First Item: Honour your workers today with six ways to improve employee training
Today is International Workers Day, so give a thought to how to improve your employee training, strengthening the all-important transfer strategies by which learning moves from the chalkboard in classroom programs to the workspace. In HR Professional, Nathalie Doré, manager of organizational learning processes for Benjamin Moore & Co., offers six tips:
1. Involve learners and managers when defining the performance objectives of your training program. This will help you gain commitment, as they see the value of attending, and will alert managers to the expected performance back on the job.
2. Make sure employees who attend know what is expected of them after training. "This may sound obvious, however it's not uncommon to find learners who either don't know why they were sent on a training program or have no use for the program," she stresses.
3. Use real-life case scenarios in training, so learners can see how it will apply to their work and practise skills under constraints similar to their job.
4. Identify barriers to transferring the knowledge back to the workplace through group discussion at the end of the session, and devise solutions.
5. Prepare action plans, in which participants write down what they will "start, stop, and continue" back on the job based on their new knowledge.
6. Support post-training through such techniques as follow-up e-mail nuggets or an intranet chat room for participants to ask questions and share successes.
Marketing: How to keep your loyalty program from betraying you
Even as more and more companies introduce loyalty programs, other companies are scuttling their own efforts that backfired. In Harvard Business Review, marketing professors Joseph Nunes and Xavier Drèze offer the five common mistakes to avoid:
-Don't get into a program that amounts to discounting, as with those airlines embroiled in price wars through their loyalty programs, paying people to buy and thus creating greater disloyalty.
-Don't reward the disloyal, as with stores that offer members-only discounts to cardholders. Shoppers simply get them for all the competing stores and the program is rewarding card ownership rather than loyalty.
-Don't reward volume over profitability. Keep track of the profitability of your customers and reward them accordingly.
-Don't give away the store, cutting into profit margins when customers may be content with costless rewards. United Airline, for example, allows premium cardholders first choice on meals, and Citibank fields customer service calls based on the callers' assets.
-Don't promise what you can't deliver. If you promise shorter lines or expedited delivery for loyal customers, you must deliver.
Leadership Succession: How board members can interact with contenders
The best candidates for CEO are generally internal, a new study by the National Association of Corporate Directors in the United States shows, but one of the difficulties board members face is interacting with the candidates in order to assess their abilities. The report urges directors to include the candidates in informal discussions on strategy with the board; longer off-site meetings and dinners; and trips by the board to foreign outposts. Directors at one company cited in the report sit in on three divisional management meetings a year, to observe the candidate in his own environment with his own people but the CEO not present. Look for this or other ways to see them in action on a daily basis, outside formal board sessions, so you get a glimpse of the unvarnished person.
Power Points
Foxit Reader -- a free download from http://www.foxitsoftware.com -- beats Adobe Acrobat at quickly opening PDF files.
Source: PC World
Ingredient labels aren't just for food any more as vendors such as office furniture manufacturer Steelcase and clothing and footwear purveyor Timberland begin to apply labels to their products to show their green credentials.
Source: The Kiplinger Newsletter
Despite its reputation as a male bastion, about 40 per cent of NASCAR's fans are female and they will spend an estimated $250-million on NASCAR-licensed products this year. Marketing expert Andrea Learned says the message is that instead of doing back-flips and making separate appeals to women like many companies, NASCAR simply kept doing what it does best and eventually drew that new audience as men enthusiastic about the sport talked it up to the women in their life.
Source: Learned on Marketing blog
Newest advertising trend: Instead of pay-for-click ads on-line, businesses are being offered pay-for-action ads, in which they pay only after the prospect has dialled a special toll-free number to contact them.
Source: Inc
The mark of a great cook is how he handles leftovers. Entrepreneur Bruno Gideon says you should apply that at work: How you handle the unexciting or disappointing moments will make a difference in your career.
Source: 1 Minute E-mail
Harvey Schachter is a Battersea, Ont.-based writer specializing in management issues. e-mail: harvey@harveyschachter.com
Harvey Schachter