Brenda Burch Dumont's Blog

I was once , very briefly in 1989, the Director of Training at Woodward’s Stores in B.C.  It was a little like lining up the deck chairs on the Titanic, but that’s a totally different story for another time.

At that time, however, and right up until about 2005, training and development was an interesting mixture of mentoring (mostly informal), reading from manuals and the very occasion classroom session for those hourly paid individuals with customer-facing responsibilities on the shop floor, hotel front desk or restaurant floor.  Training hours were meted out with Scrooge-like stingy concern.  A full paid day off the floor for a new employee to learn the department, the equipment, the merchandise, the routine and any other orientation was considered a monumental investment.  Many excellent retail and hospitality executives today got their start with about 2 hours of POS training and a day where someone kept an eye on them.

Any sort of management training usually addressed specific need-to-know topics like ‘how to explain the new wage scale’ and was usually addressed in a classroom, on paper, or in a back storage room by a travelling HR rep from head office.  Any ‘development’ was usually accorded only to senior to executive management, was totally ad hoc and without planning and on an individual by individual basis, and may have included attendance at a conference or local seminar for the industry.  Actual participation in industry associations was viewed with skepticism by ‘the executive’.

Am I wrong?  I’ll wager, with some noteworthy exceptions, this was the experience of many  middle management to executive retail and hospitality people who make up my readers.

Now for the rather dramatic, welcome, necessary world of untraining today!

Telephone conferences have been around a long time and they were a great innovation.  Unless the ‘face time’ was necessary for a meeting, travel costs to discuss a specific issue were eliminated and, if properly moderated, the issue got discussed and resolved, often by a fairly large group of people.  Teleconferencing wasn’t and still isn’t an ideal way to train, however.  With no visual focus, and a somewhat awkward feedback protocol, its hard to training anything other than concepts and without feedback and discussion concepts lose clarity.

Enter the Webinar.  Oh, how I love the Webinar! I tried to find out when the Webinar was introduced for this blog, but the result was inconclusive.  Nonethless, within about a 5 or so year span the Webinar are become so common place its part of our business lives.  Its ideal for training, in fact preferable for certain types of technical training where viewing what an item looks like on screen or how to manipulate a computer program is required.  It allows for feedback and can be used successfully, as I do, for groups as small as 1 or as large as 50 or as Michael Stelzner of Social Media Examiner fame whose famous training ‘Summits’ attract 2,000 paid viewers who can interact with the presenters at the end of the seminar in a very productive and seamless feedback fashion.   Alas, I don’t encounter too many examples of the Webinar being used to allow employees to all dial in, view a video on the newest aspect of the company’s social media program and provide feedback.  Do you use Webinars?  Are they just for technical training?

On screen technical training isn’t new.  I used to have new employees view canned videos on Customer Service, or Selling Techniques.  Most of these videos were produced in the US way back in the late 80′s, early 90′s and I think some viewers spent more time laughing about the US accent or the US references than learning.  Still, they were far better than nothing and many a great salesman got started with  the Seven Steps to Selling this way.

If your management development program includes attendance at specific events, conferences, or seminars, check out the following description of an ‘unconference’ on the topic of recruitment, hosted by Radical North that took place in Toronto on October 26th:

radicalnorth

An unconference is an event that has no fixed structure and only two rules, no power point and no presentations. The day is split into sessions during which a series of “tracks” run on a theme with a track leader hosting the discussion, debate and learning. The discussion takes a life of it’s own with attendees bringing their own views, questions and opinions as well as debate. This takes many directions and concludes with real learning and opinion forming. The track leaders are carefully chosen for their areas of experience and knowledge and for the value they can bring to the “track.” They have been drawn from across the globe giving the unconference a genuine global view. You are actively encouraged to disagree, argue, debate and question. The only rule is that you respect one another. Otherwise, this unconference is about what you want to discuss and is not restricted to any agenda.

Quite a bit different from sitting through one speaker or panel session after another with the occasional opportunity for break-outs sessions, eh?

These type of unconferences and tweetups are a result of getting people together to learn who met each other on the internet.  I’ve been to a few and they are a cool combination of targeted learning mixed with already warmed up networking.

Yes, of course, there are still traditional – and highly effective – conferences.  Companies still do classroom training with great results.  Assigning a mentor to a new employee on a formal and strategically planned basis is done consistently and is still an outstanding idea.  Hands on practise on the POS or check-in software is still essential, and individual training sessions on sensitive topics like how to conduct a meaningful and correct employee appraisal still require face to face meetings.

All us consultants involved in any level in social media (and consultants who aren’t) are preparing their annual predictions for the following year.  I’ve been doing it for 7 years and am hard at work on the draft.  It will be very interesting to see what the training consultants say about 2011 in their profession.

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Restaurants, Retail, Retail Education, hospitality by Brenda