January 18, 2010

Employee Development Systems, Inc.
The Personal Accountability Company

7308 South Alton Way, Suite 2J
Dry Creek Business Park
Centennial, Colorado 80112 

Phone: 1-800.282.3374  

employeedevelopmentsystems.com 

info@edsiusa.com 


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In 50 Activities for Collaborative Management, you'll find an array of dynamic and engaging exercises to help you explore what makes collaborative management work, its potential benefits and how to experience them in your organization.

Have you heard of Gary Vaynerchuck, the wine aficionado, business owner and thought leader?  He has pioneered a new way of personal and professional branding, and this title shares his path to success with the rest of us (Harper Collins, 2009).

 

This book is enthusiastically written, with down-to-earth advice about how he has made a personal brand out of his love of wine.  He takes that advice and superimposes it on practically any business or career. 

Start 2010 right by downloading the 2010 Trainer’s Resolution Toolkit from ASTD.  It’s free.

As we dive headlong into a new year, there are plenty of unknowns related to the business and economic climates.

 

Whether you are a trainer, manager or executive, you have an investment in the training and development of staff and are always looking for ways to be more effective, successful and (of course) cost-conscious. What can you focus on this year, to accomplish your training goals? 

 

In the past, corporate training programs were often seen as an optional component to the human resources budget.  We all have learned that training initiatives are vital to the organization, but only if they are focused on results and their objectives are clearly mapped to organizational goals Would you like to see a better ROI on your training efforts in 2010?

Do your employees enjoy working for your organization?  If they do, they are in a narrow majority. According to a survey of 5,000 households by the Conference Board research group, only 45% of Americans are satisfied with their work–the lowest number ever recorded by the organization in its 22 years of studying the issue. What is causing such discontent? There is a variety pack of reasons, all related to the ever-present remnants of our recent economic upheaval: incomes have not been keeping up with inflation, health insurance is cutting into take-home pay, and many people are concerned about job security.

 

According to John Gibbons, program director at the Conference Board, "Challenging and meaningful work is vitally important to engaging American workers. Widespread job dissatisfaction negatively affects employee behavior and retention, which can impact enterprise-level success." In fact, 22 percent of respondents said they don’t expect to be in their current job in a year!

 

Organizations feel the affects of these attitudes in worker productivity, workplace atmosphere and eventually, the bottom line. It is a simple and well-known truism: 

 

 

Tell us about the development of GAP M. 

This product developed organically, from a real need in the market.  About 10 years ago, in the midst of keynote talks, I would ask a room full of CEOs what their most important asset is.  You can imagine that I would get a resounding response of "PEOPLE, OF COURSE!" from the audience.  But when I asked them how often they checked the status of that asset, I would hear a few comments about an annual employee survey, or occasional HR meeting with department heads. 

 

Now compare that to other key indicators of organizational health, such as financial statements. How often do you think they were checking those statements?  I think you can guess the answer: at least once a month, and usually every week. 

 

These same CEOs would ask me what tool they should use to check their "people metrics."  Of course, there are plenty of services and software packages to keep track of physical inventory or track accounting trends--So what about people? There was nothing out there for them, and still isn’t anything like GAP M.  That is when GAP M was born.

 

Instead of five managers each telling you what they think their core issue is, we have the consensus of the entire organization.  Instead of management owning the culture alone and telling people what to do, GAP M allows the focus to be the collective voice of the organization and everybody owns it together. It is a tool for allocating resources that will give the highest return on investment.

 

In the past, organizations may have given an annual employee attitude survey.  The next year, they may do it again, and not only has it been too long since the previous survey, but they may not even ask the same questions! Where is the knowledge gain?   What impact did the training have that you gave six or eight months ago?  Imagine if you only bothered to get financial statements once a year…nobody would EVER do that because money is important…of course not as important as people which are the greatest asset right?  Now we can look at quarterly or even monthly information, since GAP M provides trend over time analysis.  

Many of them are the tried and true benchmarks, such as job satisfaction and time management.  Others are unique and innovative, such as energy level.  They all work together to give management and executive leadership an accurate and ongoing picture of how their organization is functioning. 

 

Trend over time is key here, just like a financial statement.  Just because one month may show negative metrics in a particular area, looking at the trend over time is what gives real information, not just a snapshot of a particular data point.  This puts HR and Organizational Development at the same table as the CPA, CFO, CMO, CITO, COO and everybody else with resource allocation, forecasting, and “prove-it-works” responsibilities.

 

As you can imagine, this really helps in making budget allocations.  We are able to look at needs in a way that they haven't been looked at before.  Basically, the more GAP M is used, the more useful it becomes. 

 

Our situation this time focuses on an international auto company that was able to keep profits fairly stable during the economically volatile time of the last two years,  The executive board is now looking back at its investments and assessing where they experienced successes and challenges.  

 

One specific challenge that has come up is in the ROI from employee training.  Although the organization fared much better overall than its counterparts, the executive team does not see any positive return on its training programs.

 

As a matter of fact, the executives are just now finding out exactly what kinds of training programs were offered last year!  They are skeptical about continuing the current training budget in FY 2010.  In order to find out more, they have called in Bruce, the training manager, to plead his case for continued training programs at the same level. He can't understand why they would think of cutting the critical training programs that helped the company weather the tough economy.

What piece is missing? What shift does this organization need to make, in order to make their training programs more effective?