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Jana Kemp

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About a decade ago, when I served on a local chapters ASTD board, I began to ponder the stalemate that can occur when trying to reach a decision through consensus. During one particularly drawn-out meeting, I found myself listening to human resource colleagues circling in conversation without deciding anything. Sitting there, I reflected on the...

Deciphering Your Decision-Making Mindset

Presents meeting-management tips. Description of meeting makers and meeting breakers; Qualities of a good contributor of ideas in meetings; Suggestions for mastering meeting skills.

From meeting breakers to meeting makers

Jana M. Kemp

You’re busy, busy, busy. So is your staff. There are skills and competencies that they need (or want) to develop, but you don’t have the budget to send them off to some three-day training seminar. Or maybe that’s not even an option for the content or experience you’re looking to develop. Or you’ve been there, done that. What to do?! Relax! There are actually lots of things you could do, right now, to develop your employees. And many of them won’t cost you a dime. Here are five ideas to get you started:Let them fly solo. By reading books or blogs, listening to podcasts or audio books, watching educational videos on TED or YouTube, or apprenticing and trying to practice a new skill with a master or a role model, employees can use self-directed learning anytime and almost anywhere. Libraries, online resources, and other employees are all examples of freely available resources that are all around us. Let your employees assess their learning readiness and learning style, and choose some self-directed development goals to achieve.Encourage volunteering. Employees who take on volunteer roles are able to build new skills and practice existing skills in a different setting from their day-to-day jobs. They can try something that is different from their usual work and bring back those skills to their current job, thereby adding value by improving their current job performance. Volunteering usually takes place on employees’ own time and doesn’t require anything but your moral support.Facilitate mentoring. Whether acting in the role of the mentor or the protégé, participating in a mutually-beneficial mentoring relationship (within or outside your organization) allows employees to develop a variety of new knowledge and skills and takes no resources (except a little bit of time). Employees can learn tricks of the trade and technical information as well as develop ‘softer’ competencies such as leadership, networking and partnering, coaching and listening skills.Give time for creativity. Allow employees to work on something that doesn’t fall within the parameters of their day-to-day job for a specific amount of time—a dedicated “Innovation/Creativity Zone.” During this time, employees can chase down an idea, do an experiment, or conduct research. The only requirement is that the employees report back what they have accomplished during that dedicated chunk of time away from work. Companies like Google, Facebook, Atlassian, 3M and Twitter, among many others, have used this method to not only allow employees to develop their own creativity and problem-solving skills in a hands-on way, but to realize organizational benefits in the form of new solutions and products.Promote social networking. Employees can collaborate with others using various online tools to share knowledge, build relationships, and interact with content and with other members of the online community. Also known as Learning 2.0 or Enterprise 2.0, these tools allow learners to learn independently, more quickly, and more efficiently, and to be more productive and effective as a result. Most of the content in these systems is user generated and user rated for interest, relevance, and helpfulness. There are lots of externally available social networking platforms we all use and love like LinkedIn, Facebook, and YouTube, as well as firewall-protected enterprise network solutions like Jive, Microsoft SharePoint, and Yammer. Additional Resources:In my forthcoming book, Employee Development on a Shoestring (ASTD Press, 2012), I describe these and six other creative employee development methods that help you keep your budget and time investment to a minimum. Dan Pink describes the Creativity Zone idea in his 2010 book, Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us. Excellent resources on Learning 2.0 ideas and tips are Tony Bingham and Marcia Conner’s The New Social Learning: A Guide to Transforming Organizations Through Social Media (2010), Jeanne Meister and Karie Willyerd’s The 2020 Workplace: How Innovative Companies Attract, Develop, and Keep Tomorrow’s Employees Today (2010), and Jane Bozarth’s Social Media for Trainers: Techniques for Enhancing and Extending Learning (2010).What are ways you’ve developed your employees’ knowledge and skills without spending an arm and a leg? I’d love to hear your ideas, stories, and questions in the blog comments below!

5 Ways to Develop Employees without Spending a Dime

Jana Reddin leads talent and organizational development at Texas Instruments, a global semiconductor company that designs, manufactures, tests, and sells analog and embedded processing chips. She and her team are responsible for creating and executing the talent strategy to support TI’s business organizations and the company’s 30,000 employees and leaders.In her role, Reddin leads a worldwide team that creates and executes on leadership development programs, technical development programs, and onboarding for new employees. Her team members are embedded in various organizations to provide talent and organizational development approaches to address the unique needs of each organization. Her team is also responsible for developing a leadership pipeline within these organizations, while also developing current leader capability through the use of targeted on-the-job development programs, assessments, coaching, in-classroom and virtual classroom experiences.Prior to TI, Reddin was the manager of talent management and organization development at 7-Eleven, where she was responsible for the performance management process, leadership development, talent review and succession planning, selection and development assessments, and high potential selection and development programs. She also spent time as a consultant where she would partner with organizations to provide talent management solutions to drive business strategy through selection and development assessments, executive leadership assessments, 360-degree assessments and feedback, leadership development workshops, organizational analysis and design, competency modeling, and succession planning.Reddin received a Bachelor of Science in Psychology from Austin College, a Master of Business Administration from the University of Texas at Dallas, and her doctorate from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.

Jana Reddin

If you are like me, you have an inbox filled with articles like, “What to Do in Times of Crises,” “Business Continuity Plans,” and “Free Content Offerings.” Businesses everywhere are responding to this new reality we’ve all found ourselves in.We started wondering if our own search data from millions of users around the world could tell us what employees are really looking for now—and how we could appropriately support them and their companies. What did we learn? Looking at the data tells a different story than the headlines.Yes, there is a significant increase in searches related to working remotely and remote work tools, such as MS Teams, Zoom, and Webex. People are also engaging with the pathways quickly created by their companies in response to the pandemic.However, when we looked at not just percentage increase but also at the overall search volume, we saw a distinct group of skills with a sharp search increase while others were significantly decreasing.Ultimately, we saw an increase in searches for Microsoft Excel, leadership, and communication (up 4 percent, 5 percent, and 15 percent, respectively) and even sharper decreases in searches for Python (down 20 percent), Java (down 27 percent), and machine learning (down 37 percent).To put this in some perspective, the number of searches for Excel-related skills is 10 times greater in volume than searches about remote working or the coronavirus. Searches related to communication skills are five times greater than current events.Finding Meaning in the MetricsBased on the chart below, the data suggests that employees are looking for skills with longer shelf lives, that are highly transferable, and that can help individuals and their companies manage change. While they don’t fit perfectly into the categories of hard and soft skills, we are thinking of these identified skills as “flexible.”Why flexible? Well, that data is grouping data analysis and leadership, Excel, and change management—perhaps seemingly unrelated skills. The common thread we see is that these are skills that can serve an employee well in almost any situation, across industries and geographies. Need to quickly launch a new product? Communication, design thinking, and leadership fit well together. The same is true if your company is suddenly shifting the way work gets done—time management, coaching, and change management will be essential for leaders and frontline employees.On the other hand, searches showing a decrease in overall search volume are highly technical and hard skills, such as Python, Java, and machine learning. We think that in calmer (more stable) times, users were looking to develop their careers or aspirational abilities to learn new, in-demand technical skills. The data doesn’t tell us—and we don’t think—that these skills are less important now than before. But it is clear that as business environments change, cutting-edge skills are not top of mind for most employees.Change in Volume of Employee’s Search TermsThis data looks at February and March search volume and compares the percent change with the time period two months prior (December and January) by active users and fully deployed clients.Time will tell how long the trend we are currently seeing in search data will last. However, it is clear that flexible skills are extremely important to companies and employees in times of change and uncertainty. As change is the only constant, this could be a good time to review what content and guidance your company is offering employees around these flexible skills.For more information about how talent development technology can help you foster and gain insights into your people’s skills, download our guide to talent development technology.

Keep Calm and Follow the Data: Search Results Reveal What Employees Value Most in Times of Uncertainty

The trend is clear. Increasingly more learning programs are occurring in small chunks. The good news is that neuroscience research is starting to show that learning in smaller, modular chunks can have benefits for making learning last. In their recent article in the January 2014 issue of T+D, “Keep an Eye on the Time,” authors Josh Davis, Maite J. Balda, and David Rock detail two findings about attention that are most helpful for creating small chunks of learning. First, attention has limits of only about 20 minutes before needing a refresher. Second, multitasking is the enemy of learning. Here’s the gist from the research: “To get the most out of learning sessions, start by paying attention to attention. Change focus every 20 minutes or so, either in content or context. Remove multitasking wherever you find it. Educating learners about the importance of a single focus so that their brains know to encode new information can go a long way.”ASTD Members can read the complete article at www.astd.org/Publications/Magazines/TD/TD-Archive/2014/01/Keep-An-Eye-on-the-Time.

Mustn’t Miss: Keep an Eye on the Time

A random tweet led me to revisit a few-years-old TEDx talk on intellectual property and the fashion industry. Fashionista communities  thrive on the fact that clothing designs are without copyright protection. This reality spurs plenty of design knock-offs of course. But it also contributes to explosive innovation and increasingly outrageous concepts in garment-making that constantly push the industry forward.So what about the training industry? Although there is trademark protection for certain e-learning programs or software suites, fundamental adult learning approaches are not protected by copyright. And I witness trainers freely sharing and borrowing ideas and models from each other all the time! The question is, has this contributed to the kind of innovation and experimentation in organizational L&D as we see on the runways? If not, why not? What lessons can the L&D field borrow from low-IP industries and cultures to remain on the advance?

Collaborative Culture and Keeping L&D in Style

Some of this year’s L&D Blog posts from Chopeta Lyons and Ruth Colvin Clark have inspired me to consider carefully the important connections we make between visuals and the concepts they represent. There probably isn't a learning program in existence in which designers or facilitators aren't inviting their learners to form some sort of relationship, be it basic or complex, between an image and a crucial chunk of information.When L&D professionals try to make instruction memorable and applicable on the job, visuals can be one's most reliable tool, and there is a wealth of evidence to support these efforts. But a recent Chopeta Lyons blog entry reminds us that what learners' brains actually see, and what we intend for them to see, don't always synch up. Even seasoned trainers need to hunt down resources to help them strengthen the image-to-idea connections in classrooms. After all, those of us who have ever worked in marketing or advertising know that these connections can mean everything to how successfully you engage your audience.I recently watched a YouTube video on the origins of the World War II era "Keep Calm and Carry On" posters. It's pretty fascinating how such a simple, utilitarian slogan quickly became a nearly ubiquitous Internet meme more than 70 years later. It's also a bit troubling to think that, thanks to the Internet meme movement, an image that resonates with people and symbolizes a harmless idea today, can morph into something dramatically different overnight. (Does anyone remember what happened to motivational posters?)So this month, I'd like to offer you what I hope is an interesting and reflective challenge: Send me a short, 60- to 90-second video about one of your most unique or successful uses of images in the class or in a program design to evoke certain connections or reactions. What did you use? How did it work out? Most importantly, what did you learn from your learners? Maybe you have even used the Internet meme phenomenon to effectively brand your training or make an important concept extra sticky.Email me your ideas, and I will post the best video in next month's newsletter. I'm looking forward to seeing what you come up with. In the meantime, click here.

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