30
dec

How to Flip Zoom and Engage Your Team!

Posted by Virtual LearningNo Comments

By: Bill Ryan

As everyone transitioned to working remotely, we all became very familiar with web conferencing platforms like Zoom and WebEx. We also discovered how much energy it takes to be on camera for hours and hours every day between meetings, project teams, and training.

Many learning and development (L&D) specialists are rediscovering distance learning techniques including the “Flipped Learning” model. The basis of this model is to use time outside of the live, or synchronous, class to introduce new materials ranging from text, videos, and interactive lessons and to allow the individual to take this content at their pace and on their schedule in advance of the next synchronous class session.  The time in the live, synchronous, class is used to begin the deeper dive into the content focusing on group exercises, small group interactions, and group discussions where the time is spent with each other engaging in conversations and working together to synthesize information and solve problems.

As we work and learn remotely, the ability to utilize group time effectively and efficiently is vital. Instead of having the contact with content be lectures via Zoom, this model allows changes to how people are introduced to instruction and creates a process that allows learners to interact with instructors and peers to practice, apply, and synthesize the content in the context of their mutual working experience.

Centered on “The Four Pillars” a flipped learning experience includes a Flexible environment to allow a range of learning modes and times to participate in the process, a Learning culture that is learner-centric and the learner is actively engaged, Intentional content where the content is purposeful and planned for where the learner explores and when time together is most effective and includes a Professional educator who guides, facilitates, and provides support to the learning community.

Using the “Six Strategies for Effective Learning” of spaced practice, retrieval practice, elaboration, interleaving, concrete examples, and dual coding the opportunity to create a robust learning experience that provides individuals flexibility and focused interactions is high.  Using these design models provides time spent online synchronously Zoom’ing for collaboration, creating connections, and working together to gain clarity and a deeper understanding of the content in the shared experiences of the peer group.  This also creates a higher level of responsibility and accountability with the focus on the learning being on the participant while the instructor finds new opportunities to provide guidance and remediation.

Promoting interaction when together while providing flexibility when working alone means time spent is invested where it matters and can engage your team to actively participate in their learning experience.

This blog post comes from the webinar How to Flip Zoom & Engage Your Team.

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23
dec

A Glorious Three-Hour Production

Posted by Communication StylesNo Comments

By Lenn Millbower, The Mouse Man™

There is a 3D movie at the Disney theme park where I was a stage manager, the Disney-MGM Studios (now called Disney’s Hollywood Studios). It features the beloved characters made famous by Jim Henson: the Muppets. Called Muppet*Vision 3D, the show is presented in a theater and is supposedly the Muppets demonstration of 3D video technology. Needless to say, Muppet mayhem breaks out and the show ends in complete, and very funny, chaos. One set of lines from that film always leaped off the screen to me. It is especially relevant to learning.

The scene sets up the show finale. Sam Eagle—pompous, stuffy and by-the-book—has been tasked with staging the finale. Showrunner Kermit the Frog, desperate to salvage something from what is becoming a chaotic mess, asks Sam what the finale is about. Sam replies, “It’s a glorious three-hour production about all countries, but mostly America.” Kermit barks back, “You have a minute and a half.” Sam Eagle disappears in an indignant huff and the finale begins. The resulting scene is one of complete chaos as Sam crams all three hours of material into a minute and a half. The result is, of course, an incomprehensible mess.

(Many of you have probably already figured out the connection to learning.)

Sometimes, trainers are a lot like Sam Eagle. Many instructors think that everything they know is important. They fear that they might never see these learners again and that they have only one chance to impart all their knowledge. They throw everything they’ve got at the poor, unfortunate learners. The result is often comprehension chaos. And, unlike Sam Eagle, it is not funny. Those learners usually leave the classroom brain drained and confused.

Rather than being about all things, our instruction must be about specifics; delivering what the learners need … and no more. Some helpful tips for pithiness are listed below.

Learners Want Relevance – Experts are often too expert. We know the subject so well that we cannot comprehend what is relevant to someone who does not. We can argue vehemently to include some obscure point because it is interesting background information that adds perspective on the whole. But, when you learn to drive a car, for example, you don’t need to know how to change the spark plugs. The learner needs to get the car down the driveway first.

Learners Don’t Care About History – The only valid reason for sharing our background stories, scars and woes is because the information makes critical points. For many newer workers, the past is ancient history. The reasons why something used to be done in a certain way are irrelevant. Learners have enough trouble learning how to effectively deliver current procedures without having to comprehend what did not work in the past. The organization’s past is not the trainees’ prologue. Only the present matters.

Learners Want Minimal, but Critical, Detail –Although learners may be interested in background information and technical factoids, they want a focus on specifics they can use. Instruction that delivers the basic points required to perform the task at hand is sufficient. If you were to teach the phone book to a learner, for example, would you teach every name in the book? Of course not. You would focus on concepts rather than detail, and teach HOW to read the phone book.

Learners Want Connections – Learners’ brains, like all human brains, seek to relate what they are learning with what they already know. Each person’s brain stores information in a way that makes sense to it. New information is usually compared to older, already filed, information and then placed in context with the old. This sorting and filing take time. When instructors pile detail on top of detail, the time necessary for the brain to make and store these connections is compressed. The learners absorb less and less as their brains overload and shut down.

Learners Want Focus – Learners resent it when we don’t get to the point. When we meander around the topic, the information becomes hard to follow. They get lost and they can’t, having no previous history with the content, know what information is important and what is not. They try, as a result, to absorb everything and get lost in the process. What they most need from us is a tight focus on the concept with the minimal details clearly aligned within that concept.

Learners Want Applications – Information that does not provide immediate, relevant and identifiable applications is wasted. When they cannot tell how something relates to their needs, they stop listening.

Learners Want Practice – We’ve all been in situations where the instructor has more content than time. When this happens, the learner application practice is often discarded. Instructors keep talking in a vain attempt to give the learners every morsel of information they may ever need. Content covered is not content learned. In order to absorb the information, learners need to try it for themselves.

A Glorious Production

So, unless you want Muppet mayhem, don’t try to cram three hours into a minute and a half. Give your learners what they need, when they need it and where they need it. The result may not be as funny as the Muppets, but it will be a glorious production.

Attend the upcoming HRDQ-U webinar, Speak like a Mouse: Eight Strategies to Pixie-Dust Your Presentations, on January 20 at 2pm EST/11am PST.

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17
dec

How Technology Impacts Trust

Posted by Human Resource Training, Virtual Learning2 Comments

By: Wayne Turmel

Working remotely is a fact of life. Even before COVID, it was on the rise and when the pandemic is over, there will be fewer people returning to a central workplace full-time. The genie is out of the bottle, as far as that goes. But there is a paradox at the heart of remote work that some people haven’t been able to deal with. Both these things are true: Remote work requires slightly more trust than when we share a workspace, but that trust is more fragile, easily broken, and harder to rebuild. How do you build and maintain trust among remote teammates?

One of the main factors in creating or re-establishing trust is that we are working mediated by technology. The technology itself isn’t responsible for a lack of trust. If you are hiding something from your boss, the email system you use isn’t to blame for that. That’s on you. But technology does change the way we work and relate to one another. It’s not the cause of the problem, but it can be a complicating factor for sure.

As we explain in both The Long-Distance Leader and The Long-Distance Teammate, (and you’ll learn in our webinar) trust is built on three factors: are we aligned and share a common purpose, are both parties competent, and are we motivated to work together well? If one of these factors is out of whack—let’s say you don’t believe that Bob in Accounting is good at his job and you have to micro-manage him—your trust in Bob (and his in you) will suffer.

It’s not WebEx’s fault. The tools we use are designed to help us overcome barriers to communication and to build solid working relationships. But there are limits to what they can do, and using them in many ways undermines what we know about creating great working relationships. For example:

  • There is less “accidental” interaction. When you work in a shared space, you are bombarded with information about the people you work with whether you know it or not. You see them in the hallway, and read their body language. Is Alice avoiding you? Are your co-workers smiling and looking you in the eyes? Do you overhear snippets of conversation or look over to see Bob on the phone again instead of working on that report? All of that helps create an impression of how things are going. If you suspect something is amiss, it’s easy to check out. When we work through communication, we get very little unsolicited information. We have to go after it. If we want to know how Alice is doing, we have to ask her. That might be part of the problem…
  • Communicating through technology is less “rich.” True communication is more than simply data transfer. We pick up cues by tone of voice, body language and facial expressions that support our communication with others. But can you pick up subtle body language in an email? If you don’t see the confident look in someone’s eye when they accept an assignment, are you as trusting with that person as if you watch them nod and smile?
  • Technology allows us to do what’s easy, not necessarily what’s best. Firing off an Instant Message rather than picking up the phone is easy and fast. But you can’t hear the other person hesitate when they say everything’s fine. You can’t pick up on how they feel overwhelmed and this is one assignment too many. Yes, you sent the message, but you don’t really know if it was received, understood, or accepted.
  • Technology alone can’t quiet the voices in our heads. When we work with other people we get all kinds of evidence that support our biases or helps adjust them. You might not trust Alice, but Bob does and he’s a pretty good judge of character so everything is probably fine. When you work alone, you have only yourself to interpret clues as to what’s going on. It is easy to suffer from confirmation bias—Bob missed that assignment, so he’s not to be trusted—without having all the information.

You’ll see in most of these cases, what we need is evidence that supports or contradicts our assumptions and allows us to trust the other person. Technology can provide us with a lot of information and evidence of what people are doing, but we have to be proactive about seeking it out. We won’t see Alice’s hard work by just walking through the office. The proof must be somewhere we can find it, and we have to go after it.

It is possible to build trust in a virtual environment—teams have done that since the Roman Empire. But we need to be proactive in providing the evidence of our purpose, competence and motives, and even more proactive in seeking out what’s really happening. We can’t simply rely on past history or our prejudices.

As with so much when it comes to technology, the tools don’t make us trust someone or not, but how we use them can greatly determine how well our team functions and whether we maintain trust.

Attend the upcoming HRDQU webinar, Building Real Trust in a Virtual World, on Wednesday, January 13 at 2pm EST/11am PST.

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10
dec

EQ is a Muscle You Can Grow

Posted by Decision Making, Emotional IntelligenceNo Comments

By: Lou Russell

Whether learning a new skill, belief set, or teaching others, there are behaviors and competencies involved. However, if your brain has entered the reptilian mode your brain is physically unable to grow anything. Access to memory is limited, and decision making and innovation are limited as well.

I had the privilege of talking with Dr. Izzy Justice about his book EPowerment. Although EQ has been discussed for years and is a powerful concept for leadership development, Dr. Justice has focused on the basics of Emotional Competency through his new book. His research shows that the less able to assess and regulate emotions, the less likely you are to grow any other competency. For example, you might learn how to create a great scope diagram (and many of you have in our project management workshops), but you don’t ever draw them due to the emotional stress of projects neutralizing your energy and triggering bad decisions, in this case thinking “…there’s NO time for something like THAT!” Imagine a day at your desk. You have a negative emotional experience (reptilian). No one has died, and it’s more than breaking a nail… somewhere in the middle. Dr. Justice’s research has shown that as the hormones flow and blood is rerouted in the body, you will have a FOUR HOUR EMOTIONAL HANGOVER. Think about it. Something happens and everything else you try to do for four hours is impacted. That happens to all of us, and frequently. Most of us have more than one of these a day and there goes the day. Dr. Justice uses a clear glass of water compared to a glass of tea – our thinking is clouded so our choices are unclear.

How do we get better at dealing with these negative triggers before they disable us? One way is through aging, but that’s a time-consuming solution. If it’s happened to us before, and we survived, we can take it again. Dr. Justice’s research indicates that we have 80 incidents during each year of our life that can grow our emotional resiliency. On average, we learn from. The steps to emotional growth are:

SELF AWARENESS – I recognize an emotion (before it gets too far), and I know what triggered it. I am aware of myself (through DISC, Workplace Motivators, coaching, etc.) to know why I react in this way and see it for what it is.

SELF REGULATION – Now that I’ve identified the emotion and trigger, I know ways to keep myself from dropping into the reptilian brain response. These techniques help me calm myself and keep my decision making on track.

EMPATHY – Once I’ve learned to be aware and regulate myself, I can help others.

So what? I am noticing my emotions more.  In my project management work, I am working with teams in similar ways. What are the triggers that take you out during the day? Why? What can you do to grow your awareness and regulation using the EQ Assessment developed by Dr. Justice? Until the brain is engaged, projects will not succeed. If you would like to try the EQ Assessment for free or would like to talk to me about getting your project team back to a full brain, contact Shawna.Moser@MoserIT.com.

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