Posts Tagged ‘budget’

I love the word “conundrum”.  It’s defined as “A paradoxical, insoluble, or difficult problem; a dilemma”. Here’s the conundrum that has impacted the training business more than any other lately: Companies complain about a shortage of skilled workers, but have slashed training budgets and the big traditional corporate training companies are bleeding customers and money at a time when what they teach has never been needed more. How can you have a shortage of skills that cost companies billions of dollars but no one’s willing to pay for it? That, my friends, is a conundrum.

The problem, I believe is a sea of change, not in what skills people need (as Drucker pointed out, the Leadership, Project Management and Strategy needed to build the pyramids aren’t any different than what we need today), but in who needs them.

Traditionally, the companies identified “competencies” that everyone needed across the organization, and either had their training department provide the content or went out and found it, brought training in-house (or to a centrally located sterile hotel ballroom) for employees to learn. This is still the model that most training companies follow- sell to the entire organization and look for company-wide initiatives… and it’s why they’re in trouble.

The audience for training is no longer the companies themselves, but the individuals in them. One manager might need to improve their business acumen while another does just fine with the numbers but can’t deliver feedback that doesn’t make people cry.  They know they need to develop these skills- if not for this job then for the next one. How do they identify, pay for and attain the learning they need?

Here’s how the players at companies will look at training in the New Year:

• The Company- will be looking for training that is short, cheap and won’t involve travel or taking people away from their desk. This will mean a huge  increase in web-delivered training,  and if they’re smart, a mix of asynchronous (recorded, available any time) and synchronous (live with a facilitator that knows what they’re doing- and they’re in short supply).The fact that they will ask the impossible ( highly specialized but off the shelf so we don’t have to pay for customization, deep enough to show ROI but we don’t want to pay very much for it or let people invest time away from their jobs) is nothing new- customers always have asked the impossible. It does, however put a lot more pressure on…..

• The Training Department- which is largely reduced to an administrative function. Rather than deliver a lot of training themselves, slimmed down Training Departments ( or more likely an HR professional juggling multiple jobs) will be asked to source and evaluate training  when it’s needed. This means fewer scheduled “catalog” classes that go on a schedule and are then canceled for low enrollment, and more specific just-in-time requests. What will determine what’s needed? Usually what shows up on performance reviews so an individual manager will have a different training requirement than their coworkers. This will mean they’ll need trusted sources of content, focused on niches or specialties, inexpensive and either public enrollment (so the manager can attend  by themselves but might mix with people from other companies) or scheduled for small groups of like-minded people. How will they find and evaluate this material? Well that’s a problem for….

• The Training Companies… who will have to move away from licensing their content (because there’s no one left internally to deliver it, and each course isn’t being delivered often enough to provide economies of scale for the Companies) and into varied ways of delivering other than putting an instructor at the front of a room. Again, whether this is the most effective method of training is almost irrelevant, it’s where the market is moving, right or wrong. Gone are the days of huge corporate-wide initiatives, and they’ll be selling through their contacts at the Company to smaller groups (business units, project owners) rather than to a VP with a vision. They will also have to change how they bill their clients as more individuals will be paying (probably with a credit card over the web because who wants to issue 25 Purchase Orders for one class?) and definitely will have to move more of their training either online or into shorter chunks. The days of the 2-week “boot camp” training are gone forever. Additionally, they will have to be able to prove the value of what they do- either in Return on Investment (which for soft skills training is almost impossible but people keep trying) or in value to the learner through Continuing Education Credits, Professional Development Units or accreditation. Even a printed certificate of completion looks great in an HR file. The real change, however, will be for….

• The Individual Learner- who will have to be responsible for learning what they need to know as they need to know it and finding it in a variety of ways. Maybe it will be traditional training, maybe it will be a book or a podcast.  The team leader who learns from their performance review, shows initiative to learn a skill and prove they’ve learned it (even if it’s just showing the certificate of completion) will be miles ahead of the worker who can’t explain what they can do or how they learned to do it. Additionally, more training will be paid for by the company (in small doses, as long as it’s not too expensive) but will be done after hours or on the employee’s time.  Online courses from trusted sources, marketed to individuals are the wave of the future.

In essence, training has gone from a B2B model with large contracts and licensing agreements to a modified Business to consumer model (the company might pay for it…they might not but if they do they’ll want to be involved in selection and pricing).

Companies that are really serious about helping their people develop skills will have to work with this new dynamic. Training companies that are serious about surviving will have to move to more web-based marketing and offerings, and individual employees will have to take their learning into their own hands.

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This article is contributed by Wayne Turmel, the founder and president of GreatWebMeetings and the host of The Cranky Middle Manager Show podcast. You can follow him on twitter at @greatwebmeeting

Tagged as: active garage, b2b, B2C, budget, Competenties, Conundrum, drucker, greatwebmeeting, individual learner, peter drucker, the cranky middle manager show, training, training companies, training department, Wayne Turmel

Now, admittedly, the title might have confused you a bit as just about 3 weeks ago, Himanshu posted an article titled It is the ROI, not the ROC, stupid! The simplest explanation for this seemingly contradictory titled post is… the ‘C’ in Himanshu’s post was Cost whereas in my post, the ‘C’ in the ‘ROC’ stands for Communication.

While talking to my father on the phone the other day, I had a breakthrough. Not the kind my therapist would like to see, alas, but one that answered a major business question: “Why do so many managers treat communication tools like they’re made of gold and not use them every day?”  It all comes down to how we measure the ROI (Return on Investment). Maybe we sometimes need to measure the ROC (Return on the Communication) instead.

I was trying to ask some pretty serious questions about his health and Dad kept trying to avoid the conversation and wrap it up. Finally, he said “Look, this is costing you money, so we should talk about this another time…”. Now you, I and just about everyone you know has an unlimited calling plan. Talk for two minutes or twenty, it doesn’t really matter- it’s just not a concern for most of us any more. But because all he could hear was the meter running, my dad didn’t want to get into a long drawn out conversation. Remember this is a guy who taught us to call person-to-person collect for ourselves so he’d know we got to our destination safely and we wouldn’t have to pay for a long distance telephone call from a payphone- he’s a bit frugal to say the least.

That kind of thinking affects managers and organizations as well, and has a direct impact on how they use communication tools with their remote teams. Here are some common examples:

• “We pay per minute and per connection, so we’ll save webmeetings for when it’s really important” I have numerous clients who have invested in webmeeting platforms, and then refused to let people practice with them, or need to get budget approval to hold a meeting in order to keep costs down. Then they are surprised that people don’t utilize the tool or use it poorly. No one will ever practice or get proficient with a tool that they can’t use at will without the accountants watching. By the way, if you’re still paying per minute per connection it’s time to have a serious talk with your provider…they’re treating you like you’re my dad.
• “We don’t waste time on chit-chat. Keep it business” In this age of Agile, virtual, matrixed and under-resourced projects – time is money.  The myth is that the less time you spend talking the more time and money you’ll save and people can get on with the “real” work. This is a perfect example of measuring something that doesn’t indicate real results. You can’t easily measure the amount of risk-management, proactivity and trouble-shooting that good, frequent and rich communication gets you. Of course, if you really want hard metrics, measure the amount of rework, lost productivity and project overruns from not staying in constant contact with your team. Take the time to find out what’s really going on with them and who else is sucking up their time.
• “We didn’t cut the travel budget just to spend it on IT”. Okay, we all agree that the reason we need these tools is our travel budgets were slashed and they are NOT coming back anytime soon (at least not in the foreseeable future). That doesn’t mean we don’t need to communicate effectively and that there is no cost of doing business. Just because people work from home doesn’t mean (magically) it doesn’t cost anything to have them on the payroll. By the way, if you look up from the “telecommunications” line item in the budget you’ll see that you can pay for a lot of bandwidth, webmeetings and telephone calls just with the money you used to spend on drinks for the team when they could get together or put more subtelly … Psssst… “It’s really not that expensive.”

Effective questioning, timely feedback and sharing information have value to an organization and a team. We need to focus less on the dollars spent and more on the value created by those interactions. Sometimes we need to focus on the Return on Communication

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This article is contributed by Wayne Turmel, the founder and president of GreatWebMeetings and the host of The Cranky Middle Manager Show podcast. You can follow him on twitter at @greatwebmeeting

Tagged as: active garage, budget, Communication, Greatwebmeetings, investment, online communication tools, Return on Communicaiton, Return on Investment, ROC, ROI, telecommunication, Wayne Turmel, web meetings

Social media is not for the weak of heart. It requires a certain level of risk taking and willingness to experiment. The success of social media is based on contribution, connections and community. There is no one way to identify what tools within social media are relevant to your business objectives. This has not stopped companies and individuals to adapt to these tools and some have successfully harnessed the raw power of social media. No doubt, there are many people and companies who are still resisting this new social phenomenon. Like it OR not – this is here to stay.

I have spoken to many people in different organizations and some have shared with me their concerns of using social media.

Here are a few that I want to share with you all:

1. We can’t have a Youtube video. If the advertisement on RHS of the video is of adult content, it will dilute our brand.

2. We can’t open up Facebook to our employees since we are a Financial services company and have to protect client information.

3.  We really are interested but don’t know the best practices around what works and what doesn’t work.

These are all valid concerns. Just recently, an article in the wired blog mentioned that Military may ban Twitter, Facebook as security ‘Headaches’.

And yet there are other companies who have transcended to leverage social media in a compelling and effective manner. In my previous post, I committed to sharing some stories of companies who are using social media in a creative and innovative manner.

Here are a few stories:

How EMC used social media to recruit, re-brand and rebuild.

COOL factor: Held a series of highly effective recruiting fairs in Second Life, a 3D virtual world,  that showed EMC the undeniable power of social platforms for business.

ROI: EMC’s employment brand operation has a zero spend budget. The number of followers on EMC Careers Twitter channel and Facebook are growing. There is a spike in the number of resumes per job opening. Therefore, ROI is positive.

JetBlue’s ” All You Can Jet” Promo shows Power and Peril of Free Media Channels.

COOL factor: A unique JetBlue promotion called, yes, “All You Can Jet” offering people a $599 ticket for unlimited travel between Sept. 8 through Oct. 8 to 57 cities where JetBlue flies. Main promotional components appear to have been a release over PR Newswire and a tweet sent out by JetBlue at around noon that day.

ROI: Total PR buzz of the effort at 31 million search results and 10 million blog posts in seven hours.

I believe that we live in a new world where we are all connected. We can  leverage these connections to create new possibilities. Truly, there has never been a time when things changed so dynamically. This does not mean that traditional media is dead. It is a great resource for mass distribution – like selling a book, launching a product or a career. The idea that your competitor has more connections and has the ability to hurt your business has driven companies to adapt social media. I believe it is the new Socioeconomy (study of the relationship between economic activity and social life) – a shift more profound than the launch of an automobile or the cell phone.

Contributed by Deepika Bajaj, President and Founder, Invincibelle, LLC. Invincibelle helps women who live and work in a multicultural world to accelerate their professional growth. You can follow Deepika on Twitter at invincibelle

Contributed by Deepika Bajaj, President and Founder, Invincibelle, LLC and co-founder, ActiveGarage (the company behind 99tribes). Deepika is also the author of the book DiversityTweet: Embracing the growing diversity in our world. You can follow Deepika on Twitter at invincibelle

Tagged as: active garage, all you can jet, Branding, budget, deepika bajaj, EMC, facebook, invincibelle, jetblue, promotion, recruiting, Social Media, socioeconomy, Strategy, Twitter, www.deepikabajaj.com, www.invincibelle.com

It is important to understand what is going on here. There is a real shift underway. Building your brand through traditional tools and trends need a closer look. Are they making you vulnerable? Are they making you a stronger business?

Speed of change is HIGH. Advertising has been moving online and is becoming less effective. The payouts of online advertisement are declining. It is harder to justify marketing budgets and ROI for online advertising.

Here are some current trends:

Trend #1 Balance of Power
There has been a big power shift and today consumer has unparalleled power.

Trend #2 Emerging Marketing opportunity
More intimate customer relationship marketing is possible.

Trend #3 New Technique to build brand identity
You can shape your brand identity through response to social market. Transperancy and humility are rewarded. Authenticity is identity.

Every marketeer is now struggling with the following questions:

Should we be on FB?
Do we start a blog?
Do we offer everything for free?
Why aren’t we tweeting?

There are a lot of people who know what is social media BUT are not sure how to use it. Social Media is focused on the long tail so it is customized for easy adaptation by consumers. For marketeers to use it effectively, they need to demonstrate leadership in using social media. They need to develop social leadership strategy that delivers desired outcome and meets their business objectives.

All day I read articles, blogs, case studies about brands that tried something — usually — missed the boat, and are now enjoying the not always positive feedback we are all so ready to give. But then again, every once and a while a company comes along and really hits the nail on the head.

The Nature Conservancy leverages Facebook and Digg for cause marketing: How TNC raised nearly $75,000 through Facebook Causes and a partnership with Lil Green Patch, a popular Facebook application. The group has also built significant brand awareness through the social news site Digg! (As reported by Jonathon Colman of TNC, September 29, 2008).

So why bother with social media?

I meet with a lot of companies, and almost always I am asked to “give an example of how a company has increased their bottom-line with social media.” Well, now, in addition to my usual spiel of stats, graphs, etc., I can also hand case studies. What it comes down to is any company can find success with a social media strategy; they just need to have the right goal in place. They need to understand where their audience is hanging out, and get in there with a good story … start passing it around. The rest usually takes care of itself.

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Contributed by Deepika Bajaj, President and Founder, Invincibelle, LLC. Invincibelle helps women who live and work in a multicultural world to accelerate their professional growth. You can follow Deepika on Twitter at invincibelle.

Tagged as: advertisement, blog, budget, deepika bajaj, facebook, Identity, invincibelle, Leadership, marketing, online advertisement, Return on Investment, ROI, Social Media, Twitter, www.deepikabajaj.com, www.invincibelle.com