Training Development for Sustainable Process Improvements: Part 2

In last week’s blog, I shared the common mistakes to avoid in training, the importance of formalizing training, and the two-week lead time for completing the training. This week, I’ll teach two key aspects of training development (interrelatedness and follow-up emails) and how to use the Process Worksheet (downloadable for free here) effectively in training development.?

Focus on Interrelatedness

On average, I see a go-live having 12 to 15 training sessions in two weeks because teams are doing comprehensive work. This allows us to show the interrelatedness of the processes.?

For example, in an entire go-live that changes over 30% of your operation through 50 countermeasures spreading across all departments, we want to execute all those pieces of training as one go-live, not disparately or by department.?

Changes in one area can have cascading effects on others. What you do in your sales discovery process affects the information that goes into your CRM, which affects the information that is handed over during onboarding to your services team, which affects the ability of your services or fulfillment team to execute whatever was sold.?

Training multiple departments simultaneously on the interrelated processes can help teams understand how their roles impact the whole operation. We are teaching people to embrace a system-thinking mindset, which is necessary for them to operate and think like an owner. This way, they take on more ownership and responsibility for the processes.

Leverage Follow-Up Emails

Following each training session, provide attendees with follow-up emails containing essential resources, references, and contact information for further queries. This immediate reinforcement aids in information retention and provides attendees with quick access to essential tools. The person who’ll be facilitating the training should write the follow-up email in advance. This email should come out within the same day of the training 100% of the time.?

Develop a Training Plan Using the Process Worksheet

The “Training Plan” tab in the Process Worksheet is where you will develop your training plan. Row 2 contains all the topics you need to populate.?

Column C contains the training subject or topic. In the image above, our example is Station Budget Setting. This is a company that does outside sales for radio stations. In the parenthesis, put the topics that are going to be covered within the training. In this case, they're going to review the resources, how to use the resources, where the resources live, and a high-level timeline of the process.?

Name Attendees

To populate column D, go through your key operational change worksheet and aggregate who needs to be trained on what because of the changes that are mentioned in the training topics. The goal is to name all attendees, not lump people together.

Avoid ambiguity by naming individual attendees rather than generalizing by department or role. This level of specificity demonstrates respect for their roles and responsibilities. It also helps prevent the inclusion of unnecessary participants and ensures that the right people receive the right information.

Take note: You can have the same topic but for a different audience. Customize the topics for each audience. We often see the same training subject broken out into different pieces of training based on what the attendees need.

For example, if you're doing the station budget-setting process, you might want to inform the Ops and Finance people of the changes. But they don't need to know the same things that the salespeople need to know. As a result, the training for them will take a shorter time compared to the sales team.

Avoid the mistake of lumping all attendees into one. It wastes your team's time and makes them distrust the process. Make it as efficient as possible for them.???

Once you have columns C and D fleshed out, we move on to columns E and F, which we will discuss in next week’s blog, so stay tuned as we wrap up this blog series on training development.

In your service,

Hilary Corna