Here is Part 3 of our 5 part series on 'How Training Builds Better Business'.
Part 2 covered 'Deliver more Deliverables'.
Organic osmosis
We’ve heard our fair share of unsuccessful training from some client’s previous attempts that’s hard (but not impossible) to undo the damage of, but at the end of the day, it's important to remember that no organisation sets out to do ‘bad training’. But do organisations intentionally set out to do ‘good training’? And I mean really good, best-practice, gold-standard training. I’ve mentioned what happens when a learner is engaged with learning or products whereby implicitly and indirectly, the effects of their own training or learning transfer to other areas of their role which weren’t necessarily by design.
This is what we’d define as ‘good training’ in that it's had a positive effect on the overall learning culture and behaviour of people within the business, that’s not limited exclusively to the area being trained.
We’ve had many discussions about this here at RedSeed and we’ve landed on the best description we can for this implicit and sometimes even tacit knowledge transfer, and that’s ‘organic osmosis’. This could be as simple as suggesting an alternative product based on learning about another product in the same category and drawing analogies from that, to retaining staff by developing better conflict resolution skills picked up from training on how to deal with customer complaints more effectively.
The MBA project’s process included empathetic interviews with clients, from which a strong and unexpected theme that came to light. This was the that there was a wider effect that well-trained staff have on a business, and the internal culture to boot.
With this in mind, aside from standard quality assurance and review processes that you’ve probably got in place when establishing new training or learning programs, factor in what the wider effects of your training might have on the internal culture of the business. Will it fall into the ‘good’ or ‘bad’ training bucket? And will it organically lead to knowledge osmosis across products and people?Part 4 of this 5 part series of blogs to come next week!
Get in touch to spark a conversation, debate, or even share a story that you think may inspire others to approach learning and content design from a more holistic perspective.
