“Yes!  I’m in.”

What you want to see and hear when people step up to their training is an emphatic “Yes, I’m in.  I get this and it’s going to make a real difference to me and everyone around me – I want to learn how we can make our daily working lives better and easier.  And I want to keep learning”.

Make it believable, meaningful and bring the benefits to life for all

Here at MGI we call this creating the believable case, and it’s the foundation stone of every tailored Learning Journey our experts create in our Mindset, Actions & Language Toolkit.  It gives a clear and complete answer to any underlying questions that could be a barrier to learning, such as: “What does it mean to me?”, “Is it worth it?” and “What will I get out of it?”.

The most successful customer service training programmes bring to life the purpose and benefits to each individual of working together to deliver great service to customers every time.  Making the case credible, plausible and realistic from the outset means every learner can swiftly choose to join in with confidence and commitment.

The case to engage with the training must be meaningful and really resonate with the learner; perceived by each learner as having true significance, purpose and value, and therefore ultimately worthwhile and an activity that they are happy to invest time in.

Research and identify what’s important

To ensure the believable case is truly believable and gives clear reasons to engage with the training, it is important to understand the reality of working at all levels of the organisation, the goals for each area and what gets in the way.  In our experience, for a company-wide programme to improve customer satisfaction, the reasons that the senior executives have to engage with the programme can be very different to the reasons that will resonate at the frontline. Through an appropriate diagnostic process, you will identify critical information that will help shape the believable case, to address challenges and issues faced at all levels and tailor the learning.

Through this tailoring, it is possible to provide true meaning and ensures that every learner gains the necessary skills required to achieve the overall goals and outcomes of the training programme.

Relate it to everyday scenarios and goals

Creating a meaningful rationale for the training and clearly linking it back to everyday scenarios and outcomes specific to the organisation and each employee provides powerful, personal benefits that everyone can relate to. Demonstrating clearly how the new skills can be applied in these everyday scenarios brings the learning to life. Workshopping the use of the tools to address challenges that people face every day is a powerful way to get immediate engagement and demonstrate value.

Communicate the rationale for the training upfront

Clear, upfront communication of the positive goals and outcomes that will result from engaging with the training is key to ensuring buy-in from all participants .  This will ensure every learner approaches their training with confidence, motivation and commitment so that their newfound skills can become a way of life for them, and fully embedded in the culture of the organisation.

Find out here how MGI’s Mindset, Action and Language Toolkit can empower your teams to create positive, high trust cultures in which to thrive.

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Ensuring new skills become a way of life for your people takes focus and dedicated embedding activity. A practical approach is required when enhancing or changing any behaviour, which is easy to understand, easy to practice, and easy to implement. How many times have you felt that the impact of a training programme was lacking? Or short-lived? Have you been on training courses and forgotten what you learnt a few weeks later (we have!)? Most likely, it’s happened because the training was delivered in silo without the wrap-around embedding support that is the vital ingredient to creating lasting behavioural change.

The steps to changing behaviour

If you are working with a training provider, ask them how they plan to ensure the training will stick? How will they secure long-term positive impact and use of the skills they are teaching? At MGI Learning, our programmes are underpinned by a deep understanding of the steps to changing behaviour. This is vital to design a compelling and complete learning journey, that includes activities before and after the training course itself.

Before the training programme is implemented, it’s crucial to ensure your people understand the “why” behind it and have both the desire to undertake the learning and the optimistic view that it’s worthwhile for them. Without this, you may face pessimism about the effectiveness of the training and lack of engagement from employees. Once the training session is in progress, it must be easy to take part in and participate, and be stimulating and engaging to encourage interaction. This will help overcome common barriers to taking part such as the training being too complicated, or the participants lacking the motivation. Post-training, it’s essential to ensure orchestrated follow-on activities are put in place. This is the vital stage where you begin the work of embedding, through positive reinforcement for using the skills and by supporting the development and use of their newly-gained knowledge in everyday situations.

Why embedding is so important to a successful outcome

Actual behavioural change is achieved through the constant, consistent and collective use of the skills and tools, which creates a culture of trust where everyone demonstrates the necessary behaviours and believes their team members will do a great job.

Embedding activities of any employee training programme need to support your people in the following areas:

• To ensure managers lead by example
• To continuously learn the skills and use the tools
• To practice using the skills in day-to-day real-life situations
• To refresh knowledge and understanding
• To see and experience the positive outcomes of using the skills
• To maintain motivation to use the skills
• To provide the tools needed to use the skills everyday practically
• To collectively use the skills as a team sharing successes and learning from each other
• To measure their use of the skills and identify any barriers to their use and areas of development

Ultimately you want your people to be motivated and bought into using their new skills knowing that they are adding value to their day-to-day work. To check how your people are doing and how effectively the embedding is working you can ask the following questions and take action on the invaluable data you will collect as a result:

1. “What did I think about it?” – allow for immediate feedback alerting you to what is going well and any barriers
2. “What do I remember?” – analyse immediate knowledge recall
3. “How confident am I?” – Self-assessment of learning, identifying gaps
4. “What extra support do I need?” – deepening activities like guides, group work, refresher training
5. “What did I learn?” – test understanding and application to really show the benefit of taking part

Ten embedding tactics to ensure the skills stick

There are many elements to include in a rounded training programme to ensure the learning journey continues to move forwards and develop. Together, these will help drive positive change, ensuring your people believe in, and see the value of, using the skills they have been taught.

Here are ten tactics you can implement to ensure the skills stick:

1. Refresher training – continuous, scheduled re-visiting of the training and tools and a regular basis.
2. Micro-learning – short, sharp bite-sized learning sessions to deepen knowledge.
3. Practice sessions – practising the skills in everyday situations and scenarios.
4. E-learning – accessible online teaching, accessible to all, anytime and on any device.
5. Practical tools – frameworks, processes and interactive tools to use in everyday application.
6. Digital and printed materials and resources – available to recall when needed or refer to in the moment.
7. Group huddles – group sessions as a team to discuss, collaborate on and practice the skills.
8. Lead by example – management must demonstrate the use of the skills themselves and help mentor their people in using them.
9. Measurement – ensure development and progress is regularly measured and any knowledge or support gaps are identified and dealt with.
10. Reinforcement and feedback – show positive reinforcement for using the skills such as praise or rewards, ensure your people can always see the positive outcomes and listen to, and act on, their feedback along the way.

The next time you implement a training programme ask yourself – How do I know it’s really making a difference to my business metrics? Are my people truly bought into it? Will things have changed six months from now and how can I sustain that change? If there is any doubt, take a look at your embedding plan and see if you can include some of the suggestions here.

If you need to help your people adapt to change, build stronger working relationships or self-manage their wellbeing, get in touch for a free consultation so we can show you how.

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According to the CIPD, “Employees who have good quality jobs and are managed well, will not only be happier, healthier and more fulfilled, but are also more likely to drive productivity, better products or services, and innovation.” We would add ‘deliver exceptional service to customers’ to that list, too, since many business goals are fundamentally linked to building strong customer relationships.

So how do leaders ensure employee training sticks? How do you embed those skills in your teams to really drive a culture change for the long term? How do you know it’s really making a difference – to your people and to your business metrics?

Driving culture change through training

Have you ever felt that the impact of training you have implemented was transient? As leaders, we’ve all seen the use of new ideas evident initially but then the momentum ebbs, skills are forgotten, and people revert to their old habits. One client of ours hit the nail on the head – “I love this content but how will you stop me going back to my evil old ways?”. At MGI Learning, this concept underpins everything we do. It’s vital to ensure that every person who trains on our courses and uses our tools practises the mindset, language, and behaviours consistently and continually. In fact, our tools are designed to also help in personal lives, as life skills that benefit both at work and at home are often the ones that stick for the long-term – the skills become firmly embedded in the psyche.

Ensuring new skills become a way of life takes focus and dedicated embedding activity. A practical approach is required when changing any behaviour, which is easy to understand, easy to practice, and easy to implement.

Four ingredients for sustained training impact

At MGI Learning, we focus on four areas that clients need to work on to ensure they experience a sustained impact from any training investment. Our simple but highly effective approach enables our customers to create lasting change in their organisation, which leads to improvements in all the metric areas they are looking to better, such as customer satisfaction and employee engagement.

1) Learn it well

Of course, with any new skill, we need to learn it. We need to understand what it is and how to use it in daily life. This isn’t just down to your people, however. How they learn, how they take on board the information and how they understand it practically is often down to how it’s taught. This includes having an engaging first teach of the skill with plenty of practical application and storytelling to bring it to life. The training needs to be relevant, tailored to the team and its unique environment and challenges, and of course, highly engaging. If the training is being delivered online, as is the case at the moment, the eLearning experience needs to be delivered in short, interactive modules, using a mix of media like video and clickable areas. At MGI, our face-to-face virtual training sessions use a plethora of tactics for engagement such as video interspersed with trainer delivery, online activities to increase active involvement, break out rooms to encourage interaction, virtual whiteboards or polling to enable group participation, instant message chat and emojis to get live reactions.

2) Live it and practice

Once the skills are effectively learned, and people understand them, believe them, and see how they can use them practically, they need to start living them. This is when we begin to use the skill and ensure that we demonstrate the use of it in appropriate circumstances. Practising using these new skills and continually improving ourselves to increase the sophistication of using them should be enjoyable and rewarding. The key here is to quickly and easily link back to the benefits of learning the skill in the first place. Putting in place incentives to ensure people feel rewarded and supported for demonstrating and living the skills is also helpful to gather and keep momentum.

3) Link to the positive outcome

If people can genuinely see that using these skills will improve their performance, we are firmly on the road to positive change. When managers and their teams link the use of the skills to helping them achieve their goals, their motivation to learn and live the skills, of course, increases. Your people need to believe it makes a difference to them personally and helps them make a difference in the workplace. It’s this embedded knowledge and experience that will drive collective adoption and ultimately drive culture change. The more people that develop the right mindset, language and actions to succeed and communicate that to others, the more others will adopt the same, with a firm knowing the outcome is positive for all. Asking for employee feedback, testimonials, and rewarding and communicating real-life positive outcomes is a great way to ensure the newfound skills are continually linked to the positive result.

4) Lead by example

As we look back over our 20 years of experience, the most successful and rewarding projects we have worked on are those where managers and leaders embrace the use of the skills and demonstrate their commitment through role modelling. Leading by example is a vital ingredient to ensuring sustained change within teams. Conversely, we’ve seen that the root cause of projects that fail to meet their potential can usually be traced back to a lack of leadership commitment to demonstrate and embrace the new skills themselves. Leading through coaching, reinforcing excellent use, supporting those who need more help to develop the skills and creating and keeping momentum are all essential aspects of leading by example.

So, if you are considering a change management training programme or you plan to invest in equipping your people with the skills and tools they need to handle whatever comes their way, building a robust plan of action to make sure the skills stick and deliver the outcomes you want, long-term will give you the foundation for success.

We would be delighted to talk with you about the training that we provide and show you the results that our customers achieve. If you would like to book a free consultation with us, do get in touch.

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The post The four vital ingredients for long-term training impact appeared first on MGI Learning - Creating Better Service in Business.