“Members in the Communications Team write poorly. We are getting many angry customers ringing us to complain about the emails they are receiving from us. Can you organise a training session for the Communications Team?”
“We are giving far too much money away as compensation. Can you put a training programme to teach our staff how to negotiate better over the phone with customers?”
“Our customer service level has gone from back to worse. I think we need a training session to get our guys back on track.”
Most people think training is the panacea to all organisational problems. Of course, this is never the furthest from the truth.
The above comments were requests that I received when I was doing training. The easiest, and probably, the most painless and least heartache way to accept the diagnosis of issues by the line managers and design the training programmes. But that would effectively reduce the training professional into a ‘post-box’ function; very scary. Years ago, when I was attending a workshop at the American Society of Training & Development’s annual conference, a couple, Dana and James Robinson, challenged me to move beyond merely being a Training Professional to that of a Performance Consultant. They articulated convincingly that most perceived training problems were actually performance issues that needed attention.
There is never a single cause to a problem. It is always easy to blame the people doing the job. Or attribute it to their lack of training. In the first instance involving a bunch of communication staff members, I took some time to visit the team and understand their issues. This was what I found. The staff members were originally working in the frontline answering phones. However, because they were turning customers off through their rude replies, Management, for good measure, decided to move them to some backend job, in this case, answering letters from customers. The only problem was that while, in theory, the staff members were now not talking to customers, they were still interacting with them. And they were writing how they were answering over the phones.
The big issue lied in the fact that when a customer wrote, s/he was likely to be extremely upset. Now you can well imagine the explosive combination of customer’s frustration and staff member’s rudeness! It was not funny.
What if we have gone down the communication route and train the staff to reply politely? Would that have worked?
Whenever there is a problem, there are many possible causes. ‘People’ is but one of the elements. Ishikawa-san, the creator of the Root Cause Analysis diagram, simplified possible causes to four main elements, all beginning with the letter ‘M’; that of Man, Method, Material, and Machine.
Only when we satisfy ourselves that ‘Man’ or ‘People’ is the root cause, should we consider ‘training’ as a real option. The next challenge is to understand what exactly is ‘wrong’ with our people. Here is where we tap a doyen of educational psychology, B S Bloom.
When looking at a ‘People’ issue, Bloom further sub-categorised that into the elements of Knowledge, Attitude, and Skill as seen below:
- Knowledge can either be cognitive or mental;
- Attitude is generally considered the emotional element;
- Skill is generally the psychomotor or physical elements.
For example, why are our staff members having a problem? Is it a ‘Knowledge’ issue? An ‘Attitude’ challenge? Or a ‘Skill’ gap?
To illustrate, let me demonstrate with a real case. The problem relates to the Faults’ Department of a telephone company. Just like in my various cases, I was approached to investigate as the Faults Department’s frontline telephonists were perceived to be giving poor services based on the number of complaints going to Management. “We need a training programme,” barked Ron Saxby, the General Manager of the Centre.
As usual, the first action I took was to visit the place, observe, and talk to the staff. Here is what I gathered in terms of my observations based on ‘needs’:
- The Faults’ Department had 150 staff consisting of both new and ‘old’; the ‘older’ ones had been around for a long time,
- Over time, the staff members had been given many different forms of training. Business rules and processes had changed but adoption had not been streamlined,
- Staff tended to keep their notes after induction,
- There were inconsistent practices across the department since different batches of staff members were trained differently (regarding rules and processes),
- Some staff members were unfamiliar with how to read an NTS chart (NTS chart is a tool to help staff members to know whether there is a problem on the telephone line. For example, staff members were unfamiliar in reading ohms, kilo-ohms and mega ohms. These were critical concepts,
- Some staff members did not know what key diagnostic questions to ask when conversing with the customer (What noise do you hear when making calls? When receiving incoming calls?),
- There were different NTS reading guidelines given over time. Different staff members have different versions,
- Some staff members were unfamiliar with what and when to tell the customer at the end of the conversation regarding access and technician diagnostic charges (These were important conversations),
- Some staff members did not put in sufficient information into their end notes. As a result, technicians did not understand what they need to do when they received a work ticket.
Now, you might like to pause here for five minutes and try and offer some solutions. When you have done that, please carry on.
Here is what I did next. I distinguished these observations into Bloom’s elements of Knowledge, Skill or Attitude so that I could devise a set of learning objectives for creating our training modules.
Here is my attempt at asking the ‘why’ question and analysing these statements. I have used ‘red’ to represent ‘Knowledge’, ‘green’ to explain ‘Skill’, and ‘blue’ to indicate ‘Attitude’.
- The Faults’ Department had 150 staff consisting of both new and ‘old’ staff members; the ‘older’ ones had been around for a long time – possibly an ‘Attitude’ issue,
- Over time, the staff members had been given many different forms of training. Business rules and processes had changed but adoption had not been streamlined,
- Staff tended to keep their notes after induction,
- There were inconsistent practices across the department since different batches of staff members were trained differently (regarding rules and processes) – You might like to note that this was a System issue as well. It demonstrated that the Department lacked a single source of truth and people were using whatever information that they were taught,
- Some staff members were unfamiliar with how to read an NTS chart (NTS chart is a tool to help staff members to know whether there is a problem on the telephone line. For example, staff members were unfamiliar in reading ohms, kilo-ohms and mega ohms. These were critical concepts,
- Some staff members did not know what key diagnostic questions to ask when conversing with the customer (What noise do you hear when making calls? When receiving incoming calls?),
- There were different NTS reading guidelines given over time. Different staff members have different versions,
- Some staff members were unfamiliar with what and when to tell the customer at the end of the conversation regarding access and technician diagnostic charges (These were important conversations),
- Some staff members did not put in sufficient information into their end notes. As a result, technicians did not understand what they need to do when they received a work ticket.
From a problem-solving perspective, Points #2 to #4, #7 – Multiple Sources of Truth – had to be arrested quickly. So, one of the first solutions immediately agreed by Ron was to create a new up-to-date and accurate knowledge base (Single Source of Truth) in the intranet (how we create the knowledge is another story for different time) while getting rid of all existing ones post-training; the latter was vital as it eliminated confusion, information mistreatment and different versions of truth.
BS Bloom also created a ‘Learning Taxonomy’, affectionately called the ‘Bloom’s Taxonomy’ to help us create learning objectives. He classified them from ‘Basic’ to ‘Complex’. For example, under ‘Knowledge’, the most basic level was ‘Recalling Data’ with the ability to ‘Evaluate Data’ being the most complex level. In effect, it is saying that the greater the ability of a staff member to answer the ‘Why’ question, the greater the achievement in a ‘Knowledge’ learning outcome since to ‘evaluate’ will mean that the learner will have to know why the data is there in the first place.
The BS Bloom’s Taxonomy of Learning is found here:
Now we are ready to design a set of learning objectives to meet our observed needs as follows:
By the END of the Training, staff members of Faults should be able to:
• Understand all critical concepts including ohms, kilo-ohms, and mega-ohms (Knowledge – Comprehension),
• Apply the relevant physical diagnostic questions to the Customer (Knowledge – Application),
• Study a NTS’ Parameter Table and evaluate the data before coming to a conclusion with regards to the status of the telephone line (Knowledge – Evaluation),
• Complete a Ticket with all relevant fields (Knowledge – Application),
• Internalize the importance of completing a Ticket with all relevant information (Attitude – Internalization),
• Develop consistent practice to ensure that we have covered the relevant information of Access (Gaining Access into the house), Diagnostic Conversation, and Commit Time (Time when the technician finishes the job) (Skills – Precision).
Most training professionals would be happy to get to this stage as training outcomes get articulated. However, there is yet another level that we can progress further and here is where we have to turn to another well regarded expert, Donald Kirkpatrick.
Dr. Kirkpatrick came up with a way of evaluating training successes at 4 levels in 1959. The four levels of Kirkpatrick's evaluation model essentially measure:
- Reaction of student - what they thought and felt about the training, or you may term this as a ‘Happy Sheet’ evaluation,
- Learning - the resulting increase in knowledge or capability. Most times, a test can determine this element,
- Behaviour - extent of behaviour and capability improvement and implementation/application
- Results - the effects on the business or environment resulting from the trainee's performance. Sometimes, you may be able to include ROI (Return of Investment) into the mix, something that accountants love.
If we combined Bloom's approach and Kirkpatrick's targets, then we can truly design a training programme while effectively measuring our results.
Coming back to our example at Faults, we can include in the following goals:
- Reduce rework by xx%
Conceptually, I have provided a way of helping you to understand that training is only a solution if it is a ‘People’ issue. Also, in identifying a training programme, it is critical to understand the issues around Knowledge, Attitude and Skills. Once you have this information, you are ready to design the training programme. Here is a model that you might like to use:
So far, I have only explained the ‘Green’ rectangle as well the ‘Yellow’ triangle. In another article, I will expand on the ‘Blue’ triangle.
For now, let me return to the story of the communication department. How can we help these staff members who could not write politely? It is true that this was a staff issue. However, the solution that we adopted was a very non-staff one. We identified the typical type of letters coming through and we developed company endorsed templates for these staff members to cut and paste, thus removing the need for them to be wordsmith.
From a purist perspective, this looked like an attitude issue relating to the staff that we can perhaps train. But ‘Attitude’ or ‘Mind-set’ is really the toughest thing to train. Hence, for a failed safe solution, templates were considered more predictable and better managed.
Hopefully, you would have by now picked up that training is not a panacea of all pain, including the ones involving the ‘People’ factor. Even if training is favoured, the toughest programmes are those that involved mind-set shift. The next article on ‘Design and Development’ will demonstrate more. Happy reading.
