In your role as an administrator of your company’s training and development, you may be asked to do something about your employee’s time-based productivity.
If so, you may start by reading my article on this website: How to Put Together Effective Time Management Training.
It’s a short introduction to the approach I outline in my book, Perfect Time-Based Productivity, where you can find a detailed description in addition to a number of forms and charts.
However, both the post and the book have little to say if you’re not the person actually delivering the training, but instead you happen to be responsible for designing the overall intervention. For you, success isn’t measured by smiley-sheets from participants, but by behavior changes that accrue over time.
If you happen to be in this place I suggest you use the four steps that underlie my books and programs in an innovative way.
Step 1 – Evaluate: There’s no avoiding the need to evaluate the work culture of your staff, and the culture that’s been created. The results of this step will inform your entire program, showing you the shortest path between where you are and where you want to be.
Step 2 – Target: Experience tells me that each company is different, revealed by evaluations that end up being quite unique. As a result, you must set custom targets for your company’s end-state, based on the results of Step 1. These need to be numeric, behavior-based goals.
Step 3 – Plan: Once you have set targets, you can decide on the kind of intervention that’s needed to close the gap. You have a number of options at your fingertips, ranging from sending out pithy, daily one-liners to hiring individual coaches. They are all useful, to some degree, and you must choose which ones to pursue.
Step 4 – Support: After an employee has experienced an intervention, your post-event support is critical. Here, as the master designer, you must craft and environment that makes continued implementation easy.
These aren’t rocket-science steps by any means. They represent common best-practices for program designers. In time-based productivity you have a peculiar challenge: employees are already using self-taught methods that work for them which has contributed to each and every accomplishment in their career. This sometimes results in their being defensive and closed to the idea of making improvements to begin with. Getting past that point makes all the difference, not only at the start, but in all four steps along the way.
P.S. Have you considered using either of my books as a self-study guide for your corporate learning group? For example, a team of project managers who meets on a regular basis may decide to read Bill’s Im-Perfect Time Management Adventure as a way to address individual time management skills on projects. Also, if you are on a limited budget, consider How to Launch a Productivity Project without Breaking the Bank.
Contact me with questions you may have at http://ReplytoFrancis.info