We at Saffron don’t like to pigeon hole ourselves as simply training providers. Yes, we design and develop e-learning, but we do a whole lot more than that too. We’re all about performance improvement and people productivity, and there are more ways to achieve those things than training alone.

In this day and age, with advances in technology opening up all kinds of new possibilities every week, isn’t it time we all broadened our minds a little and started looking beyond training?

For instance, in the past it might have taken days or weeks to notify an entire sales team of updates to a product or service. Not only is that eating up time and money, it also means that for a certain length of time some people are selling the old version, blissfully unaware of the updates. Why not send update notifications direct to their mobile phone instead? That way, they know about the changes right away and can access the details again as and when they need to, at the touch of a button.

Likewise, if line managers are constantly flooded with emails or phone calls from new starters asking the same old question, why not find a way to let them ask and answer questions amongst themselves? Build a wiki, a forum, a portal or a fully fledged social network to facilitate this. With a bit of encouragement it will soon sustain itself, it can be used to start the settling in process before a new starter’s first day, it will complement any existing formal induction training and - crucially - it will save time and therefore money.

One thing that takes up a lot of time in every organisation is compliance training - if every employee needs to take several one hour courses every year or two, it soon adds up. But is it really necessary? How about offering staff the option to download a diagnostic assessment to a mobile device to determine whether or not they actually need to sit the full training course? If the assessment is designed properly, passing it provides confirmation of compliance in a fraction of the time it would normally take them to re-sit the same course they took the year before.

I could offer more examples, but the point is that there’s more than one way to skin a cat - if you need to improve productivity or performance and save time or money, a formal training course isn’t always the answer. These days, the possibilities are seemingly endless - with a little imagination applied to technological innovations, we can all achieve great things.

Compliance training has a bad reputation for being little more than a box-ticking exercise. But here at Saffron we believe it’s absolutely possible to create effective, engaging training that achieves both competence and compliance. Read on for our top five tips for breaking the mould and delivering gold standard compliance training every time.

1. Keep it positive
Avoid the temptation to instruct your learners in what they must and must not do. Try to minimise the number of ‘horror stories’ about the dire consequences of breaking the law. Training that’s driven by fear, or by an organisation’s need to cover its back, is unlikely to really make a difference.

2. Make it relevant
When it comes to compliance, what you do is more important than what you know. So don’t focus on legislative detail; focus instead on what the law means in practice to each individual learner in their day to day work. This is a great step towards achieving enhanced awareness and competence as well as meeting regulatory requirements.

3. Keep it real
One way to achieve that relevance and engage your learners is to use scenarios: create recognisable, everyday situations and get learners to identify the issues and make recommendations. This clearly demonstrates to them what they need to know (and do) and why. It also means they’re more likely to apply this knowledge in the workplace.

4. Make it varied
If learners are engaged in and enjoy a course they’re more likely to learn from it. Use a variety of interactions and media to cater to different learning styles and keep them interested. For example, consider photo or video scenarios, handy downloadable tips, news reports or articles, real life case studies and easy to access dictionaries.

5. Keep it conversational
We’ve had user feedback confirming what we already believed: a plain English, conversational tone of voice contributes to keeping learners engaged and therefore to the effectiveness of the training. Something as simple as this is a change from the norm of compliance training and offers learners a breath of fresh air as well as delivering results.

Check back soon for a downloadable PDF of these tips, and click here or here to find out more about our approach to compliance training. We’ve also recently won an IT Training Award for a compliance training project!

I’m currently reading a book by writer and consultant John Simmons, Dark Angels: How Writing Releases Creativity At Work, which has got me gripped. As an instructional designer at Saffron, my job involves writing - and lots of it. Every course I write is on a different topic and therefore demands a different style and tone, focused towards a particular audience. My aim is to always write the content, regardless of what it is, in a light, positive and conversational way so as to engage the learners and motivate them to want to take the training. But it can be tricky to strike a balance between making sure the right message is conveyed and trying to banish the business speak and avoid switching the learner off.

So I turned to John Simmons’ book in the hope it would not only help me become a better writer, more able to conquer various styles of writing, but also inspire me. Like John, I believe that creative writing in any business is relevant and essential for business and personal development, and I know that it’s only natural that my writing incorporates some of my own personality - as well as that of the company I’m writing the course for.

Something that John encourages really stuck a chord with me. One of his principles of writing is: ‘Transform the most unpromising materials. Not even lists can be boring.’ So I challenged myself to write a list which embodies my personality, and which conveys something about me to the reader. Here goes:

The contents of my handbag

Memories captured on paper, a flash of colour as I open my wallet,
photos reminding me of the places I have been.
A bundle of jingling keys, my trusty pen and notepad just in case a thought strikes.
Wild strawberry lip gloss to brighten up the day, Ibuprofen, mascara.
Excitement for the Friday night ahead as I find my camera. Mirror.
Pennies breeding in the bottomless pit, my eyes in liquid within a plastic case; my favourite scent in a bottle. A friend gave me the purse in which I find a camera battery and a business card. The iPod which keeps me sane on public transport. A Guatemalan worry doll, tucked away safely in the depths.

Hopefully that made you smile and warm to me as a writer because I expressed something individual, something that goes beyond providing straightforward information.

Can we do this at work? Of course we can. It doesn’t matter who you are or what you do - it’s hard to think of a job that doesn’t require the use of words. As John points out: ‘The reality is that if we write at work on behalf of a company, organisation or brand, we are being asked to carry out a creative writing exercise.’

As for e-learning, if even a list of what’s in your bag can be engaging, why can’t compliance training be engaging? Shouldn’t businesses embrace the opportunity to convey their personality through their induction training? What do you think?

Evaluating the effectiveness of a learning intervention is often where projects fall down - it can be hard to know how to prove a return on investment. But isn’t it about time we had some common methods to evaluate and measure the value of learning? Here are Saffron’s top five tips for measuring that all important ROI.

1. Define what success looks like
To measure the right thing, you need to first know what the learning aims to do. Is it about mitigating risk or improving productivity, for example? Are you trying to reduce the number of security breaches or are you attempting to improve performance relating to targets or sales metrics? What does success look like for your organisation?

2. Align the metrics to the business needs
When identifying ways to measure success, keep them simple but try to think beyond typical LMS measures such as completion and assessment data. Make sure you know what the business needs are, and how the training is intended to address those needs, and align the measures of success to this.

3. Set the baseline
Ensure you have robust baseline data at the start of the project so that you can assess the performance impact of the learning. Capture results over agreed time periods and against pre-determined success factors. Then turn this on its head and ask how the business would be performing without the training. What would happen if you didn’t do anything?

4. Look beyond average scores
Use a variety of qualitative and quantitative evaluation tools and techniques. Compare the performance of a group of training users against a control group who didn’t take the training. Complement this with happy sheets, feedback forms and gathering verbatim comment. And get line managers reporting on behavioural change on the ground.

5. Consider what’s appropriate
Proving ROI from social learning is our next challenge. There is no LMS to draw data from and you can’t test learners. Instead, have polls to determine the usefulness of information, rate and rank posts, and measure the learning outcome rather than the ROI because perhaps this should be more about the individual learning process than the organisation’s return. Our advice is to trust the learner!

Check back soon for a downloadable version of these tips.

I was interested to see that Skype has recently announced a partnership with LG and Panasonic, which means we will soon be able to buy a TV which we can use to Skype and browse the internet (find out more here). Promoting this new technology Skype’s business development manager, Jin Kim claimed that,

“TVs have lacked two things to date… eyes and ears” because “they haven’t had cameras and they haven’t had microphones.”

This led me to wonder… does e-learning also lack eyes and ears?

In fact, I think that many e-learning courses already possess ‘eyes and ears’ thanks to new technologies. Take mobile learning for example, where the learner progresses through the course and answers questions by speaking. Or how about social learning? Forums and help desks are evidence of an e-learning strategy’s ‘ears’ while the use of social networking points not only towards ‘eyes’ but also towards an age of collaborative learning that Skype and social networking sites’ popularity makes possible. And what about the advances being made in PC-based e-learning where we can now use techniques like 3D graphics, which allow the learner to pan around images and really become immersed in the learning? Surely highly interactive learning such as these examples could be counted as the ‘eyes and ears’ Kim is referring to?

This led me on to thinking that even if we do have ‘eyes and ears’ in our learning courses, does this actually enhance the learning in any way? For me, the following benefits come to mind:

• A positive first impression
• Learner engagement and motivation
• More realistic scenarios and environments where the learner can safely practise making decisions
• The ability to tailor the learning for different preferences, learning styles and capabilities

So far we’ve been focusing on how technology can give learning its ‘eyes and ears’ but I believe that this can also be created through instructional design. For instance, a scenario can be made more realistic by using well researched case studies written in a conversational tone. Or the learner can choose how they want to progress through a course by selecting to experience a certain scenario from a different point of view, for example, an interviewer versus an interviewee.

Kim’s thoughts about the evolution of TV are interesting, but I don’t think we can expect to see e-learning strategies reliant on cameras and microphones anytime soon. Instead, we should continue to vary the approaches we take and to be creative, rather than focusing only on the technology involved. After all, the most innovative graphics, interactions and technology will fail to engage the learner if the instructional design falls short.

(See Cat’s top L&D tip here.)