4-5 pages, not including references or a title page. Use APA formatting. Include at least 3 scholarly sources Training Objectives and SMART Goals Paper Building on your assignment from last week, w
Lesson
Creating Training Objectives and SMART goals
Introduction
Last week, we talked about why and how to find gaps in the organization and how training can fill those gaps. We used tools like SWOT analysis, gap analysis, and needs assessment in order to determine what the state of the organization is today and the state we want the organization to be in the future. Remember that training can only fix those gaps that reflect on the skills, knowledge, or abilities (KSAs) of your workers—training will not solve problems that are created as a result of other things, like vision misalignment in the company, vendor service issues, or supply chain breakdown. For example, if a drought in the Midwest has caused an increase in the cost of corn, a chicken feed company that tries to train its employees to solve for that problem will have missed its gap filling needs if it trains its employees to use excel and budgeting products more efficiently. But perhaps training on wasting less corn when filling feedbags would be a profitable training concept if a gap is found in this area.
This week, we’re going to move further into the training process. We will review the design phase and the evaluation phase. These two are very connected, and failing to accomplish the design phase appropriately will make the evaluation phase almost impossible to do.
What Are Training Objectives?
Training objectives are the goals you want your trainees to meet in the training. After some practice, it becomes easy to create valid, measurable, and on-target training objectives for your training projects. Over time, you will find yourself getting better at honing in on specific key areas you want your employees to walk out the door ready to accomplish in their day-to-day tasks.
Big Dog and Little Dog’s Performance Juxtaposition (Links to an external site.) (Links to an external site.)
Your textbook author recommends the website that is owned by Don Clark from Edmonds Washington. His work on his website is amazing, and you will find multiple items helping you with the concepts of training and instructional design on his site. If you have time this week, review his tips about learning objectives and how to create them. This will really assist you as you work through the assignment this week. Note, however, most training and develoment (T&D) faculty and professionals use information from his site, so it is familiar material. If you use information from the site, please be sure to cite it. For proper APA 6th citation of his site, use the following format.
Clark, D. (2012). Name of page you are using. Big Dog & Little Dog’s Performance Juxtaposition. Retrieved from: [insert URL from the page you used but turn off the hyperlink.] (para. #)
Know Your Gaps
Last week, we spent a lot of time figuring out those gaps we want to fill. If you recall, in the discussions, we talked about your companies and their issues and, most likely, you came up with at least one gap you needed to fill.
For our example, in today's lecture, we'll talk about a fictional hotel in the Midwest that is struggling to make ends meet. (You may recognize this from your textbook's readings—the Noe Suites at the end of Chapter 4.)
The use of exit surveys from customers shows that, despite being a medium-price-point hotel, the customers feel that the service from the front desk and housekeeping leaves quite a bit to be desired. The last two weeks have seen people asking for their money back and demanding to see the manager as a result of feeling they were treated inappropriately by employees. You decide that it is time to conduct some training on customer service. You also realize that your development side of the HR team may have to be involved as well, and you discuss with it some performance improvement plans (PIPs) for your housekeeping manager and front desk associates. The HR director agrees with you that we need to include "completing customer service training" on the PIPs, along with other, detailed requirements specific to each employee's shortcomings.
We will discuss performance improvement plans later in the course, but you should note how they can be tied into training, either for individuals or groups of individuals, such as in this case. It's time to create training objectives for customer service training.
Examples of Training Objectives
In our example of the hotel and our customer service training, we have two groups who need to be retrained: the front desk employees and the housekeeping staff. The complaints show that when customers go to the front desk, often the front desk person is too busy talking on a cell phone or playing computer games to pay attention to what the customers need.
Further, the bills have been late or erroneous (a job of the front desk person), and the wake-up calls have been 10-15 minutes late. Housekeeping has been ignoring the Do not Disturb notices on the doors and walking in on customers and furthermore has failed to provide additional coffee, clean towels, or toiletries in the rooms when customers are staying more than one day.
As a result, the after-hours staff having to make up for this. This means they have done more housekeeping tasks and thus have not been able to focus on their work (i.e., security details and common area cleaning), which has begun impacting the efficiencies in those areas as well.
Create two training objectives for this training (with the understanding that front desk and housekeeping people will take the training).
Performance or outcome desired: Improve listening skills.
Criterion of performance: Employees will notice when a customer needs assistance and will focus on the customer, removing all other distractions from the environment.
Condition: Employees will recognize that customer needs escalate as the stress of the situation increases, and they will learn to decrease the stress for the customer.
Training Objective 1: Employees will actively listen to customer concerns and defuse stressful scenarios by providing solutions in a timely (optimally within 5 minutes of the concern) manner without succumbing to outside distractions (like cell phones or computer games).
Performance or outcome desired: Improve attention to detail skills.
Criterion of performance: Employees will provide error-free products to customers at least 98% of the time.
Condition: This should happen during all times.
Training Objective 2: Employees will utilize checklists of error-prone daily tasks and perform them with less than 2% margin of error. (Tasks will be focused on work-related responsibilities—bill creation, room cleaning, wake up calls, supply stocking.)
When creating training objectives, think about the three parts of the objective and move through it. Then consider whether that objective will solve the problems you are experiencing and how you will measure how well the training worked for your goals of training.
Note: If Training Objective 2 is accomplished, Training Objective 1 will become less important and the stress levels will reduce as a result. It is important as a trainer to ensure your trainees see this connection as well, so make sure it is part of the training program to explain the connection.
SMART Goals and Training Objectives
Performance management requires that human resource managers and supervisors assist their employees in creating SMART goals for the objectives each year. SMART stands for specific, measurable, attainable, realistic, and timely.
Training managers need to set SMART training goals as well. This will come into play when you get to the E in ADDIE—evaluate. If your training goals aren't SMART, then your evaluation will not be accurate, and you will have a hard time proving your training did any good.
Let's see how we did on our above training objectives; we may need to revise or perhaps supplement content in our training goals. We can set the goals to the side until we work on our evaluation pieces.
SMART Applied
S: Specific: Training Objective 1 is specific considering the subject matter: The employees will listen without distraction, diffuse stressful scenarios, and provide solutions.
M: Measurable: We have included a 5-minute rule on providing a measurable solution in the objective. We also say "each" customer—this means 100%. We will measure this through our exit surveys and customer metrics, as well as other staff picking up the work not completed correctly (e.g., when front desk handles a housekeeping error—this will be measured).
A: Attainable: Is it attainable for us to expect 100% customer satisfaction? Probably not. There are always those impossible clients who wouldn't be happy. Our goal is to train the employees to contact a manager to assist no more than 5 minutes into a situation in which a completely irate customer can't be calmed down. We hope that accomplishing Training Objective 2 (attention to detail) will lower the number of stressed and upset customers. Thus, if we ensure our employees understand the connection between training objectives 1 and 2, our goal becomes attainable. Getting the trainees to agree on this will be part of the trainer's work. Our later evaluation method needs to capture this in our metrics, so it is essential to think through this now. This also goes with our R (realistic) in this case.
R: Realistic: During training, you will probably include a section on those impossible-to-please customers and set a policy for how to deal with those. The 5-minute rule can be the key here—after 5 minutes; you will contact a next-level manager for more assistance for angry customers. This may be your Training Objective 3, which you cover after 1 and 2 are handled. Another possible scenario could be if housekeeping runs out of product. Ways to handle this should be covered in training.
T: Timely: Our key to knowing if we have met our goal on reacting to our customers’ needs in a timely manner. How will we time that? More brainstorming on this will be required. Further, in really tricky, volatile situations, we may need a call for help immediately. So, perhaps we want to review that objective one more time so that our trainees don’t get blindsided.
So, our SMART training goals are as follows.
Train our employees to pay attention to the needs of our customers before a problem occurs, striving for 100% happy customers.
Employees perform their duties properly each day without errors, avoiding outside distractions.
See the connection between errors made by one employee in the stress levels of our customers and coworkers who must correct the mistake.
Understand how to recognize and diffuse stressful situations with customers.
Know when to escalate those concerns to management (within 5 minutes, or sooner in emergency situations).
Sharing these goals with our trainees during the training will help them see where the training will focus. Doing this will help them start the training with an understanding of what they will learn, and this will actually improve the results of training.
Applying the Training Objectives to Our Trainees
Trainers need to consider the types of learners who will be taking their training. Different learners have different needs, and the needs of adult learners, in particular, are much different from those of children in school. Thus, this form of learning theory is called andragogy (versus pedagogy for children). As discussed in your textbook, adult learners learn through use and experience, and your training objectives and methods need to recognize this. The training scenarios that you would expect to see based on the training objectives and SMART goals for our training discussed in this lecture are somewhat intuitive to imagine: role-playing will be critical for learning active listening in stressful situations; checklist management for daily tasks will be a bit less fuzzy and more task, skill, and testing related. Tying training into the performance improvement plans (PIPs) we discussed earlier will increase motivation for the employees to learn the material—something that relates more to adult learners than children.
Training Environments
Training environments are included in the outcome of the training objectives. Event-based training (which is becoming much less utilized than, say, online training or use of vendor-supported training) may be the best type for our customer service training specific to the hotel we have been working with. Using an actual room in the hotel to help housekeepers practice seeing errors in their work will be useful in creating a training environment that will assist them in their work later.
Transfer of Training
Transfer of training is when the employee takes what he or she learned in training and applies it regularly, thoroughly, measurably, and effectively later in the workplace. For the transfer to have been successful, this transfer of training actually must make a difference in repairing or filling the gap that was noted in the creation of the training. Again, this is the critical piece for proving to upper management that the training costs made sense to the organization. We will discuss this more in the next few weeks. Although the concepts this week all contribute to transfer of training, figuring out how what will happen comes with the D (design) portion of ADDIE, making it happen comes in the I (implement) portion of ADDIE, and whether or not it has happened is captured in the E (evaluate) portion of ADDIE.
Transcript:
Week 3 ADDIE Training Process Transcript Instructional Design Process Model The Basic system is much more linear than the Iterative system. Anyone basically follows through all of the steps before deciding whether it is necessary to perform a change. Hover over one of the steps of the model to view the description. Analyze Identify your instructional goals Perform learner interviews and analysis Find out what already exists Is there really an instructional need, or is there some other problem? Design Write solid performance objectives Design instructional material Create story boards for instructional videos, animations and tutorials Develop Create the instruction License existing material if appropriate Create any multimedia, videos, tutorials, etc. Develop assessments based on initial performance objectives Implement Use the instruction or let an instructor use it Conduct formative evaluation throughout Conduct summative evaluation at end of module Evaluate What worked and what didn’t? Review formative and summative evaluation Review feedback from students and instructors Were objectives met? Were they understood? Use this information to re-analyze the instructions for improvements 2 The Iterative system allows the Instructional designer at any point to evaluate the instructional material and take one of the four other steps of directions as a result of the evaluation.
