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Training in a Box
August 22, 2007
By Sarah Boehle
When you're a centrally located training department tasked with serving a geographically dispersed workforce, finding the right time and place to gather everyone together and deliver a consistent, standardized training experience can be challenging.
The ESL Credit Union training team's solution? "Meeting in a Box," a series of prepackaged training programs that are taught by individual branch center managers during regularly scheduled team meetings at each of ESL's 17 branch locations.
Prior to each Meeting in a Box session, a "box" containing training materials developed by the ESL Credit Union training department is distributed to each branch center manager.
Box contents typically include a comprehensive PowerPoint presentation, a leader's guide, a list of materials necessary to conduct the training (e.g., flipcharts and other materials), pre-work assignments, participant handouts, and a comprehensive guide featuring relevant books, Web sites and other resources on a given meeting topic.
Training recently spoke with Kelli Loveless, a senior training performance specialist at ESL, about the Meeting in a Box program and what makes it work:
Training: What results has the program delivered to date?
Loveless: We launched our first Meeting in a Box on the topic of brainstorming in 2006, and it was a resounding success. The goal of the training was to teach participants basic brainstorming techniques and then encourage them to use those techniques to come up with creative ideas to attract new business to ESL. As a result of those meetings, participants came up with a number of resourceful ideas that resulted in an increase in sales to new-member households and a deepening of current member relationships.
The concept was so popular that additional Meeting in a Box topics developed since then continue to build on this process of innovation by applying "brainstorming" techniques to different areas of the sales process—such as defining needs, overcoming rate resistance, and others.
Yet another indication of success is the fact that participants and branch managers seem to love the concept. I think that, oftentimes, branch managers find themselves racking their brains trying to come up with innovative, interesting things to do during team meetings. With Meeting in a Box, we're not only giving them a way to engage and reenergize their staff and develop some great business-building ideas, we're also giving them all of the tools and guidance that they need to do so.
Training: What are some tips that you have for other training professionals interested in launching a similar program?
Loveless:
• Train the branch manager. All ESL Credit Union branch center managers are required to complete a comprehensive, 10-session supervisory training program, where they learn about adult learning principles and how to deliver effective presentations. If those who will be delivering your Meeting in a Box training don't have a formal background in these areas, make sure that you train the trainer before you launch your own program.
• Follow up. Some managers took to Meeting in a Box instantly and dove right into it. Others' attitude was, "I'll get to it." The lesson is that you absolutely have to follow up on a regular basis—or a program like this will just fade away.
To ensure that everyone sticks to the program and delivers the training, we follow up continually. We write and we call. We ask them how the training went or when they intend to do it (if they haven't already), what they think about the program, and what they liked or didn't like.
• Do a pre-introduction to the program. Before we launched our first Meeting in a Box program, we prepared people by pulling all of our branch center managers together and letting them know what was coming, what the program would entail, and what was expected.
• Assign an action plan. To help branch center managers keep the momentum going post-training, we ask them to distribute meeting action plans to participants. If participants come up with great ideas during a meeting, for example, they then develop a plan detailing how they will implement the ideas, what their goals and corresponding completion dates will be, and how they will measure their progress after 90 days.
ESL Federal Credit Union is a financial services company headquartered in Rochester, N.Y. The company placed 85th on Training magazine's 2007 Top 125 list, an annual ranking of organizations that excel at human capital development.
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