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The following white papers and other articles are made available free of charge on the understanding that you will contact us first if you wish to discuss their contents and allow us the opportunity to talk about your situation and recommend our first class services and offerings.
Impact of Manager Coaching on Learning Transfer. NEW!
We all know that a seminar alone is not likely to result in significant changes in job performance. It is also true that much has been written about different techniques to ensure that skills transfer to performance improvement on the job. One technique that has been discussed more than others is the role of manager support and coaching in ensuring that employees use their new skills to enhance job performance. However, while many organizations are promoting manager coaching to improve the transfer of learning, there has been little research on the relative impact of manager coaching. There is even less research available on the critical characteristics of manager coaching that determine the impact on use of new skills.
This paper reports on a subset of the findings of a Wilson Learning study on “Learning Transfer Model: A Research Driven Approach to Enhancing Learning Effectiveness.” In this study, we reviewed literature from the past several years in search of rigorous studies that compared the impact of training seminars alone to training plus different forms of manager coaching. We identified nine studies that provided a direct comparison. These studies were classified relative to the type of preparation managers were given for coaching their employees. Overall, we found that if organizations fully prepared their managers… Read more
What is the R.O.I. on Training?
We all know that a helpful and enjoyable training event like a conference, seminar or workshop has a short-term impact on performance so why not on longer-term performance? Is training an expense, a cost to be kept under tight control or even eliminated when times are tough? Or does learning and development make a tangible difference on the bottom line of a good company?
Some of the best and most sceptical minds in the business have worked closely with HR professionals to challenge the value of training over the medium- and long-term. They’ve discovered that it is possible to calculate the ROI on training. The challenge now is to change our approach to how we do training so that we improve the long-term impact on behaviour and performance and increase the ROI on our budgets. Now that we know how to measure that improvement, using a validated model, we can hold ourselves accountable for our own performance as L&D practitioners. Read more…
Learning Transfer, and how to improve it.
The majority of Kiwis prefer to give it a go before they read the assembly instructions even though we know that if we read the instructions first, and follow them step by step, the assembly process will go more smoothly and successfully, with less stress. Training is much like the assembly instructions – you only refer to them when you get stuck, right?
If we believe in the value of reading those instructions, do we memorise them? Normal people don’t do that, but if we think we might need them again, we put them away in a safe place, much like we do with the training manuals we received in that course we went to. Went to – that’s the operative word, so to speak. We go to training classes, and we file the course materials, and we only look them up when we’re in difficulty. Meanwhile our normal pattern of behaviour – and therefore our “performance” – stays as it was. If I never feel like I’m in difficulty and go to the manual, the training will change nothing and be a waste of time and money. And so the question arises: Training – what’s it worth?
Before we admit defeat and let the Production Manager steal away our L&D budget for yet another piece of machinery, let’s find out how we can change the learning impact of the training we provide. Q: How can the L&D team justify its existence and secure more budget to do more of what we do best? We must challenge our methodology – the assumptions and habitual approaches we use to design and implement our training solutions. Read more…
Choosing the Best Providers.
When we discover what it takes to make learning “sticky” – to produce a sustainable change in behaviour and performance – our next great challenge is to consistently deliver on that. We know that every company is scrutinising with greater scepticism every dollar being spent these days and training budgets are looked at more and more closely. At the same time we want to make a real difference in the over all performance of the business and we know, for sure, that we can.
Delivering that “real difference” is harder and more costly than we might imagine. Companies who embark on comprehensive design-build plans for learning & development soon discover that there isn’t enough time and money available to do it right, and that’s a dilemma! So they turn back to the marketplace and search for providers who can honestly deliver the required outcomes at a reasonable cost; can reduce the cost of delivering value without compromising the desired outcomes. And in NZ, very few providers can.
In partnership with Wilson Learning Worldwide, Growing Organisations is exceptional. Because we work with hundreds of like-minded companies worldwide, we’ve developed the systems, tools and processes that make it easy and inexpensive to deliver world class results. Because of our size, we have completely scalable solutions that serve the medium or large NZ company just as well as the Wall Street giants. As a result, your results are no longer dependent upon your company’s size and resources. Working with us, it’s easy for your company to behave like a Fortune 500 company and deliver the results your company needs, without a Fortune 500 budget.
If you work for a large company, we can confidently say we’ll help you achieve better results than you get now for less money than you spend now. And if you own and operate or manage a medium-sized Kiwi company, we can give you world class learning & development at a cost you can afford. Read more or better still, contact us for a free, no obligation meeting to discuss your desired outcomes and how you can cost-effectively deliver them.