Employee training

Employee Orientation from Administrative to Strategic

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For decades, the HR world has been spouting the following statements on an endless verbal loop:

  • Move all HR practices from an administrative to a strategic focus
  • Employees are our best assets
  • Develop a culture of employee engagement for success

The assumption is that if HR does all of the above, everything will be perfect; however, HR never really does these things. They usually do the exact opposite of what they believe in. Let’s look at what HR usually does during new employee orientations.

On an employee’s first day, HR inundates the new employee with administrative policies and procedures, which are nothing more than strict guidelines and rules that demean the new employee’s intelligence. Then, the HR professional is shocked when the employee does not embrace their culture of engagement. This orientation merry-go-round is happening on a perpetual loop at most organizations.

Successful employee onboarding, or orientation, is not about learning HR’s administrative rules. According to John Hilton, in his article “4 ways onboarding processes must change,” successful employee onboarding is about submerging employees in the organization’s culture, and the key to making employees engaged and productive in their new positions. This is noted by Hilton, when he states, “There’s a misconception that an intensive onboarding experience requires a high administrative burden.”

Additionally, Hilton suggests some ideas on how HR can successfully transition from an administrative to a strategic focus:

  • Engage employees’ emotions
  • Explain that organizational culture and behaviours are not just about meeting administrative goals on paper
  • Automate lower value activities
  • Focus all orientation activities with the intent to expose employees to the organizational culture

HR professionals know that onboarding sets the tone for the quality of long-term employee engagement. So, when HR creates an onboarding process with intention, it sets the tone for sparking a higher level of long-term employee engagement and productivity.

Discussion Questions:

  1. Research and identify if there is a difference between employee orientation and employee onboarding. State and defend your position.
  2. Research and find an organization that has an exceptional onboarding program. Summarize the main elements of their program.
  3. What would you present to your VP of HR to demonstrate the value of a strategic onboarding program?

How to Improve Employee Training and Development

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There are three things in life that are always in limited supply: time, energy and money. Whenever an organization runs a training program it is using up those three limited resources: time to train, time away from productive work, the energy required to design and participate in training, and the associated monetary costs allocated to the training. These factors must all be considered when implementing any training programs.

An article published in the Harvard Business Review (HBR) by Keith Ferrazzi, author of the book Who’s Got Your Back?, sheds light on how employee training can be improved. His broad research included training leaders in large organizations and from many different industries. He also consulted with academic leaders in several universities.

Ferrazzi’s research identifies 7 key challenges organizations must understand and address in order to improve their employee training and development.

Click here to read the HBR article, entitled the 7 Ways to Improve Employee Development.

Here is a summary of the themes identified by Ferrazzi. Remember there is a best-before date in training — everything moves so fast in today’s business world that most training has a short shelf life. So, when you think of training, think milk.

Two of the most critical factors in effective training have little to do with the content of the training and everything to do with an organization’s culture and climate. How much do employees trust an organization, and how passionate are managers about developing employees? These factors are critical.

The remaining training improvements focus on specific elements:

  • individual accountability
  • understanding the complex world of different learning styles,
  • and how to develop your virtual teams.

Dr. Edward Hess has asserted that organizations will either “learn or die”. If organizations reflect on Keith Ferrazzi’s ideas about to improve employee development, I believe they might just remain in rude health.

Discussion Questions:

  1. After reading the HBR Article reflect on the following:
  2. What is your opinion on the validity of Keith Ferrazzi’s ideas on how to improve employee development? Do you agree or disagree with the ideas? Support your position with evidence and your own ideas.
  3. From Ferrazzi’s 7 training improvement ideas pick the two that you feel are the most important and defend your position as to why.

Get Tough: How to Build Workplace Resiliency

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Resiliency: why do we want it and how do we get it in the workplace?

Perseverance and resilience green weeds grew in a waterless desert.
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With the growing concern of mental health issues taking its toll on workplaces, HR departments are considering how they can respond. Can HR teach employees to have more grit or greater resiliency to workplace stressors?

What is workplace resiliency? It is the employee’s ability to bounce back or respond to workplace challenges, changes and setbacks.

Ernie Philip a Senior Vice President at Xerox Canada believes workplace resiliency training is key to an organization’s success. Many studies have illustrated that organizations with greater resiliency have lower absenteeism, better engagement and happier workers. According to Ernie Philip: “Resilient people are happier and have higher life-satisfaction.”

Click here to read about workplace resiliency from Ernie Philp’s perspective.

It may be time for HR Departments to consider resiliency training as part of the overall wellness initiatives.

Discussion Questions

  1. Develop a presentation on the components of a workplace resiliency training program.
  2. Imagine your organization has just implemented a resiliency training program. What matrices would you recommend to evaluate the resiliency program?

Talent Champion

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Who to develop?

superhero businessman looking at city skyline at sunset. the concept of success, leadership and victory in business.
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The psychological contract of a lifetime of work with one employer is long gone. In our globalized workplace it was replaced with the concept of developing oneself in the workplace.

According to Daphne Woolf, many senior leaders are not as good at developing talent in others as they think they are or as they should be. Her video illustrates the concepts of “Talent Champion” who understand that they are responsible for developing others more than developing themselves and if they don’t have this skill set it can be developed.

Many successful senior leaders obtained their position by being operational experts in their industry, not necessarily talent experts. But when they reach that senior level they must be both an operational expert and a talent champion.

Click here to watch a video with Daphne Wolf

Daphne Wolf believes a Talent Champion can be developed by doing the following:

  • Assessing the senior executive strengths in developing others.
  • Embed the concept in the senior executive that developing others is a fundamental responsibility of their role.
  • Give them the skills and strategies on how to mentor others.

Developing Talent Champions within an organization needs to become a proactive activity not just a passive activity. This can only happen if the senior executive is naturally affiliated to develop others. HR departments need to take a leadership role in ensuring that the coaching and mentoring of others is a core competency of all senior executives.

Discussion Questions

  1. Research to see if you can find a simple but effective mentoring-others self-assessment tool.
  2. Once you have found a tool use it to measure yourself on your ability to mentor others. Where are your strengths and where are your areas of improvement?
  3. Review some senior executive’s job description. Determine if they have ‘developing others’ as part of their job description. If so, identify some common terminology.

Change your Brain, Change your Performance

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The Future of Employee Training

brain lifting weights: illustration
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Most employers have the organization goal to train and develop their employees, but the age old question always arises. In what areas do employees need to be developed? Perhaps organizations need to approach training their employee’s brains like fitness instructors train their bodies.

Dr. Judy Brockis, the author of Future Brain: The 12 Keys to Create Your High Performance Brain, suggests we can drastically improve our brain’s performances. Let’s start by describing Dr. Brockis twelve keys to brain performance.

Click here to read more about these twelve brain keys.

Key nine focuses on Change ability, a skill that can assist employees and organizations to adapt to change.

What is brain change ability? Well, the concept is very closely tied to the concept of neural plasticity, which is the brain’s ability to grow, develop and change its neural structural. Research on neural plasticity is well developed and it illustrates that we all have the ability to grow and develop at any age. If we combine the concept of neural plasticity and Dr. Brockis’s brain key number nine, change ability, we may have more tools to help employees manage change in their workplace.

Dr. Brockis outlines that our brains are dynamic and designed to change and adapt. It is our fear response that can impede change.

In her article in HRM Canada, Dr. Brockis feels that the human brain “is really wired to change, change is beneficial and always present, and it is part of the human condition. But it is all about psychological safety, the brain needs to feel that the change is not a threat in order to accept it.”

Click here to read an article on Dr. Brockis and change in the workplace.

The HR professional needs to understand the future training needs of employees and should become versed in the concepts neural plasticity and change ability, and integrate them into any change management program they wish to implement.

Discussion Question:

  1. Your VP of HR has asked you what you would recommend to make a workplace change successful. After reading the twelve keys to a fit brain, create a five minute presentation on training employees on a fit brain in the workplace and how it can reduce the turmoil during an upcoming change initiative.