Success Stories
Our Client List
includes the following companies where successions of learning and development programmes have been run:
- Axa Insurance Services
- BBC Television Centre
- NatWest
- Orange
- Skipton Building Society
- Unum Provident
- Virgin Atlantic Airways
- Virgin Mobile
- Virgin Money
- Virgin Trains
- Yorkshire Building Society.
Success Stories
Learning is an ACTIVE Experience
Colleen Greenwood, a team manager for Yorkshire Building Society’s Member Contact Centre in Bradford, first attended The AL Workshop in February of 2004 and realised that the methods and ideas she was introduced to were exactly what her training team needed. So she arranged for her team to attend the workshop a couple of months later, and since that time has witnessed a complete turn-around in the way they teach others in the company.
“The AL Workshop has proved invaluable to us,” she commented. “At the time we were bogged down with loads of monotonous ‘stand-and-deliver’ courses. We needed to kill the boredom – our own as well as the learners. As trainers we had little motivation: the mere thought of standing up and talking to people for three weeks was exhausting in its own right!”
All that has changed.
“We have so many ideas now that we can barely keep up with them - one idea just leads to another. It’s brilliant!”
Before introducing AL, a typical format for a course would be lecture-style delivery of information followed by an exercise where learners would carry out a task to ‘practise’ the information in some way. There would then be more lecture followed by another exercise, and so on and so forth.
“We tried to make the exercises fun, but at the end of the day it was all about us, the trainers, and what we were doing – it had very little to do with the learners and how they could use their own brains to take responsibility for their own learning. That is why they found it so boring.”
“The ideas introduced on the workshop gave us another way of doing things,” said Colleen. “We were shown how we could fully involve the learners. And that’s the biggest difference in our courses now: the learning is all on them, not us.”
Here is a typical example: part of the induction programme for new employees involves having to learn about the different types of accounts on offer. Learners used to be told about the accounts, which they found pretty tedious, but now they are asked to go and find out about them for themselves. “We ask them whether they would prefer to read about them on the intranet, read about them in a booklet, or go and ask someone who is already doing the job,” continues Colleen. “When they have finished their research, we get them to pair up and question each other about what they have found out. Given that they are all new to the company, they end up asking the same sorts of questions that a customer is likely to ask them once they are on the job, so it is a perfect way for them to practise their responses.”
The team works hard to include plenty of variety for their learners: “ We are careful to have something for every type of learner. Although AL involves a lot of working with others, we include opportunities for people to work alone as there are some people who really need that.”
People who attend the courses at the Contact Centre have certainly noticed the difference. “They really like it,” says Colleen. “They certainly notice that they’ve got lots more to do. They are also able to remember lots more of what they learn. The fact that they are so active certainly helps them with this, but we also build in plenty of review times using some of the activities we learnt on The AL Workshop. On some courses we no longer even give them handouts but ask them to make their own notes of what they need to remember. At the end of a day we ask them how they are going to make their learning ‘stick’. We give them suggestions about how to create job aids and then give them time to make them before they leave.”
Colleen concludes, “Getting ourselves properly trained in AL has been so worthwhile. Many of the team were already aware of AL as they had read about it , but the problem was how to put it all into practice so that it would really work. The AL Workshop teaches you exactly how to do that.”
As a manager I need to motivate my staff and inspire them. If I use even 10% of what I have learned, I will achieve this.”
Manager , AXA Insurance Services
Let THEM Create the System!
Within twenty-four hours of leaving The AL Workshop, Liz Barnes, a departmental manager for a large multi-national insurance company in the UK, was already putting what she had learnt into practice.
The workshop finished on a Thursday afternoon and nine o’clock the very next morning, Liz had to run a three-hour workshop for her unit.
Obviously, there wasn’t much time for preparation, but Liz knew that it just would not work to sit the group down and lecture them. So she decided to apply one of the Accelerated Learning principles she had learnt about: “learners learn what they do for themselves.”
Here’s what happened:
The task was to introduce the unit to a new way of processing claims in order to improve speed and efficiency. Liz started by dividing the class into three and giving each group pieces of paper with a different key stage of the procedure written on each. She also gave them some blank sheets.
She then shared with them the benefits of improving the system so everyone could see how it would impact on their own job - and pay packets!
Each group was then asked to arrange the key stages of the process into an ideal “running order” so that speed would be maximised. The blank pieces of paper were used to write down any new ideas that came up.
The whole class then came together to compare results. To make them think even more clearly about what they were doing, Liz then asked each group to argue with the other two why they thought their “version” was best!
After a while, the whole class agreed on the format that they thought would produce the very best results back on the job. This was typed up as a process chart and everyone was given a copy to take back and display at his or her workstation.
Finally, Liz gave everyone a small brightly coloured 3D card pyramid and asked each team member to note down on its faces the specific behaviours each person would have to remember to do to make the system 100% efficient. They also took these back with them to use as aide-memoirs.
Liz was knocked out with the results that her new approach achieved. “We got so much done I just couldn’t believe it!” she said. “I thought it would take at least one more three-hour session to get through everything but it was all done in just this one!
One of the best things about it was that everyone bought into the change. They saw the whole thing evolve and the ideas were theirs. It was amazing, particularly as there had been quite a bit of negativity about it in the unit beforehand!”
A Picture Paints a Thousand Words!
Spurred on by her success, Liz decided she would try out some more AL ideas in her training.
Her next opportunity came when she ran a course for claims handlers. A problem had arisen because calls for frontline staff were frequently being referred to the wrong department. The reason for this was that employees taking calls had to sift through a load of written information in order to work out the correct department to which to transfer the call. It was therefore quite easy to forget something.
Liz hit on the idea of using pictures as she had discovered on her AL course that they were highly effective memory triggers. She had also learnt how to mind map.
So she went along to the course armed with a mindmap she had already prepared and used it to teach the group how to do them. She then set everyone the task of creating a mindmap showing all the options they had to remember when answering a call. She stressed how important it was to use pictures, and to help them do this, she provided a selection of brightly coloured images she had printed from her computer.
The activity was a tremendous success, for not only did everyone have great fun making their mindmaps, but also they had a colourful job aid to take back to the workplace that would tell them at a glance the right department to transfer each call to.
“There was a real buzz in the room,” commented Liz, “so much so that my boss wanted to know what on earth was going on! In fact, the next time we ran the course, he insisted on attending that session so that he could try one out for himself!”
It more than met my expectations! I didn’t know what to do to make working with computers fun – now I do! ”
Trainer, Virgin Atlantic Airways