HR Professionals

Is Experience the Best Teacher?

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Source: Patsy Michaud/Shutterstock
Source: Patsy Michaud/Shutterstock

We have often heard the expression ‘walk a mile in my shoes’ when someone wants to relay how a certain experience has affected them.  Usually, the experience was unpleasant, challenging, or just very difficult and we want to have someone else understand how we felt.  Why?  Sometimes, when we experience a difficult situation we want to talk about it just to complain,  but we also talk about our negative experiences because we don’t want to go through that experience the same way, again.  Having a negative experience, especially one that causes us discomfort, is certainly a key factor in changing our behaviour in order to avoid repeating the same experience in the future.  One hopes that what we learn for ourselves, we might help others with as well.

Listening to someone’s negative experience is very different from living through the actual experience itself. A very effective training design technique which implements experiential learning, is being used at the Michener Institute for Applied Health Sciences.  An “aging simulation suit’ is being used to train future healthcare practitioners.  The suit is designed in such a way that it literally allows someone to walk in the shoes of an aging person and to learn, through personal experience, what it physically feels like to be a patient or a client in a healthcare setting.

Click here to read the article and watch a video

Discussion Questions:

  1. Besides healthcare, what types of industries would benefit from having this type of sensory aging & mobility training provided to their employees?
  2. Have you changed something in your own work style because of how you felt someone treated you? What did you change and why did you make that change?
  3. From a customer service perspective, what other types of training tools could be used to relay the experience of aging?
  4. Why is this type of experiential training effective?

Needs Analysis: Keep it Simple

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Very often, organizations get caught up in over complicating and over analyzing what employees need or want.  As with most things, the more complicated a process is, the more opportunity for misunderstanding, miscommunication, and missing the mark.

Source: Ivelin Radkov/Shutterstock
Source: Ivelin Radkov/Shutterstock

This is definitely the case with needs analysis related to employee learning.  We hear how important it is to drill down into the core of an organizational psyche so that we can prepare and respond to multiple employee challenges through various analytical methodologies.  It does not have to be so complex.

Click here to read the article.

In this article, there are three simple questions to ask employees about their work life, including the very powerful but simple question, ‘What do you want to learn this year?’ . Simple questions can provide an abundance of responses.  The answers to simple questions will give us a wealth of material that we, as HR Professionals, can work with in order to provide appropriate learning tools to fit what employees tell us they need.

Asking questions should be the easiest part to creating understanding about what employees need.  Making sure we respond to what employees tell us they need is where the real challenge lies.

Discussion Questions:

  1. How would you respond to each of the three questions from this article in your current (or past) work environment?
  2. What types of responses from these three questions would indicate employee satisfaction?
  3. What types of responses from these three questions would indicate employee dissatisfaction?
  4. What tools would you use in the workplace to ask employees these three questions?
  5. What is the biggest risk to an employer when employees answer these three simple questions?

Are You Mobile, Ready and Willing to Learn?

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To say that the power of mobile technology has changed our world, would be stating the obvious! Every single person who has a mobile device is holding a wealth of information, literally, in the palm of her or his hand.  With great power, comes great opportunity – Or does it?

Source: Purestock/Thinkstock
Source: Purestock/Thinkstock

The following article discusses how access to employee training can easily be provided through individual employee mobile devices.

Click here to read the article. 

Since the technology is already in place, it appears to be a natural step in the evolution of training methodologies to push workplace programs through mobile technology.  If employees are playing Candy Crush Saga during their ‘lunch breaks’ on their mobile devices, why not provide them with training applications and games that promote workplace knowledge at any time?

This is where the boundaries of work/life distinctions start to become blurred.  Just because the technology is able to provide the training, should employees be willing to participate?  What if the employee uses their mobile device to do work place training after working hours?  Will we need to pay for overtime?  Who owns the technology? Is the device the property of the employee or the employer? Will we need to track employee access patterns 24/7?

These questions will continue as long as technology continues to drive increasing changes into our workplaces.  Our job, as HR professionals, is to figure out how we can catch up to these changes.  We have the choice to, either shape how technology should be used or be shaped by the technology that we must use. We may not like what the later option looks like.

Discussion Questions:

  1. Why would employees be resistant to workplace training through mobile devices?
  2. If you had to use your mobile device to access workplace training would you do so after ‘working hours’? If yes, why?  If no, why not?
  3. What types of training would be easiest for employees to access through mobile devices?
  4. What types of training programs do you think you would not want employees to access through mobile devices?