Coloring Inside the Lines
Last month, we introduced the mistake-filled “T1 Training Company” and talked about the mistakes they made when assessing “Acme Company’s” training needs. This month we examine T1’s mistakes during the Design Curricula phase.
T1 had a standard day-long time management course that it cut to four hours, per Manager Fred’s request. Analysis of the end-of-course evaluations …Read More
The Gift of Time
The holiday season is always a stressful time of year. At home, you have gift purchases, holiday planning, household cleaning, and travel preparations to do. At work, the last month of the year is stressful either because you are trying to finish everything before everyone disappears on vacation, or because you have limited work. If …Read More
Engaging the Brain
Since the 1990s self-paced (asynchronous) online learning has seemed like Camelot for corporate training departments: It is the mythical, low-cost, low-interference way of training employees to increase productivity or comply with regulations. Although 90% of companies now use some form of online training, self-paced elearning lags behind other forms of online learning. Why? Quite frankly, …Read More
How Interactive Are You?
Which do you prefer: to sit in a room and listen to a speaker talk for four hours straight or to hear a few concepts and then figure out how you can use it for your own purposes? Most people will tell you that they prefer the latter. In general, adult learners prefer to learn …Read More
Taming the Meeting Monster
A 2021 study by Reclaim.ai found that since the COVID-induced shift to working-from-home, the average business professional attends 70% more meetings weekly than in 2018. In 2021 professionals spent almost half their official work week in virtual meetings: 21.5 hours! The reason for this is obvious to anybody who has been caught up in this …Read More
Virtual Celebrations
As Martha and the Vandellas and, later, Van Halen sang, “Summer’s here and the time is right for dancing in the streets!” The USA, France, Canada, Burundi, the Solomon Islands and 21 other countries celebrate their independence this month. All these festivities are a good reminder that, as managers, we should also celebrate the achievements …Read More
Working or Living?
A recent study by Robert Half found that 45 percent of US professionals who transitioned to working from home because of the pandemic say they regularly work more hours each week than before the pandemic. A separate National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) study found that the average workday worldwide grew by 48.5 minutes since …Read More
Move It! Move It!
The magic number these days is 10,000: 10,000 steps every day to stay fit. Working from home makes it harder to hit that goal because it removes the opportunities for “shadow exercise:” those times we walk for a purpose rather than just for exercise. For example, if you live in a city and work at …Read More
Hocus-Focus!
When it comes to working from home, flexibility can be a two-edged sword: It gives you the means by which to better balance work and home life demands, but it can also lead you down the path to procrastination. If you enjoy working from home, but find you are not being as productive as you …Read More
Hello from the Other Side
In 1960 Douglas McGregor published his seminal business management book The Human Side of Enterprise, in which he identified two basic types of managers: Theory X managers had a negative view of employees and assumed that they were lazy and untrustworthy. Theory Y managers assumed that employees were trustworthy and highly motivated. If the pandemic has …Read More