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1. Meet Social Learning

Social learning is taking over the way people learn, well, virtually everything. This includes a worthwhile learning tool like a business performance management software. Numerous programs and applications are available online and as downloadable software to enable individuals to get the level of education necessary. This social learning management system, called LMS for short, integrates social learning features to allow both private and public communities to come together. This includes the use of forums, chats, shoutboxes, polls and blogs as well as typical learning methods, subject matter focused learning and more. Collaborative learning may be the task of the future.

2. Targeted Training

Another aspect that’s becoming important is targeted training. For example, a learning management system can enable professionals to select the highly targeted training necessary. Instead of obtaining just whatever is assigned, it provides an opportunity to learn what the individual needs. The benefits of a learning management system are numerous including improving productivity, enabling social learning, reducing risks and lowering administration costs.

3. Real World Applications

No matter if the education comes from social learning or a typical classroom, it is critical for the information to be transferable and acceptable in the real world. Everything from the examples to the modules taught must be information the learner can apply directly to his or her situation. Additionally, the learner must believe in the information. For that to occur, the information must be usable and sensible in today’s environment. Learning from a 10 year old textbook doesn’t cut it any longer. EagleTribune.com states that it is all about relevant content.

4. eLearning Is a Government Thing

Education is the single most important way of reducing poverty and violence and creating a strong economy. To do that, though, it is essential to find a way to reach farther. That’s were eLearning comes into play. Some governments are using eLearning to get the same benefits that businesses have had for years. According to Virtual-Strategy.com, for example, the Mexican government has worked to improve the lives of its citizens using a system by Dextro. The system is a custom eLearning platform that allows for the development of comprehensive learning and content management system that helps small businesses and micro-organizations, which make up as much as 52 percent of the country’s GDP, to succeed.

5. Going On Demand

Education must also be on demand for the student. How many professionals have time to drive to a facility to take a course? Rather, they could pull out their tablet computer, select the right apps and take the courses they need right then and there. This type of mobile learning is faster, newer and better because it provides a just in time solution – information is up to date and easily accessible. This makes it incredibly easy for those who need it to get that information when it works for them. In short, it makes learning more accessible even to the successful professional.

Management education will continue to grow and change. In many ways, it will continue to be more in demand as the competition for being more successful continues to increase. Individuals who want to be successful must have the most up to date education and training. With these methods, management education is easier to obtain than ever and it is more up to date than ever before, too.

Tricia studied journalism and fell in love with the entertainment sector. She is never seen without her camera, her iPhone (back-up camera!), or her pug.

My first step to letting go of the corporate safety blanket was tackling my hang-up with the notion of facetime. In my previous job, the office environment groomed us to believe that working overtime, productive or not, had an actual effect on the work we did. Yes, this notion sounds crazy. But, it was a habit so engrained in me that it was a strain to break.

When Robby first told me I could set my own working hours as well as define my own goals for project completion, I hardly believed him. But, there it was: a colleague who empowered me to take control of my own workflow. Slaughter Development has taught me that in order to measure the value of work properly, we must focus in on quality. Hours in the office have no bearing on an employee’s success; particularly if the work they produce is done in a smarter, more efficient manner.

I also faced the task of viewing improvement as more than just a remedy to problems. In my old line of work, the need for improvement only came when mistakes began affecting the desired outcome. So unless the process was clearly problematic, investing the time to update and improve was considered an unaffordable luxury. After all, work needed to get done, deadlines were always fleeting and time was always of the essence. In this regard, Slaughter Development has taught me that process improvement is a living concept that continually opens avenues for further innovation. There are always ways to increase productivity and become more efficient.

The most difficult concept to warm up to however, was viewing and accepting failure as a stepping stone toward success. I had the privilege of working directly with Robby on Failure: The Secret To Success. Not only did I get to help develop the concept, but I also was able to immerse myself in the research. Once again, I was thrown for a loop: brainstorm and research positive failures in history? It sounded like an oxymoron. But, true to form, I began to truly understand. Slaughter Development has taught me that mistakes happen. We cannot change what has already occurred, but we can proactively learn from our experience and utilize such knowledge to grow in our ability.

It’s been a wild ride working with Slaughter Development these past years. I’ve been enlightened day after day by the overall vision that the company is based upon. I thank Robby for all he has taught me and promise to keep the lessons I’ve learned close in mind if and when I embark upon new pastures in corporate America again. But for now, I am taking a hiatus from working to focus on family life. I also want to thank The Methodology Blog’s loyal readers for your continued readership and support in the ongoing conversation of process improvement and methodology engineering!

That’s the topic of a new article from Bloomberg Businessweek, which carries the rather ominous title What People Really Do When They’re ‘Working From Home’:

43 percent watch TV or a movie and 20 percent play video games while officially working from home. Parents are more likely than those without children to partake in these two activities, which aren’t work-related.

Employees might not even be sober: 24 percent admit to having a drink. Twenty-six percent say they take naps. Others are distracted by housekeeping: 35 percent do household chores; 28 percent cook dinner.

Yet despite all the distractions, telecommuters are actually more productive than their peers in the office.

This data should be absolutely shocking. If you don’t have your mouth open right now, allow us to break it down into two steps:

1. People who work from home self-report that they spend lots of time screwing around
2. Despite that, these folks still get more done than their office-bound colleagues

If you’ve been reading The Methodology Blog for a while, you might not be completely stunned by this news. We’ve reported before that taking breaks at work actually improves productivity. And of course, the place to look to understand this increased employee productivity is not at the home-based worker, but at those stuck in the office. The modern office is an interruption factory.

So what should you do? Send all your employees home? Shut down the office?

It’s actually more complicated than that. Certain kinds of work and certain personalities respond better to telecommuting policies. But ultimately, if you are most interested in ensuring that people can get a lot done, the worst thing you can do is insist on face time. Almost anything is better than mandating when and where employees get their work done.

The process by which you generate results is what matters most. Isn’t that what matters to you?

When it comes to productivity, few of us consider the big picture. Being more productive at work means much more than just being able to finish more work in a day or getting your boss to notice your work ethic; it can also have a marked effect on the economy as a whole, especially when considered in relation to unemployment levels. These two markers of economic success (or distress as the case may be) are intertwined in a number of complex ways and the relationship between the two isn’t always as clear cut as we might think.

To put things in perspective, here’s an infographic about current unemployment rates:

In this context, unemployment can directly lead to more productivity. For example, the article argues:

If your employer was making major layoffs, how would you act around the office? If you’re like most people, you’d step up your game, working hard, staying late, and becoming as productive as possible so as to appear more indispensable to the company. In some cases, increased productivity may be the direct result of the threat of unemployment, much as unemployment may be the result of increased productivity

Broadly speaking, this is true. Fear of job loss can inspire people to work harder. But will that increased effort be sustainable? Will they burn themselves out and have take time off to recover? And doesn’t it imply that they weren’t working at 100% in their first place?

In an ideal world, recessions should not have any impact on individual worker productivity. But many people operate in a business environment where actual productivity is not as important as looking busy, putting in face-time, and warming up to the boss.

Is your organization one where productivity fluctuates with fear? Or is it one where people focus on getting things done, not playing politics? Let us know in the comments!

[The] video shows person after person tripping on the seemingly innocuous step in the middle of the staircase. Some catch themselves instantly; others fall straight to their knees.

…

The dangerous step, it turns out, is a half-inch higher than the others. Stairway design guidelines call for risers to be a minimum of 6 inches and a maximum of 7 inches, according to MTA spokesman Kevin Ortiz. The allowable variance is 3/8 of an inch.

How is that a half-inch makes all the difference? Watch the video for yourself to see:

At first glance, it’s amazing to think that the MTA could make this kind of mistake. Surely every part of construction is checked and double checked. And certainly once a station is completed, officials doing a final inspection would notice a step that wasn’t quite right.

But if you watch the clip closely, it’s obvious why the problem wasn’t caught sooner. Every person who trips blames themselves. In fact, this may be the most fundamental challenge with any business process improvement effort: we tend to think that we are the problem and don’t look for problems in the system.

Long before you can improve workflow in your own organization, you have to find out what is not working right. And before you can address those issues in a meaningful way, you must try to demonstrate that the problem is not the people, but the system.

That’s the secret of process improvement: focus on the process, not the employees. People make mistakes. Are you setting them up to make more by giving them uneven steps?

Check out the full piece from Vanity Fair. Here’s a great excerpt:

A management system known as “stack ranking”—a program that forces every unit to declare a certain percentage of employees as top performers, good performers, average, and poor—effectively crippled Microsoft’s ability to innovate. “Every current and former Microsoft employee I interviewed—every one—cited stack ranking as the most destructive process inside of Microsoft, something that drove out untold numbers of employees,” [journalist Kurt] Eichenwald writes. “If you were on a team of 10 people, you walked in the first day knowing that, no matter how good everyone was, 2 people were going to get a great review, 7 were going to get mediocre reviews, and 1 was going to get a terrible review,” says a former software developer. “It leads to employees focusing on competing with each other rather than competing with other companies.”

You might be wondering why Microsoft would use this kind of system. What’s the rationale behind forced ranking? Does it really improve employee productivity? Or is as horrible as the article implies?

An analysis from CBS News explains:

Forced ranking is a controversial workforce management tool that uses intense yearly evaluations to identify a company’s best and worst performing employees, using person-to-person comparisons. In theory, each ranking will improve the quality of the workforce.

…

Forced ranking tends to be popular with large corporations that have hundreds or thousands of employees and need to systematize their HR processes… The long-run impact should ideally be increased productivity, profitability, and shareholder value. But sometimes a company culture can shift due to forced ranking, creating a more competitive atmosphere and decreasing morale.

…

Critics also claim the system creates a competitive environment that can result in cutthroat, unethical behavior; limit risk-taking, creativity, and teamwork; and discourage workers from asking for help or extra training out of fear that they’ll be identified as low performers. The strategy has also resulted in legal troubles [for many companies.]

Although American business is known for innovation, risk-taking and adapting to change, management policies and employee productivity don’t seem to be an area where many companies pay attention to well-established facts. We’ve known for decades that competition at work tend to backfire. We know that performance reviews are ineffective at best.

To summarize it best, we only need to quote the famous management consultant W. Edwards Deming:

The supposition is prevalent the world over that there would be no problems in production or service if only our production workers would do their jobs in the way that they we taught. Pleasant dreams. The workers are handicapped by the system, and the system belongs to the management.

That passage comes from the book Out of the Crisis, published in 1982.

Here are the key points that should be followed to ensure that your business is both compliant and fully aware of the implications of the move.

1. Get to know the new country first

If possible, it is advisable that an employer should visit the country in question in order to get familiar with the different local laws and customs. Business owners may also consult a lawyer in the US who specializes in international human resource issues. Especially important is to understand and abide by the local visa regulations, which are different for every country.

2. Be aware of all extra costs

It is important for the business owner to factor in all of the costs, as supplying benefits including living expenses and security (if required) increases costs up to several times the actual salary. With this comes the issue that certain perks may create local
tax obligations for an employer.

Be sure to make clear what the business is prepared to pay and the resulting costs for the company. Questions such as the following should be answered:

- If the employee is moving with his/her family, will the company pay accommodation costs overseas?

- Is the payment limited to the first year of the overseas assignment?

- Does your company take into account that the employee might rent his home out and therefore earn rental income whilst abroad?

- Does the host country tax this accommodation and, if so, who pays the tax?

3. Immigration

It is of utmost importance that the business owner understands the immigration requirements in the host country so that the relevant documents can be arranged. In certain countries an employee may need a work permit, whereas in others a visa or maybe even both. In most cases, know that a work visa requires sponsorship from a local company.

4. Get tax advice

Employers should be aware of the tax implications of the relocation for employer and employee in both the home and host countries. A tax adviser can provide different options for the business operation in regards to where the employee is to be paid and where the salary costs are booked. It is possible that paying an employee locally may have withholding tax implications for the company.

An employee might also require tax advice, which is matched to the assignment structure of the company.

5. Social security

It is both vital for the employer and the employee to make certain that social security is paid at the right place. There are roughly three different areas for social security filing purposes: the EU, countries with which the UK has a social security agreement (including USA) and “other.”

6. Quick Tips for employers to send staff overseas:

• Location: Inform the employee on where they will be moving to and help them to anticipate any possible challenges.

• Preparation: It is advisable to have copies of any legal documents needed, which include passports, visas, work, and residence permits.

• Arrival in the host country: The beginning of living and working in a new country might be challenging – make sure employees understand this and are aware that adjustment is required to get used to the country’s way of life, cultures and traditions.

• Family and friends: Missing families and friends can be hard for most employees – make certain that employees are aware of this emotional factor.

• Money: Provide necessary assistance, which might be needed in understanding local financial habits, setting up local bank accounts and arranging money transfers.

• Health and safety: Inform employees about the local issues of health and safety before they depart – make them aware of any local threats (illnesses, crime, pollution).

• Culture shock: Make sure that your employee understands what differences he will face in the new culture. Everything from food to customs will be different, so reviewing this and possibly sending them over for a test run could help make the transition easier.

While we live in an increasingly global world, there are still some differences that cannot be glided over. For example, South African Hotels recently did a study to find out what foods South African expats miss the most. They found that in London, South African expats can’t find some of their favorite foods. Make sure your employee is aware of differences like these so he assimilates to the new culture as easily as possible.

Adria Saracino is a marketer and blogger. When not consulting businesses on marketing strategy, she can be found writing about style on her personal fashion blog, The Emerald Closet.

(That’s not to say that writing is good for everything. Here at Slaughter Development, we’ve warned about how operations manuals can be counterproductive. We’ve noted that there are many problems with written instructions. But when it comes to promises and decisions, writing it down is absolutely essential.)

So why do we need to put pen to paper and fingers to keyboard? Why is it so important to get things in writing?

Here’s why: Ideas in written form take moments of conversation and turn them into historical record.

Consider some of the following phrases you may have heard at work:

• “Okay, let’s put that project aside for now and we can come back to it later.”
• “Good idea. I’ll give the client a call and find out their preference.”
• “We can’t afford that right now, so we’ll have to pass.”
• “I’d be happy to give you some feedback. I’ll get something to you by the end of the week.
• “This is our most important task right now. Everything else should be second priority.”

How many meetings have you attended where people said these kinds of things but nothing actually happened? Chances are that you are shaking your head in agreement. People speak up, but there’s not much action. And it’s not as if we all work with pathological liars. Instead, we all recognize that talk is cheap. It’s not that we intend to shirk our responsibilities, we just get busy.

Here are two essential productivity tips for getting things in writing:

1. Write down your own promises, and let people know you’re doing it. Say: “Okay, I’m going to reconfirm that our security team has the new schedule. I’m putting that down right now.”

This creates one of those moments where everybody quietly realizes they should be doing what you’re doing. There are countless ways to say it, so keep doing it until others start the practice as well. You’re changing culture, and changing culture takes time.

2. Write down the promises of others, and thank them in writing. You can do this at the meeting or an email afterwards, and preferably both. “Bob, I just want to make sure I heard you correctly: it sounds like the budget doesn’t support sending the full staff to the conference this year. I appreciate you keeping us in the loop and being as transparent as you can be.”

Following up in writing not only clarifies what was agreed and cements it in the mind of others, but it also provides a reference in case there is any confusion later on. The ultimate insurance policy is an email in your sent folder which reads: “Thanks for clarifying in today’s meeting that the Zimmerman Project is *on hold* indefinitely—let me know if this changes.”

Bonus Tip: If the decision seems important but vague, or if you work with someone who has a history of changing their mind without telling, you consider adding this sentence:

“I know this is important, so can you please REPLY to this email to confirm I’ve got it correct?”

If they don’t respond to your message, you at least have the backup in your sent items. It’s proof that you tried to capture the idea in words and that you asked for a confirmation.

That’s it: improve productivity with these simple tips. Get it in writing, and you’ll find that your organization has more productive, more efficient and more effective employees!

Here’s the conclusion from Cassie Mogilner, Zoe Chance, and Michael Norton:

Although feeling starved for time generally leads individuals to prioritize spare hours for themselves over giving this precious resource away, our results suggest that if people instead spent time on others, they would feel less time constrained and more able to complete their myriad tasks and responsibilities.

At first glance, this does not make sense. Shouldn’t spending available time on our own work help us to feel less stressed?

In order to understand what’s going on, it makes sense to dig a little deeper into the research in this field. Psychologists are extremely interested in how people perceive time. For example, you may have found yourself in a conversation in the past where one person says: “We have plenty of time!” and another says “We don’t have much time at all!”

It is possible to conduct experiments that use these types of statements to measure individual reactions to different activities. The research doesn’t actually change time. If you have a week to go before the deadline, then no matter how you decide to spend the days ahead the total amount of time available will not really change.

So what should you do if you’re feeling pressed for time? Generally speaking, we here at Slaughter Development have a problem with deadlines. Certainly, though, one option is to ask for an extension. But most people probably agree with an old saying known as Parkinson’s Law:

Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.

In fact, the study reports the that people who unexpectedly get more time don’t necessary feel less stressed or more productive. Instead, it’s the individuals who have the chance to give away some of their time that have a stronger sense of their own available free time.

So what should you do? The last sentence in the paper explains clearly:

When individuals feel time-constrained, they should become more generous with their time – despite their inclination to be less so.

It may seem odd that using up the time we have would actually increase our effectiveness, but research supports this claim. It may be easier to think of it this way: when you’re feeling short on time, you probably don’t feel great about yourself or your work. But if you’ve just spent time helping someone else, your own self-concept will be much higher. As a result, you’re likely to be more productive, more efficient and more effective overall.

Try it yourself! Volunteer. Give back. Help a friend or a colleague. Escape the time crunch by paradoxically giving some of your time away.