Everyone’s heard Jim Collins’ “bus” metaphor: “Leaders of companies that go from good to great start not with “where” but with “who.” They start by getting the right people on the bus, the wrong people off the bus, and the right people in the right seats.” Here at Brandon Hall Group we talk a lot about talent acquisition, talent management, and talent optimization and work to educate the market on getting the right people in the right seats. But does anyone ever stop to think about the bus?

In this article, “Is Your Company a Chicken Bus?” Robert Hatta likens a rapidly growing company to a chicken bus; a mode of transportation that’s cobbled together based on what people can do and what’s needed at the time. Although this mode of transportation gets the job done quickly and inexpensively in the beginning, it’s eventually going to head off of a cliff.

Every company starts out as a chicken bus, or at least an economy car that’s got a driver, maybe some passengers, and is heading down the road to some greater purpose. So how do you make sure your company becomes the optimal bus with plenty of seating and a working air conditioner rather than a chicken bus where your assets are strapped to the top and sides and everyone is holding on for dear life?

Join us at 1 p.m., Thursday, Aug. 29, for some insightful strategies at Brandon Hall Group’s complimentary webinar, Talent Optimization: Where Learning and Talent Meet. It features David Wentworth, Senior Learning Analyst at BHG, and Donald Taylor, Chairman of the Learning and Performance Institute.

Until then, some ideas to think about:

1. Know where you’re going – even chicken busses have a destination. Know what you want your organization to be and what is necessary to accomplish those goals.
2. Think about who you want to join you. On a chicken bus, people join quickly, and bring along a lot of baggage; try to hire people who you want to be there for the long term and their baggage is something you really want to transport.
3. Optimize your passengers. Once people are on your bus and in the right seats, help them grow and encourage learning.

The post Talent Optimization: Don’t be a Chicken Bus appeared first on BrandonHallGroup.

It’s vitally important to get this function right, so Brandon Hall Group is teaming up with Interakt for an Aug. 22 webinar, Keeping your Brand Promise: Ensuring a Unified Brand Experience at Every Touch Point. Stacey Harris of Brandon Hall Group and Narayanan Ramen, Communication Strategist and Director of Client Engagement at Interakt, will discuss best practices in building a unified message and aligning your brand from the inside out.

In the meantime, here are three drivers of excellent internal communication from my experience with several organizations. Internal communication needs to be correct, consistent, and constant to be of value to the corporate community.

Correct. This may sound elementary, but delivering correct information is often overlooked. Be sure the information you disseminate is what your organization wants to convey and that it comes directly from a credible source. If John tells Jeff about a new product launch from Susan in Marketing that needs to be communicated to Sally in Sales, the chances of the sales team having the correct information are slim to none. There’s nothing worse than a game of corporate “Telephone” within an organization. By the time information reaches everyone, if it even does, the original message may look quite different from what was originally communicated and certainly everyone won’t be on the same page.

Consistent.  When you communicate within the organization, make sure that your delivery methods are consistent. There are a lot of great ways to communicate, both old and new. Some companies have internal chat or Yammer boards; others have internal social communities, and others use Salesforce chatter, or even short videos. Although social tools are “hot,” regular team meetings, a weekly or monthly email newsletter, or even companywide telephone messages can be used effectively to ensure the entire organization has the same information at the same time. However, be aware of where and how your employees are accessing information. It does no good to post on an internal social board if no one accesses that information. It’s important to communicate in a way that works for your audience. Every organization, or teams within an organization, should have documented processes in place for communicating various types of information to internal customers.

Constant. Even when your organization is delivering correct information with consistent methods, you can’t stop; the flow of information needs to be constant. Companies can’t make the mistake of assuming that just because the information was communicated at one time in one way that employees remembered or internalized those facts. Repetition and reinforcement are imperative — especially for important organizational initiatives.

As you look at your own corporate communications, what do you do well, and in what areas could you improve? To delve further into this topic, join us Aug. 22 for Keeping your Brand Promise: Ensuring a Unified Brand Experience at Every Touch Point.

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Although many of the entries are extraordinary and innovative, some of the entries are just good solid training programs. Instead of coming up with the next latest, greatest thing in training, sometimes excellence is achieved by just doing what works.

When you’re considering a training program for your organization, you don’t need to use every tool in an instructional designer’s toolkit to achieve measurable learning results. Many of the key takeaways for building a successful learning program are universal. Here are five pointers from one bleary-eyed Excellence Awards judge:

1. Have a reason. Don’t decide that just because you have a training department you automatically have to create the biggest and best learning program. Look at the needs of your learners and those of the larger organization and figure ways to meet those needs.
2. Use the best delivery method for your information and audience. Mobile, games, and simulations are great, but success is really measured by whether or not the correct information is delivered in a way that the audience can understand and learn the information. That may include mobile or social elements, but it might also be a simple PowerPoint presentation.
3. Deliver the correct information. There’s no point in delivering a program if you’re teaching the wrong things. Garbage in, garbage out, doesn’t just apply to computer data. Double-check your facts and focus on context.
4. Decide how to judge success, and build measurement into your program. Measurement is often the hardest part of a program, but if you don’t have tools for evaluation built into your learning, you can’t judge its effectiveness. Nor can a program be judged to be effective if participants all said they “liked” it; go back to your goals and figure out how to quantify the results based on your ideas of success.
5. Engage the audience. No program, even one that’s well designed with great information, is useful unless the audience actually participates. Roll out the program to your audience and encourage them to become proponents of your learning.

Any learning program can be successful and empower an organization; programs don’t always have to be complex to be effective. Put some thought into your learning design and you’ll be able to achieve success for your organization.

Brandon Hall Group is looking forward to announcing our 2013 award winners. In the meantime, please join us for our complimentary Award Winning Forums series where you will learn program best practices from some of our 2012 award winners. To register for one of our forums, please click here.

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Teams.  Everyone has some sort of co-worker dynamic. None of us is truly “alone” in a work environment. But how do you develop a team? What makes some teams more successful than others?

Have you ever been part of a dysfunctional team? Sometimes it’s the leader, sometimes it’s the other team members, and sometimes it’s just lack of direction. Brandon Hall Group research shows that the impact of a dysfunctional team can negatively impact productivity — which is not a surprise — but the actual percentage is 44%. Does your organization really want to be running a 44% deficit because teams aren’t working well together?

In Brandon Hall Group’s Team Development Survey, respondents were asked about their top two priorities for team development. The clear winners were motivating teams to drive results in a unilateral direction and leadership development specific to managing teams. Basically, companies want great leaders who can get their teams to move forward. Sounds like a simple goal, but how can this be accomplished?

There are five stages in Brandon Hall Group’s Team Performance Maturity Model: Unpredictable, Enlightened, Focused, Structured and Optimized.  Within each stage we have analyzed the activities and disciplines across people, processes, systems and outcomes to understand how organizations can improve performance and growth. Organizations that are in the Unpredictable and Enlightened stages tend to have very little investment in their teams; no consistent processes, which lead to poor communication; lack of supporting technologies, which hinders performance and business results.  As organizations move across levels of maturity and reach the Optimized stage, they can achieve the following results:

•    Improved Company Culture and Employee Engagement

•    Increased Business Performance and Impact

•    Better Quality and Increased Productivity

•    Improved Market Share

•    Motivated teams that drive results in a coordinated effort

Next month, Brandon Hall Group will release a white paper providing insights on what high-performing organizations are doing to achieve greater team performance and business impact.  Our research will also show executives and managers how they can implement effective team development strategies.

In the meantime, I want to leave you with these five key practices that can help any organization improve its team performance:

• Encourage communication. As the workforce becomes more global and dispersed it’s important to encourage collaboration and communication.
• Explore new technologies. Social, mobile, gamification, etc., are not just ideas for the distant future. They’re here and can be used to benefit your organization.
• Train appropriately. Many managers don’t receive any training about leadership and team development; help them learn so they can perform.
• Invest in people. In one of Brandon Hall Group’s research surveys, more than 75% of respondents stated that their organization is not investing enough time and budget for team development . Set aside time and money to engage in team development. This alone will set you apart from many organizations.
• Focus on relationships. Relationships Centered Learning, the concept of a community teaching many people both formally and informally, is where learning is evolving. Knowing your team and how each member’s unique knowledge and experiences can help improve the team, is vital toward optimizing development.

Teams are important, and if yours are dysfunctional, your organization is missing out on the power of one of the most important building blocks of an organization. Look at your teams with a critical eye and work to optimize them for improved business performance.

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When hiring managers search for a new employee they look for particular skills. Can they use Excel, Word, and PowerPoint? Do they possess a particular degree or certification? Or do they come highly recommended from a great team member? Even employees who are hired for particular skills don’t know how to do everything a job requires of them and it’s usually a change from their last position.

Here at Brandon Hall Group we talk a lot about Relationship Centered Learning. One of the hallmarks of Relationship Centered Learning is that everyone is now a teacher; we all have our own areas of expertise, and the ability to share our knowledge with others. In our hyper-specialized world, sometimes it’s hard to remember that people don’t automatically know everything, and just because someone is good at one particular skill doesn’t mean they are proficient in other areas as well.  Sometimes they aren’t excelling in a particular area because they haven’t been taught yet.

Make sure that your organization promotes a culture of learning, not just formally, but informally as well. The company of the future needs to look at hiring people who know how to learn and eagerly seek out new skills and abilities. Jobs and activities are constantly changing.  Hiring someone who is particularly skilled in a certain disciple or function doesn’t mean that this skillset will be in demand long-term. Conversely, hiring an employee who doesn’t possess a particular skillset, doesn’t mean they can’t acquire the knowledge needed or that they can’t be utilized in another area. Opportunities (and often new positions) informally occur in workplaces, especially when people leave an organization and their jobs are parceled out to the remaining team members. Are you doing exactly what you were hired to do? Probably not. Companies change, job roles change, and certainly co-workers change.

How do you make sure that your company has the people who can also change? Some ideas include:

• Hire for attributes and aptitude, not just skills
• Encourage learning, both formal and informal
• Encourage interaction between departments
• Create a formal mentoring program for everyone in the organization
• Ask people about their career development plans and how you can help them reach their goals
• Allow for employees to easily change jobs within the organization

Companies and people continue to grow and change. Make sure that you’re ready to meet those changes  rather than always staying a step behind and complaining that things didn’t turn out the way you thought they would. The only constant in this world is change; be prepared, personally, professionally, and organizationally.

For more information from Brandon Hall Group on promoting learning in your organization join us for one of our complimentary webinars. Upcoming topics that can help your organization handle change and promote learning include effective teams, building a workforce strategy, and the role of learning in global talent management.

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Here at Brandon Hall Group, we talk a lot about learning. We study it. We figure out how companies can create it, track it, and deliver it. But how do you keep learning?

Some thoughts include:

• Take advantage of your company’s formal and informal learning infrastructure. Most companies offer learning and development opportunities. Seek them out.
• Seek out interesting people. One of my former mentors suggested asking people what they do to make the world a better place. Everyone has something to teach. Look for mentors.
• Read. Read books, blogs, magazines, and websites. With the amount of free content on the internet the opportunities for reading are endless.
• Watch. YouTube isn’t such a popular website for nothing. It has great talks, tips, and demonstrations on any number of topics.
• Participate. Join a networking group, a professional association, or an online community.
• Attend. Brandon Hall Group offers informative webinars, which are a great (and free!) way to continue learning.

The trick to making learning work for you is to make it relevant – to transform it from something that may have been a chore when you were in school but now adds real business value to what you do.

For an example of how companies can make learning a business tool for their organization, join us for a webinar on imbedded learning, where Prudential will discuss turning corporate learning in to a personalized experience.

The post The End of Learning or Just the Beginning? appeared first on BrandonHallGroup.

But how can you take the information in Brandon Hall Group case studies and use it to make business decisions? What makes our case studies different from other organizations? These case studies aren’t just general highlights of a program’s outcome. We also look at the organization’s approach, implementation, measurement metrics, outcomes, and lessons learned from program implementation.

Not just a simple description of a business program or process, our case studies detail the background of the company and the business conditions that lead to the particular program. Although we describe programs in detail, often with screenshots, links, and frameworks, we also discuss change management efforts and different measurement efforts, plus lessons learned, takeaways, and future plans for the program and organization.

All of our case studies follow the same format. Below are the sections and a brief description of the contents.

• Company Background: this section gives general information about the organization, including its size, revenue, history, key products, and markets.
• Business Conditions: this section includes general background about the conditions the company faced when it decided to implement a particular program or product.
• Program Overview: this provides a high-level description of the program, its intended audience, and its objectives. This often includes screenshots of the program in action.
• Change Management Efforts: once the program has been described, it’s important to discuss how it was implemented and the process and changes needed to be successful. This section discusses the changes leading to program implementation. This can include information regarding leadership buy-in, team dynamics, and logistics.
• Measurable Benefits: everyone wants to know whether or not a program is successful. This section not only discusses program outcomes, but often describes how the organization measured success.
• Future Plans/Next Steps/Lessons Learned: this section includes the key takeaways from the case study, future plans for the program, and lessons learned.

When searching for information, you can search by industry, company size, geographical region, type of program. Even if a particular program might not directly apply to your organization, our case studies are searchable by industry so that you can see what other companies in your industry or similar industries are doing. You can also see what companies in your particular region, or perhaps a region you’re considering moving into, are doing in regards to learning. The case studies also look at how companies are implementing specific types of programs such as mobile support, virtual worlds, or onboarding. Or you can look at a group of case studies together and see how those organizations are measuring learning, or the business conditions that are leading to change.

All of our case studies contain valuable information about where companies are and the programs they are implementing, and we often have the opportunity to hear from the companies during our webinars and in our award winning forums. On May 23, we will present a webinar where DHL leaders will describe how they increased the effectiveness of their 6,000-person global sales force, reduced the time to productivity for new hires, and attracted the best salespeople to work for them.  Anyone registering for this webinar will receive a copy of the award-winning case study describing DHL’s onboarding program at the conclusion of the webinar.

We look forward to hearing about experiences with case studies and interactions with our webinars and our member center. Feel free to email us at success@brandonhall.com to share your experiences or request more information about Brandon Hall Group’s research.

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Fast forward a year or so and I was an intern sitting in a department meeting and the VP started scribbling the letters SWOT on the white board in the conference room. Immediately I thought of that particular lesson in the business class and realized that this technique really was useful in a corporate environment.

In the next few months Brandon Hall Group will focus on publishing frameworks, models, and tools that are relevant to each of our portfolio areas.  See an example here. Frameworks, models, and tools are great ways to communicate an idea or share a vision when there is limited time. But, having spent many more years in the industry now since my first experience with a business model, one thing I’ve learned along the way is that no two companies are completely alike; however, they often share important characteristics.

These frameworks, models, and tools are starting points for you and we will share multiple versions of similar concepts, because unlike a simple SWOT analysis, useful for any company, the idea of one single framework that meets everyone’s needs isn’t realistic. Some variables include:

• Company size
• Industry
• Business maturity
• Process and technology maturity
• Work environments
• Culture
• Leadership preferences

We know every organization starts at a different place, and we want to help you by providing concepts that you can use and apply to your specific situation in a way that is relevant for your business needs. If you have a particular model or tool that you would like us to research and share, please let us know by contacting us at success@brandonhall.com.  We’d also love to hear about your own models and frameworks that have helped you successfully communicate your ideas and approaches to your business.

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This is a story of what can happen when trainers reject “chunks” for large learning programs that audiences can’t – or won’t — handle.

In a previous career, I worked as an instructional designer. I didn’t end up staying on that career path, but I do have vivid memories of creating an integrated training program. The program I worked on included eLearning modules incorporating video, quizzes, coaching, role play, and webinars to tie the whole program together. When this program was conceived, the organization held endless meetings to determine objectives, hosted interviews with subject matter experts, and worked hand-in-hand with the media and IT teams to create over 5,000 pages of documentation for a program that took more than two years to create.

By the time this program — beautifully packaged on 43 CDs with five binders full of information for coaching and role plays — was finally complete and rolled out to the audience, it was already passé.

The information was still relevant, and the pilot showed positive results, but the program was just too big. It was too confusing to administer, with too many tasks, too much information, and too much time required to complete, rendering the program practically useless to the audience.

Responding to the need for a shorter, and more accessible, program, the organization moved quickly to offer face-to-face workshops and webinars and changed its entire training model. Over the next 12 months this comprehensive program, which had been lovingly created over two years, went almost unused. Not because the information was bad, but because the full format in which it was delivered didn’t meet the needs of that particular learning audience.

That audience needed “chunks.” They needed learning delivered in short increments and just-in-time. Here at Brandon Hall Group we’re seeing an audience that increasingly wants their information in smaller pieces, when and how they need it.

At the end of the day when designing a training program it’s important to connect with your learning audience and find out what it wants. These discussions include their goals and objectives, but also the resources the audience is willing to invest in the program, including time. Audiences are proving that they are not interested in comprehensive programs that teach everyone about everything. They use programs with small amounts of information up front and then supplemental learning that’s easily accessible and imbedded into a day-to-day environment. Such programs are often online, and use mobile and social tools to meet the audience where it is, not where program creators think it should be.

Designing within the needs of your learning audience is what will help your learners do their best! Brandon Hall Group offers a number of informative webinars that cover a variety of topics. In May we’ll discuss engaging Millennials, and delivering content in an increasingly mobile world. Please join us for these webinars discussing training for specific audiences.

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Are you in the market for a new LMS? Results from Brandon Hall Group’s annual LMS trends survey showed 47 percent of respondents were currently replacing their LMS in 2012, up from 33 percent of respondents in 2011.

Why is there this race to replace? Our survey also asked respondents to pick three things they liked least about their LMS and “Reporting Features” was the top pick . Respondents also chose reporting features as the most important requirement for selecting a new Learning Management System.

Why is reporting important? And what makes reports valuable?

A system’s reporting and security settings provide immense amounts of decision-making information for organizational leaders. If managed properly, reports can clearly define a company’s learning compliance level, gaps in skill development by function or region, or opportunities for talent mobility. When managed poorly, a lack of reporting functionality can lead to an area of real frustration for learning leaders, stakeholders, and end-users that are unable to view the information they need to make better business decisions.

Key practices for preparing a new LMS to better manage reporting and security needs include:

• Identifying all current reports and assessing their use.
• Validating the relevance of these reports and their continued value.
• Identifying reporting gaps (business needs not being met).
• Assessing new solution provider reporting capabilities and dashboards for their ability to address reporting gaps.
• Re-thinking security requirements versus security norms.
• Identifying opportunities for transparency and openness.
• Producing sample reports and verifying format, layout, location, schedule, and drill down requirements before final configurations.
• Regularly assessing reporting value.

Reports help evaluate learning programs. Timely and relevant reporting from a system can help administrators determine the business impact of specific learning initiatives.

Of course, managing reporting is important, but are there any industry-wide reporting standards? Brandon Hall Group has teamed up with the Center for Talent Reporting to deliver an educational webinar on Getting Measurement Right: New Standards for Reporting. For more information or to register for this informative session please click here.

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1 Brandon Hall Group, LMS Trends Survey, November 2012, N=347.

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