Corporate trainers and educators are profit drivers now — and in more ways than one. Although their primary impact on a company is by training employees to master high-impact skills that help improve business performance, they can also add value (and profit) in other ways, too.
Read moreThe word on the street is that we're in a skills shortage. Companies’ bottom lines are negatively impacted by employees who don’t have the increasingly complex skills needed to consistently perform their work and positively influence customer loyalty. It's not a supply problem, people say, it's a skills problem.
Read moreIn his book First Break All the Rules, employee-engagement specialist Marcus Buckingham shares this alarming statistic: As many as 65 percent of employees are disengaged, and do just enough work to not get fired. Nearly two thirds of employees are merely “good enough.”
Read moreAs educators, we're intimately familiar with the time and effort required to prepare and present any kind of training program, whether it's in a classroom or online, self-directed or a collaboration. Under-preparing for a program is a recipe for disaster, but sometimes even when we put the effort in to new learning initiatives, we still
Read moreMost employee training and education programs focus on just a few required, core topics: basic skills, computer systems, and keeping current on industry regulations or changes. That’s fine. Fundamentals are important.
Read moreLots of employees dread company education. They dread it because often we, as educators, don’t create compelling or engaging programs. Nor do we explain the reasoning behind the materials we use in those programs. Sometimes employees feel they're being force-fed management’s agenda without any apparent connection or value to their day. But in talking with
Read moreWhen I start working with organizations, I like to take some time to meet with the employees. I find that listening to how they describe their own organization — its values, behaviors, and attitudes — often shows more about the company's real culture than anything the management says.
Read moreRight now I'm working on a new education program for our sales team that I call The Art of Questioning. In it, we'll be reviewing what makes a great question, how to ask one, and how to listen for and assess information based on the answers — and all of it is tailored to our...
Read moreI distinctly remember a classroom program a colleague and I presented to our corporate office several years ago. We were sharing ways for the corporate support staff to work more closely with the field service operations — to make their contact an “event.”
Read moreEven great employees can get into a performance rut, where the monotony of doing the same thing day in and day out can turn into a sort of mindlessness. Nobody intends to get in a rut, but few people actively seek out the changes that can help them pull out of one. That’s where managers can...
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