Some of my friends and colleagues have been telling me that my success framework - the seven elements that support effective environmental training programs - could apply to all sorts of different professions. I didn't really get it, though I encouraged them to pick it up and apply it to whatever area they wished.
But yesterday evening I caught up with Graham Philps of Quality Constructive Solutions. Graham is a quality, health and safety expert with considerable experience in environmental management. He bears the unique distinction of being the first person I didn't previously know to congratulate me on my new environmental training website. Lots of my wonderful friends, family and colleagues have been very enthusiastic - but as I said to Graham, it's usually only your mother and best friend who take the trouble to tell you so!
Graham and I share many of the same views about training - he said "I can't believe how much training is done without checking people's understanding afterwards!" I told him that many professional trainers confess to the same shortcoming: it's an area of vigorous discussion in training circles.
But one of the things I realised in the course of our conversation is that my success framework is ideally suited to health and safety at work.
Like environment, health and safely is a highly regulated field and depends for its success on clear guidelines and procedures, good training, good resourcing and thorough monitoring, evaluation and reporting. Crucially, it also depends on strong and positive relationships with external parties, including regulators, and with many different parties within an organisation.
For the first time, I got it! My success framework will be as effective for occupational health and safety as it is for environmental management.
And of course, many projects I've worked on in the past have shown that many environmental initiatives also deliver health benefits, the change in the printing sector from solvent-based to plant-based inks being just one example. There are many more.
Given that the risk identification and management processes are so similar for health, safety and environment, let's start talking and sharing to streamline our internal procedures and cut through the bureaucratic paperwork to make life easier for our much-battened upon supervisors and middle managers!
More information:
You can find out more about Graham's company, Q-Sol Quality Constructive Solutions, here.
And you can go to my new training website from here.
Tuesday, December 9, 2014
Monday, June 2, 2014
Practice leads to Proficiency - but does our training allow enough time for this?
This question of allowing enough time in workshops for what is most important has challenged me throughout my training career. It zoomed to top of mind a couple of weeks ago at Beryl Oldham's seminar on training needs assessment for the New Zealand Association of Training and Development.
Taking a good look at what Beryl called "what IS" there (rather than what level of staff performance we "think" might or should be) is essential at the assessment phase.
But it was when she asked if we know "how well does training transfer from the artificial training environment to the actual workplace" that I really sat up. This has also been difficult for me as a mostly external trainer with no influence over the workplaces my trainees go back into.
It was here that Beryl emphasised the need for repeated practice in order for trainees to acquire proficiency. She asked:
"If criticality is involved, they need practice, practice, practice," she said. So, we need to include more training time to rehearse critical procedural skills. "If people have to do important things frequently, then they need to have regular routine practice sessions," she said.
I can really see the application to environmental procedures, where non-compliance can have serious consequences for the environment - and the business.
We also need to train people's supervisors or managers before they send their staff on the training. Campbell Sturrock works in the civil construction sector as Team Leader, Business Improvement - which I think is a great name for an environmental team! Campbell told me recently that the need for supervisor/manager training was a key learning for him. He said that in his view, supervisors are an essential part of supporting trainees' new skills and making sure critical skills are regularly practised at work, especially just after the training so trainees develop capability and confidence. He said this also emphasises that the company really, truly, deeply believes this is important - a powerful signal to staff to take environmental procedures seriously.
As Beryl said, "The biggest reason that training fails is that we don't follow up on the job."
If we want to maximise the return on investment (ROI) of the time and money that bosses invest in training and the goodwill trainees invest in it, then we need invest properly in our training needs assessment and our assessment of the criticality of key skills - and program in that all-important time to "practise, practise, practise."
Beryl Oldham is a Certified ROI Professional and a New Zealand Associate of Drs Jack and Patti Phillips' ROI Institute. Find out more about her work here.
Find out more about Drs Jack and Patti Phillips' ROI Institute here - and about their book "The Green Scorecard: Measuring the Return on Investment in Sustainability Initiatives" here.
Check out the New Zealand Association of Training and Development here. Look for similar associations in your own country - they offer wonderful opportunities for professional learning and development. Every environmental subject matter expert delivering any form of training should belong!
Taking a good look at what Beryl called "what IS" there (rather than what level of staff performance we "think" might or should be) is essential at the assessment phase.
But it was when she asked if we know "how well does training transfer from the artificial training environment to the actual workplace" that I really sat up. This has also been difficult for me as a mostly external trainer with no influence over the workplaces my trainees go back into.
It was here that Beryl emphasised the need for repeated practice in order for trainees to acquire proficiency. She asked:
- do we allow enough time in the training for people to practice skills?
- do we assess the criticality of various necessary skills?
- do we allow more time for trainees to practice more critical skills - during and after training?
"If criticality is involved, they need practice, practice, practice," she said. So, we need to include more training time to rehearse critical procedural skills. "If people have to do important things frequently, then they need to have regular routine practice sessions," she said.
I can really see the application to environmental procedures, where non-compliance can have serious consequences for the environment - and the business.
We also need to train people's supervisors or managers before they send their staff on the training. Campbell Sturrock works in the civil construction sector as Team Leader, Business Improvement - which I think is a great name for an environmental team! Campbell told me recently that the need for supervisor/manager training was a key learning for him. He said that in his view, supervisors are an essential part of supporting trainees' new skills and making sure critical skills are regularly practised at work, especially just after the training so trainees develop capability and confidence. He said this also emphasises that the company really, truly, deeply believes this is important - a powerful signal to staff to take environmental procedures seriously.
As Beryl said, "The biggest reason that training fails is that we don't follow up on the job."
If we want to maximise the return on investment (ROI) of the time and money that bosses invest in training and the goodwill trainees invest in it, then we need invest properly in our training needs assessment and our assessment of the criticality of key skills - and program in that all-important time to "practise, practise, practise."
Beryl Oldham is a Certified ROI Professional and a New Zealand Associate of Drs Jack and Patti Phillips' ROI Institute. Find out more about her work here.
Find out more about Drs Jack and Patti Phillips' ROI Institute here - and about their book "The Green Scorecard: Measuring the Return on Investment in Sustainability Initiatives" here.
Check out the New Zealand Association of Training and Development here. Look for similar associations in your own country - they offer wonderful opportunities for professional learning and development. Every environmental subject matter expert delivering any form of training should belong!
Thursday, February 13, 2014
Training - the temerity!
It's always amazed me how training works. You take a bunch of fully autonomous adults in a room together - and there is an automatic consensus about the conventions we operate under. Yes, we socialise, crack jokes, make conversation, have fun. But it's not a social situation in the normal sense, apart from in the breaks.
The conventions around how we operate in a training context form an unwritten social contract. Most of us are unaware of it, and just naturally enter into it. Someone tells the others what to do - and they do it!
It was trainer extraordinaire Rich Allen who first made me conscious of just how extraordinary the training context is. He pointed out that as trainers, once we've built rapport with our trainees, we can say things like, "Now go back into your groups for this activity," or "Pick up your materials and move to your new places." He said we use a "special trainer voice" for this - it's friendly - but it's also clear and commanding. And he made us all burst out laughing when he said that you'd never use that tone of voice at a dinner party - imagine saying, "Pass the salt" in "trainer voice"! It's a very specialised tool to be used only in a specialised context.
So why would a roomful of adult professionals, each and very one of whom is an expert at his or her job, submit to "trainer voice" in a workshop?
Well, that's the convention!
All animals learn from each other, and humans seem to spend the longest time doing so, in our childhood, adolescence and early adulthood. But we may be more rare in that, at intervals throughout our life (if we're lucky!) we also enter into formal and informal learning situations, some spontaneous, some institutionalised. And while we know that many people end up on training courses they don't particularly want to attend, most of us (including most of our reluctant trainees) still enter into the convention of the workshop when we get there.
That convention really is a mutual contract that does two main things. It allows the trainer to use "trainer voice" and other modes that focus attention, and it engenders in the trainees a willingness to embrace the process. And those two things are possible because we all know that we are doing it in a learning context.
So the role of the trainer is to be conscious of and respect that context, and the very specialised, highly evolved behaviours that go with it.
And while trainees "submit" to the conventional behaviours that allow the training to proceed in a timely and fully inclusive manner, adult learning also offers the joys of mutual respect and celebration of each others' expertise. Some of my most enjoyable moments in training have been when trainees have raised questions or commented on things in a way that reveals the depth of their knowledge and their interrogation of the training itself. That too is part of the convention: we are all learning together, and some of our best learning comes from challenging what we are told.
Good trainers remain aware of their own and their trainees' dynamics, and operate in the full knowledge that breaching the unwritten workshop contract will result not in revolution or an overt display of bad manners, but most often in suspicion and withdrawal - and, worst of all - a failure to learn effectively or a lack of willingness to apply the training at work.
I should add that there has been a long gap between blogs, as I've travelled to the UK to collect copies of my book and meet some great people there and in Europe. I'm now starting to promote the book and the speaking and training that will accompany it - more on this soon!
Find out more about Rich Allen and subscribe to his training tips at http://www.justrightevents.biz/.
The conventions around how we operate in a training context form an unwritten social contract. Most of us are unaware of it, and just naturally enter into it. Someone tells the others what to do - and they do it!
It was trainer extraordinaire Rich Allen who first made me conscious of just how extraordinary the training context is. He pointed out that as trainers, once we've built rapport with our trainees, we can say things like, "Now go back into your groups for this activity," or "Pick up your materials and move to your new places." He said we use a "special trainer voice" for this - it's friendly - but it's also clear and commanding. And he made us all burst out laughing when he said that you'd never use that tone of voice at a dinner party - imagine saying, "Pass the salt" in "trainer voice"! It's a very specialised tool to be used only in a specialised context.
So why would a roomful of adult professionals, each and very one of whom is an expert at his or her job, submit to "trainer voice" in a workshop?
Well, that's the convention!
All animals learn from each other, and humans seem to spend the longest time doing so, in our childhood, adolescence and early adulthood. But we may be more rare in that, at intervals throughout our life (if we're lucky!) we also enter into formal and informal learning situations, some spontaneous, some institutionalised. And while we know that many people end up on training courses they don't particularly want to attend, most of us (including most of our reluctant trainees) still enter into the convention of the workshop when we get there.
That convention really is a mutual contract that does two main things. It allows the trainer to use "trainer voice" and other modes that focus attention, and it engenders in the trainees a willingness to embrace the process. And those two things are possible because we all know that we are doing it in a learning context.
So the role of the trainer is to be conscious of and respect that context, and the very specialised, highly evolved behaviours that go with it.
And while trainees "submit" to the conventional behaviours that allow the training to proceed in a timely and fully inclusive manner, adult learning also offers the joys of mutual respect and celebration of each others' expertise. Some of my most enjoyable moments in training have been when trainees have raised questions or commented on things in a way that reveals the depth of their knowledge and their interrogation of the training itself. That too is part of the convention: we are all learning together, and some of our best learning comes from challenging what we are told.
Good trainers remain aware of their own and their trainees' dynamics, and operate in the full knowledge that breaching the unwritten workshop contract will result not in revolution or an overt display of bad manners, but most often in suspicion and withdrawal - and, worst of all - a failure to learn effectively or a lack of willingness to apply the training at work.
I should add that there has been a long gap between blogs, as I've travelled to the UK to collect copies of my book and meet some great people there and in Europe. I'm now starting to promote the book and the speaking and training that will accompany it - more on this soon!
Find out more about Rich Allen and subscribe to his training tips at http://www.justrightevents.biz/.
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