Leadership Development Training with Video eLearning – In Good Company Review

Here’s what David Patterson had to say about this excellent training for taking managers and learners on journey to improve Leadership Skills, Team Performance and Customer Experience:

In Good Company – Netflix-style quality video, designed to deliver employee engagement

Here’s what David Patterson had to say about this excellent training for taking managers and learners on journey to improve Leadership Skills, Team Performance and Customer Experience:

In Good Company – Netflix-style quality video, designed to deliver employee engagement

Subtext…..the future is around Employee Net Engagement Scores and xAPI

I was lucky enough to talk with Amrit Sandhar recently about the eLearning video series he has developed, called In Good Company.

However, we began by talking about learner Engagement and Amrit’s views on this topic, which were fascinating.

As we all know, Learner Engagement is one of the most discussed issues in modern workplace learning at present and one that the L&D industry continuously frets about. A huge effort is made to understand why learners will or won’t engage with learning programmes. It is no secret that some eLearning programmes achieve woeful levels of engagement.

Well, it appears Amrit is on a mission to deal with this, but he starts with a fabulous concept from the world of customer satisfaction and brings it to employee satisfaction. That is the Net Promoter Score.

Net Promoter or Net Promoter Score (NPS) is a management tool that can be used to gauge the loyalty of a firm’s customer relationships. It serves as an alternative to traditional customer satisfaction research and claims to be correlated with revenue growth.

NPS has been widely adopted, with more than two-thirds of Fortune 1000 companies using the metric.

Net Promoter Score is a customer loyalty metric developed by (and a registered trademark of) Fred Reichheld, Bain & Company, and Satmetrix. It was introduced by Reichheld in his 2003 Harvard Business Review article “One Number You Need to Grow”. NPS can be as low as −100 (everybody is a detractor) or as high as +100 (everybody is a promoter). An NPS that is positive (ie higher than zero) is felt to be good, and an NPS of +50 is excellent.

Net Promoter Score (NPS) aims to measure the loyalty that exists between a provider and a consumer. The provider can be a company, employer or any other entity. The provider is the entity that is asking the questions on the NPS survey. The consumer is the customer, employee, or respondent to an NPS survey.

The step to Employee Net Promoter Score (ENPS) was an obvious move and this is where The Engagement Coach is coming from. They have built some serious expertise in understanding and analysing employee attitudes, coupled with their own consultancy expertise delivered into several large UK corporates. The focus is on employee engagement with the organisation.

WhileThe Engagement Coach offers high impact face to face training, they have invested heavily in producing some very high impact and engaging video learning materials called In Good Company. A clever title indeed. This is all about the mission to deliver engagement, and the materials certainly live up to the premise.

There is a whole series of short 20-minute video clips built around the interactions of a sales manager and his team in a typical UK organisation. It would be unfair to say this is a rip off of The Office, as the approach is quite different when you get into the materials. What is fair to say is that the production values and the acting are of The Office’s standard, though the faces are a lot less famous.

The production values are as noted quite excellent, but the contextual narrative just resonates beautifully in my view to the issues in many teams in many organisations.

It is a very clever trick to take something that is generic in its approach and make it relevant to so many organisations, but In Good Company pulls that trick off quite superbly, and here is why:

The video modules are built of three different components. Firstly, a very true to life scenario, such as a sales meeting. This is followed by the issues being dissected by a behavioural expert who looks at the patterns of behaviours with an objective eye and then by a workplace engagement expert who highlights the very real downsides of the behavioural dynamics observed, which consequently will lead to actively disengaged employees, and consequently lead to other side effects such as stress and the resultant time off work.

The injection of expertise is sobering, and while the overall scenarios are not played for laughs, they really do resonate and replicate the real world with a wry sense of the reality of the everyday. However, expert analysis has an impact.

The narrative overall is strong and the third component is an interview with two of the lead participants of the scenario. This is reflective and insightful and adds depth to the narrative and a degree of learner anticipation, and excitement to watch the next episode is created to good effect by The Engagement Coach team.

I am told, and can quite believe, that the next video in the series is eagerly awaited by the course participants. Unlike with Netflix, learners are not permitted to binge on the courses one after another.

I have no doubt that the video courses, when delivered by The Engagement Coach as part of a blended programme, have a great effect, and this is backed up by the company’s own follow-up with their customers. Among managers who attended,75% reported positive behaviour change within their teams when surveyed 17 months later (443 respondents). This is both reassuring and extremely impressive.

The opportunity for their usage, however, is now being opened up, and a project to provide the videos with a SCORM wrap is well underway (xAPI Tin Can learning statements to follow no doubt). This will allow the courses to be licensed to companies to use in their LMS and become building blocks of courses with additional assessments and activities curated in house by L&D teams.

The next step is to Employee Net Engagement Scores (ENES). This is where we are heading in my view, and xAPI is going to be key in making this understandable metric become a reality. xAPI will be able to collect a large number of learning activities that are real changes in attitudes and behaviours. Too often in my view, issues with Learner Engagement are seen in isolation. The issue is more complex and learning is part of the solution to the wider issue of engagement in an organisation.

To me, this whole approach to engagement is hugely exciting as engagement experts such as Amrit Sandhar and his team bring their expertise to market as digital learning to really deal with the issue of employee engagement.