E-learning brings new hires up to speed

LYNN GREINER

Special to Globe and Mail Update

Published Monday, Jun. 27, 2011 2:38PM EDT

Over the past few weeks, we've been looking at online ways to find and lure new employees. Once an offer has been made and accepted, a desk and computer have been allocated, and everyone anxiously awaits the new hire’s arrival, the hard part is over.

Now all you have to do is bring them up to speed.

Training, whether it’s for new hires or seasoned veterans, is often one of the first things chopped when there’s a budget crunch.

Yet, with today’s technology, companies can enable learning from the desktop at considerably lower cost than sending people offsite.

According to the American Society for Training and Development, that’s exactly what they’re doing. In 2009, 37 percent of all U.S. corporate training hours involved electronic technology, and Global Industry Analysts forecasts say that the global e-learning market will hit $107.3-billion (U.S.) by 2015.

There are, of course, many different flavours of e-learning, notes Kurt Tiltack, managing partner of Pathways Inc., a Toronto-based management consulting firm specializing in learning and development, and each has its place.

There’s the classic Web-based courseware we all think of when we hear the phrase, but instructor-led online training, webinars, sessions via Web meeting (using tools such as Cisco WebEx or Citrix GoToMeeting) and customized courseware also fall into the e-learning bucket.

Writer and educator Paul Lima adds to the list; he offers email-based “correspondence courses” to his clients, as well as hybrid classes, with online components supplementing classroom training.

But regardless of the delivery method, e-learning can save a business of any size both time and money.

It makes a lot of sense. Management guru Peter Drucker is said to have asked, “I wonder why a company pays to transport a 170-pound body 20 miles downtown when all it needs is the body’s three-pound brain.”

However, Mr. Tiltack says, wherever that brain is sitting, it needs to be engaged.

Sitting at a desk listening to a monologue or reading text just won’t cut it. “It’s not the way adults internalize information,” he says.

Mr. Lima agrees. “It’s kind of relentless,” he says, “like being back in university listening to a lecture.”

Instead, planning e-learning – or any other kind of training – should follow a set of best practices. And chief among them is to engage the student.

“The (online) experience, if done correctly, can be very powerful,” Mr. Tiltack says. “But the learner must be engaged. There should be an activity of some kind after every two or three slides.”

That activity can take one of many forms. It might be a mini-quiz, a drag-and -drop exercise or a case study. The important thing is that the student be required to do something, not just sit passively, without participation.

“You have to give students a change every 15 or 20 minutes,” Mr. Lima says. “People look forward the change of pace.”

Without that change, they tend to tune out.

That’s part of the challenge with e-learning.

In a classroom, the instructor can see eyes glazing over and students surreptitiously smuggling Blackberries under the table when the droning goes on too long. An e-learning designer has to anticipate the need for a switch to an activity.

Good e-learning should run no more than 20 to 30 minutes for each module. Mr. Tiltack recommends that courseware be as personalized to the customer as possible, so examples are meaningful to the student.

There is, of course, a cost to this but, he points out, once that customization is done, it can be reused as long as the information is still valid, at no extra charge.

“That’s value to small businesses without deep pockets,” he says. “The module stands on its own for a fair bit of time. And there’s no need to pay for a facility or an instructor.”

Many courses work fine out of the box; for example, Bill 168 training, in which people are taught what constitutes harassment in the workplace and what the law says about it, is probably general enough that a canned course is sufficient.

However, he adds, “a great e-learning designer understands how people learn. That’s what’s neat about e-learning – if you have a critical point to make, the audio can speak to it and the use can click on the slide for more information.”

The biggest mistake course developers make, he says, is not considering how people learn. They make modules too long, and think “interactive” means having the student click through animated slides.

“We learn by doing,” he points out. “If you want to hold the learners, they have to be engaged.”

That engagement can start even before a new hire walks in the door.

Mr. Tiltack says e-learning is an effective tool for onboarding, by introducing the new employee to a picture of the company culture, dress code and other critical information in a fun, interactive manner.

Getting that “you’re hired” call is exciting, and if the onboarding e-learning is done right, he says, “It gives a snapshot of the organization with appropriate punch to hold the new hire at the pinnacle of excitement.”

Special to The Globe and Mail

10 Creative Bar Code Designs [PICS]

10 Creative Bar Code Designs

A Tale of Shockingly Good Customer Service By Rick Broida | June 10, 2011

An interesting article on customer delight. A satisfied customer, almost as a truism, remains a businesses greatest asset. But do businesses understand and appreciate that?

Ask any business owner and you’ll hear the same tale: good customer service is a tricky thing to pull off. But it’s also critical if you want your business to succeed, and so I want to share a true story of how one company defied expectations and turned an unhappy customer into a delighted one.

I own two HP desktops. Different makes, different sizes, different ages. About a month ago, one of them died abruptly: it would no longer recognize the hard drive. Two weeks later to the day, the second one suffered the exact same fate.

Luckily, I was able to rescue my data from both. Turns out the hard drives were fine, but the motherboards had failed. A bit of online research lead me to an HP support forum, where I discovered that dozens — perhaps even hundreds — of other users had encountered the very same issue. Clearly, HP had used a bad batch of motherboards across a wide range of desktops.

Because both my systems were out of warranty, however, I figured that was that. HP wanted $300 per machine for repairs, which made no sense given the comparable price of brand new desktops.

Of course, I wasn’t going to buy more HP gear. Hardware failures happen across all brands (yes, even Apple), but twice in two weeks? And a forum packed with similarly burned users? Think I’ll see what’s on special at Dell.

Before I parted ways with HP for good, I decided to send an e-mail to CEO Leo Apotheker. (Turns out HP has a special page set up for just such communiques.) Though I expected nothing from it, I described (in polite, non-threatening terms) what had happened and explained that I wouldn’t be buying from HP again. Clicking Send gave me only a sliver of satisfaction, as I expected the message would wind up in a virtual dead-letter pile along with thousands of others.

It didn’t.

The next day, I received a call from a friendly, apologetic member of HP’s customer-service escalation team. We chatted a bit about the situation, and then she turned me over to a case manager. This guy was even friendlier and  more apologetic. Alas, because both PCs were out of warranty, the best he could do was offer me 50 percent off the repair charges.

I politely declined. He apologized again, profusely, saying he wished he could do more, and said the offer was good for 30 days if I changed my mind.

Half an hour later, the phone rang again. It was the case manager. He asked me a couple more questions about the systems, then put me on hold for a couple minutes. When he returned, he said, “You know what? I’m going to repair these machines.”

The day after that, two shipping boxes arrived at my office. HP was paying for overnight freight, both ways, and expediting the repairs to boot, promising a turnaround time of 4-6 business days.

Needless to say, I was blown away by all of this. And assuming both machines do get fixed properly (they’re winging their way to the repair depot as I write this), I will not only buy from HP again, I’ll recommend the company to others.

And that, my friends, is the result of good customer service.

Is Creativity a Bad Trait for a Senior Leader?

Supporters of the status quo — not the creative types — are seen as more effective.

by Matt Palmquist

Title: Recognizing Creative Leadership: Can Creative Idea Expression Negatively Relate to Perceptions of Leadership Potential? (Fee required.)Authors: Jennifer S. Mueller (University of Pennsylvania), Jack Goncalo (Cornell University), and Dishan Kamdar (Indian School of Business)Publisher: Journal of Experimental Social Psychology

Date Published: December 2010

Don’t be too creative with your business ideas, this paper warns. Unless you have plenty of charisma to complement your creativity, thinking outside the box could keep you out of top management. Companies say they want fresh ideas from their leaders, and most researchers concentrate on the positive impact made by creative bosses. But this study focuses on how stereotypes about “creative types” and “effective leaders” clash, leading people to believe that their innovative colleagues aren’t cut out for the top spots.

Psychologists have established that to most people, the prototypical leader reduces uncertainty and promotes stability, emphasizing shared goals and group identity to preserve the status quo. The stereotypes of creative people are at odds with that definition; the very act of advocating unproven solutions can be seen as rocking the boat.

The researchers conducted two experiments to gauge how bias against creative thinkers factored into whether they were seen as suitable for top jobs. The first asked 364 employees at a refinery in India, whose jobs required them to find innovative solutions, to rank their colleagues’ level of creative expression and leadership potential. Even in a workplace that prized creativity, relatively creative people were seen as less likely to become leaders.

In the next experiment, nearly 400 undergraduates in the United States were assigned first to be idea pitchers and then to be evaluators. The evaluators were asked to rank the pitchers on the strength of their ideas and their leadership potential.

In the experiment, creative types were seen as just as competent and personable as their purely useful peers, but were judged less fit for leadership. However, when primed to think that the creative person also demonstrated stereotypically charismatic traits, such as uniqueness and individualism, the evaluators were more likely to regard that person as a potential leader. “A charismatic leader is expected to take the group in a new, novel direction,” says Cornell University’s Jack Goncalo, one of the study’s authors. “If you are supposed to be a transformative leader, then actually being creative in those conditions is an asset.”

Still, the findings indicate that the dominant model of leadership is one that encourages useful, noncreative solutions. The researchers also argue that creative employees are gradually filtered out on their journey up the corporate ladder. 

Bottom Line: Because of conflicting stereotypes about creativity and leadership, stakeholders prefer the prototype of a leader they see as fostering a stable and secure environment. However, creative people who are also charismatic stand a better chance of advancing.

India's Greatest Artist is no more

Maqbool Fida Hussain lived life large. And his works portrayed that inclination towards scale. Like the 13 meter (45 foot) long mural at TIFR. I remember, standing stunned and humbled, as I filed past this work, like a pilgrim. I had never seen anything like this before. Done in 1962, Husain-saab already showed the unmatched genius that we came expect from him, and which took him to the top of Indian contemporary art. I must admit that only the raw power of a Tyeb Mehta work could ever impress me as much...

And today, just like that, he is no more. Dead, in exile, far from the land that was his soul, his identity. Husain-saab legacy cannot be the narrow, bigoted, politically-motivated rubbish some of our esteemed leaders have come to preach. To me, and to countless other adoring fans, it will be the mural in south Bombay, or the magnificent and bold brush-strokes that spoke more than words ever could have.

R.I.P., finally. India is poorer without you. History will forever remind us of that...