- An employee sues for sexual harassment? Get the attorneys to do a company-wide seminar!
- Workers bungling the inventory counts? Run’em all through the workshop again!
When you have a problem or opportunity, how do you know that training is the right solution? You don’t, unless, like a good physician, you examine the symptoms, take a history and do some tests.
At the Mav, we’ve developed a great new methodology for helping organizations get more from their training dollars by applying the principles of Lean to training and development. We’re calling it Lean CLO™.
You can be a Lean CLO (aka chief learning officer) at your own company by avoiding shotgun approaches that waste valuable time and money on unnecessary training.
One Lean CLO method is to eliminate training waste by thoroughly diagnosing the problem and focusing your training only on the people whose learning will help meet the objective.
Let’s see an example of how this particular Lean CLO method might work in a meeting between you and the manager of your company’s call centers.
Manager: “Our customer satisfaction’s going in the toilet. We obviously need to put our call center employees -- that’s about 500 people -- through a refresher course.”
Lean CLO: “What numbers are telling you this?” (What’s the problem?)
Manager: “Call handle times are way up.” (How is the problem manifesting itself?)
Lean CLO: “Are all the call centers seeing the increase?” (Where is the problem?)
Manager: “Atlanta’s got the worst performance by far.”
Lean CLO: “And when did the Atlanta numbers start going up?” (When is the problem occurring?)
Manager: “Right after we moved our dishwasher service there. About 4 months ago.”
Lean CLO: “Who’s having the most trouble servicing this product?” (Who is the problem?)
Manager: “The swing shift. About 80 people.”
Lean CLO: “Why the swing shift?” (Why is the problem happening?)
Manager: “ There’s no engineering support in the evening and nights to fall back on. It’s a complicated product and half of the employees are new.”
Lean CLO: “So what I’m hearing is that about 40 people in your Atlanta operation’s swing shift need support training on the dishwasher product. Let’s assess their current product knowledge and target the training specifically where they’re having trouble. Then, let’s monitor their call handle times and see if we nailed it.”
Makes a lot of sense, doesn’t it?
Instead of putting 500 employees through remedial customer service training and spending hundreds of thousands of dollars with little to show for it, now you’re meeting a specific business objective with fewer dollars, less time and whole lot more productivity. Give it a try next time you’re thinking of throwing training at a problem.
This is just one of many Lean CLO methods that can help you get a lot more out of your training dollars. If you want to know more, we’ve got lots of ways for you to learn. Check out our new Lean Knowledge Transfer white paper, see our Lean CLO brochure, catch one of my speaking gigs, hear a podcast or just do the virtual equivalent of hollering over the cubicle wall -- give me a call at 303.819.6662.
Let’s ride!
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