Be The Trainer

Be the trainer

Every time I walk into the training room, I get the butterflies fluttering their wings frantically as I prepare myself to help my group learn something new. Something useful. The same feeling I had, the first time I trained any group. Initially, I thought this will be gone after the first few session. Now this makes sure that I have prepared well, every time.

So what really prepares you to deliver a good training? How do we really get people involved? What makes it really worth listening to?

It all boils down to how well you connect with your group. Each person is unique. And as a trainer, you need to be able to identify the type of person and connect with them in their own little unique way.

There are a number of tools that you have at your disposal. Discussions, videos, inspiration stories, team games, story building, personal experiences etc. And while using your tools, be sure to add a few jokes here and there to make sure that your group is awake. Afterall, for most of the people, it must have been ages since they sat on a day long sessions.

In any group, there will be a few who open up quickly and share experiences. When the team themselves open up, it really help others to connect and become part of a live and interesting sessions.

There will be people who are little reserved, who needs a little push to get them involved. An activity or a game are usually the best tool that I use here. Where I don’t single them out, but help them come out as a group and break the ice.

Then again, there are people who are still immersed in their office work and are sitting here due to mandatory office training requirements. Now, these are the tricky ones. If they show the confidence to speak out, give them the opportunity. Prompt them to contribute to the story that you are building up. Or may be ask them to share the experience that they had in office. This will help the rest of the team gain from their experience as well as excite them to participate more as a group.

A good trainer always gets the class to participate and guide them to come to a conclusion from the group. A conclusion that the trainer wanted, but was derived and delivered by the group. This way, this will be imbibed in the class and hopefully some of them will make use of it in their daily life.

And once the session is over, it is critical that you analyse the class, to understand, how you could have delivered better. Feedbacks, if the session is recorded, watch the session yourself to see where you faltered and learn. If we, the trainer do not put in the effort to learn, how can we expect our group to learn.

To a better tomorrow … Keep learning.

-Ruby

Employee Induction – Process and Check list

Employee Induction – Process and Check list

Process of Induction and Orientation:

• Link with the recruitment team for New joiners
• Scheduling of Programme
• Fixing Numbers of participants
                      o        Max – 15
                      o Minimum – 6
• Drawing the Program content
• Arrange Venue, Food, Handouts and Stationery
• Sending communication email to all the participants
• Sending the participants the venue details and the timings for the same.
• Prepare for presenter back up
• Prepare HR ppt

Checklist:

o Have the rooms being booked keeping in mind the number of participants
o Projectors being in stored in the rooms booked
o Reading and writing materials along with stationery arranged
o Mic testing
o Telephones in the rooms
o Sent joining instructions and got their consent
o Details of the induction process, games, ice breaking sessions, start and end time.

Employee Induction – A must in a company- Part 2

Any employee be it a fresher or experienced person needs to go through the process of Induction. In some companies it is also known as orientation.

• Orientation is Introducing a new situation or environment to the new employees.

• Induction is the need to familiarize the new employees with the organisation, people, department, teams, hierarchy,  organizational policies.

• Orient employees with the work culture, work protocol, team culture, escalation procedure

• The basic induction is being done by the HR, later continued by the Team leads.

Different styles of conducting induction:

o Power point presentation in  a conference room

o Class room Lecture

o HR Handout Reading

o Ice breaking exercise to induction team

o One On One induction with Team leads

It is important for us o follow a sequence while conducting the induction. The induction sequence can vary according to the presenter’s style. Following is the 

Induction presentation sequence:

• Introduction to the Organisation

• Vision, Mission and scope of organisation

• Organisation culture

• Organisation Structure

• Company policies

o Leave Management ( No. Of PL, CL EL etc)

o Dress Code

o Appraisal

o Training

Change Management - How it Effects the Employees

Majority of the companies go through the phase of change management.  What is change management?

Change Management is bringing in transition among individuals, teams and organization for better and profitable future growth and prosperity of the Organization.

One of the biggest troubles management will face is to convince their employees to adapt to the change. Initially they will be hesitant, not ready to change. It is just like our normal human behavior, all of us become little hesitant when suddenly someone tries to pull us out of our comfort zone.

Change management majorly happens at the time of merger/acquisition. Especially when a new management takes over the existing one. In fact different mergers have a different story in itself.

Disney-pixar,is one of the greatest example I can take for a successful merger but on the other hand Quaker-snapple was a  disaster not only for its employees but also for the company too.

It’s very important for the management to always give out hints about the merger or acquisition so that the employees are prepared for the “D” day. We as the HR should make our employees understand the benefits of the change which will be useful for the employees too. If there is a transfer, it becomes more and more difficult for us to convince our employees even if we provide them with all the benefits, increments, they might not be interested to move out of the place.

There might be many employees who are married and settled, for them moving out(transfer) will be like a nightmare. 

Employees who are there with the organisation for more than a decade  might not be comfortable

with present management. The old employees are used to working in  a certain manner and with which they comfortable too. A change in the same will make them irritated and might effect their performance output which might effect the overall organisation output. 

Hence change  should take place slowly but in a steady manner which will benefit all the employees and not effect their productivity a large extent, which will ultimately help in reducing attrition and the company will have happy employees, which the key to the success of any company.

Catch em Young. New Joinee feedbacks

Employees form the core of all the companies. Without them, the company would not have been where it is. And so, it is quite important as HR to have the feel of the employee morale at all times. The New Joinees are the right place to nurture this culture. A culture of regular feedback. A culture of support.

The advantage of starting this process at the new joinee level is that the employee is just getting settled down. They would be able to share the details more freely and is more probable o voice the differences that he noticed from his previous organisation.

The goal of this feedback is to chart out and document the feel factor of the employees, like any difficulties or issues that they face, etc. We also get to know their expectation from the company and what would they like to suggest for the company to grow.

Where ever possible, this should be a face to face meeting. Where in we will be able to understand more about the employee than what he voices out. This also provides us an opportunity to persuade the employees to open up by using the right communication technique. But as the organisation spreads its wings across locations,  we may need to conduct this meeting over telephone. To be very honest, it does not have the same effect as the face to face interview has. However, we can make the best use of technologies and conduct a video conference if possible.

The most important skill that an HR will have to have here is 'Patience'. There might be some employees who might just pour out their feelings. And there may be some others where you will have to work hard to get a single word out. It all depends on in individual nature, whether they are introvert, extrovert, their background, confidence level or even their personal issues at the time of the meeting. We need to read in between the lines and prompt the employee to open up in order to get the maximum out of every meeting.

This meeting takes a minimum of 15 minutes and maximum of 1 hour and one more thing there is more of listening and less of talking from the HR person.

The following can be a rough guidelines for the data collected


MY FIRST INITIAL DAYS @ -xxxx A Follow Up

Name ..................................................
Date of Joining ...................................
Department .........................................
Designation ........................................
Grade .................................................
Location .............................................


1. What is your current role in the organisation?
2. How does your technical skill/Functional skill help you in carrying out your role effectively?
3. What has been your experience so far in the organisation in terms of work culture and overall culture?
4. How do you think we can make [company name] a better company? / Name two things that we can improve in the company.
5. How can we drive quality orientation across  [company name]?
6. What are your expectations/aspirations?

My first experience as a soft skill trainer

29th august,
It’s 4am in the morning and I am half awake twisting and turning on the bed to get some more sleep. But all in vain, I was fully awake by 6am. I prepared coffee for my husband and me. It was time for exercise. I am on my elliptical peddling hard to burn calories, but for the first time I was not even looking at the calories displayed. My mind is on the presentation that I have to deliver today. While preparing breakfast also I was murmuring my presentation in mind. I could see the slides moving one by one and me talking. I was literally visualising the
training.

I was all ready to go to office. I reached office on time. For the final time I went through the presentation. I was all confident, and pumped up with energy. It was 1 in the afternoon and my cab arrived. In an hour we reached the client place. The moment I stepped into the training room, a quiver went through my spine. I was feeling little nervous.

I was given the responsibility to train 10 employees on self confidence. I was reminding myself by saying that the day has come when I am the trainer and not the participant attending the training. I started with the session by introducing myself.

There was a little starting trouble from both my side as well as participant’s side. In the beginning I started speaking and noticed the confused face of the participants which made me realize that my speaking pace was fast. Immediately I started speaking slow with breaks in
between.

Since I wanted to make my session an interactive one I started asking them their views and opinions on different topics. I started writing down those points on the white board so that I link those statements and move forward.

Slowly I started getting smiles from the participants, my nervousness just disappeared, I became comfortable. I don’t know was it knowingly or unknowingly that I started building a rapport with them. They also became very friendly. My session went on for 3hrs. I was happy. Now from their feedback I came to know that many were happy and few were not.In the end my hard work paid off.