Question

1.In BBC Airline, a training program on improving customer service was given to flight attendants in response to the increasing customer complaints. However, when the trainees are back to the workplace, most of them have not served customers as expected in the training. To make transfer of training possible, you are required to:

(a) suggest what should be done by the organization and

(b) discuss how the training should be designed.

2.A two-day workshop on improving communication skills will be given to 30 salespersons in three fashion outlets of J&J. Half of them have the requisite skills of active listening. However, the other half are newly recruited and have just graduated from high schools. They know nothing about this area. To save training costs, both the new and existing employees have to attend the workshop together.   You are required to:

1. discuss how the training should be designed, considering the diverse background of the trainees and
2. describe four types of role play to facilitate learning with an example each.

3.In B&B Café, a two-day workshop on effective feedback skills will be given to 20 managers. It is focused primarily on performance reviews. To ensure that the training program can achieve its objectives, you are required to:

1. explain how the training program should be evaluated throughout the training process and
2. describe four types of evaluation outcomes after training with an example each.

4.The increasing number of competitors, which leads to the decline in the business profits of ABC Restaurant, has been brought to the attention of a senior manager. He believes that training should be given to regain the market lead in a highly competitive market.   You, as a training manager, are approached by him for assistance. In a meeting with him, you are required to:

a. discuss the type of training needs analysis relevant to the situation and

b. elaborate how data are collected to analyse the training needs.

Answer 1

1 (a) In order to evaluate the gap between the training session and expected output, it is important to understand whether the skills imparted by the training session were relevant and also whether there was enough stress on the actionability of those skills. This can be found out through a detailed feedback session which can be organized by getting the group to reassemble for a follow-up exercise to the training session.

This followup group should be organized with an objective of

(i) gauging the effectiveness of the training program conducted initially

(ii) The extent to which the objectives were understood

(iii) The extent to which the group believed they implemented the exercise

The activities in this follow-up session should be planned to obtain this information, have the group analyze this information within themselves - the facilitation approach via group and team activities could be used effectively for this purpose - and devise an action plan for themselves in actual work scenario over a fixed time frame. This action plan will need to be at an individual level and clearly documented via a standard template for everyone in the group. Further the action plan needs to be shared and aligned with the supervising manager of each individual for tracking and follow up so that the loop is closed.

(b) As a first step in the evaluation we would need to look at the nature of customer complaints that existed in the first place with regard to the service. An analysis of the customer complaints both quantitatively as well as the insights that were brought out should be made and the broad areas that need to be improved could then be identified. This would be the basis of deciding what the objectives of the training program are, so that it addresses the key issues that were identified by the feedback.

Since we need the results of the training program to be utilized immediately, it is important to have a structure that tracks progress and improvement and incentivizes it appropriately. We should look at a 2-phase workshop of equal length durations spaced out by a period of a few weeks with the idea of providing enough time for the participants to implement their learnings, document the results and share it over the next phase. There should be an appropriate recognition scheme between Phase 1 and Phase 2 so that the leaders of improvement are kept motivated to continue and the laggards have the incentive to catch up by the time Phase 2 is done and the overall group has improved in the entire process.

2 (a) The given problem is a tricky one because we are looking at two diverse groups with different skills - half of them are experienced and the other half are unskilled and fresh out of school. We need to build a list of skills within communication that this session will focus on - some of them would be more relevant to one group than the other. Each skill should be listed out and against that skill we should assign one of three possibilities - Important for Experienced Group, Important for Fresh Recruits, Important for Both. Based on this the activities and role-playing scenarios should be devised such that the actor learning in the activity corresponds to the right group. The facilitator in the activity can be from the other group. In case of the activity being of a skill important for both groups it should ensure participation at the same intensity for both groups. This can be ensured by the activity splitting the groups into smaller sub groups having equal number of individuals from either set. e.g. if there are 30 trainees with 15 experienced hires and 15 fresh recruits we could look at group activites of 5 groups with 6 members each - 3 freshers, 3 experienced hires.