovatingGrowing for the next roleThese moments of need are about driving toward something new, taking original approaches, gaining insight, and expanding.As we consider these moments, we should also think about how we organize resources for different learning situations. Transposing our concept of a learner onto one of several distinct types of learning roles is useful when supporting someone throughout an entire learning experience.Expanded Learner RolesWe no longer subscribe to the traditional mindset of simply providing content that a learner consumes and then regurgitates. When we move beyond the first two learning moments—learning for the first time and learning more—to adjusting, refining, reacting, innovating, and growing, it’s critical to understand the expanded learner roles at play during different moments of learning. For instance, at different points individuals may take on these expanded learner roles:ConsumerModeratorCuratorContributorCreatorCollaboratorWhen we treat people like active participants, we expand beyond the mindset of a consumer learning experience, and instead incorporate the roles of moderator, curator, contributor, and so on.We can use an understanding of expanded learner roles and their attendant needs to apply, refine, and amplify the learning experience in innovative ways. When we identify and nurture learning moments of need and learner roles, we witness organic response to change and conflict resolution.Connected Organizational Learning RolesAnother equally important, yet often overlooked, component of a connected learning organization rests in how an organization facilitates learning and provides support throughout the learning life cycle.We can think about the following list of organizational learning roles through the lens of Robert Cross’s work on organizational network analysis, a way of thinking about how organizations become productive.We have four primary organizational learning roles:Learning connectors: People inside a business who have access to resourcesLearning bridges: Individuals who make connections across an organization or team by bringing in insights and different perspectivesCoaches and mentors: Topic specialists with an area of expertise who can help facilitate and accelerate specific projectsInformation brokers: People with access to information in a very fluid state who enable us to learn and ultimately performAll of these roles are critical for a transforming organization. It’s important that we uncover who performs these roles, identify how to nurture them, and make sure we retain them.Once we identify how the broader organizational learning ecosystem operates and contributes resources and information, learning itself will flourish without much formal intervention. This approach allows us to pull full value from our communities and make real strides toward success.

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