optimizing employee learning on the job (advertising account management)

October 2014

ACCOUNT MANAGEMENT SKILLS DEVELOPMENT SERVICE

OPTIMIZING EMPLOYEE LEARNING ON THE JOB

1.  Workplace training: Why and Why so little

2.  «On the job» concept and rationale

3.  How the approach works 4.  What’s in it for your organization

Giroux - Optimizing employee learning on the job (October 2014)

WORKPLACE TRAINING: WHY and WHY SO LITTLE

To improve and perform better

Account Managers that …


Know how to build a relation of trust with their clients.

Can efficiently deal with delicate client problems/situations.

Know their client’s in-depth and thus can identify potential new business opportunities for the agency.

According to the Canadian Federation of Independent Business, close to six out of ten

small-to-medium size companies miss business opportunities because their employees lack

training.

Reported by Stéphane Champagne in La Presse - Quand formation rime avec

innovation (March 18, 2013)

Develop clear and convincing briefs and presentations.

Can build a productive working environment on their account at the agency.

Pay attention to client profitability.

* Corporate Executive Board studies ‘Driving Results Through Employee Development’ and ‘Engaging Managers as Agents of Employee Development’

Line managers who effectively train their reports can easily improve their performance by

25 % ! *

To better engage staff and develop next generation leaders


Engagement and retention

Highly engaged employees are 87% less likely to leave their employers than their disengaged colleagues.

2004


Engagement salary

Over the years, surveys have been unanimous on why employees leave their jobs. The boss thinks that the

employee is leaving for salary reasons. However, his reasons have more to do with a lack of challenges, a poor

working environment or a lack of training

Florent Francoeur, CEO of l’Ordre des conseillers en ressources humaines du Québec. (Des stratégies pour éviter de perdre un employé clé – January 9, 2013)


Staff turn-over costs a lot !

The termination of an employee, voluntary or not, costs on average 0.5 to

2 times his/her salary. Staff turn-over can thus add up to hundreds of thousand

of dollars of extra costs […] for an organization. And this does not take into account the negative impact on the firm’s

reputation.

Samuel Larochelle, Taux de roulement: Les dommages collatéraux. (April 26, 2014).


More than 60 percent of all organizations cite “leadership gaps”

as the top business challenge.

In today’s heating economy and rapid shift in demographics, you’ll be

competing for talent regardless of your industry.

Josh Bersin – Employee Retention Now a Big Issue: Why the Tide has Turned (16 août, 2013)

February 4, 2014 Press release – Based on Bersin research on the topic of human capital trends, due to be published H1’2014.

Developping next generation leaders : A growing challenge


WHY SO LITTLE ?

… time to: ü  Assess employees’ training

needs ü  Create workplace

environments conducive to learning

ü  Help employees navigate the vast amount of learning materials now available

ü  Coach and mentor them as well as provide feedback

Training people requires time …


Unfortunately, line managers are increasingly short of time


Between 2003 and 2013, we asked 37,419 managers (from 891 different organizations), “What is the hardest thing for you about managing people?” We collected narrative verbatim responses to this open-ended question. The vast majority of responses fell into 10 categories. (The top two are *:)   Not enough time or too many people to manage (span of control); insufficient

time to attend to managing direct reports due to other non-management tasks and responsibilities (24%)

  Giving negative feedback to employees regarding their performance (19%)

Bruce Tulgan (Jan/Feb 2014)

* Categories #3 to #10, each received 4 to 6% of mentions and included: Different personalities of the various employees, interpersonal conflict on the team, balancing being the boss with being a friend, etc.

The greatest challenge to providing [career management programs among Canadian businesses] is time :

Challenge: % of businesses (n=500) Lack of time 45 Cost 33 Lack of expertise 13 None of the above 4 Not our responsibility 2

Career Development in the Canadian Workplace: National Business Survey. Survey done on behalf of the Canadian Education and Research Institute for Counselling (CERIC). January 2014

Some prefer to search for the «magical» solution …

Where bosses once hired for potential, viewing workers as lumps of clay to be moulded to the

company's needs, they now want hires to arrive with all or most of

the skills needed for the job — another symptom of how the employer-

employee relationship has become reduced to a transaction, said Peter Cappelli, a management

professor at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School.

Just Whose Job Is It to Train Workers - Lauren Weber, wjs.com (July 29, 2014)


MY MISSION

To help advertisers and advertising agencies improve the skills and productivity of their brand or account management personnel.

«ON THE JOB» CONCEPT AND RATIONALE

More than 70 % of what people know about their jobs has been learned informally,

on the job. Sources:   Lombardo and Eichinger (1996),   US Bureau of Labour Statistics

(1998)   Charles Jennings (2007)   Jay Cross (2007)

Workers learn more in the coffee room than in the classroom. They discover how to do their

jobs through informal learning: talking, observing others, trial-and-error, and simply

working with people in the know. Formal learning—classes and workshops—is the source of only 10 to 20 percent of what

people learn at work. […].

Jay Cross (Blog - 20 feb. 2012)

Formal vs. informal learning

Formal: ¨  Out-of-the-office ¨  An event ¨  Often a lecture

¨  To be applied «later on»

Informal: ¨  Integrated with work ¨  On-going ¨  An experiment, a

conversation ¨  Just-in-time:

Problem/task-driven


Just-in-time; Problem/task-driven

The key is to put things into practice. If one learns something and has no time to apply it, what is the

point ? Robert Haccoun, professor of Industrial Psychology Quoted in La Presse – La clé c’est la mise en pratique (March 25, 2013)

Hermann Ebbinghaus (1885)


Informal learning: Judged more effective (relative to usage levels) by organizations that responded to CIPD’s 2014 survey

  Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development

  Founded in 1913 (Welfare Workers’ Association)

  130,000 professionnals in HR management throughout the world

  Based in Wimbledon (London), UK


Learning & Development Annual survey report 2014

[Unfortunately] corporations overinvest in formal training programs while neglecting

natural, simpler informal processes.

Jay Cross (Blog – Feb 20, 2012)

Shouldn’t organizations pay more attention to this 70 % of learning done informally?

To develop working conditions that favour informal learning is a particularly interesting avenue for

organizations: Employees already learn that way, without knowing it, without it being recognized, without support, without direction, and without any reading of

its impacts. […]

Sylvie Tousignant – L’Apprentissage informel dans un contexte organisationnel : Le quoi, mais surtout le

comment (L’OBSERVATOIRE-COMPÉTENCES-EMPLOIS. March 2013).

Optimizing employee learning …on the job

One-on-one facilitating, support and mentoring-type interventions, undertaken at the organization’s place of business, and customized to each employee’s specific performance needs, projects and tasks.

Optimizing learning on

the job.

3- Draw lessons learned and share them.


We need to move much of what we do (as learning professionals) as far into the natural workflow of the organization as possible

Conrad Gottfredson The Other Side of Learning: « Performance is Everything» (Learning Solutions Magazine, April 26, 2011).

Make sure you keep a dynamic position during this first long

pitch. All right? Go ahead !!

Similar approaches in the market …

Learning in action at the SAQ The SAQ offers its managers a «learn in action training programme», (…) a practical programme anchored on

the everyday life of its employees.

(March 8, 2014)

«Formalize» Informal Learning More than 80% of corporate learning occurs through informal approaches (…). Today's high-impact learning

programs "formalize" informal learning into their design (…)

HOW IT WORKS

Identify training needs

1.

2.

Select relevant projects

3. Search for &

validate learning contents

4.

Facilitate. Support. Mentor. 5.

Evaluate progress &

contents

6.

Draw lessons. Share them.

ANALYSIS

EXECUTION

PLANNING

The crux of the matter (in workplace training) is to have a good understanding of one’s needs and

of one’s objectives. Too many companies loose sight of this. There are so many possibilities in a

training initiative that one can easily make incorrect choices.

Hugues Foltz, President of Ellicom, a major Canadian e-learning provider. (Quoted in La Presse, 8 april 2013).

Analysis


Understanding the environment:   The organization   The people to be trained

Prioritizing needs – by person, by skill

For each targeted employee, identifying performance gaps that are due to a skills deficiency

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Analysis


6 ACCOUNT MANAGEMENT BEDROCK SKILLS

Communicating

Analyzing/solving problems

Developing a client relationship based on

trust

Creating a productive work environment on the account

Identifying new business opportunities for the agency

Contributing to better client profitability

THINK

APPLY

LEARNING

To learn is …

Planning & execution


Execution   Facilitate and

support thinking (discovery and understanding) before and after apply.

  Document and help

share new learning.

THINK

APPLY

LEARNING

Planning   Identify promising

application opportunities.

  Find contents/tools to help stimulate thinking.

To learn is …

Planning & execution


Learning contents/tools

GIROUX’S TOOLS :

q  Personal library: Public documents (articles, videos, blogs, cases, how to) I have gathered on the targeted skills.

q  Personal experience

CLIENT’S TOOLS :

q  In-house methods/processes and associated templates

q  «Best-in-class» examples (of letters, analysis, briefs, etc.)

q  Knowledgeable colleagues

q  Other contents (or tools) that belong to the client (for example, materials from ICA/WARC/etc.; courses/tutorials already purchased; etc.)

Execution – Facilitate, support, mentor


Mentoring consists of an interpersonal relationship of support, sharing, and learning in which a person of experience—the

mentor—shares her/his wisdom and expertise to guide a less-experienced person (or group) towards personal growth and

broader knowledge. Coaching or mentoring: Which is the best

approach for the development of resources? (SSA SOLUTIONS, Nov 7, 2012)

Coaching and mentoring are ‘helping behaviours’ used to support personal development over shorter and longer periods respectively. Mentoring involves the use of the same models and

skills of questioning, listening, clarifying and reframing associated with coaching.

(cipd.com)

Execution – Typical session

Review progress on each project:   Problems/difficulties? Successes?   Lessons learned to date?

Review understanding of learning contents/tools used to date

Generate potential approaches to address problems/difficulties

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Evaluate (and self-evaluate) acquired skills and training process

  Draw appropriate lessons learned

Document, catalogue and share new learning

  Ideally, set up Knowledge Management System

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Execution – Evaluate, document, share


Timelines


Identify training needs

1.

2.

Select relevant projects

3. Search for &

validate learning contents

4.

Facilitate. Support. Mentor. 5.

Evaluate progress &

contents

6.

Draw lessons. Share them.

Analysis & planning : Week #1

4-5 hours/employee

Execution: Weeks #2-14

1-2 hours per week/employee

WHAT’S IN IT FOR YOU

A skills development service that :


1. Is flexible and easily integrates into the organization’s ongoing operations. Thus, a non-disruptive service.

2.  Is anchored on real work situations: Allows rapid application of learnings and impact on skills level.

3.  Leads to the development of sound continuous learning habits.

4.  Targets «fundamental» account management skills.

CLAUDE GIROUX brings more than 30 years of marketing and agency experience to his role as a consultant and workplace trainer for marketing professionals. Claude spent seven years in Brand Management with Procter & Gamble, training Brand Assistants and Managers. Claude’s career also includes thirty years in Account and Agency Management with Ogilvy & Mather Canada and Ogilvy Montréal, where he designed and implemented internal training and support programs for managers and directors. Claude is an accredited Trainer with a Diploma in Workplace Training (UQAM, 2013) and holds a Bachelor of Commerce (Marketing) from McGill University. He is also a guest lecturer for the McGill/Desautels Faculty of Management.