Implementing internal training courses is a great way to grow talent inside your business. In this LMScast Chris Badgett talks about smart corporate training and organizational development systems that are far more effective than the tools you’re using now.
Training and organizational development systems are necessary, but generally businesses haven’t changed their approach over time. New employees usually learn the business by shadowing a current employee for a few days, or at worst, they’re thrown into the job and expected to learn through trial and error while working. Often managers are hesitant to improve onboarding and training systems, because they’re afraid their own jobs might be compromised if they’re not putting personal time and effort into the training process. But the truth is, more effective tools would allow them to pursue more high-level tasks as the training gets done efficiently without them hovering over the process.
Traditional tools for onboarding and training new employees usually include an employee manual and maybe a checklist of duties and expectations. This is outdated technology. It’s dry, difficult, and ultimately ineffective. People learn better if they’re engaged, and making the training process fun will get your new hires excited about your business and invested in doing well. Online courses really shine in this area since the trainee can learn through gamification, and then earn incentives like badges, certifications, or congratulatory emails as they successfully complete each stage of training.
Creating your own internal tools also allows you to capture value by capitalizing on the knowledge and expertise of your best employees. It may seem counterintuitive, but training is not necessarily best designed by your CEO or other leadership positions. Your best trainers are the people who actually do each job and do it well, and they’re the people you would normally assign your new hires to shadow and learn from. But what happens when those A-Players leave the organization? If you have them help design your training program, then you capture the value of their contributions to your business and make that resource evergreen, scalable, and available on demand.
Putting together a system of internal online courses may sound complex, but you can hire a service like ours to set it up for you quickly and professionally in just five days. Then your key people can add your content and media. It’s all about improving your existing business, helping your team grow, and capturing value through smart corporate training and organizational development systems. Find out more by visiting our LifterLMS My Corporate Training page.
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Episode Transcript
Chris Badgett: Hello, and welcome back to another episode of LMScast. My name is Chris Badgett. In this episode we’re going to be talking about the organizational development and corporate training opportunity with a learning management system or online course website that’s really for internal use. It’s not for the public. It’s not about selling courses or building a business. It’s about improving your existing business, helping your team grow, capturing value. There’s three areas I want to focus on for why corporate training and organizational development systems are important and the opportunity to leverage these within your business.
The first one that I want to talk about is if you’re not doing it, if you’re using two, kind of, outdated methods that need support or just there’s a gaping void or opportunity available to improve your new employee onboarding or new contract or onboarding system. The first is just not having any kind of organizational development or tool for newcomers to use to get onboarded beyond just the typical shadow or mentor of an existing employee. Or what’s even more common is you kind of throw people to the wolves and let them figure out their job through trial and error, through just experimenting and finding out when things don’t work. Often times it’s kind of counter intuitive, but if you have a management layer in your business sometimes the managers may feel it’s not in their best interest to create these kinds of tools because it might make their job obsolete, which isn’t entirely true.
What it actually does is if a layer of management creates and maintains and continuously improves these tools then that management function can focus on higher leverage opportunities because the training part of what they do or responsible for is much more efficient. If you’re not using any kind of tool to help support your new organizational development where you’re either bringing people into a new position that have been freshly hired or you’re trying to improve your existing team or leverage training opportunities to bring everybody to a higher level of performance, that’s the first gaping void.
The second is to just be using outdated technology, like for example, having an employee handbook that might be written in a way that’s kind of dry, doesn’t cite a lot of specific examples, talks a lot about high leverage philosophy, which is important but it may not get into the nitty gritty of this is what this point, exactly, means when translated into the day to day of the business. Perhaps you’re just using just some kind of other outdated method like some kind of checklist that a new employee has to go through. A mentor checks off everything as that new person goes through there. It’s a checklist, it’s nice but it’s not necessarily as developed as it could be.
In addition to filling gaps that are there in the organizational development or corporate training space, the other big gap is just to bring the fun back in training. If you’re a new employee or a new contractor and you’re coming into a business training should be fun. That’s a perfect opportunity to get that new hire excited about your business and not feel like they’re behind or they got to get through this hard trials and tribulations of getting to understand their job. There’s a big opportunity to make corporate training and organizational development fun.
The fun factor, you can do things like you can gamify the systems as they learn things. They can compete with other people in a similar position or in completely different positions but kind of learning similar things. You can put a little healthy competition in there and you can gamify that. For example, if you’re doing an online course about, let’s say, customer support and how you, as a company, what your culture and this is how we respond to customers and once people get through that, that course they get a badge or they get certified in company XYZ support philosophy or whatever. You’re giving them little milestones incrementally as they go through the training process to make it more fun. Or, you could things like, as they complete something you can have an email go to them that is just congratulating them on their progress and letting them know how much you appreciate their investment in learning how to do their new job well and going through the program.
Just bringing the fun and the excitement back into training, whether that’s a new hire situation or a continuous improvement situation, bringing the fun back with online courses and a well designed learning management system is another great thing about incorporating the modern training tools in organizational development and corporate training.
The other big opportunity is what I like to call value capture. Who should create this? Well, the insight is counterintuitive. It shouldn’t necessarily be the CEO or the co-founders or the leadership of the company that creates all the training tools. While ultimately the brand and the business may stop with the founder, the buck stops there or whatever, the reality is if they’re good at building their business there’s probably other players on the team who are going to be better suited to train specific components of various roles within the company.
Basically, what I mean by that is you want the A-players on your team to assist in the creation of the training program. That also scales and that’s why there’s a big opportunity for value capture because if you don’t have a corporate training or organizational development tool or system in place you may put the new hire with the A-player and they’re learning from each other, which is good and I’m not saying don’t do that but that value is never captured. What happens when that A-player has to do that exact same thing with somebody else and somebody else and somebody else. You’re not leveraging the scale of creating training products and tools that are evergreen or last forever.
The other big thing to consider is what happens if that A-player, which often happens or can happen with A-players is they’ll leave and go to another opportunity and you’ve just lost that. If you were to capture their way of training, let’s say, sales methodology and even if that person leaves or even if the company gets really busy and you don’t have the bandwidth to put your best people on training the new hires you’ve still go that training resource. There’s a big opportunity for value capture.
How do you implement a corporate training or organizational development system and get it going quickly because it can seem complex. It can seem complicated but the reality is there is resources out there to get you set up and running so that all you need to do is just plug in your key players and some media and start moving forward with your corporate training system.
If you’re interested in learning more about that and finding out more about the opportunities for greater value capture and positive culture change within your organization I would encourage you to go check out lifterlms.com/my-corporate-training and that’s, again, lifterlms.com/my-corporate-training and there’s a video message over there that will tell you more and let you know what you need to do next. There’s an opportunity to have a company like ours set up your system for you so that if you’re not an expert in online course delivery systems or learning management systems but you are an expert in your business we can kind of come together and get you up and running in five days with a platform for your to move forward and reap the benefits of a modern organizational development or corporate training system at your fingertips that’s easy to use.
Thank you for coming to this episode of LMScast. Again, if this all sounds good to you and you want to find out more go to lifterlms.com/my-corporate-training.
