Mike Song Blog

Time Management Rollout 5 Worst Mistakes Monthly Campaign Blog

Are You Making The 5 Worst Training Rollout Mistakes?

Get Control Time Management Training MistakesToday Lean and Agile Time Management projects are becoming more and more common for good reason.  An enterprise-wide time-management training program can deliver more ROI to your organization than any other training initiative.   It can also provide many more opportunities for truly grave mistakes.  If properly executed, a productivity initiative like this can deliver:

  • 15 work days in saved time per year per participant
  • Organized, prioritized employees who get 20% more done each week
  • An extremely high impact lean, agile, kaizen, or six sigma enterprise initiative
  • Increased revenue from sales people no longer struggling with admin burden
  • Improved communication that leads to better execution and results
  • Reduced liability costs via improved email etiquette
  • Energized, motivated, and more fulfilled employees

Mistake 1:  Launching Useless Training

Dump the fluff! The most successful training programs today are 1.5 to 2 hours long, well-paced, engaging, and packed with useful, practical information that people can immediately leverage.  It’s critical to focus on the most important pain points your people are experiencing. To help with this, I co-wrote a white paper called Wounded Workflow – based on 35,000 professional surveys – that clearly describes the four most frustrating productivity barriers. We can help you diagnose your organization’s unique pain points via a Get Control! Impact Workflow AssessmentEmail us to request the free white paper and assessment.

Mistake 2:  Not Presenting It as an Enterprise Initiative

Think “We” vs. “Me”. Plan your initiative as “team training” and find leader champions who are ambitious and results oriented. They will motivate their people to attend because they see a better way for everyone to work.  Hint: The higher you go in the management ladder, the more people will “get” that this is an enterprise imperative.

  • Productivity is lost through ineffective team interaction (focusing on the wrong priorities, poorly written email, lost info on shared drives, unprepared meeting participants, etc.).
  • One inefficient team member can slow the entire team down!
  • The biggest obstacle to team efficiency is a leader who doesn’t know how to coach productivity. The result is a team that falls behind on projects, misses opportunities, and suffers from poor communication.

Mistake 3:  Failure To Measure Impact Correctly

Measuring the success of productivity initiatives is critical to your success. The key is to measure twice – two weeks before and two weeks after training. If the training is excellent, the results will demonstrate tremendous savings via enterprise adoption.

  • If you ask the wrong questions, you won’t have a useful pre-to-post training comparison after the program is completed.
  • If you don’t design your tool with statisticians who understand how to create statistically valid results, your data-driven executive team will tear the results to shreds.
  • If you don’t work with IT to show reductions in server cost via a TCO (Total Cost of Ownership) analysis, you won’t know your true hard dollar savings.

Participants who attend Get Control! seminars achieve concrete, measurable results, including an over 20% reduction in time spent on email and an average improvement in quality and clarity of email of more than 35%. Don’t make the mistake of failing to measure the results of your initiative correctly!

Email us if you need help.

Mistake 4:  Allowing The Results To Stagnate

If people change their behavior for a month or two and then return to their old habits, you may be held accountable by management for failure to capture long-term results.   Include these three essential elements into your time management training initiative for the greatest enterprise impact.

  • First, the key is to motivate participants to share insights with others after the training. People are much more likely to remember what they’ve learned if they teach it to someone else.
  • Next, you need to have a way of convincing leaders to emulate all the behaviors in the workshop. Running a leadership focus group can help you gain buy-in before and after the program.
  • Finally, remember that repetition is the only way for training to become part of your culture. We offer free follow-up refresher webinars and a monthly 90-second Get Control! sustainability video to help participants continue to leverage workshop insights for years to come.

Contact us if you aren’t able to create a truly lasting program. We have content for leader focus groups, refresher webinars, and sustainability videos already built to perfection and ready for you.

Mistake 5:  Your Trainer Is Boring

Don’t let this happen to you!  Boring trainers match one of these two profiles:

  1. The NON-TECH TRAINER:  He’s a motivational, story-telling, “warm and fuzzy” guy who struggles to answer even easy technical questions thrown out by the skeptics in the audience. His presentation sounds fluffy and obvious and participants tune out. They say that the effort was a big waste of their time.
  2. The MEGA-TECH TRAINER:  She knows all the tips and tricks but consistently fails to dramatize content and relate it to the real world. She struggles to connect with the audience and in some cases is a little condescending. You wince as you watch the CEO fall asleep. You worry about the success of this initiative and your next evaluation.

The key, of course, is to have stellar time-tested content delivered by a person with both technical (hard) and training (soft) skills who has a passion for training. This type of person is rare. It takes us a long time to find the perfect candidate and then a long time to perfect their ability to teach Get Control! programs.  However, when they are ready, 99% of participants rate our training Excellent or Good. Make sure that you choose and train your trainers with great care. Again, let us know if we can help in any way.