Global Learning Summit 2009 (24-27 Feb 2009) Singapore Date:  24-27 February 2009Location: The Marriott Hotel, Singapore IMPORTANT: Seats are limited and allocated on a first come, first served basis, we advise that you reserve your place at your earliest convenience. To do so, kindly complete the registration form found on the last page on the brochure (attached in this email), email it tovivian@salvoglobal.com or fax it to +65 6336 1716 For priority booking, please quote priority code VH1221 Various streams are available for selection by delegates! Exclusive sponsorshipopportunities are available to leverage on this regional conference to heighten the profiles of your Company, kindly contact Vivian for more information. Email: vivian@salvoglobal.com Tel:  +65 6297 8545 Fax: +65 6336 1716 Upcoming Conference: GLOBAL PROCURE SUMMIT 16th – 18th February 2009, Singapore   Dear Laurence, 2nd Annual Global Learning Summit 24 – 27 February 2009, The Marriott Hotel, Singapore “Harnessing the power of learning and aligning learning initiatives with business objectives to boost bottom-line performance in light of the current global economy” I would be delighted if you could participate on 24th – 27th February 2009 for our Second Annual Global Learning Summit. Salvo’s Global Learning Summit 2009 is a unique platform to learn, network, discuss and debate fresh and innovative learning ideas with our esteemed faculty of speakers. Only the best speakers will be featured in this programme! Featuring presentations from world class organisations: • Accenture • Agilent Technologies • Defence Intelligence Agency • Deutsche Bank AG • General Physics Corporation • Goldman Sachs • IBM • Johnson & Johnson • Oracle • SAFTI Military Institute, Singapore Armed Forces • Schenker • Sony Ericsson Mobile Communications International AB • StatsChip PAC Ltd • Swiss Re • Telstra Learning Academy • The Walt Disney Company • Volvo Trucks Find out more about the Energiser by Team Building Hear cutting edge presentations on: • Aligning Corporate Learning to Your Overall Business Objectives • Unleashing the Power of Strategic Learning and Development   Through Organisational Learning and Cultural Change • Achieve maximum return on your learning investment through   effective partnering with learning institutions • Develop your future leaders quickly by implementing effective   leadership programmes • How to Tackle Knowledge Transfer: Capturing the intellectual   capital of the aging workforce • Expanding the Skill pool of your Existing Workforce through the   Implementation of learning and development programmes • Web 2.0 and Its Impact on Workplace Learning • Transforming Frontline Performance with Podcasting, Vodcasting   and M-learning and more...  Should you have any questions, I will be glad to be of help.I hope to see you in February 2009 and look forward to your participation. Please do let me know whether you are available. Best regardsVivian Ho Salvo Global Tel: +65 6297 8545 DID: +65 6305 1389 Fax: +65 6336 1716 Email: vivian@salvoglobal.com www.salvoglobal.com           Gold Sponsor:             Official Endorsers:   Official Journal:   Official Media Partners:

Just Want to Have Fun - Kanexa

Chief Guru: Kenexa founder and CEO Rudy Karsan at the company's Wayne, Pennsylvania, HQ. | photograph by Peter Hapak

How Kenexa is blending psychology and technology to create passionate workers.

At the suburban Philadelphia offices of Kenexa, people grin at one another all day long. Sometimes they hug. Bright posters of the company's guiding principles dot the walls: YOU'RE ALLOWED TO LAUGH YOUR WAY THROUGH A PROBLEM AND MAKING FRIENDS REPLACES OUR ORGANIZATIONAL HIERARCHY. The CEO, Rudy Karsan, spouts odd koanlike talk: "The world is like a roomful of jars. Every time you open a jar, there's untold treasure in there."

Ah, but there's treasure in such psychobabble. Kenexa is the leading human-resources-services company in America. Sixty percent of the Fortune 100, including Caterpillar, General Motors, Time Warner's, and Wachovia, hire Kenexa to help get inside the minds of their employees and build worker loyalty. It has what analysts say is the sector's most sophisticated data-crunching software, as well as a squad of scientists -- statisticians and industrial and organizational psychologists -- to help turn correlations into action plans as well as profit: Kenexa's revenue has tripled since its 2005 IPO, to $182 million. In HR, a discipline viewed by workers at most companies as unhelpful at best and horrendous at worst, the company's secret is its Cyndi Lauper -- like conviction that employees just want to have fun.

The company's secret: its Cyndi Lauper -- like conviction that employees just want to have fun.
According to Kenexa, turnover among managers who feel pride in their company is 21% lower than among those who don't. Adds the Kenyan-born, Canadian-educated Karsan: "When you're in a job that you enjoy and you're good at, you're not just a better worker. You're a better spouse, a better parent, a better citizen."

But this isn't just about group hugs. Kenexa's scientists do interviews and surveys to learn what inspires employees. (Managers: Apparently, employees love sessions where you just listen to them.) Its industry-leading software runs the data through sophisticated algorithms, identifying correlations and possible causations. Then Kenexa devises strategies to improve work environments and recruit, evaluate, and keep talent. For example, after studying several service industries, Kenexa recently developed a program in which potential hires use avatars to act out scenarios -- from remembering the proper arrangement of items in a hotel room to making judgment calls about inebriated drinkers at a bar -- to measure how naturally engaged an applicant would be on the job.

But first, Kenexa has to get itself hired. When Aetna's HR head for business operations, Craig Hurty, first approached Aetna CEO Ronald Williams about measuring employee motivation, Williams had just one question: How does it change financial performance? Kenexa's researchers presented statistics showing that companies with higher satisfaction scores had 700% higher shareholder return. "When I sent those results to our CEO, I was up in his office that same day, and we spent half an hour going through the results," Hurty says.

Karsan notes that knowing employees are passionate is pointless if a company doesn't know how to exploit the passion. Kenexa's software helps suggest action plans drawn partly from a 4,000-client database of what has worked in the past for its highest-scoring clients. Last year, the company took on a huge and complex case at Boeing, where it drilled down to departmental groups as small as 30 people and delivered tailored plans directly to the company's 15,000 managers. "It used to be that we'd take the survey, we'd look at the results, everybody would say, 'Oh, that's nice,' and we'd put it on the shelf where it would gather dust until we did the next one," says John Messman, Boeing's employee-relations director. Today, he says, everyone from the CEO down to division managers discusses not just scores, but also strategies to goose engagement.

Karsan says Kenexa "sells its own dog food internally." Everything from recognition programs to in-house competitions to the corporate structure is constantly subject to employee feedback, and everything is meant to boost involvement and loyalty.

Kenexa draws a line straight from its employees' behavior to its success. The company now has offices in 18 countries, including a newly opened 25-acre research campus in India. "It doesn't matter where in the world you go," he explains. "Through their work, people find dignity."

From Issue 130 | November 2008

Source: http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/130/the-employee-whisperer.html

Akin Soetan: Soft skills and hard facts

Soft skills and hard facts

Author:

Akin Soetan

Posted:

16:39 30 Jan 2008

Last year a survey by the US Society of Information Management listed the top 10 professional concerns of CIOs. The issues are perennial and remain essentially the same in the UK, although they might not be listed in the same order:

1.  Attracting, developing and retaining IT professionals
2.  IT and business alignment
3.  Building business skills in IT
4.  Reducing the cost of doing business
5.  Improving IT quality
6.  Security and privacy
7.  Managing change
8.  IT strategic planning
9.  Making better use of information
10.  Evolving CIO leadership role

In today's IT function, it is a given that IT leaders and professionals make an effort to understand the business and ensure the alignment of business and IT strategies. The more forward-looking departments also make the effort to build business skills in IT especially among the leadership.

ADVERTISEMENT

Despite this, nothing much has changed in terms of the influence and impression that IT professionals wield in the business landscape. IT departments are seen more as a support function than as critical to business. Few CIOs enjoy a position on the main board of the business even though they have contributed extensively to growth and have an end-to-end view of the business that few can boast of.

So why do only a few CIOs and IT directors make it to those lofty positions on the board and in doing so lift the impact and influence of their IT departments to heights that the others can only dream about? The answer to that question may lie in an evaluation of the time allocated to different business activities identified by the CIOs in the survey:

• 23%  Relationship management with business
• 16%  Strategy
• 13%  Relationship management with IT
• 9%    IT governance
• 8%    Architecture
• 8%    Operations
• 7%    Non-IT
• 6%    Software development
• 3%    Other

It is instructive that these stats show that 46% of the working time of the most successful CIOs and IT leaders is spent on the softer aspects of business such as relationship building. Such aspects extensively affect how decisions are made, and influence what gets done and who gets what, when and where. Relating with other parts of the business is time-consuming, but it needs to be done the most effective IT leaders have cottoned on to this and work at it to good effect.

As professionals rise through the IT ranks, they soon realise that IT has become more than a technical pursuit done by reclusive people who cut code and fix faxes. Today IT is no longer merely a service function but critical to business success. IT professionals require an enhanced skill set that embraces all the softer skills and sits side by side with professional and technical skills.

The key soft skills

To gain the recognition they deserve and sit at the table with other functions - accounts, legal, marketing, and sales - IT professionals need to become proficient in the people stuff as well as the technical stuff. At the highest levels the technical issues start to matter less than the soft, people issues:

• Relationships: learn to build win-win relationships with key people - anyone and everyone

• Organisational politics: like it or not, politics are a fact of organisational life, and you need to learn to navigate the stormy waters while maintaining your integrity

• Influencing: learn to master the art and in particular have an impact at board level

• Reputation: learn how reputations are made and what you can do to change yours for the better

The most effective CIOs have been able to change the outlook of their IT departments and increase the impact they have on the business by addressing these areas. Business and IT leaders can enhance the effectiveness of their IT departments by making a conscious effort to develop their key personnel in these areas rather than leaving it to chance that they will acquire the necessary soft skills as they rise through the ranks.

The IT professional now requires an enhanced skill set to develop effective relationships throughout the business with customers, suppliers, bosses, subordinates, colleagues and most importantly the board.

Effective relationships require an appreciation of the motives and drivers behind people's behaviour and the ability to reconcile differences. Outcomes in the political arena depend on subtle interactions and interplays between people.

Each situation will be different and what is successful in one may prove disastrous in the next. To survive in this challenging environment, the IT professional will need to master the art of organisational politics, turning every interaction into a win-win outcome and building effective relationships with everyone.

IT managers and directors ignore the need to develop the softer skills and build relationships both internally and at the business level at their own peril.

Akin Soetan is research fellow at the Information Systems Research Centre, Cranfield School of Management

Source: http://www.computerweekly.com/Articles/2008/01/30/229183/soft-skills-and-hard-facts.htm

Harvard Business in You Tube

Harvard Business Publishing (harvardbusiness.org) provides emerging leaders with the practical insights, tools and resources necessary to become effective executives and managers functioning at the highest levels of business.

http://www.youtube.com/HarvardBusiness

Developing the CEO Within You by Joseph L. Bower

Management Lessons from the Girl Scouts

Tranforming Giant - CSR

An Interview with Rosabeth Moss Kanter, Professor, Harvard Business School. Some multinationals, despite their size, manage to be nimble, innovative, and connected with local communities.


Reflection:
I really like this conversation on CSR. The few companies that I rank very high in my career are those who take CSR very seriously. It empowers the employees to change the world in their own ways. In Komag, the company actively involved in young entrepreneurs program sponsored by AMCHAM, school projects by SIPI, rural hardcore community in Butterworth and many more; Pfizer sponsors medical assistance with mobile van to various rural areas, each HOD allocate a budget to help a local community annually.

Stop Measuring ROI on Soft Skills Training

by Charles H. Green on Thursday, October 16, 2008 (post #358)

Let’s tackle a garden variety corporate orthodoxy: the one that says your company shouldn’t do training without a measurable return on your training investment.

Variations on the theme: if you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it; all training must be defined in terms of behavioral objectives; each objective must link to behavioral milestones, each quantifiable and financially ratable.

Let me speak plainly: Subjecting soft-skills training to pure skills-mastery financial analytics is intellectually dishonest, foolish, wrong-headed, useless at best and counter-productive at worst.

There, I said it.

Now let me explain—and offer an alternative.

There are are sprinklings of truth in the rush to measure soft-skills ROI—but they are surrounding a germ of crap, like a Bizarro oyster and anti-pearl. Worse yet, the ones who buy and propagate this dogma are those who buy training, and those who sell and deliver it.

The ROI-behavioral view of training is fine for pure cognitive or pure behavioral skills. If your focus is on teaching Mandarin to oil company execs, mastering the report generation functions of CRM systems, or teaching XML programming, you can stop reading this now.

But if you're talking about communications skills, trust, customer relationships, listening, negotiation, speaking, giving and receiving feedback, consultative thinking, influencing, persuasion, team-building and collaboration, then read on.  There are at least four problems with measuring "return" on these kinds of programs.

First problem: definitions. We evaluate golf coaching by lowered golf scores—neat, clean, unarguable. But try defining “good communication.” Or trust. Or negotiation. You might as well define the taste of water, or the quality of love. To accept behavioral indicators (“she smiles, she touches me”) is to miss an essence.

Second: causality. All causality is unprovable, though we know when to accept it anyway. “I had 3 lessons with a golf coach, and cut my score by 8 strokes. It was the coaching—you can quote me!”

But what if I take one course in trust, and another in listening. Suppose my sales go up next year by 50%. Which course did it? Or did my company’s 70% growth have something to do with it? Or my happy new marriage? Too many variables.

Third: the Hawthorne effect. (Or, the Heisenberg Principle in physics). Sometimes the act of measuring alters the measurement of the thing being measured. If I know I’m being graded on listening, I’ll do whatever it is I think that you think makes me look like I’m listening. Which destroys real listening.

If you hype net-promoter scores, many will game the scoring—thus reducing the genuineness that underlay the original idea.

Fourth: the perversion of individual measurement. Most soft skills deal with our relationships to others. The drive to individually behavioralize, then metricize, has the effect of killing relationships—an ironic outcome for relationship-targeting training.

Suppose a course teaches focusing more on the customer, listening, helping others achieve their goals, helping teammates grow—worthy objectives, found in many programs.

The only reason to define those results financially is to evaluate them financially. Thus someone—somewhere between the CEO and the person getting trained—is responsible for deciding to do more, or less, relationship-building programs—by using short-term individual measurements, usually with short-term incentives.

Hence the perversity: training people to focus on relationships, by measuring and rewarding them individually.

“The more unselfish you are, the more money we’ll give you for being unselfish. 
“The more you get rated as providing ‘excellent customer service,’ the more we’ll pay you” (which leads to pathetic begging by CSRs)
“The more you focus on others, the more we’ll pay you. 
“Quick, get over here, I want to genuinely listen to you so I can raise my quarterly bonus and get promoted.”

Raise this perversity to the level of an industry over decades, and you can understand why pharmaceutical and brokerage companies have accrued such low ratings on trust.

So what’s the answer? Simple. And you don’t even have to give up your addiction to metrics.

Just measure subjective rankings.

Ask people these simple questions, over time:

1. Would you do that training again?
2. Would you recommend others attend?
3. Would you include it in your budget?
4. How do you rate that training compared to these other five programs?

You can run regressions, chi-squares and segmentations on that data to your heart’s content—as long as it’s measuring subjective data in ranking terms. Just stop trying to monetize interpersonal relationships by measuring ROI on soft skills training.

Charles H. Green, author of Trust-Based Selling and co-author of The Trusted Advisor, is a consultant and speaker on trust issues for some of the world's best companies. He has written about trust in business relationships at Trust Matters since 2006. Read more...

Source: http://trustedadvisor.com/trustmatters/425/Stop-Measuring-ROI-on-Soft-Skills-Training

How to measure the impact of soft skills training

Kirstie Redford 17 July 2007 00:00This article first appeared in Training and Coaching Today. Subscribe online and save 20%.

It's one of the toughest challenges facing learning and development managers – measuring the value of soft skills training.

Measuring the return on investment (RoI) on hard skills training is hard enough, but what about calculating the RoI on communications training and other softer skills? Tracking and measuring the effectiveness of this type of training is notoriously difficult and is a challenge many training and learning and development managers shy away from.

But the advantages of measuring RoI on softer skills go further than justifying training spend.

By taking the time to analyse how different training methods are impacting the business' bottom line, it can give trainers insight into their own effectiveness and provide useful signposts to develop learning techniques and to work more efficiently.

The first step is to acknowledge that all skills – no matter how soft – have a clear purpose and will impact a business ina specific way."All training is done to achieve some kind of benefit, even if it is as mundane as morale boosting," says Andrew Mayo, director of Mayo Learning International. "The question is what benefits did it achieve and were these justified by the cost? If there is no measuring system for the benefits – such as morale – we will not be able to tell."

Key performance indicators

So the best place to start is identifying key performance indicators (KPIs). But then what?

"Starting with the KPI, identify the key activities thathave to happen for successful achievement of the measure and for each activity, identify the competency requirements, especially those with most leverage over the outcome," says Tony Dunk, principalof HR consultancy CDA's training and development business.

For example, the KPI might be a customer retention measure, where one contributing activity is to reduce customer losses by dealing with complaints effectively, so a key soft skill is dealing with angry customers. In this case, Dunk says that we can measure the customer losses both before and after the 'dealing with angry customers' training, quantify the improvement, and set it against the cost of the training.

"Where it is difficult is to take a generic training programme on handling difficult customers, and answer the question 'what is the RoI for the programme' when it isn't within the context of a specific KPI," says Dunk.

"This is why training departments often find it difficult to establish RoI for their curricula, because their needs analysis often drives generic development across the organisation, without a real understanding of the financial need being addressed in specific areas of the business. That and the fact that they only tend to do it when the budget comes under scrutiny."

Donald Taylor is strategic alliances director at management software companyInfoBasis and chairman of the Learning Technologies conference. He says that when calculating the RoI on any training, results need to focus on core areas such as productivity, morale and staff turnover,whichare in line with business needs and are of clear value to the organisation.

"It's crucial that alignment to business needs is done up front with training, so that when you are asked retrospectively whether there has been value added, you have clear answers," he says.

Skills audit

According to Taylor, this means ensuring that training is aligned to an ongoing skills audit."If you are on top of which skills each role requires and because roles are defined by business needs, it can illustrate how training bridges that gap," he says.

Declan Mulkeen, marketing director at communication and cultural awareness training provider Communicaid, agrees that for soft skills training it is vital to understand that effective programmes will have an impact on end behaviour.

"Once it is clear what changes in behaviour you require and you have determined their potential impact on business performance, it is possible to translate them into tangible metrics, which can be measured financially," he says.

Mulkeen cites the example of measuring the RoI on cultural awareness training given to employees before being sent on an international assignment."Assignments are very expensivefor any organisation, with costs typically four to five times' the annual salary of the employee.By providing pre-assignment training, you can reduce the failure rate. As you understand what you want to measure and possess a clear vision of the outcomes you require, it is then possible to establish RoI," he says.

However, Mulkeen does have aword of warning: on its own RoI cannot determine whether training has been truly successful."Don't forget delegate feedback, line manager and team 360-degree reviews as well as pre- and post-training assessments and examinations.Other measures of training should always be considered to evaluate whether it was a successful initiative," he adds.

Top tips

• Before measuring RoI, make sure the training solution is aligned with core business needs
• Use an ongoing skills audit to provide evidence of why training in specific areas is needed
• Be clear on objectives and identify key performance indicators (KPIs) to measure training against
• Estimate outcomes from the start – do not start a training programme unless the initial expectation of benefits improvement is justified by the cost.

Source:http://www.personneltoday.com/articles/2007/07/17/41446/how-to-measure-the-impact-of-soft-skills-training.html