Balance the Workload

Today many businesses are not hiring new workers. The amount of work expected from one individual has grown due to added responsibilities in the workload. If your company has long work hours and growing absences, you should reconsider the amount of hours or projects each employee is assigned. Even if tired employees come to work, their productivity will suffer from the lack of rest. Giving them a break each day and limiting their workday to eight or nine hours will do more good for your business in the long run.  It may pay to hire a part timer to pick up the slack, rather than wear out and de-motivate your good employees. To be perceived as a caring business, you should respect the personal time of your employees and be considerate of their welfare.

Promote Healthy Habits

Your employees’ health will have a considerable impact on the energy they bring to the business. Have fresh fruit available in the break room. Consider contacting a gym nearby, and get a reduced group price on memberships for your employees to take advantage of. Have your company participate in a charitable walk-a-thon twice a year – they get fit, you get the promotion. If you have office luncheons, you can order fresh salads, veggie platters, or sandwich rings versus serving pizza or wings.

Promote Socializing and Friendly Relationships

The most effective way to keep employees coming to work is to make the office environment an enjoyable place. While it is important to keep focused and get work done, your employees should also have small breaks to interact with co-workers. Encourage team building. Use motivational signs and posters around the office to promote this.

It is easier to come to work where there is a friendly and welcoming atmosphere. These relationships will also impact group projects and your workers’ social skills with clients. Managers should take the time to get to know their workers and ask how they are doing. Get in the habit of greeting employees when they arrive, as best you can, depending on the size of the office. When a manager treats employees as individuals, they will feel more inclined to come to work. Recognized employees will feel more responsible because they know their absence will be noticed on a professional as well as personal level.

Summary

Management has the ability to increase and improve attendance with employee recognition and motivation, and simply following the Golden Rule. When a manager shows that he or she is making improvements for their employees, they’ll feel appreciated and motivated to do their best for your company. Growing absences are a sign that your employees, and your business, are not at their fullest potential. If you can help your employees be rested, healthy, and happy, they will help you get the job done.

Michelle Forester represents GNeil.com, tools to manage and motivate people in the workplace.

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• How to Reward Your Employees (openforum.com)
• Transform Your Employees into Passionate Advocates (blogs.hbr.org)
• 5 Workplace Strategies to Supercharge Team Productivity (lifehack.org)

Certification

By using online tests as part of training plans, employers are able to offer accreditation to employees who prove their understanding and skill in the areas being taught. Once this accreditation has been achieved, the personal value of the individual is improved. Many businesses are now making use of online certification tests when carrying out skill specific training programs, with the aim of inspiring employees to reach a higher level of performance.

The overall work environment is improved when employees are all challenging themselves to achieve the best results possible. Offering accreditation for their work boosts the individual’s self-worth and confidence in the workplace.

Online Training

With the majority of employees now using computers and the web in the workplace around the world, offering training via this platform makes sense for employers. It’s cost effective as it cuts the requirement for a large volume of printed training documents.

Online training free up resources which can be better placed elsewhere, the primary factor being a manager’s time. Employees can be left to carry out the online tests on their own, with a trainer available to contact if any issues should arise.

New employees also have the opportunity to familiarize themselves with the company computer systems and online resources that they’ll use on a daily basis. This can be integrated into the training program, along with more background information about the company itself. It should also be noted that although online training is highly effective, no single method of training can be comprehensive. For example, pair up online training with one on one training sessions involving development of communication skills.

Happy Employees

Employee satisfaction is equivalent to good results and encourages self-improvement in the workplace. With standard training plans it’s possible that some new employees can feel a bit lost, but not reach out to line managers to raise their concerns.

By using online tests, employers can see for themselves where any problems may have arisen and focus on the individual who needs some more explanation or help. These issues can be dealt with on a one to one basis, meaning the employee won’t feel embarrassed or singled out during the training program.

As resources such as time and budgets become increasingly strained in these tough economic times, it’s crucial that employers capitalize on opportunities like the use of online tests.

James Bentham represents The Test Factory, a company that produces online tests to evaluate knowledge, skills, abilities, and workplace performance.

Related articles

• 2012 Checklist for People Management (rickdacri.wordpress.com)
• On The Job Training – Like Getting Back To The Gym. (brucemayhew.wordpress.com)
• The Value of Training (lrassess.wordpress.com)

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Continuing with our series investigating the Behavior Engineering Model by Thomas Gilbert, we move now to what I feel is probably one of the greatest barriers to performance in any organization – information. If you were to survey workers in organizations around the world, most will tell you that information (or lack there of) is the reason for many performance problems in the workplace. It’s almost a universal issue.

Gilbert categorized information as part of the environment – the workplace – in his model. Here, information consists of the expectations leaders and managers have of employees, standards for performance, feedback to reinforce positive behavior, and availability of information so it is accessible to those who need and so they can take action when and where necessary.

Despite information being one of the more common barriers to performance, it is one that can be easily fixed. For example:

• Clearly define the expectations of each employee. State (or even write out) what all employee responsibilities and obligations are in the organization. Job descriptions usually serve this purpose.
• Establish performance standards by defining at minimum what is allowed in terms of performance and behavior. Performance metrics or benchmarks are a good example.
• Provide feedback to employees to correct behavior or actions related to performance. This is accomplished by way of performance reviews.
• Make information available so that it is accessible and in a format that can be easily used. Many organizations use knowledge bases or wikis to make information accessible and easily retrievable to employees.

Out of all the categories and elements that performance is classified in Gilbert’s Model, I enjoy addressing whether or not information is the root cause of a performance problem in an organization. For one, it is relatively easy to fix, but secondly it is the one that is most impactful to changing performance in the workplace. You’ve probably heard it said that “information is power”. In this case, it’s very true!

Related articles

• Five Ways to Retain Your Best Employees (gthankyou.com)
• How to cultivate a truly collaborative workplace (theglobeandmail.com)
• Four Potential Causes of Employee Poor Performance (benoitcentral.com)

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My previous post explored some of my favorite books for instructional designers that currently have a place in my library. Now, I turn to books performance improvement specialists should have in their collection.

There is a big difference between instructional designers and performance improvement specialists. While some professionals in the workforce development field may play both roles in their organization, instructional designers primarily focus on developing instructional interventions (training) to improve knowledge, skills, or abilities in their target audience. Performance improvement specialists look at the organization as a whole and tries to find ways to improve workplace performance beyond traditional forms of training. Interventions administered by performance improvement specialists tend to be non-instructional in nature.

There are a lot of great publications that are helpful to the performance improvement specialists. Here are some I have found useful in my career:

• The Performance Consultant’s Fieldbook by Judith Hale. A great reference guide to performance consulting whether internal to an organization or working independently. This book provides many tools that can be customized based on the current issue you are looking to resolve.
• Training Ain’t Performance by Harold D. Stolovitch, Erica J. Keeps. This book is the follow-up to Telling Ain’t Training and focuses in on how training isn’t always the best intervention to solve a performance problem.
• Analyzing Performance Problems: Or, You Really Oughta Wanna–How to Figure out Why People Aren’t Doing What They Should Be, and What to do About It by Robert Mager and Peter Pipe. Hands down this book is the king of analysis as you try to determine the root cause of performance problems. It’s a quick read and very entertaining.

I find books on performance improvement to have a more holistic view of the workplace and how to improve it. They also shed light on how best to improve the workplace through interventions that are cost effective and efficient. In this economy, who can argue that?

Related articles

• Will social technologies improve performance? (mgmtblog.wordpress.com)
• 2012 Checklist for People Management (rickdacri.wordpress.com)
• Workplace Performance Services: more than just Training (c4lpt.co.uk)

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Anybody who designs and develops training should have a library of books and reference materials at their disposal. Creating a personal library of reference books allows you to have an instant resource to go back to when you need to re-learn or remind you of a training concept or model. It also is serves as a repository of new ideas that you can develop based on proven techniques published in these books.

Over the years I have created my own personal reference library. Here are the books that I think all instructional designers or training developers should include their their own library:

• ISD From the Ground Up: A No-Nonsense Approach to Instructional Design (3rd Edition) by Chuck Hodell. This is a comprehensive, step-by-step guide to designing and developing effective training.
• Telling Ain’t Training (2nd Edition) by Harold D. Stolovitch, Erica J. Keeps. Teaches you how to design training that is learner-centered and performance-based.
• A Practical Guide to Needs Assessment by Kavita Gupta, Catherine M. Sleezer and Darlene F. Russ-Eft. A great book that teaches you how to “look before you leap”. It is important to identify true needs and the root cause to problems in the workplace before you commit to training. Includes worksheets to help guide you through the needs assessment process.
• A Teacher’s Guide to Cognitive Type Theory & Learning Style by Carolyn Mamchur. If you want to understand how people learn, this book will make you a better trainer by teaching you how to design training based on the learning styles of your learners.
• The Conditions of Learning: Training Applications by Robert M. Gagne. As the title implies, this book makes you aware of the conditions under which people learn and how you can develop training around it.

Even though we live in a digital age where we can download books to our desktop, laptop, or tablet computers, there’s still nothing like the actual thing that you can hold, turn the pages, highlight the text and annotate. A personal library of books doesn’t have to be grand, it simply needs to be a reflection of you. It’s about what you are interested in and what is useful to you as a training developer.

The books listed here are what I have found useful over the years. What about you? Are there training or instructional design books you have in your library that are useful to you that you would like to share?

Related articles

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