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Listen to the Voices of Measuring and Evaluating Training: Mary L. Broad

Mary L. Broad

HRD innovation for substance abuse prevention

As the founder of Velocity, LLC, The Conversation Company™, which emphasizes the art of strategic conversation using 4SConversations, Jill has spearheaded innovative programs for employees from corporations such as American Express, The Walt Disney Company, Elizabeth Arden, L’Oreal, Mary Kay, Donna Karan, Reebok International and Turner Broadcasting. Her approach to employee motivation and wellness has been highlighted at change management best–practices conferences worldwide. Contact her at jill@4Sconversations.net

Jill Miller

Elliott Masie has been the host and curator of many L&D seminars, labs, and conferences throughout the past 30 years. He is a provocative, engaging, and entertaining researcher, educator, analyst, and speaker who is focused on the changing world of the workplace, learning, and technology. He is acknowledged as the first analyst to use the term e-learning and has advocated for a sane deployment of learning and collaboration technology as a means of supporting the effectiveness and profitability of enterprises.He heads The MASIE Center, a Saratoga Springs, New York, think tank focused on how organizations can support learning and knowledge within the workforce. He leads the Elliott Masie Learning CONSORTIUM , a coalition of more than 150 global organizations cooperating on the evolution of learning strategies, including American Express, General Electric, McDonald’s, General Motors, and Fidelity Investments.He is the editor of Elliott Masie’s Learning TRENDS, an Internet newsletter read by more than 52,000 business executives worldwide, and a regular columnist in professional publications, including Chief Learning Officer magazine. He is the author of 12 books, including the ASTD /MASIE Center’s Big Learning Data. Masie’s next book, EveryDay Learning, is scheduled to publish in September 2020.His professional focus has been in the fields of corporate learning, organizational performance, and emerging technology. He has developed models for accelerating the spread of knowledge, learning, and collaboration throughout organizations.He serves as an advisor to a wide range of government, education, and nonprofit groups and has served on the board of trustees of Skidmore College as a member of FIRST Robotics board of directors and Williamstown Theatre Festival. He has served as a pro bono advisor to the Department of Defense and on the White House Advisory Council on Expanding Learning Opportunities as well as a member of the CIA University board of visitors.Masie is known as a highly approachable speaker and trainer who blends humor, applicable stories of best practices, and high levels of audience involvement. During the past 35 years, he has presented programs, courses, and speeches to more than 3,100,000 professionals around the world. He lives in Saratoga Springs, New York, owns thoroughbred horses, and is a Tony Award–nominated Broadway producer of shows including Kinky Boots, An American in Paris, The Prom, The Cher Show, Anastasia, The Play That Goes Wrong, SpongeBob SquarePants: The Broadway Musical, and most recently, Seared.

Elliott Masie

If you work at an organization with a large deskless workforce, you know just how difficult it can be to upskill and reskill employees. Deskless workers are often on the front lines or hard at work earning revenue for the business. They’re interacting with patients or customers, doing work out in the field, or on the road—delivering goods or offering services. Employers may be hesitant to take them “off the job” for training. Patty Gaul, senior writer and editor for the Association for Talent Development, explored this topic in a recent article.“An L&D leader may learn that a company doesn’t include training time as a bucket of employee time,” she writes. “The organization encourages their managers to hurry their direct reports to their stations or positions (such as the manufacturing line, cash register, or delivery route) rather than giving employees the time to learn how to do their immediate work well. This negatively affects workers’ knowledge and, in the end, motivation.” Research shows that poor training also puts staff in danger—instances of human error causing occupational accidents are more likely when workers are under-skilled.There’s an opportunity cost as well. Gaul writes: “Too often, leaders train these workers only when there’s a problem, not taking advantage of the opportunity that development affords.” Employers that do not invest in training may be leaving productivity gains and a competitive advantage on the table.With all the benefits L&D offers—and all the challenges it can help your organization avoid—how can you train your deskless workforce in the most effective way possible? Giving learners more options to complete their training can help. Employees don’t have to be chained to a desk or sitting in a classroom to learn and develop. A little bit of L&D creativity can go a long way. Read on to discover four strategies to motivate your deskless employees to fit training into their busy schedules.1. Give Learners the Flexibility to Learn Wherever They Happen to BeMost workers want to learn new skills and are intrinsically motivated to improve and develop. A recent survey shows that seven out of 10 workers feel more connected to their organization when they’re learning. A further eight out of 10 say learning gives them a sense of purpose at work.Giving deskless workers the opportunity to access this kind of purpose can drastically improve their job satisfaction—and extend their tenure too. Research shows that having a strong culture of learning can improve employee retention by up to 57 percent. Some employees may associate learning with taking notes in a lecture hall, or sitting in front of a computer—but “studying” shouldn’t have to equal “desk.” The solution to helping deskless employees learn and develop is already in their pockets. When staff can complete their training right from their mobiles, wherever they happen to be, a whole world of opportunity opens up to them.Did you know that Bridge LMS, an all-in-one solution for training and upskilling staff, comes with the intuitive, user-friendly Bridge Learning app as standard? The app, available for both iOS and Android, makes it simple and easy for employees to complete their learning, whenever, wherever.Learners can even access content without Wi-Fi. This makes the learning experience seamless. They can start their training in a break room, for example, and effortlessly keep their momentum going when traveling to a field site. They’ll have key insights on the topics that matter to them at their fingertips—even in the most remote locations. With Wi-Fi-less learning, a bus, a train, a factory floor, their kitchen, and even the most far-flung location can instantly become an inspiring classroom.2. Help Staff Keep Their Learning on TrackResearch shows that there’s a strong correlation between motivation and learning outcomes. Setting smaller goals and steadily working toward them can help people stay committed to their targets. Breaking a big learning target down into less intimidating, achievable goals can be tremendously helpful. This is particularly true for deskless workers who may work in isolation or don’t get much contact with leadership. Boston Consulting Group stated that: “[A] major issue is the limited access deskless workers have to corporate communication systems like email and intranets. These tools are often designed with desk-based employees in mind[...]This communication gap can lead to a sense of isolation, making these workers feel disconnected from the organization’s broader goals and culture.”Choosing an LMS that helps you keep every learner on track, wherever they happen to be, can make all the difference. With Bridge Mobile, push notifications remind learners when a course is due. This relieves them of the cognitive load of managing their own learning and development schedule.Admins can easily track enrollments, missed deadlines, and course completion rates. They can generate intuitive reports in a few clicks and share data-powered insights with the wider organization. This empowers managers to intervene with support at the right time. Regular contact from well-informed managers means reports feel less at sea and more empowered to meet the development goals that matter to them.3. Be Realistic About Learning Challenges and Prepare for HiccupsAs useful as remote training is, it does come with challenges. If it’s not properly managed, it can open the door to miscommunication or inefficient learning. Workers may encounter technical difficulties, for instance, and feel that these headaches are a significant burden after a long shift on their feet or on the go.Tech challenges can have a big impact on morale, even among younger generations. Research shows that just under 50 percent of young graduates surveyed across the globe feel their level of technical expertise has left them unprepared for the workforce. As many as one in five young workers say they feel “judged” when they don’t know how to solve a tech issue. Tech headaches can be exacerbated for deskless staff who work far from a central IT team and may not have admin time built into their schedule. The key is to accept that challenges may arise from time to time and prepare for them in advance. Your first line of defense will naturally be to choose a mobile LMS with a very simple, clean interface, and intuitive, user-friendly features. Bridge Mobile offers a straightforward experience with uncomplicated dashboards. Learners can easily navigate between their courses, learning libraries, and agendas. User-friendly design isn’t the only factor though. Choosing an LMS provider known for meticulous onboarding and responsive customer service can also help you stay ahead of tech challenges. The last thing you want is for a learner to lose their motivation for good because of a minor technical hiccup that could be solved with a few simple instructions. This is why Bridge offers comprehensive onboarding. Our expert teams work with your admins to make sure they fully understand our app’s capabilities. When admins know features inside out, implementation is easy—and they’re empowered to help their team as and when required. It’s thanks in part to our outstanding onboarding that we recently achieved a customer satisfaction score of 93 percent. We also offer tech support 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year. This means deskless workers with unusual hours don’t need to fall behind on their learning just because they need a bit of extra support. We have an excellent service team—and we’re proud to share that our customers love us for it. A representative from US-based construction and engineering company Rudolph and Sletten said: “Bridge LMS is exceptionally user-friendly, featuring an intuitive and clean interface that simplifies navigation for both administrators and learners. The customer support is outstanding—easily accessible and remarkably patient in understanding and resolving even the most challenging scenarios.”4. Offer Accessible, Engaging, and Personalized Learning for AllWhen staff feel that instructions are passed down from some invisible authority, they may feel less motivated to learn. On the other hand, intrinsic motivation—wanting to complete a task because it is fun, interesting, or helpful—can be a crucial factor for successful learning. Employers can promote intrinsic motivation by making employees feel competent and autonomous.To achieve this, personalizing learning is key. Especially when you consider the type of tasks deskless workers tend to do. Deskless workers are the lifeblood of many organizations. Every hour away from their daily tasks is an hour away from crucial activity that drives their company’s revenue or underpins their organization’s ethos. When the stakes are this high, cookie-cutter learning content can feel like a waste of time.Bridge Mobile can help you steer clear of one-size-fits-all courses. It empowers you to deliver personalized learning journeys for every employee. Managers can assign courses that align with specific, individual targets—and employees always have a clear view of their progress over time. This means that they’ll have a little bit of motivation to keep learning, and easy access to that learning wherever they are.Because the app stores tasks, ideas, achievements, and due dates all in one place, employees have their own, personal space to work toward their goals. This can help them feel like your organization is invested in improving their experience at work, instead of just forcing standardized training en masse.Crucially, Bridge also makes content more accessible for every learner. The app supports 20 different languages, so you can keep your employees of all backgrounds engaged and inspired. It also complies with WCAG (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines) at AA-level. This means:It’s easy to use with assistive technologies, like screen readers.There’s good color contrast between any text and background.Content is organized under clear headings, in a logical order.Navigation buttons or elements are consistent across the app.

4 Ways to Effectively Train Your Deskless Workforce 

The concept of “open source”—that is, software for which the original source code is made freely available for others to add on, modify, and improve—radically changed the way software is developed and has played a large part in enabling the technology boom we see today.
But the open-source idea isn’t just for software engineers. Some of the core ideas associated with open-source approaches can offer interesting new directions for L&D teams too.
As decentralization, openness, sharing, and collaboration become the new norm in many organizations, the idea that anyone can share their expertise broadly, and that individuals and teams can access and build on each other’s know-how, perfectly encapsulates this concept of open-source learning.
In this webcast, you will learn from the experiences of a technology company on applying the concepts of open-source software development to development of another kind—that of your staff. We’ll cover:

the fundamentals of open-source learning
how these relate to knowledge sharing and learning within an organization
how to make open-source learning happen
the role of the L&D professional in driving an open-source learning culture.   


Leveraging All Your Experts: What L&D Can Learn from the Software Industry

Often when we’re frustrated at work, it’s not so much because of the company we work for, but rather the specific role we’re in. Personality type, as described by the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator® instrument (MBTI®), offers insight into certain preferences—particularly for how we take in information and make decisions,  which heavily contribute to on-the-job satisfaction. The more we work within our preferences, the more energized and less drained we’ll feel. As discussed in my previous post, your current job may not map well to your preferences. However, if the broader company culture is more in line with who you are and your personality, pursuing a new role within the organization might be preferable to looking elsewhere for employment. Just as personality types describe human beings, you can in fact “type” a company, department, or role by observing how information is gathered and decisions are made.. Use personality type as a guide for determining a better fitting role—looking at what is not only required of an individual, but also what skills and attributes are most sought after in various departments. Identifying What You Really Want to Do Children are often asked: “What do you want to be when you grow up?” In seeking a new role within your company, a better question to ask yourself is: “What do you want to do?” By discovering the kinds of tasks and responsibilities that line up with your core motivators, you can more accurately identify a more satisfying role within your current company. According Allen L. Hammer in “Introduction to Type® and Careers,” you can begin by asking yourself:What do I want to do on a day-to-day basis?Where do I want to be in one, five or ten years?What kind of people do I want to work with?What kind of working environment do I find most comfortable?What kind of working environment allows me to be most productive?What motivates me to do my best? Regarding this last point, while preferences for Thinking (T) or Feeling (F) describe how we make decisions, Sensing (S) and Intuition (N) describe the types of information that we base those decisions on, and the combination of these indicates what will most motivate us at work:ST:  achieving bottom line resultsSF: offering practical serviceNF: making a meaningful differenceNT: improving the system. Research shows that people actually self-select into occupations that coincide with these middle letter preferences. For example, if you have an F preference, you may experience great satisfaction in a role where you get to help or support other people. This can manifest itself in a number of ways—helping customers, mentoring, serving on an advisory board, improving society, or making the world a better place. Additionally, for those with a preference for Feeling, keep in mind that the overall result of your work can also affect your ultimate level of job satisfaction. For instance, you may find that even though you’re not spending as much time performing “helping-type” tasks in your day-to-day activities, you could still be energized by a job that ultimately contributes to a greater good for people. If you work for Habitat for Humanity or at a university, even though your day-to-day activities might not involve direct “helping” activities, knowing you’re a cog in the wheel that makes a difference in peoples’ lives may be enough to keep you energized. Molding Your Own Role If you have a preference for Sensing and Thinking, yet find yourself in a position that requires a lot of one-on-one counseling, you may want to seek out a position that allows you to conduct data analysis with an emphasis on the here and now, or even seek out these types of responsibilities within your current job. For example, I often work with career counselors who have preferences for ST, but their profession requires them to frequently use their non-preferred Intuition and Feeling functions. Although they usually report that they like their jobs overall, they also say their jobs are very draining and frustrating when they spend too many hours in a direct helping role. However, if they’re able to seek out activities that allow them to work within their natural preferences, such as analyzing career assessments, critiquing resumes, running the office operations or managing departmental technology, they can achieve a renewed enthusiasm for their roles. In general, if you can cherry pick enough activities that match your own preferences and integrate them into your daily role, you will be much more satisfied and energized in your current position.  Having the Patience to Work Your Way Up Sometimes there’s not an immediate solution because developing the skills and expertise to operate in certain roles takes time. If you have a preference for Thinking, for example, you may enjoy logical objective decision making, and like to look for what is wrong with the system so you can fix it. The question is, are you far along enough in your career to initiate and implement change? Let’s face it, most teams don’t take well to junior-level employees telling them what’s wrong with what they’re doing, regardless of how on-point their advice may be. In some cases, you may have to stick it out for a while, building your level of expertise and influence before you are able to take on more of a “fixer” role. You may experience frustration along the way, as you’ll likely witness incompetence in both leaders and peers that you would like to “fix,” but don’t have the power to do anything about it, yet. Instead, use your current position to gain the expertise and, eventually, the level of authority to implement change, so you can grow into a role that you’ll find very satisfying and allows you to do what comes most naturally.

Frustrated at Work Part II: Using Personality Type to Find a Better Role at Your Company

In 1996, Abraham Maslow (best known for his theorem of the hierarchy of needs in psychology) quipped that “I suppose it is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail.” Two years earlier, the American philosopher Abraham Kaplan made a similar observation: “Give a small boy a hammer, and he will find that everything he encounters needs pounding.”This adage came to life in my own family recently, when we learned that our future daughter-in-law found her new car covered with a half inch of ice after an overnight storm. Not sure what to do, she found a hammer in the trunk and proceeded to use it to smash the ice loose from bumper to bumper. Predictably, it was difficult to convince her insurance carrier to reimburse her for the multiple broken windows and sheet metal dents. (I’m sorry to confess that she will fit in nicely with our family!)What does this have to do with business and training? A great deal. Let me explain: Recently, I have become concerned that the “hammer du jour” in our metaphoric trunk is high technology.First, let me say that this article is not a Luddite rant against technology per se. This new millennium has brought to our training tool boxes a host of promising, wonderful technologies like web-based training, virtual instructor-led classrooms, simulations, gaming, and social media, to name a few. These tools make it easier to deliver training to more learners, less expensively, more consistently, and across broader geographies and time zones. In short, we can get more done with less as a result of the technology advances that have emerged.However, there is a tendency for people to use these technologies like the proverbial hammer. Some organizations have pushed forms of e-learning into cultures with little online learning interest and/or infrastructure. Others have insisted on taking an exclusively “high-tech” approach to teaching “high-touch” skills such as coaching and conflict resolution.More recently, the universal technology panacea in some quarters seems to be the application of new social media technologies to learning (a.k.a. “Learning 2.0”). The notion that most people learn better and enjoy it more in a social environment is inarguable. For that matter, the traditional classroom (when led by an interactive teacher or facilitator) can be a very social milieu within which to learn, particularly if the learning objectives are focused on human skills, such as leadership.The DownsideThe social media buzz, meanwhile, is about technology-based interactive experiences including blogs, chat rooms, and discussion forums, not to mention the wildly successful commercial social platforms—Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Yammer. Clearly, these tools can be harnessed within our organizations to make learning more interactive, involving, and spontaneous, while also spanning geography and generation, and capitalizing on the collective wisdom of groups.However, some of these platforms can be risky for organizations in terms of security and legal liability. Technology can sometimes be surprisingly difficult and inconsistent. Corporate firewalls can be fussy about what they let through. And technology is always changing, which is good for progress but frustrating for infrastructure investments.In addition, corporate cultures differ, just like people do, and what is easily adopted in one organization may be ineffective in another. And finally, there are regional and international variances in uptake, technology, and governing laws and institutions. Thus, the promise of social media is tempered by the complexities and uncertainties experienced by organizations to varying degrees.Force-Fitting Doesn’t WorkUnfortunately, some learning and development professionals have tried to force-fit social learning tools and platforms into topics and cultures, whether or not they are necessarily well-suited. And regardless of the tools in our tool box, a few maxims about effective learning systems haven’t changed. Next week, I’ll post these tenets of learning systems design that are key, despite mode or technology. I’ll also list a few guiding principles for using social technologies.

Training, Technology, and "The Law of the Hammer": Part 1

Over the past several years, many learning trends have emerged that continue to impact the market for professional development and lifelong learning. Advances in learning technology and methodologies provide new opportunities for L&D to design and deliver meaningful learning experiences that align with business objectives. As companies evolve to become digital businesses, they expect their learning organizations to also be more digital. Join us for an exciting look ahead to the broad implications of digital learning and the emerging trends.
In 2019, the stage is set for transformative moves as last year’s digital learning developments continue to mature and converge. Trends such as integrating learning into work along with all the innovative and immersive technologies that continue to be developed allow for endless possibilities to improve the learning experience. In this interactive webcast, Don Duquette, executive vice president of Learning Solutions for GP Strategies Corporation, will deliver easy-to-understand insights on the questions that learning professionals will be asking in 2019, such as:

How do I measure the impact of learning?
How can I improve the learner experience?
What new developments are ahead in personalized learning?
What are some practical uses for chat bots, augmented and virtual realities, and robotic process automation?
How can we develop process for innovation and ensure viability?


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