In an age of information overload and constant change, corporate training matters more by the day. But in a climate of tight budgets, is it merely a nice-to-have — something a company can just as easily do without? Surely no one would deny that training can lift staff performance, boost morale, raise productivity and reduce turnover. Choose the right people, let each play to their strengths, and a company can rise above an intensely competitive market.
Mindset: easily overlooked in corporate training, yet the bedrock of performance
Mindset decides everything. "Mindset" and "habit" are key ingredients of corporate training. Adjust employees' "mindset" effectively and cultivate their "habits", and you can lift the operating efficiency and results of the whole team in a way that lasts.
Mindset is, in essence, a matter of attitude towards work, and every job calls for the right one. Take, for example, how managers in recent years have faced changes in the workplace — including work-from-home arrangements — that demand rapid adaptation while still leading a team. Here, the growth mindset proposed by Dweck (2006) is crucial: a growth mindset (Growth Mindset) is the belief that ability, qualities and skills are the product of sustained effort, rather than something fixed at birth. It follows naturally that, with a growth mindset, managers will not become complacent and stand still. The good news is that a growth mindset can be cultivated. The benefits of a growth mindset are many, including fostering positive thinking, heightening the drive to learn, improving work efficiency and handling stress effectively.
Once employees hold a good mindset, you can begin to work on behaviour and skills. Offering work-related training — Excel tutorials, service and sales techniques, and the like — can directly improve employees' efficiency and performance, and the results of that training often hinge on whether employees can apply what they learn and keep at it over time.
Behaviour: after a training programme, timely coaching is what makes it pay off
Timely coaching (Coaching) plays an important part in the learning process: observing employees' performance closely, giving timely on-the-spot feedback, setting short-, medium- and long-term learning goals for them, and reviewing their results regularly all help to drive their learning and growth — and here, a manager's coaching skills are key.
Coaching skills are undoubtedly a major challenge for many new managers. In practice, a new manager might start with praise — recognising what an employee does well before guiding them on what to improve. Managers can also strengthen performance management through Skinner's (1938) theory of operant conditioning. Widely applied in education and business, the theory neatly captures the interplay of the carrot, the stick and the cane: it holds that people can be prompted, through stimuli such as reward and punishment, to produce responses (Response) — and thereby learn the behaviour that is hoped for.
Research suggests that intangible rewards such as praise are better at sparking employees' self-motivation than tangible ones such as a pay rise. Irregular rewards — a manager treating the team to afternoon tea, say — are also more effective at encouraging good behaviour. Managers should bear in mind that, as stimulus and response are repeated, the link can weaken in response to timing and environment (Extinction), affecting how lasting the behaviour is, so a manager would do well to watch for this and adjust accordingly. Master the techniques within and you can apply them flexibly to achieve the desired effect.
Emotion: with loyalty in decline, reforming the team is a must
As for emotion, a good deal of research points to a positive relationship between employee loyalty, team spirit and team performance (Yee, Yeung, & Cheng, 2010; Murali, Poddar, & Seema, 2017). Employees are a company's important asset, and raising their loyalty is vital to the company's development.
However, a report published by the human-resources management firm TINYpulse points to a downward trend in employee loyalty: 43% of respondents would leave their job for a 10% pay rise, up 18% on the previous year. The report surveyed 25,000 working people across North America, Europe, Asia and Australia, and found that the main reasons for the decline in loyalty were a lack of a good company culture, working environment, and opportunities to learn and grow. It recommended that companies use regular town halls or team activities to understand how employees feel and the problems they face, and to foster communication, trust and collaboration. Clearly, then, strengthening team communication and cohesion brooks no delay.
In fact, as long as you train employees effectively across emotion, behaviour and cognition, they will develop a good attitude towards work, become self-motivated, add value and create a multiplier effect that lifts the team's results.
As the saying goes: "Sow a habit early and it becomes second nature." Good habits are the cornerstone of success. Surely no one would deny how important it is to build good habits — and yet many fall into the trap of thinking that simply repeating something doggedly is enough to forge the chain of habit and form a good one. In truth, blind persistence only leaves you worn out and likely to give up halfway. The key to building a good habit, then, lies not in sheer persistence but in creation — that is, in creating value and giving the habit meaning. Here, a manager can use the growth mindset and operant conditioning to weave meaning and value into a good habit, motivating the team to press on towards its goals. In addition, the scaffolding theory of Bruner, Ross, & Wood (1976) holds that breaking a final goal down into smaller, more attainable ones helps to achieve that final goal — and here, too, a manager can use praise or small rewards to encourage the team towards the next goal.
Mindset, behaviour and emotion are key ingredients of corporate training. TreeholeHK will be sharing more training-related knowledge with you, including the growth mindset, positive thinking, sales and service techniques, presentation skills, negotiation skills, coaching skills, leadership skills, strategic thinking, team building and training tools. Do stay tuned.
References
Rachel, Y., Andy, Y., & Edwin, C. (2010). An empirical study of employee loyalty, service quality and firm performance in the service industry. International Journal of Production Economics, 124(1), 109-120.
Sachin, M., Aayush, P., & A, S. (2017). Employee loyalty, organizational performance & performance evaluation–a critical survey. Journal of Business and Management, 19(8), 62-74.
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