Effective Learning

How may times have you attended a "training program" and at the end of the presentation wondered if you had actually learned anything? I know I have. It wasn't because I was daydreaming that I did not learn as much as I had hoped, it is that the modern business culture has confused "presentation" with "education." There is a big difference between the outcomes of a presentation and an effective educational experience; a presentation only suggests learning, but education requires learning as a core purpose and outcome. I believe one reason for this confusion stems from the ease of which we are enamored by visual stimuli. In other words, when someone makes a nifty multimedia slide presentation we assume that its apparent complexity promotes efficient information transfer. Unfortunately, the visual appeal of a presentation is much less important than the "function" of the presentation.

An educational program has only one function - to provide employees with a systematic experience with new rules enabling the application of those rules to new or diverse situations. If this function does not occur the training program is not educational. It might be entertaining, enjoyable, and even thought provoking, but if the program does not influence your behavior in meaningful ways, the educational process has occurred.

Demonstration of learning is an often overlooked feature of the educational process. How many times have you received a "certificate of training" for sitting in your chair and staring forward for a few hours? The only certification of this style of learning is that you were physically present in the room. Real education requires demonstration of skill. While the practical problems of individual demonstration of learning are considerable, especially in large groups, the fact is that until we see evidence of improved action, we have no valid measure that learning has occurred. It may appear relatively easy and efficient for a presenter to deliver a training program to large groups of people, but the efficiency is illusory as no evidence of any real education has occurred.

It is easy to malign the standard presentation process. But what can be done to make education more effective while retaining its efficiency?

When you really want your employees to learn something, divide the material into small modules so that employees can complete each module in less than twenty minutes. Ask employees questions that provide a reasonable indication that they can apply this knowledge to new situations. Time the test so that they must demonstrate a reasonable level of fluency with the information. Use a variety of question formats, such as fill-in the blank, matching, exclusion, etc., as each kind of question demonstrates a different kind of understanding. If you really want your employees to learn, you need to validate the educational process by observing and recording your employees' behavior on an individual basis.

Don't Delay

In this blog I would like to discuss a behavioral law, extensively studied in the research laboratory, that affects the value of every employee-customer interaction. It will be summarized as follows: the value of an outcome depends on the delay to that outcome.

Here are four important implications of this law:

1. Once a customer has identified their need, the more quickly it is delivered, the more valuable will be the customer’s perception of the outcome. For example, the faster you deliver the camera, resolve the complaint, complete the repair, produce the print, etc., the greater will be its perceived value.

2. As delay to a desired outcome increases, the value of that outcome decreases. No matter how elaborate your personal justification of the reasons for delayed action, procrastination systematically degrades a customer’s evaluation of your resulting hard work.

3. If you cannot meet an agreed upon action deadline, tell the customer when you will have it done, and be sure to alert the customer when it is done. If you wait for the customer to call, you have measurably diminished the value of your service. If you need more time to complete the transaction, alert the customer and re-establish agreement on the completion time.

4. Given two choices with the same outcome, a customer will choose the one with the shortest delay to obtain the outcome.

The law of delay is like the law of gravity, in that awareness does not negate its effect. For example, while you are free to personally disagree with the law of gravity, this offers no advantage in freeing yourself from its constant influence. The law of delay is equally non-negotiable. You may indeed provide to your customer an elaborate and highly believable justification for your delaying in providing some form of service, but the effect of delay always diminishes the value of your service compared to presenting that service with less delay.

It is important to note the effect of delay is relativistic. We remember how photo finishing businesses prospered in the era of one hour processing. Reducing the time of film processing and printing from several days to a mere 60 minutes offered customers an opportunity to substantially reduce the delay to receive their finished prints. Plus, in many cases the individualized attention facilitated by small batch processing allowed quality to increase. A lot of money was made by capitalizing on the behavioral effect of reducing delay for photo processing services.

While the philosophical debate continues to rage whether or not the world contains absolutes, the world of retailing is defined not by the absolute best retailer, but by the better retailer among competitors. It is convenient to say the quality of your photo finishing is better than your competitor’s quality, as there continues to be no independent tool to measure photo finishing quality. Indeed, this measurement loophole continues to offer a significant promotional advantage. However, it is considerably more difficult to promote the advantage of purchasing a camera or some other hard good from your store when the competitor’s store offers the same item. Lowering your price is a well known strategy to motivate a customer’s purchase, but this strategy comes at great expense.

A much more economical strategy is to enhance the value of making a purchase at your store. By systematically decreasing delay you can meaningfully increase the level of customer service. Here are some examples:

1. Answer the phone after fewer rings, return voice-mail, email, and all other actions related to your communication system as soon as possible – especially for customer complaints.

2. Complete all services when due.

3. Open the door to your store at the appointed time.

4. Place special orders as quickly as possible and follow-up with the warehouse to ensure the order is shipped according to plan.

5. Whenever possible, complete a customer’s request while they are in your store.

6. Quickly welcome customers as they enter your store with a non-business greeting, e.g., “Good morning, nice to see you again.”

7. Process refunds quickly.

I am sure that you and your employees can find additional ways to reduce delay in achieving customer service. Once you have established with your employees this dimension of customer service, they can apply this concept to all future situations they may encounter. Some enterprising store owners might consider employing delay as a direct measure of customer service. That is, the longer it takes, the poorer the customer service. This concept is utilized in automobile repair shops where the time to complete a repair has been well established. You might consider measuring the length of time necessary to resolve a customer complaint. How long should it take? Each store will establish their own standards, but the best stores will minimize delay in delivering customer satisfaction.

The Employee's Perspective

In managing others we should consider two groups of people, those who think they are the best in their job, and those who know they are skirting the system. Let's consider the first group, those who think that they are doing their job better than anyone else in the company. These people have a difficult time understanding why they are not receiving greater recognition for their hard work. From their point of view, their contributions are largely ignored and they tend to resent their supervisor's ambivalence. Worse, they resent the attention their supervisors give to others for work seemingly inferior to their work. Do not be surprised if one day this employee decides that he is seeking greener pastures, needs to goes back to school, or some other seemingly reasonable endeavor. The real reason he is leaving is that in his mind you have not met his expectations for feedback.

Feedback is critically important, and will be considered in more detail at another time. For now, let's focus on the core experience of unfulfilled expectation for feedback from the point of view of the employee. He truly believes he is working to full capacity, and from his unique perspective, he is doing a great job. After all, no one has told him otherwise, so he is free to derive his own assessment of the quality of his work. An important issue that we must contend with, even as we begin to provide this employee additional feedback on his performance, is that the employee truly believes that he is meeting or exceeding the expectations for the job. When you take the time to provide "constructive criticism" the employee may view your coaching efforts as overly critical and unappreciative of his hard work. Such can be true even with the worst performing employees. All perspectives are derived from a point of view. The poor performing employee may be making a reasonable self-assessment based on his perspective. He cannot see things as you do, and thus he believes that he is performing well.

When you begin to help this under-performing employee be sure to obtain his self-assessment. If he believes that his performance is exemplary, but it is not, (and the employee is worth keeping) it may be beneficial to set smaller goals. If you inform the employee of the true state of affairs, that he is for example the worst performer in the company, the sudden loss of personal value may be too much for him to handle, significantly increasing the likelihood of leaving the company.

All of this may seem overly gentle, as if you are coddling the poor performing employee. Not so. You are managing the employee on an individual basis and recognizing that while performance standards have been fairly set for all employees, the steps one must take in reaching those standards must remain flexible. Without doubt there is a bright line to be drawn between evolving excellence and accepting deficiency. When you provide a corrective action to an employee, acknowledge the value of his current efforts, and then raise the bar slowly, decisively and consistently, so that your employee can acquire the necessary skills and perspective to achieve excellence as you have defined it.

Speak Softly and Carry a Big Stick

There are so many good books on improving one's management style. Their authors sound so competent and effective and maybe we resolve to utilize the suggestions made. Sometimes we have the opportunity to participate in specialized training on management styles. Some of us listen intently to the presentation and consider all of the ways that we can implement new techniques to be more effective, more positive, and less demeaning to our employees. Yet, when we return to our familiar work situations our previous management technique returns. The optimism of our education gives way to the realities of needing to make a difference to our supervisors, and we once again rely on the tried and true effects of verbally kicking someone in the butt to make them move faster down the improvement lane. Why do we continue to rely on these negative techniques when we know a better way?

One answer is that we confuse emotion and motivation. While we can motivate through emotion, such as when we yell, kick and scream at our employees to do more, or to do other things less, we are not required to motivate improvement in this way. It is simply that we want to make a very clear point that the employee's current performance is substandard, and yelling at them seems to be the best way to communicate that point. Right? Well, yes and no. We do communicate a lot by yelling at an employee, but the key point of underscoring our need for improvement does not need to be communicated this way. We can instead use another old fashioned, tried and true method of speaking softly, and carrying a big stick.

Yelling is only for the moment. Once the sound wave has passed over your employee's ears, the sound dissipates, never to be heard again. The employee will of course remember that he was yelled at, but that too fades with time. What is left in the employee's world is a residual stimulus that reminds him of the negative consequences of being yelled at, fired, demoted, etc., if his performance does not improve. The power of this residual stimulus comes not from the amount of anger you can show, but by the consequences of not improving performance. Thus, it is the "big stick" that motivates, and an effective manager need not resort to yelling. Instead, he can be equally, if not more effective by "speaking softly."

It is the consequences of our actions that motivate, not the stimulus. The more management power you have, the less you need to rely on the magnitude of your stimulus. When the consequences of accomplishment and failure are clearly delineated to your employees the form of your request diminishes in importance; a simple command to "get it done" is enough to get it done.

The next time you need to enforce policy, improve performance, reduce unwanted behavior, calmly explain to the employee what will happen if he continues with his current actions, and what will happen if he changes. Ask the employee if he understands what you are saying. Ask him to repeat it to you. And then ask for his commitment. You will find this style to be very effective, far less emotional, and increasingly helpful to your employees.

Management Technique

Employee behavior forms the basis for all commerce. Without employee behavior companies could create no products, no services and would have no business. While it may be easy to agree that employee behavior is a central concern to any business, managers often use their personal and highly varied experiences with employee behavior as a means of shaping their managerial technique, believing they "understand people" and "know what makes people tick," etc. Although extensive managerial experience can generate effective managerial technique, themethod of developing effective management solely through experience can sometimes be counterproductive. For example, managers with military experience may emphasize discipline in their civilian management style. While military management methods can certainly improve a lax team, the effectiveness of this style of management is generally maintained by an underlying and inescapable threat of coercion or punishment. Thus, while a military style of management adapted to the civilian workplace may show short-term advantages, it can also correlated with increases in undesirable or unproductive employee behavior, e.g., reduced quality, absenteeism, theft, etc., in response to the overall harshness of the techniques.

At the opposite end of the managerial spectrum we may find a more compassionate approach based on the view that employee satisfaction directly promotes performance excellence. Thus, to increase employee performance, we must first increase job satisfaction. While job satisfaction can be an important measure of managerial effectiveness it is doubtful whether satisfaction can produce superior employee performance. It is suggested that job satisfaction is at best a measure of one aspect of positive management technique rather than a direct cause of increased employee performance.

Improving performance through job satisfaction seems logical and legitimate. However, satisfied employees can be as unproductive and disruptive as unhappy, unsatisfied employees. Measures of job satisfaction are similar to measures of “awareness” commonly used to measure the effectiveness of marketing campaigns. While an interesting measure of marketing effectiveness, awareness does not always correlate with increased sales. Like awareness, satisfaction is a measure, but not necessarily a direct influence over employee performance necessary to increase corporate performance.

Behavior Management offers a more direct approach to improving managerial technique: train specific managerial actions that will directly facilitate employee improvement. Combining job skill training with effective performance feedback enables your managers to communicate to their direct reports the job that needs to be done, when to do it, and what will happen after they do it. The recognition they receive will directly support their success and will naturally foster job satisfaction.

Measurement

What is the best way to measure improvement? How can we ensure new techniques learned through training programs will enhance employee behavior? In order to evaluate the return on our training investment we must first consider the “great training misconception” - that knowledge learned in one context will be automatically applies, or generalizes, to other situations sharing a similar characteristic. For example, if a salesperson learns to sell one kind of camera in the classroom setting, he should therefore be able to sell that camera in the store. A further form of generalization would predict that from learning to sell one kind of camera, the employee can now sell all kinds of cameras. While classroom training offers the essential ingredients for learning, we cannot assume employees will apply this new knowledge to their regular work settings.

One of the greatest challenges presented to corporate trainers, is to accurately measure the result of their efforts - in and outside of the classroom. Without confirmation of learning in the classroom, it will be unlikely that such learning will generalize to the work setting. When your company provides training, do you require your employees to demonstrate their learning prior to receiving credit for completing that training module? Most often, employees receive credit for the training session simply for sitting attentively through the training session. Rarely is there a valid, individualized demonstration that learning has occurred.

What is the goal of training? For example, in retail sales settings, is normally assumed that sales training will increase sales productivity. If front line managers were asked about the benefits of sales training they might convey that something was accomplished. Rarely, however, is the employee ever challenged to specifically demonstrate their new skills in the classroom and in the actual work environment. Thus, the correspondence between training and increases in employee performance remains at best, weak and tenuous.

It might seem overly harsh to require each employee to demonstrate and validate training. Conventional testing, such as multiple-choice or fill-in-the-blank post-tests imply that something was learned, and is a reasonable way to validate training for policy and procedure changes, or federally mandated updates on programs such as “reducing sexual harassment” or “improving worker safety.” While educating employees on what they can and cannot do is an important function of training. However, training programs designed to increase employee performance are not reliably validated by multiple choice tests. Even the most detailed “pencil and paper” assessment of classroom training cannot adequately measure the effect of training on improving employee performance in the normal work setting.

Training effectiveness must be measured by changes in work performance. In the retail setting, sales skill training can only be evaluated by sales increases. In manufacturing settings, quality control training must result in decreased errors. If your company’s Performance Scorecards are not sensitive to the effects of training, it will be difficult to properly justify training program expenditures. Perhaps your company has a good assemblage of performance measures. Can they be focused on a small enough slice of sales or production? Will normal variation in sales or production obscure these improvements, leading to dissatisfaction with the rate of return on training investments?

It is not uncommon for companies that are experiencing financial difficulties to eliminate their training departments as part of general expense reduction. Such decisions are relatively easy to make, given typically poor cost/benefit measures and the difficulty of finding real evidence of employee improvement. Training program directors must be willing to sustain their jobs using real criteria - just like everyone else in the company must do. This way, when the time comes to evaluate and eliminate non-essential departments, the training department can prove their effectiveness and importance to company performance.

Make your training program a significant contributor your company’s success. Validate training by connecting it to real measures of employee improvement. Revise or eliminate ineffective training programs. Most employees do not want to waste their time attending boring, insignificant or otherwise irrelevant training. Invest in training, but demand ROI - as you would for other capital expenditures. This will ensure meaningful, cost-effective training and continued performance improvement.