What problems do your training design, development and consulting typically solve?
Our training solutions are designed to be flexible, targeted and modular to solve for countless challenges.
See “Training Challenges & Solutions in What types of problems does Intelivate solve?”
Why are training programs and training important?
Training should be an exciting and accurate interpretation of both organizational vision and business process.
It’s difficult – and sometimes impossible – to realize the true potential of your leadership strategy and process without formalized training programs.
Why does training fail?
There are any number of reasons that make a training program ineffective. Some of the primary reasons we see training programs fail to perform include:
- Goals are not defined or are unrealistic for the training program
- Goals are not matched to the training delivery approach
- Disconnect in current business process or process documentation
- Lack of reinforcement or leadership involvement
- Lack of ongoing quality checks, links to key business and team performance indicators, or incorrect link to KPIs
- Trainers that are subject matter experts but haven’t been ‘trained to train’ or how to develop influence.
This is by no means an all-inclusive list. We can work with you to quickly identify your current training gaps and the core cause(s) of poor training program performance.
What are ways to improve training programs?
Regardless of the training approach, these items increase not only the chances of success but of the real value returned to the business:
- Leadership reinforcement/accountability.
- Evaluation of process support to ensure that process does not contradict or work against the goals. Ideally, your business process is strategically aligned to not only support the goals but grow them over time.
- Accountability in reinforcement and goal attainment of participants after participation.
Ideally, these are connected in both operations and process adherence, performance measures, leadership coaching and relates back to specific operational needs that are BEING SOLVED by the investment in participant time and effort and the cost of the program.
What is your process for developing a training program?
Although we always customize the process based on your unique goals and needs, here is our general training design process.
Assessment and Identification
This phase is used to assess and identify current gaps in information, process, and design in the current training program(s). This phase identifies “what isn’t currently working to potential.”
Design
This phase is used to design a training program from start to finish. It is the blueprint for all components of the new program and the steps to proper and complete implementation.
When designing and developing training content, we leverage three major components:
Mindset Focus, necessary for significant and sustainable performance change, segues to introducing, developing and improving performance skills.
Approach Focus, applying the new mindset toward developing and improving performance skills, generates creative approaches based on audience and determined goals.
Result Focus, implementing newly developed skills, utilizes comprehensive applications, projects, and effective collaboration.
Pre-Implementation Documentation and Processes
This phase is used to execute all tasks, programs, and processes that should occur before the actual training program implementation in order to increase the chances of success during training.
The goals of this phase are to both set expectations and to manage resistance, especially if the training involves change management in process, skill and/or mindset. Two of the main components of this phase are communications and a leadership session.
Communications Plan
Communications are developed and implemented to set expectations and build anticipation for the actual training. It helps to answer the “why” and “how” to everyone that will be involved with the training.
Leadership Session
The leadership session is designed and implemented to preview the final program, ensure leadership cohesiveness and acceptance, and to provide coaching/reinforcement strategies for the new process, mindset and skills once participants leave the training.
This is a critical component of any program as if the mindset and skills are not reinforced and coached to once participants leave training, desired performance results are either not realized or not sustainable.
Training Implementation
This phase is used to implement the designed curriculum to targeted participants. Training implementation should be customized based on goals, audience and staffing “shrinkage” allowances.
Implementation can occur over a single session or multiple sessions based on these variables.
Post-Implementation Documentation and Processes
This phase is used to execute all tasks, programs, and processes that should occur after the actual training program implementation to increases the chances of desired results and ROI of the training implementation.
Two of the main components of this phase is the success roadmap and reinforcement activities.
Success Roadmap
We develop and utilize a success roadmap to give participants guidance on how to implement the new concepts, developed mindsets, and skills into their roles and day-to-day functions.
This is critical in eventually realizing significant and sustainable training results.
Reinforcement Activities
Reinforcement activities are used to reinforce and refresh participants periodically on the concepts and skills learned in the training.
Because these are usually implemented by leadership in team meetings or coaching sessions, an ancillary benefit is periodic leadership reinforcement as well.
What is a training needs analysis?
A training needs analysis determines specific training or knowledge gaps in the business based on your current or future organizational goals.
A training needs analysis is much more than just a survey. A survey or series of surveys are just one component of a needs analysis.
Other components of a training needs analysis include:
- Mapping KPIs to current training to determine team performance trends linked to training
- Future business changes including technology implementations
- Current business process documentation and any identified process gaps
- Evaluating current training content and programs for overlaps and gaps
A training needs analysis is essential for identifying the right training, with the right content for the right audience and to receive maximum ROI on your training investments.
Also, see:
“What types of staff and employee surveys do you recommend?”
What is train the trainer?
A train the trainer develops trainers in a specific skill-set or to prepare them to properly facilitate a specific training program.
What is your train the trainer model and methodology?
Our train the trainer model and methodology primarily depend on if the training is for a specific training program or to develop the trainer overall.
Intelivate performs both types of a train the trainer.
We even have a full leadership and influence course for trainers. The primary function of an effective trainer is to influence participants towards desired mindset and behaviors. This is also the primary goal of leadership vs management.
A train the trainer model for a specific training program might include:
- Familiarizing the trainer with the training program goals and content.
- Demonstrating the facilitation of the key training program modules to the trainer participants.
- Facilitating activities for deep-learning of the training content.
- Observing trainer participants doing a teach-back of the one or more key training program modules.
- Giving structured feedback to trainer participants on their teach-back sessions.
- A comprehensive test for official certification to facilitate the training program.
Do you conduct trainer assessments and facilitation evaluation?
Yes. Trainer assessments are great tools for new trainers or tenured trainers looking for improvement or to implement in a trainer-specific career progression plan.
Trainer assessments and facilitation evaluations can be done in one of three ways:
- Remote observation through live-streaming of the facilitation
- Remote observation through video recording of the facilitation
- On-premise observation of the facilitation
In all cases, we customize the trainer assessments to incorporate your specific business goals.
Can you facilitate training feedback forms and training evaluations?
Yes. We design a training feedback form specific to your training programs using best-practice methods.
You will get a detailed training feedback analysis based on the results. We even analyze how ‘reliable’ the answers are based on a number of statistics and variables. This is to ensure you are using relevant data as a basis of your training improvements.
We can also keep combined data over time for a specific training program, all training programs, and trainers. This provides powerful data to detect overall program and training trends for the organization.
Aggregating training feedback form data requires a different approach to developing and administering the evaluations.
If you think this is something you will need in the future, let us know at the beginning so the forms are designed correctly.
What is meeting facilitation and why should I consider it?
Meeting facilitation is where we facilitate a meeting for you. The meeting has very specific goals and we develop a meeting facilitation approach with those goals in mind.
There are many benefits to using a consultant for meeting facilitation. One the reasons leaders consider a meeting facilitation consultant is so that everyone can be involved as participants.
This is especially beneficial for new teams or developing team norms, as well as identifying and prioritizing business-critical initiatives.
We can even design and develop the meeting facilitation content for you and then someone internal to the organization can execute the facilitation.
Does Intelivate do team building sessions?
Yes. How we do that is based on your goals, budget and the number of locations with participants. We’ve even design team building sessions that are facilitated remotely with virtual teams.
One recommendation we have is to analyze whether a team building session is a right approach based on your goals. We can quickly help you answer that question.
If we determine a team building session is not the right approach, we often recommend meeting facilitation as a more effective alternative.