Category: Leadership

When Customer Confusion Leads to Churn

You can have the best, most feature-rich product out there, but if your customers do not know how to use it, they will churn.

I remember it well.  We had just implemented a massive infrastructure change in my organization years ago, and we were excited to see how it would help us build out convenience across multiple departments.  We rallied, issued training to the power users, and advertised with key stakeholders, and it looked like we had a winner on our hands!  And so, we went live.  

Then, things started running into trouble.  Departments didn’t conform to the processes we put in place, and tried to circumvent them because they didn’t follow their previous processes.  Our team would follow the processes as outlined, yet requests would go missing.  Incidents would get submitted, but not resolved.  The brilliance of our new infrastructure design was showing cracks. Sure, we had great tools, but we struggled with the results.  We needed a change.  Or, better yet, proper training.  

This same scenario has played out for several IT Management platforms I’ve worked on, and each one had similar results:  turn it on and hope that folks will just learn to use it.  Well, it doesn’t work that way, and more often than not, the contract would not get renewed, and we would go through the same process with another product in 3 years.  

The thing is, this could have easily been resolved if we received proper training as part of our Change Management process, which would have resolved our churn, and that of many other clients.  Let’s explore how that would work.  

Tools are Replaceable, and always misused

Until we finally understood the right process and workflow through a platform, that platform was, essentially, just a bunch of tools we could use on the job.  Tools, folks can understand and use, even if they use them incorrectly.  I admit it, I’ve used a crescent wrench as a hammer before, when I couldn’t find my hammer.  Did it work?  Sure.  Was it good for the wrench?  Nope.  I left nicks in the metal.  Still, I used the tool that was handy for the job I wanted to complete.  

This same principle happens when you use your fancy platform as “tools.”  Need to track IT requests?  Incident tickets are tools to do that.  Need to track changes to your infrastructure?  Change tickets will do that just fine.  Don’t quite know how Change Management works, but you need to track a Change request?  It’s tempting to use an Incident if that’s what you know.  Sure, you don’t have the same workflows, but at least you are tracking it, right?  

Eventually, you realize that your methods of doing things aren’t working, and the tools don’t seem to live up to their promises.  Where is the automation?  Where are the approvals?  How does it relate to devices in the CMDB?  So, you start asking yourself, why did we invest in this costly platform if it’s not doing what it promised to do?  So, you start looking for other solutions.  

The Data

In this hypothetical example, I’m using a vague IT Management platform.  You could replace this with any platform and any similar scenarios:  I’ve seen this play out with several digital platforms in the past.  If it’s not used properly, it feels “broken,” and you look for a replacement.  It’s a costly migration, lots of money spent, and yet the same problem will exist.  

The thing is, all this could be properly avoided if your user base were properly trained.  Training would give them the knowledge of how to use the platform, when it should be used, and why it works the way it does.  This means training on the platform and the new processes to as many people as you can.  How do I know this works?  Because I’ve been on the opposite end of it:  I’ve received the necessary training, I’ve delivered the necessary training, and I’ve planned the necessary training when implementing.  So let’s go through the data.  

01

End-User Skills Gap

When evaluating the problem areas in the platform, we often came to the same common issues:  End users were attempting to circumvent the new processes that the platform provided for what they used to do (email requests, no follow-up, no reviewing of the platform, and often ignoring the platform).  Users were struggling to get their requests and incidents addressed because they were reaching out to their “guy” in the department instead of going through the process.  

The Solution

We needed to better understand how customer workflows at the end-user level operated.  We met with customers, ran surveys, and analyzed the user data available to see what worked and what didn’t.  More often than not, the end users would use non-traditional methods to circumvent the new processes established by the platform because it’s “what they always did.”  

This was a clear indicator that end-users needed to be trained on the expected process they would take, and the benefits of the platform as it came to them as part of the Change Management process to the new platform.  This would easily be resolved by creating platform-specific, micro-training videos that walked end-users through how to submit their incidents, monitor progress, request updates, and educate them on the current processes.  

The Results

The results were dramatic.  End-users were more comfortable with the new incident process, which triggered proper requests to go through with monitoring and automations in place.  Incidents were automatically assigned to appropriate departments, and responses were swift as SLA counters and triggers would kick in.  

02

Power-Users and Broken Processes

The next common issue that came up was broken processes that were being built into the platform by power users.  The platform was designed for specific functions with pre-defined automations triggered as specific stages or assignments were made.  The Power Users, on the other hand, knew what their current processes were and built them into the new platform.  Did it work?  Well, as well as previous processes worked.  Was it faster?  How could it be?  Power users were using the same broken processes that would take just as much time as in their previous environment.  No benefit was being seen.  

The Solution

It was clear that power users needed to understand how the platform was designed, where the automations kicked in, what processes were built in for their benefit, and how to customize the process for optimization.  

We started with the research:  looking at what customers were doing and how they were approaching their problems.  Surveys revealed that customers were performing much the same steps within the process, with a lot of additional overhead that could be weeded out.  We then refined processes, workflows, and the platform UI to better support their goals as power users while highlighting the value the platform brought to the table.  

Now, we needed to communicate the new process and results:  This required multi-day power user bootcamp-style training, walking them through the platform, helping them understand how the platform was designed, and where the automations triggered.  We worked through the process steps, where customizations could and should be made, where the default process shone, and how it would apply in their own environment.  The goal was to help them reimagine their broken processes by following one that was already optimized by the platform.  

The Results

The classroom results were dramatic.  Several power users were blown away by the strength of the process that was built in, and understood where their existing processes were broken.  As we worked through each lab, they would stop, take notes, and often ask questions on how they could make this same process work in their own platform.  The change was dramatic:  They saw the platform as a platform, not a set of tools that they should use.  The change in perception made a huge difference, and the adoption of the baseline automations accelerated amongst multiple customers. 

 

Understanding the Solution

This was a mock evaluation loosely based on similar case studies I’ve completed in the past.  The process is pretty much the same for each one:

  • Identify the business outcome you want to achieve
  • Measure your baseline of success
  • Identify the gaps
  • Change those gaps into outcomes:  How do you know your steps you are taking are successful?
  • Deliver the Training and measure the outcomes

This might seem simple at first, but there’s a lot of work that goes into each stage, which is why an L&D leader, like a Fractional Chief Learning Officer, is so valuable.  If you have current issues and would like to talk strategy, let’s chat! 

Ai-Generated image of a boat maker building a sailboat.

I’ve worked at several organizations with varying degrees of cultural health. Some have been extremely toxic, others have been very inclusive and rewarding. Most have been a mix: Some teams are inclusive, others are toxic. Looking back, I struggle to find one particular reason for the cultural environment. Was it leadership that drove the culture? Peers that reflected it? How did one team become inclusive while the other was toxic? Could a team drift from one to the other? And, like everything else in life, there wasn’t one simple answer. There were three, at least that I identified. Can you identify the root cause? Yes. Can it be fixed? Of course, with effort. Let’s dive in.

Understanding the Drivers of Culture

It’s been commented on LinkedIn so many times it’s threatening to become clichè, but culture really isn’t what’s documented on your web page, what you put in your job descriptions, or what you say in your all-hands meetings. It’s what you, your leaders, and your people do daily. It’s how you treat your customers, your partners, and your employees. It’s the difference between “Garfield Mondays” and excitement for the challenge. In short, it’s how your company works in unison to meet your collective vision. It encompasses a lot: ethics, compassion, work ethic, respect, honesty, etc. It’s how you prepare your folks for their jobs, keep them skilled and motivated, and handle scale. Culture is how your teams succeed, not why your teams succeed.

Let me explain that last statement really quickly. I’ve worked for some companies that were ethically questionable in how they treated their customers and employees, yet they were still successful companies (at least in the short term). Whether it was because of short-term gaps they filled, or price ranges that appealed to customers even if the experience was questionable, they managed to succeed with a toxic culture. That culture was perpetuated from every level, often because those who were good were driven off by the culture, causing a feedback that only attracted those of like minds. So the company didn’t succeed because of their culture, but despite it, though “success” should be qualified: They were in business and made a profit, but struggled to grow in market share. They remained niche, and often were perfectly happy to be there as long as the money kept coming.

So, if bad culture succeeds (in a fashion), why worry about having good culture? Let me answer that with one of the best success stories of my long career: ServiceNow. When I started at ServiceNow, I was employee 3336. The company culture, for the most part, was very positive, inclusive, and willing to accommodate those who needed accommodation as long as they could perform their duties, which they did once they could feel comfortable doing so. That was over 11 years ago, and the company now has over 100,000 employees, is a powerhouse in B2B, and continues to have, overall, an excellent culture. They strive for inclusion, and it shows. Now, they succeed because they have an excellent product that continues to get better through driven employees who want the company to succeed. The culture drives that desire for excellence, and it shows. It’s how they succeed.

So what drives culture? I mentioned three drivers, so let’s break them down:

  1. Senior Leadership Behavior: Senior Leadership behavior has a huge impact on the culture of the rest of the company. When C-Suite leaders not only talk about inclusion but actively live it in their day-to-day behaviors, it sets the tone for the rest of the company. Investments in Employee Resource Groups, training, discussions, ethical principles of behavior, and outright kindness and understanding go a long way in driving company culture. If your C-Suite team is dedicated to a healthy, inclusive culture, employees take notice. So do the next group.

  2. Management: VPs, Directors, Managers, and Supervisors all take the vision of the C-Suite and translate it into action. At each level, culture is interpreted and passed on. One bad manager or one indifferent director can derail a team’s culture from the main company, turning it toxic. Conversely, one really good manager or director can buck the toxic trend within an organization. They have just as much scrutiny as C-Suite from their directs, and drive the culture within their respective spheres of influence. I’ve seen new leaders come in and demolish culture within an org to such a degree that other departments were thrilled to see them leave. I’ve also seen leaders drive such a culture of compassion and inclusion that employees across the company would line up to join the team when an opening was made available. How can you find them? Employee Voice surveys. One thing I was most proud of during my tenure at ServiceNow: my Employee Voice surveys from my team were the highest of any other team at the company.

  3. Peers: I was going to say Employees, but I think peers are the best way to highlight this last group. How your teammates treat each other has a direct impact on the team. Generally, this is tied directly to the leadership of the team, but it shouldn’t always be that way. A toxic employee can rapidly drag a team down if not kept in check. I’ve seen it before where a good manager can manage a toxic employee within his sphere of influence, but once they leave, they revert to their toxic behaviors. Cliques within teams often lead to toxicity, as they become exclusive to others, putting up barriers that stifle inclusion. On the flip side, I’ve seen teams who, understanding that team members are struggling, will reach out and actively help, coach, encourage, and support their teammates so everyone wins. Peers have a huge amount of influence on the health and well-being of the team culture.

Prepping for the Journey: Getting the Foundations of Culture In Place

So, we know where culture is driven; how do we drive it in the right way? It’s a good question, and it really comes down to who wants to drive the culture and how ingrained that culture is. Not because it’s impossible to fix a toxic culture, but because it takes a long time to rebuild trust in teams, and the more pervasive the toxicity of the culture, the longer it will take.

First, you need C-Suite dedication to inclusion and understanding. This means proper training, coaching, and mentoring. As a leader, you need to watch your own behaviors and approach to your culture. Inclusion, particularly neuroinclusion, is a good bellwether measurement for your culture: if you are neuroinclusive (welcoming of ADHD, autism, dyslexia, etc. as well as the neurotypical), then you are likely, culturally inclusive (racially, ethnically, religiously, etc.), though it should be mentioned that it’s not exclusively 1:1. As a side note: I focus primarily in neuroinclusion, though many of these same suggestions will work with other inclusive steps to strengthen your culture.

Once your C-Suite is in place, you need to properly train your leaders. Shockingly, 66% of managers are not trained to be managers until they have been on the job at least 10 years. Train your managers, and if I can recommend any type of training, I would recommend a situational approach to leadership (and if you need someone to conduct the training, I know a guy!). I would also recommend regular presentations from neurodivergent presenters, specialists, and other speakers who can put perspectives on what it’s like from the neurodivergent point of view. Need more guidance? There are organizations out there, like Aubilities, that can give you the perspectives you need to better understand how inclusion can happen.

For your peers and your employees, you need support. Employee Resource Groups are a great way to build and maintain an inclusive culture, and as an estimated 20% of your workforce is neurodivergent, you should have a resource group in place! Training and support systems are also valuable, and Aubilities or Auticate can give you resources for your employees and peers to better understand their own diagnoses, as well as their peers’.

Setting Sail: Building Your Culture of Inclusion

You have the tools in place now, you’ve prepped for the journey, it’s time to get started. As Bill McDermott is fond of saying, “Trust is earned in drops, and lost in buckets.” If you really want to change your culture, you need to start as soon as possible and keep right on at it. You won’t see changes immediately overnight (without firing a whole lot of people at once, and that’s not good for the company!), and it will take time for each group to change, learn to trust, and earn that trust. Be patient, settle in for the long haul if you need to, and know that the long-term growth and scale of your company depend on your patience.

 

Intentional, or Accidental?

Early in my career, I worked as the systems administrator for a very early startup, with only 10 of us, many family members of the founder.  It was wild, and we were running on a shoestring.  We brought on some folks to the tech support team.  This was my first introduction to employee enablement:  I developed the training for our tech support.  It was wild, it was ad hoc, barely structured, but it did the job for those who had some basic experience.  Those who did not, they really struggled. We had heavy turnover, with many sticking around for no more than 90 days.  

You see, if you don’t properly train your folks, they will leave as they do not have the adequate resources or experience to succeed.  No one likes feeling like they are failing.  

And yet, in many early startups, one in three employees considers leaving within the first 90 days due to poor onboarding.  Think about that for a minute:  All the cost you put into recruiting, interviewing, finding a good candidate, and getting them started.  All lost, because they didn’t have the tools they needed to do the job.  They didn’t know where to go, what was expected of them, how their success was measured, or how to do key parts of the job.  

Now, once they leave, you have to start all over again, often spending up to 2x of their salary just to get a replacement.  As a startup, you can’t afford that.  You also can’t afford the lost momentum those hires would have brought, the bottlenecks that will result due to unfulfilled roles, and the days, weeks, months, or even quarters where you just can’t find the right person who will do the job without needing onboarding.  Hint:  you can’t.  Everyone needs to be onboarded. 

An image that displays the chaos of multiple LMS systems

You are training your people, whether it’s intended or not.  The only question is, are you intentional, or is it accidental?

The Myth:  “We’ll Figure It Out Later”

But you are a busy guy!  Leading an early start-up, you are busy with Sales crushing deals, evangelizing your product to everyone and anyone that will listen, and looking to build your market share.  It’s why you hire!  You need people to take aspects of the business you don’t have time to do yourself.  So, you figure you can hire experienced folks from other similar companies and they will just “figure it out” as they go along.  So, you step back, take your role under Product or Sales, and just let onboarding happen.  

The belief, or the myth, is that smart people will just figure it out.  They’ve worked in their industries before in similar roles; they can just make that happen.  So, you turn them loose onto your fledgling company with little direction and hope for the best.  The anecdotal evidence that feeds the myth is that, often, people make it work.  They bring their experience from their previous companies, build their own fiefdom with their own policies and operational roles, such as IT and HR just have to figure things out as each department runs on its own rules and policies.  It’s inefficient, often expensive, and feeds silos where collaboration should exist.  

At the employee level, this feeds controlled chaos, areas where people become “indispensable” because they hold all the tribal knowledge for their department.  If they go, the department is thrown into disarray and confusion as co-workers immediately update their LinkedIn profiles and resumes.  Employees become disengaged because they don’t have a firm foundation of policy and procedure: It all comes down to the memory of their co-workers and shadow support processes that develop in response to the vacuum.  How can they make a decision when it’s immediately undermined by a more experienced co-worker? 

Finally, there is a more operational hit.  As teams realize their need for training, they will start training internally, their own training, their own takes on policy and procedure, their own LMS.  I’ve walked into companies that had 5 different learning management systems, and new employees were expected to use every single one of them as part of their onboarding process, as dictated by a wiki page or Word doc that was constantly out of date.  License costs were crazy, and those expenses could have been better applied to hiring new people.  

The Hidden Costs of Poor Onboarding

So, you figure, “well, it’s just the cost of business, right?” And as your teams start to build their own programs, their own policies, their own mini-companies in your company, the one you have poured your heart and soul into, you carry on, hoping things will work out on their own.  So, what exactly are the “costs of doing business” when you come right down to it?

01

Lost Productivity

Poor onboarding means it takes longer for employees to get up to speed.  Most organizations will have a 30-60-90 day plan, which, if you don’t prepare your employees properly, will extend for weeks, months, or even quarters as they “Try to figure it out themselves.”  Eventually, of course, they do, but you have wasted months of productivity while senior staff are constantly pulled in to shadow new employees, dealing with missed KPIs and increased training needs.  It’s inefficient, it’s costly, and it’s leeching momentum from your growth.  

02

Higher Turnover

When there is a lack of clarity, a lack of direction, or a lack of support, employees become continually frustrated.  Many try to contain this frustration internally, which feeds into poor mental, emotional, and physical health.  Eventually, the work of catching up becomes too much, and the calculations start:  How much more frustrating is it to try and meet unknown, vague, and/or inconsistent requirements than to try and find another job?  It may take 90 days, 5 months, or even 1 year, but that calculation is constantly running in your employee’s head.  

Now, you need to hire someone to replace them.  The cost of replacing an employee can run as high as twice the compensation of the employee who left.  It’s like hiring three people to keep one.  Is that efficient?  Is that economical?  Is that good for business?  Now, couple that turnover with the costs of delays, bottlenecks, and stalled growth.  

03

Cultural Drift

When teams are left to fend for themselves, they develop their own culture, policies, processes, and expectations.  If your company doesn’t structure onboarding, it’s happening by accident.  You may be the most employee-first, diversity-minded, and ethically-driven leader, yet your ideals and values are not the ones being perpetrated.  The culture that is perpetuated is dictated by your early employees, or those who remain.  Those who are dealing with their own frustrations, those jaded by their own poor onboarding experience. That will be the culture of your company, that will be your legacy, until you decide to fix it, and fixing a culture is extremely torturous and expensive. 

04

Customer Impact

“Still,” you think, “that’s a problem for another day.  Our customers can’t wait, and I don’t have time to dedicate to proper onboarding right now.”  Imagine for a moment, you walk into a hospital for a routine bypass surgery.  Your doctor finds out that the surgeon slated for your procedure has left, frustrated with the hospital policies that constantly change on a whim.  So, as your doctor, they are asked to do the surgery.  Leadership thinks, “You’ve been to medical school, right?  You can do this.”  The doctor, your family doctor, one who does stitches or the occasional hernia check, is expected to expertly cut into your chest and perform a bypass.  As a patient, would you go back to the hospital?  Would your doctor?  

Customers can tell when their Sales, Customer Success, and Support teams are poorly trained or supported.  They know, because they’ve seen it in their own companies.  Your customers lose trust in the company and are now doing the calculation:  Do you bring enough value to warrant the frustration they get from poorly trained contacts?  Once the calculation has started, it’s difficult to reverse it.  It’s difficult to rebuild trust once it’s lost.  That means churn.

05

Leadership Burnout

“But,” you say to yourself, “I hired leaders to take care of this.  If they can’t do it, I’ll get someone else who can.”  Sure, you can blame your leaders for your lack of dedication to proper onboarding for your company.  So you start to churn through leaders, because they are getting burned out trying to make onboarding happen in a structured way.  Blame is thrown about, and good, talented leaders, left to their own devices, start looking elsewhere.  

I’ve been on both sides:  Leaders leaving because they just can’t get anywhere with senior leadership, and as a leader, struggling to make things work in a culture of vague direction, promises, and poor onboarding.  Onboarding can make or break whole teams.  

An image of a CEO, frustrated that things aren't going according to plan.

Why Early-Stage Startups Are Hit Hardest

When you are just starting, you need every headcount you can get.  You need folks who can hit the ground as quickly as possible, keep on message, and grow the company.  Sales for new logos, Customer Success, Product, and Support for retention.  You need to build a structure quickly and efficiently.  Every weak ramp-up process derails progress and delays growth.  

“Well,” you might think, “Perhaps I just don’t need the headcount.  My team is small, but they can make it happen.”  They can, now.  But can they, when one person is hit by the lottery (because it’s nicer than being hit by a bus)?  Perhaps they leave for a better opportunity elsewhere, or start their own business?  Do you have the redundancy necessary to cover for those who are temporarily or permanently out of the office?  And what about mistakes made by the team, without help?  Newly onboarded employees will make mistakes.  Poorly onboarded employees make serious mistakes.  Mentors can help mitigate the impact, but not if you are short-handed.  

What then does your budget allow?  Frequent turnover is costly, not just in lost sales or lost customers, but in real dollars.  Limited budgets can’t afford high turnover because of poor or non-existent onboarding.  

Small teams are hit worse by less redundancy and more mistakes.

Signs Your Startup Has an Onboarding Problem

“Yeah, sure, what you are saying makes sense,” you are thinking to yourself, “but I don’t have a problem!”  Perhaps, though, you pause.  Then think, “How would I know?”  That’s a much better response:  How do you know you have a problem with onboarding?  What are your indicators?

The first sign would be that your new hires are asking the same questions again and again.  And again.  They ask for a momentary response or solve the immediate problem, and the answer is pushed out by the next crisis.  Answers are not internalized, skills are not developed, and learning isn’t happening.  This is, quite often, the case when you rely too heavily on mentors and on-the-job training.  Don’t get me wrong, both are valuable to the onboarding process!  But your new-hires need a strong foundation of information and skills from which to draw, so the practice can apply. 

This leads to our next indicator:  your teams rely too heavily on shadowing and mentor leadership instead of structured training.  Mentors provide guidance and knowledge checks, but shouldn’t be there to teach.  They don’t have time; they have their own jobs to do!  Structured learning provides that necessary foundation that Mentors can place into context, showing the value of mentorship.  

Next, we have inconsistent performance across hires in the same role.  Some folks do really well in the chaos, quickly acclimatizing themselves and running with it.  Others struggle.  Inconsistency in onboarding is a sign that something is wrong, and it’s not your new hires.  One constant is true with hiring:  Those who are hired generally want the job.  Maybe not because they are motivated by your Mission, or even by the team they are on, but ultimately, they want to work (or they wouldn’t have applied).  Onboarding should provide a baseline of performance from which everyone can work.  Mentorship places the training into context, and everyone should have the same opportunity to succeed.  Even if you follow the standard Bell curve, at least 75% of your team members should meet their KPIs within a reasonable amount of time (generally 1.5 to 2 months).  If you aren’t seeing that baseline result, there is definitely something wrong with your onboarding process.  

Finally, your managers, or you as the founder, need to constantly re-explain “how we do things.”  Culture is critical to a company, but if you constantly have to remind your employees of how things are done, something’s wrong.  Now, I’m not talking about basic compliance training, which is required by law.  I mean explaining your culture:  How the company does business, why people do the things they do, and what’s important for your business outcomes.  This goes beyond compliance; this is the heart and soul of who you are as a company, your brand.  

Employee working from home

The ROI of Getting Onboarding Right

“Okay, okay,” I can hear you say, “but how do I know onboarding is going to be worth it, and not just another expense you are trying to sell me?”  A good question.  Onboarding is much like a service:  If it works, you don’t know it’s there.  When it doesn’t work, everything is in chaos.  Let’s break down the real benefits of good onboarding.  

First, you have a faster ramp-up process for new hires.  They are ready in weeks, not months.  Skills are taught at an accelerated rate because you aren’t relying on the live environment to give you all the experience someone needs:  You have it set up in a controlled, curated setup that covers almost everything.  This translates into real business growth and bandwidth because hiring bottlenecks are removed. 

You have reduced turnover and, therefore, fewer recruiting costs.  Your new hires are more comfortable, more prepared, and feel ready to go faster and without much mentor intervention.  They ask fewer questions, they contribute faster, and the business is better placed to grow.  Without increased recruitment costs and lost experience from high employee turnover.  

Your culture is stronger, the vision of every employee is aligned with the founder’s, and employees feel connected to the company’s purpose.  Employees know what you want, they know what drives you, and they understand why.  

Your onboarding process can scale with your hiring needs.  Onboarding playbooks prepare you for rapid growth, setting well-established processes in place with regular reviews for updates.  It doesn’t have to be complex, it doesn’t have to be all video, and it doesn’t have to be difficult to set up.  You just need to be organized, have an easy method of tracking progress, and measure the success.  

Proper onboarding means real returns on your investment: productivity, time-to-value, and significantly reduced recruiting costs.

Practical Steps for Startups

So where do you start?  Once you know you have a need, you need to get the plan in place.  

Start with a “Day 1–30 Roadmap” for each role.  Your HR team, ideally, should have skill requirements and job analyses for every role.  Chances are, though, the HR team for a startup doesn’t.  It’s a large task, and you likely have a small team that handles onboarding.  Often, this task is delegated to the hiring manager.  Then, build out a 30-day onboarding roadmap that level-sets job requirements and skills, familiarizes the learner with the processes for the role, and sets milestones for success.

You can then document those processes somewhere they’re easily accessible.  Start with docs (Google Docs, SharePoint, Notion, Confluence, etc) and make sure everyone has the access they need.  Create learning paths that are user-specific in your LMS (preferably only one for your org), and assign the learning they need.  This should be role-specific, with knowledge checks.  The training doesn’t have to be complicated or completely built out by hand.  If you have a Large Learning Library (LinkedIn Learning, Skillsoft, etc), then use the training that is available there for generic role skill sets.  Be creative, and you can make it happen with the resources you already have.

Then, assign your onboarding buddies/mentors as guides.  They can track the onboarding process, verify that the learner is meeting their milestones, and provide context for the training.  You can use your training platform as a way to measure progress, communicate milestones, and provide guidance for your managers as they follow up on development.  

Finally, treat your onboarding as a strategic investment, not an afterthought.  The success of your onboarding means success for your new hires.  The success of your new hires means the success of your company as it scales.  

Captain working on his navigation plan.

Poor onboarding drains start-ups, keeping them from scaling successfully.  By investing in onboarding, you are not investing in overhead.  It’s acceleration fuel for scale.  Treat it as the valuable asset it is.  

If your team is growing and you’re concerned about onboarding gaps, a fractional CLO can help design a scalable onboarding framework without the cost of a full-time exec. Let’s talk.

Two versions of the same person representing the two processes of the brain: Experiential Response and Reasoned Exploration.

 

Owning Your Learning Success in the Age of AI

 

 

Growing up, we spent a lot of time camping. While camping, we would occasionally need to wash clothes, and as it happened, my parents owned a washboard and taught us how to use it when cleaning clothes in the creek. It was very rustic, and a lot of fun for little kids who were learning something new.

Now, I’m sure many of you out there have no idea what a washboard is, since the washing machine has been around for over 100 years. Knowing how to use one isn’t common knowledge. Everyone from CEOs to janitors has gotten along just fine without needing to know how to scrub clothing on the board to get the dirt out. It’s a lost skill, replaced by modern technology, and only picked up as a novelty skill. Much like celestial navigation and sailors, since GPS has become so ubiquitous, or from-scratch cooking since fast food and ready meals are so common. It takes extra, conscious effort to acquire these skills that were replaced by modern technology or conveniences. Now, we have AI.

I’ve been spending a lot of time researching Artificial Intelligence, as I’m sure the rest of you have been as well. I’ve worked through the early Turing days, different Machine Learning models, and spent time learning about LLMs and Agentic AI. Each time I look at what it can bring, I keep thinking about how it will impact Learning.

Perhaps I’m dating myself, but I was there when personal computers in the classroom were a novelty (we had Atari 2600s in my 6th-grade classroom). I saw how computers could help kids engage in learning through gamification. It was supposed to be the next revolution in education, yet we still have instructors in a classroom. I was there when we first started doing remote learning at my local Community College, and even helped provide video discs for learners (because video streaming was murder in dial-up speeds). And I was there when MOOCs were becoming a thing, and Apple was courting Universities to post recorded class sessions to iTunes U (now defunct). At each stage, there was supposed to be a revolution: a change in how we teach, and yet, we still have instructors and teachers in front of classrooms (or on Zoom).

But now. Now, we have AI. We have ChatGPT, Gemini, or Anthropic, which can answer questions for you when asked. They seem to have all the answers and can confidently respond without hesitation (right or wrong). They can rewrite your scribblings into a coherent, structured paper or article. Why practice sentence structure or the art of essay writing when an LLM can do it for you? It seemed so revolutionary that some companies have, reportedly and anecdotally (not confirmed), fired their L&D teams and given every employee a ChatGPT license as their source of learning. The reported results (again, not confirmed) were a disaster. Skill gaps widened instead of narrowing. Why? Why would skill gaps widen when answers were right there?

Well, to address that particular question, I would recommend an excellent video on AI and Learning called Effort is the Algorithm. The video pointed out that there are two processes our brains use: One is fast and uses the available knowledge and experience we already possess. Think of it as the computer hitting RAM for cached information. This process uses all the knowledge and experience you gained from years of learning, trying, failing, trying again, failing, trying again, and finally succeeding. You’ve lived it, you know it, you have put it to the test, and you can confidently respond without having to think too much about the answer.

The other process is slower, more methodical, and used when learning something new. This process is engaged when you are working through a problem, failing, trying again with a new approach, and repeating until you achieve success. This is learning. You listen, you watch, you try, and see results. Your mind engages, building Neuron connections with each practice (the general magical number is 7 for long-term retention), and you have banked a block of knowledge/skill/behaviors that can be utilized by Process 1.

So, what happens when you offload your learning practice to AI? Process 2 is happy to offload anything that takes extra effort/energy/resources, and Process 1 simply regurgitates the short-term information it has and purges that info. This is why skill gaps happen when you rely on AI as your Process 2: you are not building blocks of knowledge/skills/behaviors that you can call upon when pressed. There’s no effort in learning key information points because you are relying on external sources.

Now, is it really a bad thing? The same could be said of that washboard use, right? The general population doesn’t know how to use one; they offloaded that knowledge to the washing machine, and the world still turns just fine. So the question you should be asking yourself is: How important is the information/skill/behavior you are getting from AI to know when doing your activity?

Let’s put this in context. You are in Sales, and you are raving about the benefits of your company’s product or service. AI can give you all the talking points, highlight the key benefits for the customer, and might even be able to give you some customer insight ahead of time. What a great way to prep! Then, you are in the pitch meeting, and someone asks a question about how the product/service works. If you have to stop and ask AI, does that show confidence in your knowledge?

Let me put it another way. You are in the hospital for heart surgery, and your surgeon comes in for your consultation. You have, understandably, some concerns about the surgery procedure and need some clarification. You ask, and the surgeon turns to the computer and asks ChatGPT how the procedure should be performed. Would you keep him as your surgeon?

Now, I’m not saying AI doesn’t have its benefits in learning: It does! You can do amazing things with AI both before and during instruction. But as a learner, you can’t offload the learning process to AI. It doesn’t build your knowledge base, skill sets, and behavior guidance you need to be successful in your job. It’s your responsibility as a learner to put the effort in, try, fail, and keep trying until you succeed. That is learning, that is success, and that is what will ultimately differentiate you in the industry. Make the effort, and you will see amazing results.

 

You can’t offload your learning to AI to be successful.  You need to use AI to learn, try, fail, and try again until you succeed.  That’s learning, that’s succeeding.

 

 

 

 

Building An Engaging Learning Program

  • Strategic Alignment & Needs Assessment
  • Design for Impact & Engagement
  • Implementation & Support
  • Measurement, Evaluation & Evolution

 

 

Beyond Training – Towards Transformation

We’ve all been there; we’ve sat in those classes.  Training for training’s sake, little was gained, but boxes are checked, and we return to the daily grind without applying anything.  This is an all-too-common scenario in many employee enablement attempts.  Disengaged learners, burnt-out instructors, or “trainers” who think reading from the PowerPoint is sufficient.  

The thing is, it doesn’t have to be this way.  Training is a skill multiplier when applied correctly through an effective learning program.  Learners want to attend training because they know what they are getting: skills to help them succeed.  Trainers who deliver the content are engaged because it’s not the PowerPoint that motivates them; it’s the message.  They sell it because they believe it.  Proper training and well-designed learning plans drive real, measurable change.  

What’s more, it’s not that hard to have effective learning programs.  Start with

  • Strategic Alignment & Needs Assessment
  • Design for Impact & Engagement
  • Implement & Support your Plan
  • Measure, Evaluate, and Evolve 

Let’s explore each one.  

Strategic Alignment & Needs Assessment

You are probably thinking, “Well, yeah, of course we should be strategically aligned!” And you would be right!  But “should be” and “are” is a journey that isn’t always so clear to navigate.  So let’s map it out and clear the process up. 

Define “Moving the Needle”

What does it mean to “Move the Needle?”  It means that, whatever your training plans are, they should tie directly to measurable business objectives.  You may want to train more people to use a particular aspect of your product.  Why?  Because, in using that aspect of your product, they are more tied to the product itself, and less likely to churn.  You want people to follow a specific process while using the product.  Why?  Because it reduces the number of support tickets that come in, which then means better customer satisfaction.  Training can directly impact the business when it’s tied to business outcomes.

Identify Performance Gaps

Now that you know what you need to change and how training is going to create an impact, you need to know what needs to be taught.  This means conducting a thorough needs assessment.  Conduct interviews, run surveys, look at performance data, and analyze for obvious gaps.  You want to know what needs to be taught to meet your business objectives.  

Once complete, you need to organize the content to distinguish between skills, knowledge, and motivational issues.  When I build out my analysis data, I organize it by 

  • Job:  The job contains several tasks that need to be performed.
    • Tasks: The tasks that are needed for the successful completion of the job.  Each Task has several subtasks.
      • Subtasks:  Subtasks are the tasks needed to complete a Task, and are, themselves, made up of several components. 
        • Skills:  The job skill is executed to a degree of accuracy that completes a subtask.
        • Knowledge: Knowledge is the information needed to implement a skill accurately.
        • Motivation: The approach to applying knowledge and executing the skill.  Often this is called Attitudes, or Mindset.  

This logical breakdown serves two purposes: 

  1. Building a database of skill sets needed for every class that can be written up and easily transferred
  2. Logically structuring the content for delivery 
    1. Job: The Course
    2. Tasks: Modules
    3. Subtasks: Sections
    4. SKM: Paragraphs

BONUS Benefit:  HR now has clear skill sets for job requisitions and onboarding.  

Target Audience Analysis

Now that you know what needs to be taught, you need to understand who needs to learn.  Target audience analysis helps you identify your personas, the level of skill needed for a particular job, and the depth of knowledge needed to complete the job.  

  • Are you addressing Leadership and business outcomes, or Engineers and processes?  
  • Do you need to position the skill for new learners that need more detailed walkthroughs and explanations, or for more advanced learners who need to see context, connections, and cross-functional applications?  
  • Do your learners learn best through lectures, games, and challenges, or tactile labs and milestones?  
  • Can your learners dedicate a full week off the job to training, or do you need to break up your training into 1-hour sessions spread across 8-12 weeks?  

How your learners can engage will determine how well they engage in your delivery. 

Finally, you need to understand your learner’s motivations.  Do they want to learn new skills, or are they being made to learn new skills?  This can heavily impact the success of the training. 

Design for Impact & Engagement

Outcome-Based Curriculum Design

Too often, when training needs to be built, we start with a workflow and focus on features.  For large products that apply to many different industries, this might work, but even then, you have a desired outcome for the course.  Designing your course from the desired results and behaviors first, then working on the content to support it, keeps the training on course.  The outcome is always in sight; it’s woven into the content delivery, instructions, and processes presented.  

There should also be a focus on application, rather than memorization.  25% of all lecture content is retained short-term, while only 7-9% is retained in long-term memory. That’s not a lot!  Your training should be focused on applying skills, not memorizing steps or facts.  

  • For technical training, this means doing labs.  
  • For onboarding, this would mean simulating your experience.  
  • For Leadership, this would mean a cohort training session where skills are applied during the weekly course, and then “homework” is assigned where skills are exercised in real scenarios to be reported on later.  

Engage through applying skills, connecting skills to similar life experiences, and showing how the result is relevant to their needs.

Diverse Learning Modalities

There is no one right way to build and deliver training, so use them all!  Utilize microlearning, workshops, coaching sessions, experiential learning, and self-paced learning to cater to a wide array of learning needs.  Encourage engagement by meeting your learners where they are most comfortable.  Do they need a live class to stay on task?  Offer one!  Are they more comfortable with self-paced learning? Make it available!  Are they too busy to attend a single bootcamp?  Design a cohort track spread over several weeks!  Are they neurodivergent and in need of options to better support their comfort levels?  How can you say no?  Some topics and content lend themselves to one delivery methodology better than others, but never use just one.  

Engaging Content & Delivery

Engaging content contains real examples from real scenarios and is designed to be interactive.  When building your workflows, build them off of examples that your learners will experience in the field.  Then, create an interactive component.  If it’s technical learning, have them build it out in the platform.  If it’s leadership, run role-play scenarios and assign tasks to apply while working.  Looking to build or enhance skill sets for your struggling employees?  Run employee cohort sessions where best practices can be applied immediately after a session, and then reported on the next time you meet.  The closer to real-world experiences you can give your learners, the more they will retain.  

Every training should tell a story:  The story of the workflow (Why are we doing what we are doing?), the story of the examples (why would someone do this?), and the story of the outcome (who benefits and why?).  Stories with relatable examples encourage learners to build on their existing experience, helping them connect the dots to the existing processes.  

Clear, concise communication is critical to success.  This, personally, is a challenge for me:  I tend to be very verbose in writing and while teaching.  Industry acronyms, jargon, or buzzwords are tempting, but ultimately undermine your training.  Avoid anything that would get in the way of your learners quickly absorbing and applying the concepts you are teaching.  Remember, cognitive load is a very real thing:  Don’t add to it unnecessarily!  

A sample of what training programs can be created.

Virtual Presence Robots in the Classroom
Virtual Presence Robots in the Classroom

Implementation & Support

Pilot & Iterate

Now you have your plan, you’ve laid the keel, and you built the course.  You are ready to get it out in the wild and see what she can do.  You are ready to implement.  

Implementation is, just like with anything else, a phased process.  You want to start with your Alpha run:  teaching internally and to a select few outsiders so you can get the feel of the course.  Ask some key questions: 

  • Did the course hit all the right notes? 
  • How did it flow?  Does it make sense as you move from one concept to another?
  • Are there any gaps or barriers in the delivery or content that was an irritation or a frustration to the overall course? 

The Alpha run is very much a chance to shake down the course.  You want to work out any bugs before you place your content before your customers. 

The next step would be to run a Beta.  Unlike the Alpha, which is generally run with a near (but not complete) course, the Beta is a run with a course that is, essentially, complete.  You are now training your key instructors and partners on how to deliver the course, and they see it in action.  Sometimes key customers will be included if you need feedback from a customer standpoint, and is often recommended when you have strong customers that are willing and eager to contribute to the success of your platform.  And, of course, you iterate with each delivery: Work out what landed well and what doesn’t.  

Leadership Buy-in & Support

Now that you have a course that’s ready for prime-time, you need executive buy-in and support.  For internal training, this means Leadership needs to be on board with the message and skills being delivered, know what behaviors are expected after training is delivered, and reinforce those behaviors in the wild.  If leadership doesn’t support, or outright dismisses, your training, it will not have the impact for which it was designed.    

Create a Supportive Learning Environment

Learning is the practice of failing, and trying again.  If you don’t feel safe in failing, you can never truly learn.  Every training should provide a safe space for practice and failure.  Learners will get frustrated, learners will find they are behind.  They need to know that they will not be judged for the pace at which they learn.  

This also applies to learning methodologies and preferences.  Some learners will prefer self-paced over in-class, because they can take their time and/or they don’t have others waiting on them to complete the process.  There’s a level of psychological safety in being able to learn in your particular learning style and preferred methodology.  

Measurement, Evaluation & Evolution

Kirkpatrick’s Levels of Evaluation (Simplified)

I’m a big fan of having key measurements for success:  It’s easier to reference when you are looking for success in a training platform, and it provides foundational references to the value training is bringing to the table.  The thing is, you can’t comprehensively measure the success of training during class:  You can’t scan the learner’s brain and identify the skills they acquired.  You need to work with other teams to identify how training has made an impact.  

Fortunately, Kirkpatrick’s 4 Levels of Evaluation make things easy.  

  • Reaction: Did learners like it? Do they see the value in what you are learning?  These questions you can ask with your closing survey.  Be cautious though:  Don’t just look at the responses you got, look at the number of responses you didn’t get.  Ideally, you should be aiming for a 60% response rate for your closing course survey.  Anything lower than that, I would be suspicious on the accuracy of the satisfaction scores.
  • Learning: Did they gain knowledge/skills? Depending on your course design, you can use quizzes, assessments, or reviews to evaluate if they have learned something during the class.  This will test their short-term memory, in which at least 25% of a lecture will be captured.  Long-term memory usually hovers around 7-9%, and will require some additional study and practice to ingrain behaviors into habits.  An excellent long-term learning measurement would be certification exams.  
  • Behavior: Did their behavior change on the job? When creating internal training, this is an easy measurement point:  Are learners performing better against their KPIs?  Are they performing faster, more accurately, or correctly in their tasks?  Managers can easily measure this result and report back on the results.  Customers, on the other hand, go back to their jobs and behavior is much more difficult to measure.  If you do not have a direct way to measure, you can use conversations with your key Customer contacts and the Customer Success team to determine if behaviors changed with those who attended.  
  • Results: Did it impact business outcomes? Internally, this is an easy metric.  Are KPIs improving?  Do we see reduced waste and increased performance?  Managers are already measuring job performance through KPIs, and those KPIs should be directly tied to ROI. Better KPI performance should increase ROI of the training program.  Customers, on the other hand, require interaction with the CSMs, though their general Account Health will be the determining factor:  Did training customers increase customer loyalty and dependence on your product?  

Data-Driven Decisions

Now that you can measure your success, look at the data.  Identify what works, and what doesn’t.  Customer Satisfaction of the course will let you know if the course flows well and answers the questions the learners had.  Course quizzes, exams, and lab completion scores will indicate if the learner is, well, learning and retaining key concepts short-term.  Improved performance and task completion will identify that behavior is changing, and increased KPI results and better account health will indicate the results are promising.  Watch these metrics, tweak when necessary, and watch again.  All course development should be iterative.  

Communicate Success

If things are going well, communicate it out!  Let Leadership know what CSAT scores are being generated, learner comments, and measured behavioral changes and results.  Let your Stakeholders know how their input has made a material difference in the learner, the organization, and the company.  

The Continuous Journey of Learning Excellence

We’ve made quite the journey on this process, navigating key points that help you move the needle when developing your training platform. By starting with Strategic Alignment & Needs Assessment, you have a superstructure of training that meets the needs of the learner and ties back to key business objectives and desired outcomes.  When youDesign for Impact & Engagement, you are building a course that will engage your learners throughout the process, tie back to their previous experiences when necessary, and show them the value of the content and outcomes desired. Then, with Implementation & Support, you are taking your course live through it’s iterative process, evaluating and adjusting as necessary for success.  Finally, with Measurement, Evaluation & Evolution, you track the value being added through training.  Each phase is a valuable port of call as you navigate your learning program. 

 

A Compass Gives you Direction.

A Navigation plan Gets you There.

 

I remember, as a young scout, getting my first compass.  I thought it was the coolest thing in the world, and, if Television and Movies were anything to go by, it would always point to where I needed to go.  Quickly, to my confusion, I learned differently.  The compass only points North.  How would I ever find where I needed to go?  

Then we started Orienteering, and I learned how the compass can be used as a tool as part of a wider plan.  A compass, by itself, only lets you know in which direction you are going.  You need other tools, like a map and GPS to understand where you are and how you can get to your destination.

Sailing changed things a bit more, because orientation on water means an understanding of wind, tides, and weather.  Now, instead of navigating around mountains, you are navigating shoals, reefs, storms, and large container ships.  Your navigation plan is essential to navigating to your destination.  

“Knowing where you’re going isn’t enough. You need to know how to get there and what might throw you off course”

 

Teams struggle similarly with their training plans.  They generally know what they want:  Growth, innovation, agility, product adoption, etc., yet they lack the actual plan to get there.  Often they start creating content for a product or service, covering features, shot-gunning capabilities in hopes that the learners will learn and apply what they need.  It’s distracting, confusing, and often falls flat.  

The problem is, the team isn’t directionless, just at a loss of what to do, and how that’s going to be done.  They know where to point their rudder, but need to navigate around islands they get frustrated.  Then, as leadership and/or messaging changes for the new Sales cycle, pressures mount to create content that talks to those new positions.  The storm hits, and the team is just bouncing, trying to do what they can with what they have.  There’s no vision, no plan, no structure to the process.  Some leaders will call this being “agile” but I call it blind panic.  

With a plan, even when the storms hit, you know where to go safely.  If you have a set process and procedures for your training, the Team can afford to be flexible and agile, knowing what to change, how much to change, and how much work it’s going to be.  No more panic, but structured refocus.  

A Navigation Plan Aligns the Team Around Milestones

Sailing with a crew can be amazing, when everyone knows what they are supposed to do, when they should do it, and how it’s done.  When I sail with my family, I have a son manning the port lines, my wife manning the starboard lines, so all I have to do is man the tiller and mainsheet as we navigate.  We know where we are going, how we are going to get there, how many tacks it will take, and how long in each tack we should be.  As everyone does their part, we move well and enjoy the experience. 

If I go out with an inexperienced crew, with no notion of what they need to do, how to do it, or when to do it, I’m left with having to do everything myself, hoping that they will just “get it”.  It impacts the plan, because they don’t know what to do, and I need to compensate.  It’s unnatural, slows things down, and we often ended up turning too far in a tack while I was securing lines.  

When everyone knows what they are doing and how it contributes to the bigger journey, everyone wins.  Not only do they know what they are doing, when to do it, and how, but they can flex as conditions change.  The plan, goals, and milestones remain the same, allowing for execution to flex with need.  Planning means agility, flexibility, and comfort for the team.  No plan means chaos, confusion, frustration, and increased turnover.  

The plan also creates a shared language when communicating issues, solutions, or changes, keeping everyone in the loop.  It also provides accountability and focus:  People know what they should be working on, what they own, to whom they report, and the priority of each task.  

And when the Storms hit, focus can flex using the plan as the guide.  Milestones may shift in timing, but remain.  Responsibilities and accountability is still there, just with new focus.  Priorities may shift, but the overall plan is still helping everyone make their final destination.  

Captain working on his navigation plan.

“It’s not about rigid planning.  It’s about intentional movement with shared awareness.”

Support continuous Learning, not Just one-time Training

I remember my first time out on any body of water.  I was camping with the family by a beaver pond in the mountains, and I gathered some logs together and lashed them into a raft.  My young mind thought of the adventures of Tom Sawyer, and I was going to float on the raft.  Did it work?  Sort of:  I had really wet feet, but I didn’t have to swim.  I wasn’t prepared, I didn’t know what I was really doing, I was just, well, doing.  

If you develop training without a plan, it’s like lashing some logs together and calling it a ship.  Sure, it works for now, but for how long?  What’s the impact?  Can it scale?  Ad hoc training doesn’t scale and means redoing everything from scratch, every time.  

A good navigation plan will weave learning into daily work, leadership coaching, onboarding, and product development.  Stakeholders will all have a voice in the development of training, with clear expectations in the process.  

Navigation Plans Help You Prioritize What Matters

Every time we take the boat out, we have a plan for where to go and how we are going to get there.  I know when we will tack, how long we will spend going in which direction, and when we will be heading back to the slip.  Checkpoints let us know where we are relative to our time:  Do we need to modify the plan to get back on time?  It’s all part of the navigation plan. 

Training is no different.  Clear waypoints, such as product launches, team scaling, onboarding new hires, set the pace of the plan, and we know how to choose the right tools and frameworks at the right time to hit those waypoints on time.  Instead of rushing to getting everything done at once, we hit the right sequence to provide a smooth launch.  

 

Leaders use Navigation Plans to Inspire Trust

When it’s just you, you can just climb aboard and go.  You know what you can do, you know where you are going, and you can build out the waypoints in your head, and you just do it.  Descriptions are not necessary, written or verbal plans are not needed, because it’s just you. 

The crew, on the other hand, need to know what’s going on.  They don’t just need a direction and will take orders barked at them while you go.  This isn’t Mutiny on the Bounty, and teams don’t work on blind faith.  They need to trust that you know what you are doing, how you will get there, and what their responsibilities will be. 

The thing is, this could be taken to extremes.  Some leaders jump in and set every step down in meticulous detail, which quickly gets overturned once headwinds change.  It’s not about knowing every wave, just where the shoals are.

 

 

You can’t JUst Wing It Anymore

Your company is growing, your team is growing.  More people are doing more specific tasks that contribute to the overall success of the company.  It’s not you, alone in your dinghy crossing the Bay, you are on a larger ship with a lot of hands.  There’s too much complexity to rely on instinct alone:  You need a plan, and a Fractional CLO can help you build one without full-time headcount costs.

Your clear navigation plan becomes your competitive advantage:  it saves time, reduces friction, resolves frustration, and boosts confidence across the organization.  

It’s time to:

  • Map your key journeys: Onboarding, product adoption, and role transitions
  • Set your clear waypoints: 30/60/90-day goals, enablement outcomes, and promotion criteria
  • Align stakeholders: Co-create the plan with team leads, not just top-down dictation
  • Revisit the map regularly:  Course correction is a feature, not a flaw

 

 

 

 

Training Happens Whether You Know It or Not

We’ve all been there: walking into a company with 3 to 5 learning management processes, three checklists with mostly the same content on each one, and a lot of outdated information that a new hire is expected to update when they find it doesn’t work.  Leaders rely heavily on tribal knowledge, existing documentation, shared knowledge dumps, and the occasional video walking through the product.  

The thing is, each of these methods really does count as training.  This might be a controversial statement to make as a Training leader, but training happens whether you want it or not.  People will share knowledge, best practices, and policies that are developed on the fly to create a cohesive experience for everyone.  

The question you have to ask yourself is, do you want your people trained in this way, with no oversight, no organization, no actual plan?  How long does it take for someone to be up to speed on your processes, vision, direction, or purpose?  How long until they are productive?  

If you don’t design your training process, chaos fills the gap, and poor knowledge transfer means lost productivity, repeated mistakes, uneven performance, and employee frustration.  

Leaders are training teams every day; the only question is whether it’s by design or by accident.  

 

 

Organizational Success Depends on Learning Agility

While working for ServiceNow, I had an amazing mentor who peeled back the business side of training for me.  I saw that our customer training program would grow right along with the company’s growth: maintaining 4% (at the time) of the overall company revenue.  That growth was just as organic as the company, keeping pace and flexing with the company’s direction.  

All other companies for which I’ve worked had struggled with that type of growth:  as Start-ups, they saw training as a secondary thing, something that was the responsibility of the Deployment or Implementation teams.  The results:  struggling adoption and a lot of questions on how to do things on their platforms.  The structure of training wasn’t there, the coherent messaging was missing, and resources to develop training were strained.   They needed something better.  

Early stages of an organization are fast-paced, with quick changes on every pivot.  Products change often, policies are developed on the fly to handle more and more common scenarios, and you need your people to keep pace.  Structured training programs with information capture processes, single-hosted training locations, and predictable session plans will provide the framework that employees will rely on when ramping up on new products, processes, and procedures.  

Having a single vision for knowledge transfer streamlines this experience across the board, standardizing all onboarding, upskilling, enablement, and customer training, keeping pace with the momentum of the company.   Without that vision and direction, without structured learning systems, growth velocity will stall.  

 

 

 

 

Onboarding is a Growth Multiplier

If you don’t have structured onboarding, it can increase your new hires’ time to productivity by 30-50%!  Think about that for a second:  newly hired people, hired because you are growing like crazy, can’t get up to speed as fast as they should.

 How fast is that?  Well, it generally takes between 90-100 days to be fully onboarded and productive for any new role.  New employees will, essentially, suck at their jobs for at least 45-60 days as they ramp up, get trained, and get experience in their new role.  Now, if you don’t train them, you increase the growth period by another 30-50 days.  Half a quarter longer, because they are not properly onboarded. 

Now, Onboarding isn’t just your general compliance training: It’s learning the tasks, proprietary knowledge, and vision that make your company, well, unique.  Don’t sacrifice that because you think it takes too much time. 

 

Playbooks, Not Tribal Knowledge

Too often, leaders will point to a senior member of their team and tell a new hire to “do it the way they do it” and expect to rubber-stamp an employee’s knowledge.  The thing is, it doesn’t work that way.  

Having lived through that more times than I care to count, I can tell you from experience that the senior member of the team is doing their job, and will not have the time to properly train their new co-workers.  Instead, they say, “Do this and let me know if you have any questions.”  The new hire, then, tries and fails, tries and fails, all the time feeling like they just can’t do the job.  

Then, what happens when your senior team member leaves the team?  Where does all that knowledge go?  Not a good situation, because not everyone creates a knowledge base to brain-dump before they leave, like I did. 

Building documented systems early, even when messy, prevents bottlenecks and standardizes knowledge across the team.  A good CLO will help turn your tribal knowledge into repeatable, scalable assets. 

 

 

 

 

Your Team Is More Than Sales

The Sales team is a critical team for the growth of a company, and leaders will pump a lot of funds into their enablement, as they should!  But what happens after you Close/Won an Opportunity?  

While working for a small start-up, we had that problem.  The economic headwinds spooked the Board, and hiring freezes were in place for every team but Sales.  Sales then had a bumper year, outstanding growth, lots of new customers, who couldn’t get onboarded.  We didn’t have the deployment team to support he growth.  Prioritizing Sales brought in a lot of new logos, but they weren’t happy when they were waiting 6 weeks to realize value. 

Enabling Sales is important, but you need to enable the rest of your teams with just as much passion and urgency.  The Customer Success team needs to know what Sales communicates to customers, Professional Services needs to have the knowledge/skill to get those customers launched as quickly as possible, and Support needs to know how to support the customer if something doesn’t work.  

A good CLO will support cross-functional learning so silos don’t slow down execution.  Sales, CS, Product, and Ops all benefit from unified learning leadership. 

 

 

Early Learning Culture means Long-Term Competitive Advantage

My favorite employer experience always came with well-organized training programs.  Proper onboarding, clear expressions of expectations, documented policies and procedures, and good on-the-job training sessions with a dedicated mentor who was dedicated entirely to my onboarding.  I spent more time being productive and building relationships than struggling to find answers, stressing about my performance, and doubting my own skills.  It’s such a pity it happened so rarely in my career.

Organizations that prioritize training early on in their growth develop a strong learning culture, generally democratized and collaborative, that naturally work cross-functionally.  They recovcer quicker from mistakes, adapt faster to the market, and build stronger cultural ties and practices that resonate across every role in the company.  

If you don’t start your learning culture before your Series A funding round, you will forever be playing catch-up.  Instead of greasing your growth engine, you will deal with organically grown, tribally driven training systems that are more wiki-driven, fractional, and disjointed than structured.  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Sailboats on San Diego Bay.

Sailing as a Metaphor for Training Systems

I love metaphors, partly because so many different metaphors can be used for any given topic, but mostly because it helps folks relate to a topic by taking a familiar experience and relating it to something new. 

So why sailing?  Because I love sailing.  I’ve been a member of our local sailing club for a while now, and there’s something powerful about getting out on the water.  I’ve talked before about Blue Mind theory, and getting on the water seems to reinforce that theory for me (anecdotally, of course).  I therefore recommend anyone interested to try sailing.  

So, how can sailing relate to training?  There are a lot of ways, and we will explore them below.  

Whether Sailing or Delivering Training, it’s all about preparation, experience, and capacity planning.

Navigating Training Mechanics for Success

My last sailing session was a 4-hour trip around San Diego Bay.  It was a windy day for a small 22-foot keelboat, and even with the mainsail and jib reefed, we were easily moving between 5 to 6 knots in 11-knot winds.  The spray was flying off the bow, the rail was in the water, and my crew, some of whom had never sailed before, were not quite sure of the experience.  And yet, we kept it moving as I tried to single-handedly steer a boat that was built for at least two crew members.  It all came down to the mechanics.  

Upon reflection, I noticed that I could easily relate this experience to starting and running a scrappy, start-up training program:  The speed and size of the boat, the inexperienced crew, and the need for folks to take on multiple roles while the system was in motion:  All these previous experiences I’ve had building training programs at various organizations related to this one sailing trip.  It made me smile as I turned too far, having given the tiller to a crew member while I jumped up to tack the jib and lock it down, often stepping over crew members who, inexperienced as they were, didn’t know what to do.  

Training programs can be the same thing:  Often, when you start a new program, you are creating training content, delivering the training, scheduling sessions, and maintaining the LMS, all with a smile on your face when you see it work out.  It’s not best practice, it’s not efficient, and it’s often not scalable, but it’s working well enough until you can get the program properly staffed and working like a well-oiled machine.  But there are some pitfalls too, which we need to discuss.  So, let’s look at how the mechanics of Training can relate to Sailing, and vice versa. 

01

Prep For The Environment:  KNow Your LImits

This last sailing trip was in heavy winds for a small sailboat, requiring reefed sails for safety.  Could we have sailed under full sail?  Possibly, but if you put too much stress on the rigging from too much sail, you can snap the rigging and the mast, leaving you dead in the water, as best.  Preparing for the environment means knowing when you need to reef your sails to shrink your sail area for safety, and when even just using a mainsail or jib is all you need.  You can’t move as fast, but it’s safer, easier to handle, and doesn’t freak out your crew.  

For training, this means understanding your capacity.  No instructor should have more than 16-20 people in their class if you want your class to be well prepared.  Everyone needs to have the materials (if you provide them), and all lab environments should be prepped days in advance.  

Could you have 30-40 people in class, or 170-500 like lecture halls in college?  Well, let me ask you a question:  in your lecture hall, how many people asked a question of the professor?  Could you?  I’m willing to bet, if your experience was anything like mine, you could not.  The professor just couldn’t manage that type of experience.  No matter how many people are begging, they will not have a good experience if you overload a class.  Period.  If this becomes a regular problem, you probably need to hire more trainers to manage capacity (or start a Partner Training program).   

02

Establish Your Process:  Know Next Steps

Sailing a boat isn’t like motoring a boat:  you need to have momentum from the sail to get going, which means you need to be angled correctly against the wind.  Sometimes this means you need to tack several times to get where you are going, moving back and forth.  This means you need to organize the tiller movement, the filling of the sail, and unlocking/locking your jib (if it’s not self-tacking).  A lot is going on, and if you are not familiar, it can take you some time to get things set up right for successful forward movement.  Knowing your process, your lines, and getting the timing down is key.  

Process and mechanics apply to everything, and most definitely that includes training.  Make sure you follow your established processes, ideally documented, and have everyone on the team follow them.  If you don’t have established processes, but wing it every single time, it will stress everyone out and impact the training experience for learners.  

You need to have a solid registration process and a way to track registration.  Know how to add folks to your lab environment, distribute training materials, and provide meeting links if remotely taught.  A good Training Coordinator is a lifesaver in these scenarios, keeping track of everything, documenting processes, and establishing routines that make training a joy for those delivering.  

03

Short-Handed Struggles:  It Works, but not Well

Is single-handed sailing possible?  Provided the lines are properly set up for single-handed sailing, absolutely!  The sailboat we had put the winches too far forward, making it difficult to keep a hand on the tiller and winch in the jib.  Usually, I have a couple of crew members who take a winch each, which makes it easier, helping the sailing experience and making it more enjoyable with smooth tacks.  Without that help, I’ve got to trust the tiller to the crew who may not have experience, and often sends us too far to one side or the other.  It takes patience and understanding to manage this on your own with bodies in the way.  

Training can be the same, particularly for a scrappy start-up.  Leadership might think that a single manager can create training, deliver it, keep it all up to date, and manage registrations and course prep, all without breaking a sweat.  For really small start-ups, that’s possible if you are delivering training once a month.  Any more than that, you need to get some staff.  

Curriculum developers specialize in building out your content so that it best relates to the needs of the learner while making the training experience enjoyable.  They need to be aware of cognitive load, prerequisites, constructivist learning, and the whole works.  Content isn’t just about slides: it’s about making sure the structure and content support excellent delivery. 

Trainers excel at the delivery arts and performance that is leading training.  They know how to relate to the learners, provide experiences that help learners connect the dots faster, and answer questions from their own experiences.  Some can be excellent curriculum developers; most are not.  They don’t know, or care, about design; they are all about the art of delivery.  

Operations management is a whole different beast.  You need good people to understand who organizes office space for classrooms, links, and Zoom rooms needed for class, registration requirements, and training material logistics.  Could they teach?  Perhaps, but I’d rather they focus on operations and keeping the training engine running smoothly.  A good Operations person and make a successful training program.  

04

Forcing The Passage:  Your Judgement Impacts The System

I wanted my crew members to enjoy the sail:  I wanted them to love it as much as I do.  I talked it up prior to the day, I hinted at the practicality of the experience, I talked about theory, and the joy of just being out on the water.  Then, when we got out there, I worked my tail off to make it as effortless as possible for them.  Did it work?  Well, a lot was missing from the experience because of a lack of knowledge.  The crew wasn’t properly prepared (there wasn’t time), and we went anyway.  If I had it to do all over again, I would have taken some time and trained them on the mechanics of sailing, so they understood what I was doing and why, even if I still did it myself.  

Training experiences are impacted by so many different things:  Environment, content quality, delivery quality, and learners having completed prerequisites.  If one thing is off, you don’t get that sweet spot.  To be honest, when you are short-handedly delivering training, that’s going to happen a lot.  Training sweet spots, like hitting a perfect close-haul on the ocean, require everything to be aligned.  

Sometimes it’s best to put things off, provide more time, so that the experience is better for everyone.  You may think loading down a class or adding folks from that high-profile customer into an advanced class without a basic understanding is good customer service.  It’s not.  It’s the worst thing you can do for your customers, and taints the reputation and quality of your program. 

Sailboats on San Diego Bay.

Learning the Lines

Proper planning, well-prepared teams, and good judgment can make all the difference in your training program.  Prepare well, have a good support system in the back end, and you are looking at some smooth sailing in the sweet spot, tasting the salty spray and feeling the breeze.  

 

 

Maximize your Time-To-Value

 

While working at a previous employer, our Professional Services team ran into a problem:  there were too many customers who needed deployment, and not enough Professional Services team members to do it promptly.  Tier 1 customers were prioritized, and the smaller customers were constantly pushed down the schedule until, in many cases, it took 6 weeks from Closed/Won to realize value.  

Everyone agreed that this was a problem, yet not enough to warrant bringing on more people.  We had to come up with a more efficient way to get smaller customers up and running without engaging more people.  The solution was simple:  organize some pre-launch steps that would simplify the deployment process for these customers, so the product could be turned on without the need for a Professional Services team.  

Now, depending on your experience, you can choose any number of possible solutions: 

  • Organize a series of tasks that you assign to your customer through a CRM platform:  This becomes hairy because it requires programming and difficult management.  Plus, assigning tasks to your customer?  Really?  
  • Provide a white paper to customers to guide their experience.  The white paper can be either a download PDF, knowledge articles, etc, and provide the steps the customer needs to take. I’m not a big fan of this process because reading documentation is not a clean process:  not everyone enjoys reading content. 
  • Build a wizard into the product.  This seems the most obvious solution, but we had a problem:  Development wasn’t going to deviate from their development schedule.  Our solution needed to be resolved without their help.  
  • Develop training to guide the customer through the self-guided deployment steps.  Now, the beauty of this solution was the reporting through the LMS on training completion.  Customers could complete the training and, when done, the deployment team would get a notification through Salesforce, check the settings on the customer’s account, turn things on, and all without the need to engage Development.  

The Training Solution

Not everyone was onboard at first, and the solution was kind of out-of-the-box.  It required some clear steps to make it work:

  • Reporting to Salesforce so completion could be tracked.  This meant that the LMS needed to have an integration with Salesforce.
  • Access to the LMS needed to be easy.  Most LMS solutions require a login created, OR some complex SSO solution that can be a beast to integrate.  There are a few, though, that have instance access solutions (Workramp is one of them), which makes things easier.  Customers can log into the platform with their existing login solution and instantly access the LMS with key identifiers passed based on their login.  
  • The tasks that the customers needed to complete had to be identified, with detailed step-by-step examples provided (with videos or other interactive examples).  For this solution, because of the limited content development technology, we used videos, which were very successful.  We also built out a clear Task Analysis for the process with the skills, examples, and steps needed at the Task, Subtask, Skill, Knowledge, and Attitude level (SKAs are needed to complete the Subtask, the Subtasks are needed to complete each Task). 

All this in place, we were ready to get it built and deploy.  

CRM Integration

Our LMS had an integration with Salesforce, it just needed to be deployed.  This was harder than you would think:  The Sales Operations team was as reluctant to deviate from their plans as the Development team.  Fortunately, we had a high-ranking champion for the team:  The Chief Review Officer wanted this to happen.  Because he was on board, we had the support of Sales Ops.  And it took all of 20 minutes to deploy.  

Instant Log-In for Customers

This was a beast as well, because it still required engagement with Deployment.  For context, I had requested this feature be added to the platform a full year before this project was launched.  Yes, a full year.  Each quarter, it would be considered and rejected.  

What changed this time?  The framing for the problem:  now it was less about customer convenience and more about time-to-value.  C-Suite champions greased some wheels, and I had a very heated discussion with the head of Development on getting this done.  Once implemented, it went live in a week (the process was really easy), with a week for testing.  

Task Analysis and Content Development

The easiest and least stress-inducing part of the process, I had this built within a week.  The process was simple, the tasks straightforward, and clear discussion points and questionnaires were built into the process, with quizzes, with quiz results shared through the Salesforce integration for variable configuration settings to be communicated to the deployment team.  

Having already been embedded into the Customer Success team, our L&D team had a good relationship with the Deployment team, making training development and content sign-off easy.  

 

 

Did it work?

Yes!  So much so that the first customers who ran through the beta version of the training went live with their newly purchased platform within a week, instead of 6 weeks.  As we refined the process, we tightened up the time-to-value to 2 business days.  

Think about that.  Two business days instead of 6 weeks of paying for a product you couldn’t use, and a deployment team that was snowed under with hundreds of customers in need of help, and a limited amount of time and number of team members to help.  Everyone wins in this scenario.  

 

 

 

Keeping the Spark Alive

It’s well established that burnout happens in high-demand, high-stress environments. Wellness techniques such as exercise, mindfulness, meditation, deep breathing, and/or positive psychology can increase resiliency and fight burnout.  This is universally true throughout the neurodiversity spectrum, applying to both neurotypical and neurodivergent individuals.  

Motivational Needs Conflict 

Yet, corporate wellness programs are not being used.  Programs that are meant to strengthen employees are failing to do just that.  The reason:  They are generally top-down, generated corporate programs that were conceived without employee motivations in mind.  Sure, it’s great that you have yoga classes or a meditation room, but if your people are purely motivated by Survival, they won’t have the time or inclination to participate.  They are too busy spending their efforts on not losing their jobs.  They would be better served with some time off to recover and regroup so they can come back to the job with more energy and a fresher perspective.  That doesn’t mean that wellness programs are inherently wrong; they just need to be well thought-through to best serve all employees instead of the few who want to have company-subsidized yoga classes.  

 

Planning Wellness For All by Motivational Need

To approach Wellness effectively, start with the motivational needs of your employees.  Where are they on the motivational pyramid?  How can you best set up your team for success over the long term and fight burnout?  Let’s take each motivational level and discuss how to best support employees at each level.  

Survival

When you are in Survival mode, you are worried about how you are going to continue to live.  This could be the standard of living at which you are currently, or from where your next meal is coming.  Depending on the level of survival, various wellness programs can be appreciated.  Let’s start with the most extreme and then move from there.

  • Temporary Housing for Homeless Employees:  Housing can be expensive, and many employees may find themselves, hopefully temporarily, without a place to call home.  Providing them with a place to live, showering options, and food can be a temporary alternative.  Some companies find that allowing employees to sleep on the premises overnight, providing showers, and keeping healthy food and drink options can allow their otherwise homeless employees a place to stay while they work out options.  Is this ideal?  No, and possibly illegal in some states or cities (consult your corporate Counsel before setting a program in place).  A better solution is to pay a living wage for your employees so they can sustain their housing. 
  • No Judgement PTO:  Now for the more common, more often abused solution:  respecting time off.  Don’t require a reason for PTO to be taken; allow employees to take their PTO without feeling it needs to be justified.  They have earned that time off, so let them use it however they need.  If you are worried about projects or tasks falling by the wayside, you should
    • Have a solid way to track all tasks that need to be done (basic project and task management tools will take care of this)
    • Have a plan in place for maintenance mode: If a valuable employee is out of the office, have a plan to cover the basics of that role while they are out so they don’t come back to a massive backlog
  • Support Life-Changing Events:  There are times when employees will have an event that will turn their lives upside down.  A new baby is expected, a family member passes, or even a massive accident that can dibilitate an employee for some time.  Have support plans in place to let them know that their jobs are NOT in jeopardy, and plan for coverage if they need time away.  These events can be sudden and take any employee from a higher level of motivation instantly to Survival mode.  Rally around them and give them all the support you can.  Work through how the change in their life will impact their career and how you can help them grow through the change.  

Safety

If your employees are looking for safety, they need some level of stability and reassurance in their future.  The best way to help build their resilience is to reinforce their levels of safety and security within their career, and encourage wellness practices.  For those in the Safety level this means allowing PTO without judgement, and flex time (where possible).  

  • Flex Time: Now, we should take a minute to define what I mean by flex time:  Flex time means working when the person is most productive, and allowing them to balance out that work with their general life.  
  • Work-Life Balance (For Real):  We hear alot about work-life balance, but that generally means “be available at all times.”  That’s not what we are talking about here.  To have proper balance, you need to make time for your life.  Employees are contracted for 40 hours of work a week, and any more than that is a gift (unless they are hourly, in which case it’s overtime).  Allowing employees to work when it’s most convenient for them means they can do the best possible job for you.  This also means if they are working over their usual hours one week, let them take that time off the next (or a subsequent week).  Give them time to focus on self-care, while you focus on the real Key Productivity Indicators (i.e., the work getting done).  
  • Respect Boundaries:  Set and respect boundaries for your employees, and they will feel safe in their role.  Only contact them during working hours.  Respect their Slack status (in meeting, unavailable, offline) and don’t expect immediate responses.  Emails that can wait until Monday should be sent on Monday (you can schedule your email delivery, did you know that?).  If someone is on PTO, respect that they are on PTO and don’t try to contact them.  
  • Plan for Time Off:  If you don’t have a back-up plan for someone who is on vacation/sick, then start planning for one.  You aren’t planning for a replacement, but have a plan for someone to pick up the slack or make the key decisions if a person is out of the office.  
  • Encourage Safety in Groups Through ERGs:  Employee Resource Groups, which allow like-minded employees to build relationships with each other, provides an anchor in an organization when social relationships are still being formed.  Employee Resource Groups cost nothing to make (it’s just a group in Slack), provide an opportunity for folks and allies of a similar race, sex, belief, culture, sexual orientation, or neurodivergence to build a strong network.  You could also build similar groups for beer-brewing enthusiasts, role-playing gamers, sailers, surfers, etc.  By encouraging employees to bond within their existing social connections will help them feel more safe within the organization as a whole. 

Social

Social needs and motivation is a level where teams start to gel, folks want to work because they like hanging out with their teammates, and social acceptance has been achieved.  What starts with ERGs can move into more general acceptance within a group.  Wellness at this level means group events that are not work outings or team-building off-sites, but rather opportunities for shared interests to be enjoyed.  

  • Expand ERGs:  Your Employee Resource Groups continue to play a role as they expand in building connections:  Sharing experiences and perspectives through team presentations in a safe place.  I had a conversation with someone in the Biotech industry, and she explained their approach.  Many of their researchers were neurodivergent, and felt uncomfortable socializing in a traditional “drinks after work” setting.  They did, however, enjoy role-playing games, so the company sponsored a role-playing social event to bring folks from multiple teams together in a comfortable setting for their researchers.  The result was phenomenal:  researchers could now relate to other team members because of their role-playing experiences, which built stronger social relationships across teams.  Their researcher retention went up significantly as a result.  
  • Plan Social Events With Everyone’s Feedback:  Not everyone wants a pizza party and alcohol.  As a non-drinker myself, I always felt awkward around co-workers who were drinking.  If you had ever been a non-smoker in a smoking section (perhaps I’m aging myself here), you would know the feeling.  Social events can be dinners, or group service projects, or even team radio shows.  The thing is, everyone needs to be on board with the idea.  If folks aren’t, and are forced to participate, they feel excluded while participating.  Also know that everyone will not be one hundred percent on board with every idea, so cycle through ideas that engage as many people as possible.  For those who generally don’t participate, find out how you can help them feel more engaged with the events.  
  • Team Empathy:  When folks are struggling, the last thing they want to worry about is whether or not they brought the cups for the social that night.  Encourage the team to be empathetic to those around them and recognize that, should someone not want to participate, it’s OK.  Invite them, welcome them, and let them know they are always welcomed in future.  Rejecting a social event isn’t a personal slight, so don’t take offense.  

Recognition/Esteem

It might sound odd to include this option as folks who are motivated at this level already have solid foundational needs met.  Yet, burnout can still happen if you are trying incredibly hard to be recognized.  Employees at this level are more likely to ignore their work/life balance in favor of work, put in long hours on projects, or take a lot on their plate in order to stand out.  Wellness programs at this level may take champions in leadership to encourage folks to find the time to decompress and relax.  

  • Encourage PTO:  Encourage folks to take their time off to relax and unwind, even if it’s one day in the middle of the week.  Time off, unplugged from projects and work, can do wonders.  It’s also important to note that it takes time to unplug and decompress.  Travel, family, last-minute worries, etc. can all impact the ability to relax.  If one day isn’t going to do it, encourage longer breaks.  Be a champion, and lead by example.  When you are on PTO, do not be available, and let people know you are not available.  If you are outside the United States, this probably sounds obvious, but in the US there is an expectation of availability and an “always on” mentality.  Stop it, break that cycle, and you will build a more resilient culture.  
  • Be Mindful of Recognition:  Now, you might think this is a plea to recognize everyone for something, but that’s not really that valuable.  Instead, be aware of which behaviors you recognize.  Is it more often folks who work longer or cut PTO short for a project?  Perhaps you tend to recognize folks for their willingness to take on multiple projects at once, more than would normally be expected.  The reasons and trends behind those recognitions are very visible to your team, and will dictate their behavior if they are motivated by recognition.  Either they will mimic the long hours and no PTO to their detriment to meet your recognition threshold, or they will stop being motivated by recognition all together, and therefore stop progressing through their journey.  Why you recognize folks matters, so try to make sure it’s for something real, rather than something that will impact their health.  

Purpose

When someone is driven by purpose, their whole perspective changes.  All of a sudden, they are focused on how they can contribute to the goals and values of the company.  That doesn’t mean, however, that they are all hunky-dory and don’t need wellness opportunities.  It does mean that their definition of wellness will change:  They will have a focus more on benefiting others rather than themselves.  Therefore, your wellness options would need to shift.  

  • Charitable Giving:  Making the lives of others better becomes a foundational need for those who are looking to de-stress at the purpose level, and charitable giving is an excellent outlet.  Charitable giving can be as simple as providing charity donation options as part of Payroll or providing match programs for a person’s favorite charity.  How it’s done isn’t as important as providing the opportunity.  
  • Volunteer Work:  Much like charitable giving, volunteer work gives employees the opportunity to share their unique talents with those who most need it.  They could be teaching for after-school programs, working in non-profit aid offices, or cleaning the beach with friends.  How they do it doesn’t matter, and even whether or not they are recognized shouldn’t matter, it’s the fact that they have a chance to give back to others that builds resilience.  
  • Respect Anonymity:  Some people love being recognized for their charitable giving or volunteer work, and can’t wait to post about it on social media. These folks would love being recognized for their works within the company as well, often tying their events to their work personas.  There are others who do not like being recognized and prefer to give and volunteer without accolades.  Respect the desire for anonymity, and do not require people to record their volunteer hours or charitable giving amounts for corporate recognition. 

Survival

Non-judgemental PTO and well-established support for work projects.

Let people take time off so they can recover without making them feel like their jobs are on the line and have maintenance plans in place.

Safety

PTO, Flex time, and Employee Resource Groups (ERGs)

Time off should not feel punitive, meaning they shouldn’t be made to feel guilty.  Employee Resource Groups can provide social support for anyone in their group who feels overwhelmed by working through existing community ties.

Social

Expand ERGs and encourage social events with the team

ERGs are a great way to establish a social outlet for all employees and drive social motivation.  Providing social events that are sponsored by ERGs can help build social connections within the company. 

Recognition /Esteem

Become a champion of wellness programs

Encourage your employees to share their wellness practices during work recognition to emphasize that success can include self-care.

Purpose

Volunteer work and/or charitable giving

Your employees driven by purpose will be best served by giving of themselves outside of work, either through volunteer or charitable work.  Recognize their work when appropriate, though respect their choice for anonymity.

Final Thoughts

Wellness has many different definitions to different people, and can often be impacted by culture, needs, and health in general.  As a leader, you want your team to contribute to the best of their ability to the success of the company.  That means you need to be mindful of their stress levels, motivational needs, and ways to mitigate their stress so they can be as productive as possible.  Recognizing their levels of need and having a playbook for those differing levels means they will have the support they need when they need it, and they will become more resilient.  

It should also be worth noting that resilience training wasn’t mentioned once, and there’s a reason:  It’s been found that resilience training actually has a detrimental impact on employee’s overall resilience (ironically).  Perhaps it’s because people don’t want to hear about how they can breathe differently to melt away their stress when they are afraid they can’t pay the bills, or that yoga can fix their problems when they don’t feel part of the team.  Resilience, true resilience, comes from understanding where you are, and how you can be helped.  It’s an active task expected by leadership, not an afterthought that can be fixed with training about ways some folks have found it successful.  Now, I know the irony of me sharing the fact that resilience training doesn’t work as a way of educating someone on how to be resilient, but it’s important to note:  the key to resilience is understanding what you need at the moment and how to avoid completely burning out.  That’s personal, and a good leader can facilitate by providing options, showing compassion, and being supportive.  

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Looking to build resilience on your team, but not sure where to start?  Let us help!  We can guide your team through the fundamentals of motivational needs, leadership approaches, business conversations, and cultural change management that will increase trust, productivity, and engagement with your teams.  Ask us how!  

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