A People & Change Consultants, India, newsletter for leadership and development professionals.
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June 2012 | People & Change Consultants, India Between the Lines Engaging Business Leaders “Today just isn’t another day. Today I will create something beautiful”. Volume 4 In this issue Tips to engage business leaders in the training process Training in Retail: An interview with Mallar Chakrabarti SPARK: A PCC India Intervention to enable Retention As training leaders we need to remember that our closeness to business should get reflected through the degree of involvement of business leaders in the various initiatives that we launch. Here are a few ways in which you can engage business leaders: - Engage business leaders for launch activities – mail communications, introduction in forums - Incorporate their message in the content through videos or other methodologies - Involve them to deliver plenary sessions or the opening of your initiatives - Create and implement review sessions with leaders, along with participants
Transcript
June 2012 | People & Change Consultants, India
Between the Lines Engaging Business Leaders
“Today just isn’t another day.
Today I will create something beautiful”.
Volume 4
In this issue
Tips to engage
business leaders in
the training process
Training in Retail:
An interview with
Mallar Chakrabarti
SPARK:
A PCC India
Intervention to enable
Retention
As training leaders we need to remember that our closeness to business should get reflected through the degree of involvement of business leaders in the various initiatives that we launch. Here are a few ways in which you can engage business leaders:
- Engage business leaders for launch activities – mail communications, introduction in forums
- Incorporate their message in the content through videos or other methodologies - Involve them to deliver plenary sessions or the opening of your initiatives - Create and implement review sessions with leaders, along with participants
1. What is the predominant focus of training in your organization? How much of technical and soft skills training do you do? We recognise that increasing knowledge, improving skills and job satisfaction of colleagues are all vital to the continued growth of the company. Our aim to expand and diversify requires that we have the right people, in the right place, at the right time. Many factors affect capability building: • The opening of new stores in new
locations means that we must adapt to different requirements of consumers
• In-store and non-store based positions may require different technical / functional / behavioural skills and competencies
• Colleagues having wide skills range who can work flexibly are more productive for the business.
We employ people from a wide range of backgrounds and all colleagues have the opportunity to grow and develop. We regularly evaluate the performance of our colleagues in order to anticipate any possible skills gaps. This
helps managers and colleagues decide whether they have the correct knowledge, skills, understanding and resources to carry out their job effectively. Through annual reviews and career discussions, colleagues are able to apply for training suited to their needs. We have a flexible and structured approach to training and development, which adapts to individual employee needs. This allows people identified as having the potential and desire to do a bigger or different role to take part in training to develop their skills and leadership capability. We offer colleagues both on-the-job training and off-the-job training. On-the-job training methods include, but are not limited to: • Job shadowing – a person already in the job shows the employee how to do it • Coaching – a manager or designated colleague will help trainees work through problems and inspire them to find solutions • Mentoring – a more experienced member of staff acts as an adviser • Job rotation – the trainee has the opportunity of covering their target role, taking full responsibility on a temporary or limited basis.
An idea that is developed and put into action is more important than an idea that exists only as an idea.
- Buddha
We caught up with Mallar Chakrabarti of Reliance Retail. Mallar, a consummate training professional with close to 13 years of industry experience has been leading and managing various facets of the Training function at corporate and zonal levels. Here is an excerpt of the interview where he shares his insight into training in retail.
Off-the-job training is often more appropriate for training in specific new skills or for developing the individual, in areas such as team-building, communications (for example, making presentations), or organisation and planning. It usually involves attending internal / external (or blended) courses run by professional training organisations or qualified internal training staff. 2. How important is training in the retail segment? The Retail industry is one of the most booming sectors in the Indian economy and is expected to reach around US$ 175-200 billion by 2016. This phenomenal expansion and, in due course, coming of major global players in this sector, has led the role of training to increase significantly. Lack of skilled workers is the major factor that is holding back the retail sector for high growth. High attrition rate among the frontline staff is another crunch area. The sector also faces severe shortage of trainers. Also, the current education system is not sufficiently prepared to address the new processes, according the industry majors. To bridge this gap, many retailers are investing in training and creating captive training academies. Others are partnering with local business schools to create retail certification courses, where students are absorbed into retailers’ operations after graduation. 3. What kind of training will give you a competitive edge in the market? Retail is one of the oldest professions and the business, by appearance, looks deceptively simple. You go buy products in return of some due value. Quite simple, isn’t it? Everything - strategy, execution, product mix, product availability, product pricing and customer service, etc., culminates inside the store, in the selling process. It requires a gargantuan effort and application to ensure that this process results in a satisfied and delighted customer.
Any good market research will tell you various triggers that make for a very satisfying shopping experience; however, the two most important are knowledgeable and helpful associates. These link in very nicely to our learning and development strategy. We expose Associates to training in their specific area of responsibility through various on-the-job and off-the-job methodologies. With the high turnover that retail has, Just-in-Time (JIT) initiatives also play a critical role to bring a new hire up to speed and productive in the quickest time frame, but at the same time ensuring they have the skills needed to serve our customers. For our regular Associates, JIT ensures they stay up-to-date on various critical areas. So we always leverage our learning and development strategy to ensure we meet the business strategy, which is to have extremely satisfied customers. 4. How do you prepare your leaders to anchor the various roles? Our Leadership Framework focuses on select key themes to guide appropriate behaviour in colleagues. This links to critical organizational success factors, which break down further into various levels of assessment. This framework helps to identify those colleagues with the potential to be the “best leaders of the future”. We see it as a priority to develop leadership at every level in every part of the business. Before undertaking training and development, colleagues with the help of their supervisors identify gaps in their knowledge and skills. The gaps identified are logged in a Personal Development Plan. Colleagues and line managers decide how they will fill these gaps by training or development activities. Our programmes provide a long-term strategy for development. It offers, for example, workshops focusing on both leadership behaviours and operating skills. The colleague’s Personal Development Plan includes Activity Plans, a Learning Log (to record what the key learning points of the training were and how they are
going to be used) and a ‘Plan, Do, Review’ checklist to monitor when plans are completed. This allows trainees to carry out their own analysis of progress. Personal development helps to produce long lasting competencies. This means colleagues become more positive, productive and valuable to the organisation in the long term. Development also helps increase the level of colleague motivation. All these initiatives are driven through various L&D engines like Action Learning, Job Rotation, E-Learning, Blended Approach, On-the-Job Coaching, and Mentoring etc., embedded in in-house leadership programs. Using various approaches offers flexibility to colleagues who can attend to their daily official commitments as well as focus on career development. Also, combinations of these drivers ensure that we not only have behavioural skill development but also focus on translating them into tangible business results. The whole process ensures we have the right calibre of staff to build a sustainable leadership pipeline for the future. 5. How do you measure the success of your training programs?
Historically, this has been one of the biggest challenges for any learning and development organization. We do course evaluations at the end of every classroom session. However, smiley sheets tell what the trainees want to say about the quality of the program but they aren't effective for showing return on investment (ROI). We conduct pre-post testing for our learning modules to help measure understanding of the content. The challenge for most learning & development teams is to test application and transfer back to the job. We rely on observation by the facilitator / supervisor – looking for participant application of new knowledge and skills at workplace through feedback, actual job observation, compliance to process and time and motion studies etc., among others. We also measure participation scores and course completion for our retail managers and associate training plans. Measuring results of various training programs / initiatives by focusing on the Customer Opinion scores is also a potent way to measure training initiatives.
Management is efficiency in climbing the ladder of success; leadership determines whether the ladder is leaning against the right wall.
