There’s no doubt that investing in training and developing your team pays dividends. But how can you ensure that you’re getting the full benefit of your training budget? This week Caroline Cooper from Zeal Coaching explores seven ways to ensure you're truly maximising your investment in training.
There are many reasons why hoteliers may be tempted to cut back on training, but developing your team is key to giving your hotel competitive edge as we hopefully move into more prosperous times. Not only does it provide consistency in customer service; well-trained staff can help improve productivity and efficiencies and can free up valuable management time. Investing in your team also helps them feel valued leading to better employee engagement and motivation, and can help to establish a reputation as a good employer, enabling you to attract the best people.
1. Create a culture of learning and development
The word training conjures up images of people sat in a classroom in a formal setting. This view does little to excite people. Talking about learning and development opens up far more possibilities in people's minds and will do a better job of engaging both employees and managers.
This then makes it a lot easier for recognising everyone's role in learning and development rather than being solely the responsibility of the HR or training department. Every line manager has a role in developing his or her team.
Equip managers, supervisors, and team leaders to carry out their learning and development responsibilities by giving them the skills and confidence to coach, mentor and support their team and colleagues.
Learning and development opportunities should be open to everyone. Taking a bottom-up approach will seldom be effective. Even if junior staff are well-trained, without the backing, guidance, support and coaching from those above them it will be an uphill struggle to implement what they've learned.
To create culture, learning and development needs to become part of the day-to-day activity, for it to become second nature for people to help and support one another, and to learn on the job. It also requires an environment where it's okay to ask questions and to admit that you don't know all the answers, where people are encouraged to seek out new activities and it’s accepted that people will fail occasionally as long as you learn from experience.
2. Knowing what you want to achieve
When identifying learning and development needs start by ascertaining your expectation, what you want to improve, and how will you know when it's been achieved. Simply because someone is not able to perform a particular task to standard doesn't always equate to a training need. So many businesses just throw money away by nominating people for programs that with the best will in the world would never resolve the problem. Just as wasteful, is nominating people for programs they don’t need. Avoid the sheep dip approach by only involving those who will benefit; and who will have an opportunity to it put into practice. No one wants to sit through something that is a repeat of what they've already done, irrelevant to their job, or insult an their intelligence as they've been doing the job to standard for many years already.
Having clear objectives makes it easier to find the right development activity, get greater buy in from employees, and gives a way of measuring your return on investment. It's useful to think of your objectives in actionable terms. “To understand the importance of customer service” means nothing. What you want people to do differently as a result of the activity?
3. Be creative with development activities
Formal training can be expensive, as well as giving logistical challenges, particularly with complicated shift patterns. Use everyday activities as opportunities for learning and development. Assign tasks or projects on real business issues and challenges, identify staff champions for specific tasks or KPIs, encourage job swaps and cross training for greater flexibility amongst the team, and then encourage people to review what they've learnt.
Use team meetings as an opportunity for learning. Take it in turns to organise or chair the meetings; allocate topics to individuals or champions to lead a discussion in the meeting, use brainstorming, discussions, or team activities to solve problems or business challenges.
Talk to your suppliers about what training and support they can offer. Product and equipment suppliers will often be more than happy to carry out or assist with training, and will often add a different dynamic to the subject matter.
There is of course a whole host of information available at the touch of a keyboard, so make use of online resources, as well as trade journals and books. But beware of this becoming information overload, much of this information needs to be consolidated and streamlined to ensure it is digestible and people can extract the relevant messages. Make use of other modern technology such as video and web conferencing to minimise the cost of getting the messages out.
4. Plan ahead
Whenever taking people away from their workplace for their development plan ahead. It's disruptive for the employee and anyone else involved when people are given inadequate notice. Staff who are concerned about their day-to-day duties not being covered will at best be distracted, if not arrive late, leave early, or simply not turn up at all. Plan events with some forethought for people's schedules, busy periods in their working week or month and consideration for a life outside work. So give plenty of warning.
Tell people what they will be learning and why. This means relating to personal some benefit; will it make their job easier, quicker, safer, or more interesting or fun? Will it put them in a better position to progress to a new role they aspire to? Will it give them more confidence or independence in their role? You don't need to ignore the business benefits, but help them identify what's in it for them to get them engaged from the outset.
5. Make it engaging
Get as much involvement as possible. In group sessions start with icebreakers to get everyone relaxed. Find out what they want to get out of the event. Ask for their opinions, and get them to put forward their own ideas through exercises or group activities. Add in energisers and brainteaser exercises to break up the formal sessions. Use team exercises to encourage interaction, and quizzes and games which add an element of competition and fun.
Stimulate all the senses by using music, creating mental pictures, stories to illustrate your points. Use props and live examples that people can touch, smell or even taste.
Role-plays can effective, but often staff find them intimidating, so get the best of both worlds by running role-plays in small coaching groups where another delegate can act as an observer.
Add variety. Do something different to what people are used to, to make it interesting and memorable. Take people away from their normal environment (as long as this doesn't make them feel uncomfortable), use interesting presenters or even actors.
Different people will have different preferred learning styles, so tailor to the individual as much is possible, or use a variety of methods to appeal to a wider audience.
6. Make the learning transferable
Making the transition from theory into practice can be a challenge. Using relevant examples and illustrations can help people relate to their own job.
At the end of any development activity start by checking their understanding of the key points and asking for their ideas on how they are going to implement what they have learnt. Help them to identify situations where they can put their learning into practice as quickly as possible.
Identify any obstacles that might stand in the way of this happening. As well as their newfound knowledge or skill do they have the necessary resources, time, authority, peer support and opportunity to put their learning into practice?
We shouldn't expect perfection straight away. People need time to practice and find their own way of doing things, and not be afraid to make mistakes when they apply their learning. Assigning a mentor, coach or buddy can help overcome the initial barriers to perfecting a new skill.
When someone has had to change the way they do things it may take a while for this to become habit. Put processes in place to monitor progress.
7. Measuring your return on investment
Don't continue to invest in learning and development activities unless they are paying dividends. However recognise that sometimes this will be a long-term return; so set some specific short-term criteria where people can demonstrate what they've learnt. The more specific your objectives at the outset the easier it will be for you to determine whether or not the development activities have achieved what was intended, and if this has given value and return on your investment of time, resources and money, so you are getting the most form your learning and development budget.
Caroline Cooper is a business coach with over 25 years in business and management development. She is the founder of Zeal Coaching, specialising in working with hospitality businesses, and is author of the 'Hotel Success Handbook'
For more information and articles from Zeal Coaching see http://www.zealcoaching.com/products-rescources/free-downloads/
