Today’s audience has a really short attention span, and most employees are doing 3 jobs and running 60 Km and hour just to get to Friday at 5:00 in one piece. A full day of ‘lecture style’ presentation won’t accomplish a thing after the first hour or so.

Another tip comes from Brinkerhoff in The Learning Alliance, (Josey-Bass 1994) His tip is to get the buy in of the trainee’s supervisor so there’s some follow-up after the training. It’s really hard to check the effectiveness of the session until the attendee has had a chance to use their new skills. Another great idea he has is to use ‘in-house experts’ to deliver 10 – 15 minute tutorials for software rather than sending folks away for a two day session.

For better training material design, stop by BetterSlideSets.com

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If the concept of ‘look for ways to improve our processes’ is new to your organization, this should be practiced as well. Attitudes take a while to change, but seeing is believing and your employees will see this how well this approach works.

Once your organization demonstrates support for ‘improving the process’ during internal audits and change actually takes place, the cycle is complete.

Start with your Internal Audit procedure. Make sure all the useful clauses in ISO 19011 have been taken advantage of first. Then flowchart your business lines from the inside out (end-to-end from the customer’s perpective) and plan the audit to follow the work flow.

Finally (and most importantly) change the philosophy of auditing from ‘assess conformance’ to ‘find ways to improve our processes’. This has many advantages:

1. helps you discover ‘cracks’ in the workflow that don’t show up when you audit by sinlge processes or the ISO clauses
2. changes the focus from ‘hide this from the ISO cops’ to one of ‘maybe they really are trying to make the work flow better
3. creates an opportunity for the person who knows the most about the process to explain how they would improve it helps find hidden waste, the #1 budget killer

Make your audits pay dividends with true ‘Process Audits’.

If we carry out internal audits looking for ways to improve our processes rather than looking for non-conformances the whole tone of the audit activity changes. People stop hiding under their desks or calling in sick or taking vacation days. Once we engage our employees to find ways to improve processes, waste starts to disappear and work starts to flow more smoothly. The best news? More profit!

Just like preventive maintenance, audits looking for improvements ‘now’ will reduce the need for repairs later.

“When organizations deliver training as a stand-alone event and fail to link it to strategic initiatives, the true value of training and developing people is lost.”

Ken Blanchard – Author, ‘One Minute..’ series and ‘Raving Fans’

According to the Blanchard group of companies, five key factors are critical to the success of any training initiative. As the Learning Alliance, we work with you to address the factors they have identified right from the beginning of our relationship.

Getting to the heart of the matter

Uncovering the true business need is one of the most important steps in our process. Often the real need is layers below the perceived issues. Once we are clear that we’ve identified the real problem, we make sure that the training design drives your organization’s strategic objectives, and aligns critical tasks and competencies so that your people are equipped to make a difference and know where they can contribute most effectively

Getting Top Management Buy In

We show senior executives why they have to set the tone and create passion and buy in for the training initiative. Brinkherhoff has determined in his ground-breaking book The Learning Alliance that lack of buy in from Top Management dilutes the effectiveness of the training delivered by as much as 90%.

Effective Training Delivery

Training must be an ongoing process in order to fully maximize the payoff. Our uniquely designed ‘outside in’ process is two-to-three times more effective than standard training delivery. ‘No more Bullet Points’ helps, too.

Demonstrating Tangible Value

It is critical that your training initiative pay off where and how you want it to. We work with you to determine the changes and impact your organization wants to achieve from training.

Focused Follow-up and Reinforcement

Organizations must spend 10 times the energy reinforcing training than they do in the delivery. Follow-up and reinforcement help bridge the gap between learning and doing to ensure that your people quickly and effectively internalize and apply what they’ve learned. This is echoed in Brinkerhoff’s work, too.

Why burden your organization with a management system that takes more work than it’s worth? Why not make your system so easy to use that everyone starts getting real value in return for the time and effort you and your employees have invested in your system?

Our ‘one page quality manual’ model uses open source content management software – WordPress (free, by the way) – to manage your documents. It also behaves like a web page (no training required) and puts all the relevant documents at the user’s fingertips.

Document updates Imagine document changes that are literally 3 steps (and fully controlled) with the ‘comments’ box. You can see these boxes right here in our site.

Step 1: When an employee wants to suggest a change to one of the documents they use, they simply fill in the ‘comments’ box, submit it and it goes straight to the Quality Management Rep. Step 2: He or she decides what kind of approval is required and gets the required approval. Step 3: The QMR updates the document in the ‘Administration panel’ of the software – it’s that easy!

Following non-conformances couldn’t be easier. Our one-page corrective action sheet has everything you need to meet your Standard’s requirements and track the progress of your activities. ‘Timely’ is a word that we see in most standards when it comes to corrective actions and our approach delivers this – in spades!

We also have associations with a stable of exceptional auditors in over 50 SIC codes. These seasoned professionals have all had at least 10 years in the field auditing to a number of different Standards. Let us know what you need and we’ll match you up with someone who can bring value to your next Internal Audit.

We can facilitate Internal Audits, deliver Internal Auditor training and coach your audit teams. Together we can decide what will be the best way to improve your auditing processes to the point where the dividends start to show up.

Give us a call (613-599-4574) or drop us a note to see some examples.