It’s National Learning at Work Day – 17 May 2012

Why should companies participate in Learning at Work Day and what are the benefits of training employees?

It’s all rather simple: the more people learn the more people can accomplish. Shouldn’t this be every company’s greatest aim? Having a competent and well-trained workforce in place generating revenue showing off their skills and knowledge while doing it? Sounds like a win win situation for both sides…

Let’s look at other benefits of training your employees:

• Training helps your business run better and continuously improve on previous performance.  Well-trained employees will feel at ease and confident with their responsibilities and tasks at work.  A well-trained employee will close that deal, offer outstanding customer service or think out of the box at the next pitch for a major contract. 
• Training promotes self-esteem and confidence in the workplace. Everyone wants to feel needed and appreciated; we also all need to have a purpose. Going home after a day spent not achieving anything at work can be demoralizing, but training and development at work can instil a feeling of achievement and self-worth.  
• Training leads to job satisfaction and fulfilment.  Employees offered training will contribute to the company. The more involved employees are in the organization and decision making process, the greater the rewards for the company. 
• Training is a way of retaining your employees.  By offering training the company creates a culture of loyalty where employees feel appreciated.  Employees will be more likely to stay, learn and grow at your company if opportunities to grow, learn and train are offered on a regular basis.  Which bring us to the next point…
• Training is also an excellent form of recruitment.  Candidates no longer just look at salaries and benefits offered but also consider the training opportunities and career progression offered when considering potential companies to work at. 
• Training employees in multiple sectors in the business can lead to adjustability and greater efficiency at work. Companies should cross-train employees as much as possible in order to fill the gaps when people are ill or absent from work. This will not only help your business but also keep your employees stimulated and engaged. 
• Another great form of training is creating a culture where employees can learn and teach each other.  Sharing skills amongst employees will be like diversifying your investments. 

Companies can’t really afford not to train employees anymore, salaries and benefits are not strong enough incentives. Employees work for different reasons, including job satisfaction, learning new skills, increasing confidence and knowledge at work or building their careers.

For more information on Learning At Work Day please visit the website: Learning at Work Day 17 May 2012

To celebrate Learning At Work Day, Capita Learning and Development is offering 50%-60% discount on selected courses.  Please click here to view our offers

How To Successfully Lead A Team Through The Difficult Process Of Change

Managing and leading employees through any form of change in an organisation can be a challenging, difficult and even unpleasant task. What change entails might even be misunderstood, as the video clip below shows, but leading a team through the process of change can be mastered…

In our globalised and interconnected economy, organisations deal with continually shifting market conditions, customer demands, technologies, input costs and competition. Organisations must continually adapt and ask questions such as: ‘How can we improve our strategy, tactics and business plan? And what can be improved upon in order to reach our long terms business goals?’ 

The biggest problem relating to initiating change in organisations, whether it be changes to the organisation, employees moving to different departments or taking on different roles, new systems being introduced or just a different way of doing things, is people don’t like change. People have been used to doing things in a specific way for a certain period of time. People are in general adverse to change and don’t like being told you now have to do things differently to what you have been doing up until now.

But surely change can be managed successfully? As the leader who has to manage the change, you have a difficult task ahead, but ensure the following and it will ease the process and lead to the change being implemented successfully faster:

1. Communicate why the change is necessary. Talk to your team and make sure they have a very clear understanding of why things need to change, how they need to change and how the change will be implemented and followed through. 
2. Give your team the opportunity to contribute, make suggestions and allow them to get involved in the decision making process. 
3. Facilitate and encourage questions to eliminate any uncertainty which will in turn reinstate confidence in their work and in themselves. 
4. Celebrate any successes and goals accomplished during the change process. Employees need to feel valued and should be thanked for the work they’ve done and their willingness to adapt to the change. 
5. Reiterate why the change is necessary and how it will benefit the company. Always have an open and clear communication channel, when there is a communication vacuum employees wonder what is going on and will feel left out. They might even think their manager is plotting something. 
6. Be as transparent as possible. 

Remember: Change is less scary when you are leading the change, making the decisions and monitoring the progress. When you are in the driver’s seat you are in control. But always consider your passengers and try and make their journey as pleasant as possible.

The Growing Strategic Function Of Human Resources In Businesses & Organisations.

The role of Human Resources is transforming within organisations and businesses around world. Traditionally HR has been viewed as a support function concerned with recruitment and selection processes and learning and development.

However, HR is increasingly being seen as more of a strategic function that should consider employee engagement, organisational and cultural change and performance management. There are several areas in which the HR function is developing a more strategic approach and with additional important points to consider.

The growing trend is that organisations and businesses are considering HR as a Business Partner and not just a support function. This transition requires some thought, planning and development. HR professionals in this transition must understand the difference between this and other HR roles and how to build stakeholder relationships within the business or organisation.

The strategic HR function is gaining support from the greater organisation in its role within performance management. This support is necessary for the development and implementation of organisational competencies and competency frameworks. These both lead to greater efficiencies in individual and organisational performance and talent management, areas which have traditionally been associated with line management responsibilities.

Organisations must embrace change as it happens. Change is a people business, which inevitably requires the attention and involvement of the HR function. With the recent cultural changes resulting from these tough economic times, there will inevitably have been a direct impact on how overall change is accepted. It is, therefore, essential that the Strategic HR Function understands cultural value systems and how they directly influence the way change is accepted or not.

Watch this video featuring management author and expert Dave Ulrich who talks briefly about the transformation of Human Resources and it's growing participation setting business strategy.

Please also post your comments and experiences relating to this post.

What Makes An Effective Team Leader Or Manager?

Some managers inspire and motivate, but many fall short in their attempts to engage their employees. An "effective" manager takes responsibility for ensuring that each individual within his/her department succeeds and that the team or business unit achieves results. The good news is managerial skills can be developed through training, mentoring, and experience - it doesn't have to revolve around natural talent.

The top 5 most common traits in successful managers include communication, leadership, adaptability, relationships, development of others, and personal development.

As a new or established manager, what skills and behaviours should you be demonstrating in order to lead and manage successfully.

1. Communication - effective managers develop their ability to understand others' communication styles, as well as their own, and how they can be harnessed to create a positive impact on working relationships within a team and the wider organisation.

2. Leadership - Leadership is an essential quality for any manager but one that is sometimes overlooked during the process of promoting a new manager. As a new or established manager are you instilling trust, providing direction and delegating responsibilities effectively within your team? These are all characteristics, which can be developed.

3. Adaptability - The ability to adapt also contributes to a manager's effectiveness. When a manager is able to adjust quickly to unexpected circumstances, he is able to lead his team to adapt as well. Adaptability also means that a manager can think creatively and find new solutions to old problems.

4. Relationship building - Effective managers should strive to build personal relationships with individual team members, which helps build trust. When managers establish relationships with employees it builds trust and employees feel valued, which in turn leads to increased efficiency within the team.

5. Coaching others - Effective managers know when their employees need more development. Coaching skills drive performance within a team and help others achieve more of what they are striving for. Training is the first step to learning, coaching then accelerates that learning process to build skills and deliver real ROI.

If you are reading this blog post and you have experience of the positive effects of other qualities demonstrated by a successful leader or manager then please post your comments below.


In this training update from CAPITA Learning & Development we will look at these top areas that you, as a new or established manager, should be demonstrating in order to lead and manage successfully.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Each year CAPITA Learning & Development develops hundreds of top leaders and managers through our Leadership and Management faculty. For more details please contact us on 0800 022 3410 or email us with your query: enquiries@capita-ld.co.uk

The Future of Project Management

Have you considered the difference between someone who manages a small in-house project and someone who manages a large infrastructure project?

After all, they are both project managers and they both manage time, quality and money. In theory, they both meet all of the project management definitions.

However, their competencies surely differ?

If we look carefully at a "project manager", we are really identifying someone who has a broad range of skills. These skills are dynamic; as they shift and grow depending on the climate of the day. For instance, in Financial project management, risk assessment has a much higher priority today than it did say three years ago. As a subset of risk management, governance and corruption prevention is taking a higher standing with the introduction of the Bribery Act and UNCAC.

In short: project managers are facing a daunting number of skills to develop in today’s day and age.

The skills sets in Project Management broadly fit into three main areas:

• General management
• Project Specific Skills
• IT Skills. This has taken on huge significance over the last couple of years with a vast range of software in a variety of areas.

Figure 1: General Management. These subjects are included in many organisations’ management development training programmes. 

 Figure 2: Project Specific categories   

Each of these will, of course have a complete subset and if we look at Procurement alone, this would include:

• Legal framework
• The procurement cycle
• Specification
• Planning
• Sourcing
• Bid preparation, analysis, evaluation
• Award of contract
• Contract Management
• Audit
• Negotiation
• Etc

Figure 3: IT Project Management Diagram 

We can infer from the diagrams that a project manager cannot simply "possess" all of the required skills and that the difference between someone who manages a small in-house project and someone who manages a large infrastructure project is not simply a matter of scale.

Not many of us would be too comfortable in buckling a safety belt on a long-haul flight, when knowing that the pilot's previous experience of flying was that of controlling a model aircraft.

A project manager similarly requires careful professional development and to be able to measure individual performance against a series of parameters or a competency framework, is paramount. Most of these subjects do not exist in schools or colleges but are demanded by most employers. These will be identified on appraisal forms or during a training needs analysis and then a panacea training course will be provided. The diagrams also indicate that a project manager needs to possess a wide range of skills and competencies and these cannot be developed in a short space of time, but can be planned over a period for the right individual.

Many organisations who have developed competency frameworks include key soft management skills in their core competencies, but then include an all-encompassing “project management” competency.

As most managers, have to manage projects, is it time for organisations to reconsider their "fast-track schemes", management development schemes and leadership development programmes and replace them with project management development schemes. This would provide managers with more than just the soft skills required for leadership and management but also a complete range of functional skills at the required level, required for tackling appropriate projects.

By Stefan Urbanski, Director of Studies, Capita. 

Are You As SMART As You Think You Are?

Each New Year we resolve to lose weight, quit smoking, or whatever. In the vast majority, these aspirations end in failure, but why does this happen?

The smart money, you might say, would probably be on a lack of goal setting. Without clear, measurable goals, the reasoning goes, we are doomed to fail. SMART goal setting has become such a staple of management training that it seems superfluous to remind you that the acronym stands for Specific, Measurable, Achievable (or Active), Realistic (or Relevant) and Time-bound.

Businesses and Government have enthusiastically embraced this goal-setting model and the world of work is now awash with SMART goals. But how effective are they?

First, a quick trawl through any random sample of business plans or appraisal documents will soon reveal that very few goals are SMART in practice. Setting a truly SMART goal is quite difficult; it takes time and thought to fashion something meaningful – time that managers rarely take, in my experience.

Second: the things that are most easily measured are likely to be of the least use, and vice versa. In practice, people often measure what they most easily can, rather than what they should. Thus, for example, we might know how many meetings staff members attended, but their effectiveness therein is less well understood.

Third: organisational emphasis on goals and targets understandably shifts management attention towards results; the monitoring of "how did they get there?" is often left undone, potentially leading to nasty surprises later, when managers find good results being underpinned by dubious practices.

Last: organisational metrics are often confined to management activities. I frequently ask my course delegates: "When was the last time you were measured on your coaching activities?". "Never" is the most common, depressing, answer. It seems many senior managements, despite espousing them in principle, routinely ignore a whole raft of leadership activities for measurement purposes, filling managers' schedules by default with management activities, and thus constraining time available for leadership.

And so, as we embark upon 2012, my question to you is simple: are you as SMART at work as you think you are? 

By David Soloman, Learning Consultant, Capita Learning and Development

What motivates employees?

We are not as easy to manipulate, nor as predictable, as you’d think. An MIT survey calls into question the reward/punishment models that most organizations have been built on...

What the study showed was that, for simple, algorithmic, mechanical tasks, financial rewards work. But once the task moves above a rudimentary cognitive skill level, then financial rewards actually… backfire.




How can that be?

A study was done at MIT, where students were given various tasks ranging from memorizing digits, solving word puzzles to throwing a ball through a hoop. To incentivise the students, they gave them three levels of rewards similar to a typical motivation scheme within an organization. Thus if they reached level 1, they would get x, if they reached level 2 they get y, etc. What the study showed was that, for simple, algorithmic, mechanical tasks, financial rewards work. But once the task moves above a rudimentary cognitive skill level, then financial rewards actually… backfire.

Once you get above rudimentary cognitive skill, it's the other way around. For simple straight forward tasks, like 'if you do this then you get that', financial rewards deliver outstanding results. But when a task gets more complicated, when it requires conceptual, creative thinking, then those incentives don't work. If you don't pay people enough they won't be motivated. What this proves is that money is a motivator, yes. But the trick is to pay people enough so that money no longer matters, and people think about work, not cash.

What then emerged was a new purpose-driven motive based on three key factors: autonomy (get out of their way), mastery (people want to get better at tasks), and purpose (people want to make a contribution). Autonomy means to be self-directed. An Australian software company, Atlassian, told their developers that they can work on anything with whomever they want for 24 hours every quarter.  All they have to do is show the results to the company at the end of the 24 hours. Afterwards everyone got together with refreshments and discussed what they worked on. That one day of pure undiluted autonomy has lead to software fixes, various ideas for new projects and a culture based on innovation.

Mastery is the urge to get better at stuff. This is why people play musical instruments at the weekend. Why would people spend time on something that is not going to lead to any financial rewards or finding a partner?  Because it's fun and you can get better at it which is satisfying. Take for example companies like Linux, Apache and Wikipedia. Various people around the world who have satisfying, challenging jobs which pay them a good salary, spend their spare time contributing to Linux or Wikipedia. But why are they doing this? Because it's challenging, it involves mastery and they get to make a contribution to the world.

More and more organisations across the world are realising that they need to have a purpose. Partly because it makes acquiring new talent easier and it makes coming to work easier. When the profit motive becomes unmoored from the purpose motive, bad things happen. Companies who are flourishing are animated by this purpose. Take Skype as an example: 'Our goal is to be disruptive, but in the cause of making this world a better place'. We need to have purpose in order to get up in the morning and go to work. The science indicates that we care about mastery, and we want to be self-directed. Based on these findings we can build better organisations, which in turn will also lead to making our world just a little bit better. 

Traditional management styles are great when what you are after is compliance. But in this new, purpose-driven world, you need to enable staff to do what they do well – and here, self-direction works best.