All Posts Tagged With: "training"
Hire for Qualities, Teach Skills
Although 9% of Americans are unemployed, 52% of organizations recently surveyed by ManpowerGroup are having trouble filling positions. The problem is not that unemployed workers are living large off their unemployment benefits but that they lack the exact skills employers need.
At FastCompany, Donna Wells, CEO of Mindflash, suggests a solution that does not involve blaming our education system or the work ethic of our labor force: Hire for the qualities you seek and teach the skills they need.
Wells provides an example. Con-way Freight of Salt Lake City couldn’t find and hire qualified drivers fast enough to meet its needs. Rather than being chronically understaffed—and losing revenue as a result—it started free driving schools at 75 of its truck yards and guaranteed a job for anyone who passed the training. In the first 18 months, it graduated nearly 440 drivers and has retained 98% of them.
The Baldrige Criteria ask a number of questions that you can use to evaluate your hiring and training processes:
- What are your key human resource or workforce plans to accomplish your short- and longer-term strategic objectives and action plans?
- How do you assess your workforce capability and capacity needs, including skills, competencies, and staffing levels?
- How do you recruit, hire,…
One Team’s Systematic Approach to Improvement
A recent case study published by ASQ tells the story of how FirstSource Solutions used tools and processes that are common among Baldrige Award winners to tackle a single problem—reducing the turnaround time (TAT) to approve applications for a retail mortgage client—with impressive results.
The client was in the United Kingdom. Here’s a synopsis of how Firstsource tackled the problem:
- It used data to define the problem: Over a nine-week period, the client offered mortgage loans in 14 days or less 69% of the time, well short of the 75% target.
- A financial benefit estimation exercise determined that improving performance on TAT to 80% would increase revenue by six million pounds annually, create a more efficient process, and provide faster service to applicants.
- Firstsource formed a team to improve TAT. The team received training on the Six Sigma DMAIC methodology and quality tools.
- The team started with a supplier-inputs-process-outputs-customer (SIPOC) exercise to create a high-level process map and identify stakeholders.
- The team produced a three-stage analysis road map to assess the current situation and identify possible root causes and improvement activities. It used the road map to agree on five causes of the longer TAT.
- The team brainstormed possible solutions and then assigned a relative rating for…
Evaluating Training Effectiveness
In its award application summary, Studer Group, a 2010 Baldrige Award winner, describes a tiered approach to evaluating training effectiveness. This is typically a weak area for most organizations, whether or not they integrate Baldrige. Most rely on participant surveys at the end of classes or courses to tell them whether the training was effective. At Studer Group, that is just one tool in the first of three tiers it uses to determine effectiveness.
Tier One methods include evaluations by everyone involved in the training. Tier Two measures effectiveness by how well the new knowledge and skills were applied. Linkage grids identify specific actions that participants should take, and online surveys capture the extent to which participants applied the learning. Tier Three assesses the degree to which new knowledge and skills affected results. For example, Studer Group has two employee segments: coaches and admin employees. Each coach is formally evaluated on the degree to which his/her partner’s (client’s) results improved on individual LEM (a Web-based performance management system) scores.
Tier Three addresses the true value of any training, that it make an impact on the success of the organization. Participant surveys tell you what people thought of the training but they cannot…
7Apr2011 | Steve George | 0 comments | ContinuedCompliance Training Can Be Fun?
The Baldrige Criteria promote ethical behavior through questions in the Leadership, Workforce Focus, and Results categories including:
- How does your organization promote and ensure ethical behavior in all interactions?
- What are your key processes and measures or indicators for enabling and monitoring ethical behavior?
- How do you monitor and respond to breaches of ethical behavior?
- What are your results for key measures or indicators of breaches of ethical behavior?
Most organizations try to instill ethical behavior with some type of compliance training. As Dan and Chip Heath point out in “How to Make Corporate Training Rock,” that training tends to be so dull that nobody would take it if it wasn’t mandatory.
For BearingPoint, a management and technology firm, compliance training was too critical to make it boring, so they told their chief compliance officer to redesign their program to influence the behavior of employees operating in different organizational cultures across the country. Russ Berland, the compliance officer, and his team interviewed employees about the “gray areas” they encountered. The stories they heard became the basis for a fictional video series of ten short episodes. You can watch an episode at the story link above.
Modeled after The Office, the series features a Kevin, a “lovably, oily boss,”…
14Dec2010 | Steve George | 0 comments | ContinuedHow to Be the Best
Baldrige.com focuses on information that can help you build the organization you want. As a result, nearly all of the articles address elements that contribute to an excellent management system. This one is different: It looks at how you can become excellent at your heart’s desire.
In “Six Keys to Being Excellent at Anything” (HBR, August 24, 2010), Tony Schwartz quickly dismisses the myth that greatness is determined by our genetic inheritance. He analyzes current thinking about building personal capacity as well as his company’s experience working with executives to state that how hard we are willing to work determines our level of excellence. The minimum level of practice required to be expert in something, according to people who have studied this, seems to be 10,000 hours. That’s about seven years of practice at 4.5 hours per day, six days a week (this will make more sense when you read Tony’s list).
Schwartz offers six keys to achieving excellence:
- Pursue what you love. Passion “fuels focus, resilience, and perseverance.”
- Do the hardest work first. Great performers delay gratification and do the most difficult first.
- Practice intensely – for 90 minutes without interruption. Then take a break. And great performers practice no more than 4.5 hours a…
Measuring Training Effectiveness
One of the most vexing challenges in completing a Baldrige assessment is showing meaningful results for workforce and leader development. Most organizations can show the percent of employees who received a certain type of training. Many can summarize data from surveys of people who completed specific training. A few can provide hours of training per employee.
Very few can identify results that show how effective their training is.
The Baldrige Criteria ask how you “evaluate the effectiveness and efficiency of your learning and development systems.” Examiners expect to find measures of effectiveness and efficiency, the results of which should appear in Item 7.4. Not many organizations have a good answer for the question or relevant data to put in the Results section.
In “Putting a value on training” (McKinsey Quarterly, July 2010), Jenny Cermak and Monica McGurk explain why this data is so important, noting that “90% of respondents to a McKinsey Quarterly survey said that building capabilities was a top-ten priority for their organizations. Only a quarter, though, said that their programs are effective at improving performance measurably, and only 8% track the program’s return on investment.”
At a time when building capabilities in existing employees is critical but the resources to do that…
10Aug2010 | Steve George | 0 comments | ContinuedSmall Wonder
Stoner expects every one of its employees to be a leader. Before starting their jobs, new employees complete two weeks of orientation that includes shadowing every job in the company—including that of the president. They can do all that in two weeks because Stoner only has 45 employees.
Located in Quarryville, Pennsylvania, Stoner makes specialized cleaners, lubricants, and coatings, primarily for car care. In 2003, it became the smallest company to win the Baldrige Award.
“We first learned about Baldrige in 1991 through the local Lancaster County program,” said Rob Ecklin, Jr., Stoner’s president. “We started to familiarize ourselves with the criteria then.” Stoner became the first company in the county to win the award in 1995. A few years later it submitted its first Baldrige application.
“We like to learn, to challenge ourselves and to be challenged,” said Ecklin. “Only a small percentage of companies truly want to improve. We’re one of them. We get excited about performance excellence. This is not a sexy business. It’s not high tech. Not flashy. But we’ve been able to get extraordinary results from ordinary people.”
Stoner gets these results by expecting every employee to be a leader. It involves all employees in setting the direction for…
24Jun2010 | Steve George | 0 comments | Continued
