Author: naren@hybreed.co
About the Client
The client makes it easy to understand and buy insurance. Their intent is to “demystify” insurance by explaining the jargon in a simple way and providing smart tools to help a user make the right choice. From search to purchase, the entire process can be completed online in just a few clicks.
Background
The client was looking for a way to embed the culture of giving continuous feedback amongst its leaders. Below are some details:
- The organization is expanding rapidly and has further plans to do so; the HR Team would like to establish behaviors amongst new joinees that are aligned with the organisation’s culture.
- The module/course should encourage employees to give feedback periodically and not wait for the annual appraisal cycle.
- The organization wanted to enable managers and CXOs to learn how to create a psychologically safe environment for their employees to receive feedback actively.
- During the appraisal process, the leaders wanted their teams to know the best way they can contribute to the organization and their personal growth – learning how to give impactful feedback was one of them.
To make feedback work as intended, everyone (managers and employees alike) must know that feedback is a win-win activity
Problem
To create a culture where giving feedback encourages constructive change within employees, and to do it in a timely manner in alignment with the performance appraisal process.
Solution
FocusU team offered a customizable and quick-to-learn approach: A self-paced course on ‘Giving Impactful Feedback.’
Why Self-Paced Learning?
The team specifically wanted a learning solution that:
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- Gave employees the autonomy to learn at their own pace
- Enabled long-term knowledge retention amongst participants. The storified format of FocusU’s self-paced courses are highly engaging and appeals to the team.
- Did not limit the number of participants and was affordable for larger groups.
Execution
We customised a 60-90 minutes long self-paced course and shared it with 250+ managers (including CXOs) providing 30-day access to the course. The course was designed to empower managers to:
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- Understand the benefits of giving feedback to their team members
- Practice ways of creating a safe space to share and receive feedback
- Understand the art of listening actively
- Enhance consciousness of biases while sharing feedback
- Use the SBI framework to help managers share feedback
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To ensure that the managers learn these points practically (and not just theoretically), we storified the course. This storified learning approach not only engaged learners but also challenged them to showcase their learnings by having to give feedback to the story’s protagonist.
At the end of the course, participants evaluated their newly-acquired knowledge by taking part in our application exercises (which are included in the course to encourage self-assessment).
Impact
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- Total Number of Participants: 382
- Active Participants (Completed at least 1 challenge on the course): 140
- Number of graduates (scored 75% in the course): 57/ 382
- 28 participants reached out with their curiosity and queries after the completion of the course.
- When asked how was their learning experience via our SPC (in terms of content, challenges, and application of the tips), the client and learners gave us an average rating of 4.52/5.
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Participants shared their feedback in the following ways:
“What I understand is mostly we take feedback as a routine but used to missed out its importance. Now I understand the requirement part also of this”
“What I liked about the course was it had videos and it had examples and stories that can be relatable”
“I like the way it started and journey was so good and we can relate it with our daily exercise. I liked the story well as it help to understand the situation”
“It was really good.it makes me understand more valuable points and how to give feedback. Thank you team Focus U”
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Problem
Keeping employees’ mental health in mind, the organization’s management team requested an impactful program that not only protects and enhances employees’ overall mental health but also does that in a way that is engaging and time-efficient. As all employees could not commit the same amount of time at once, we created a solution that would require nuggets of time from each employee and encourage all employees to leverage the program at its best
Background
The objective of this program was to:
(a) Encourage mental wellbeing
(b) Introduce participants to various mental well-being practices such as gratitude, compassion, sleep schedules, and more
(c) To encourage the formation of sustainable habits
Solution and execution
Mental health is not only a complex issue to resolve but also very subjective. While employees want to be at work on the whole, some struggle with concentrating, while others have problems with juggling tasks or communicating effectively. To reap the benefits of the program, it was important for employees to have multiple support choices. Therefore, RamG Vallath, a wellness coach and a best-selling author, worked with the FocusU team to co-curate the entire program. Nine traits that are the bed-rock of mental well-being were converted into simple yet exciting challenges that were made available to the participants one day at a time, so as to encourage participants to spend a few minutes each day on their mental wellbeing.
These were:
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- Gratitude
- Physical wellness
- Compassion
- Self-confidence
- Sense of humor
- Authenticity
- Peace of mind
- Personal Integrity
- A Passion-filled life
These challenges were spread across 25 days so as to ensure participants were not overwhelmed and could easily spend a few minutes every day consistently and consciously. The importance of each trait and all challenges in cultivating the trait were explained through short videos. As an example, here is how the first 3 challenges out of the 25 challenges turned out: Challenge 1: Thank one person who has contributed to your success. Focusing on gratitude, this challenge served as a great reminder to participants that they are not alone and that they have people – be it friends, family, colleagues – to who support them. Challenge 2: List down all the things you are grateful for. To bring light to their current situation, we challenged the participants to count their blessings and relive the joy of those blessings and strengths. Challenge 3: Identify one good thing that happened because of a bad experience. Participants were encouraged to view their bad experiences from a different perspective and realize how things fall into place. Some screenshots from the app:
Impact
To understand the degree of impact, we requested participants to share their experiences with us. With 300+ active participants spread across 35 teams, we received an average feedback rating of 4.2 on a scale of 1 to 5. The application allowed for peer motivation through upvotes and peer comments, and was complemented by a team and a player leaderboard that kept the spirits high. We asked participants to share one element of the challenges they will take with them and continue to do in the future in professional and personal aspects. Here’s what the participants had to say: Thank a person for success Yoga challenge Meditation challenge Peace time Help a colleague Good thing from a bad experience Incedents & feelings Besides individual experiences, we also wanted to understand how relevant each of these 9 traits was. Here’s what participants mentioned:
Participant feedback (stated here verbatim):
- Provokes us to think on things which we never do but is necessary, I like how people are engaged into the activities and talk about it during their free time.
- This concept is really good thought to reduce the stress.
- The concept is paving the way to create a cool and happy person.
- Once again thanks to the team.
- This program covered all subjects in our life.
- This was very helpful to recall our old memories.
- It’s very fun and energetic and always loved to do task Relaxation in between work Visibility of progress and scores.
- The way of organized content to engage.
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About the Client
The client is a digital-first, life sciences commercialization company. It helps biopharmaceutical, emerging biotech, and medical device companies develop products, get them to the market, and grow their impact through the life cycle in a more effective, efficient, and modern way.
Problem
From the Cultural Lens- Culture plays an integral role in shaping organizational success. There’s no debate its effectiveness has only multiplied in the post-pandemic era.
During the pandemic, the organization underwent bouts of upheaval and transformation concerning resources, operations, systems, and more. To continue offering top-notch digital-first solutions and sustain growth in times of adversity, the client added resources (employees) from diverse cultural backgrounds across the globe. The team size doubled during this period. To effortlessly align all new joinees to its culture and values, a partnership was initiated with FocusU. The aim was to introduce and educate participants about the organization’s cultural credo; and familiarize them with behaviors that are encouraged.
However, the implementation was a challenge – primarily, the selection of a learning approach that not only teaches and familiarizes participants with the culture credo but does so in an engaging manner and; importantly, it also facilitates implementation of the newly-learned lessons immediately, while they are fresh in participants’ minds.
Solution
The client was very clear that the selected methodology be highly engaging. After much deliberation, it was decided to implement the same through a tech-based app, through which the content could be made available to employees in a gamified and story-based format. This approach encourages participants to think of solutions independently yet interact with other participants to implement the best solution promptly, making it engaging. A tech-based, scenario-driven gamified solution was also appropriate given the volume of competencies that needed to be covered and the intensity that was needed for a session such as this to be impactful. Further, to set the ball rolling and give all employees the right context, it was decided to initiate the process through virtual instructor-led training (VILT).
Other methodologies considered included self-paced courses and instructor-led training. However, both were discarded as those are time-heavy. Further, self-paced courses did not seem to elicit the right kind of engagement in this context. The organization was keen on a more efficient and effective approach.
Execution
The gamified solution was designed on an app with an interesting storyline called ‘The Awards Night.’ It involved participants nominating team members who have demonstrated the right behaviors, based on the organization’s culture, for an award. On the day of the VILT, participants were required to go through a video-based case study before putting up their nominations. They did this in groups, via breakout rooms of a virtual meeting platform, where they deliberated amongst themselves why they selected a particular employee over another. This discussion was key in facilitating an understanding of which behaviors are in line with the organization’s culture credo and which aren’t – that too, through examples of their own colleagues. The focus was not on the right answer but on the reasoning and thought process behind the nomination.
Audience
The program was designed for mid to senior-level employees. Roughly 2,000+ participants joined this program in groups of 50. Some snapshots from the web-enabled app
Gamifying the solution turned out to be the right approach as it truly helped in engaging all participants, across groups – instead of relying entirely on a facilitator. Importantly, the discussions enabled the direct application of the knowledge – participants were able to apply the lessons learned then and there.
A key takeaway from the discussions was that team members are always a mix of positive and negative attributes and that there is always scope for improvement in certain facets. However, it is important to give feedback when there is a lapse just as it is important to recognize behaviors that stand out.
Participants also realized how it is important to use data so as to arrive at an unbiased decision; moreover, data also helps overcome individual perspectives and blind spots, which can highly influence the final nomination. Some feedback from participants themselves (stated here verbatim): – The scenarios presented as ‘feedback’ were in sync with real-life cases. – The gamification made the workshop more engaging. Conducting the activity individually and then as a group offered brilliant insights.
- The gamified experience helped in understanding how some may excel and some may fall short in different aspects of work.
- Understanding how different people perceive the same situation is essential for developing empathy.
- Recognizing how having a balance of traits is very significant for growth. – Practically connecting the characteristics displayed in the case study to the organizational culture.
- The perspective of how you as an employee might be perceived based on the various values that the culture credo has laid out.
- It was an eye-opener in realizing specific values in people and not just having a rigid perception
- It was refreshing and made us think outside the box.
Feedback
Participants from across the globe attended the workshop (India, USA, Europe, Mexico, etc). The gamified version was well received by all participants and garnered the appreciation of participants from various geographical backgrounds.
We also asked the participants about their overall experience on a scale of 1 to 5, 1 being “not good” and 5 being “very good.”
- Average feedback score for overall experience: 4.4
- Average feedback score for graphics and navigation: 4.4
- Average feedback score for gamification: 4.5
Train The Trainer
To make learning and development more sustainable for the batches to come, FocusU proposed TTT (Train The Trainer). Upon completion of 25 batches, the FocusU team identified and trained their trainers to carry the delivery further.
Testimonial
“The Culture Credo roll-out was a key initiative for us. It was equally important to make it interactive, fun, and engaging, and include all our colleagues globally. We partnered with FocusU, and the team designed a gamified workshop and co-created a great learning experience for everyone. I am very pleased with the feedback and the outcomes and would like to work with FocusU on more such key initiatives”
-By Director- Leadership and OD
About FocusU
“Learning interventions need to deliver business impact.”
This is the core belief that has made FocusU one of India’s prominent names in the field of corporate Learning and Engagement.
How an intervention is designed, how it is delivered, how it is reinforced, and how it is finally applied back at the workplace is customized to what works for the learner. This is done after thoroughly understanding or client’s learning needs through 1:1 discussion.
Their learner-centricity is not an empty promise. They have backed it up for 12 years now with an unconditional promise to their customers that they call, “Happy or Free.”
More recently, they have ventured into the space of self-paced courses, offering online courses to individuals wishing to improve professional skills at the workplace.
They have 3 offices in India, a joint venture in Mauritius, and now in the brave new virtual world, customers all around the globe.
Every year, they conduct around 700+ learning workshops – that touch the lives of over 40,000 employees.
Customized Content & Design
This gamified workshop experience was implemented under FocusU’s Customized Content & Design (CCD) services.
Our Customized Content & Design services are primarily for the benefit of those clients whose needs are truly unique and do not fit under any of our standard offerings.
Simply put, if you have a business problem which can be solved through a learning intervention, we will leave no stone unturned to make that happen.
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There is a huge difference between just learning for knowledge’s sake and learning to achieve expertise in any field. Whether it is writing, teaching, sports, programming, music, medicine, therapy, chess, or business, it takes something called deliberate practice to achieve expert performance and master the skill.
Deliberate practice, unlike regular practice, involves repeatedly performing certain specific activities with the goal of improving one’s performance in a particular area. It is this systematic and purposeful effort that creates top performers, turns amateurs into professionals, and is absolutely essential to stay on top of the game. Repeating the same actions and behaviours, for hours each day or over years together cannot make you an expert. With regular practice, you tend to repeat the same mistakes over and over again and reach a plateau with your skill level. So, deliberate practice is what is required for:
- Reaching expert level performance to achieve competitive success.
- Enhancing a skill much faster than through regular practice
- Overcoming plateaus in existing skill levels.
So, what are some of the deliberate practices, we need to follow to get proficient in any type of skill?
1. Clarity about the skill or subject:
“Aman with clarity reaches his goal sooner than the man with confidence.”
― Amit Kalantri, Wealth of Words
First and foremost, deliberate practice is about having clarity on the specific component of the skill in which you want to improve. Then, you need to learn, how exactly you would go about improving on that skill. The more you practice, the greater the improvement in your capabilities.
2. Methodical and disciplined practice:
“I could only achieve success in my life through self-discipline, and I applied it until my wish and my will became one.”
– Nikola Tesla
Being lazy will not help. You need to come out of your rut – it is easy to fall back on the old and tested methods that are much more effortless. Focus on what you can’t do, seek out your weaknesses and improve upon them. Set measurable goals to gauge whether you are moving towards them. The easiest way of doing this would be to take your skill, break it into smaller components and trying to achieve these smaller targets one at a time.
3. Stepping outside your comfort zone:
“We have to be honest about what we want and take risks rather than lie to ourselves and make excuses to stay in our comfort zone.”
― Roy T. Bennett, The Light in the Heart
Like a baby, taking her first steps and falling repeatedly, it is a process of repeated failure and frustrations. So, get out of that complacency and push yourself out of that comfort zone even if it means failing a couple of times before you succeed.
Noel Tichy, professor at the University of Michigan business school and the former chief of General Electric’s famous management development centre at Crotonville, classifies the concept of practice into three zones: the comfort zone, the learning zone, and the panic zone.
The comfort zone- in which we tend to practice all the time, the panic zone – which leaves us scared and uncomfortable and the learning zone – which is always out of our reach, but the only way to make progress.
4. Making time for rest and recovery:
“There is a time for many words, and there is also a time for sleep.”
—Homer, The Odyssey
As deliberate practice can be exhausting and can result in burn out, it is important to restrict this practice to just 2-3 hours in a day. Though you may work the whole day, intense practice of any kind needs to be restricted to smaller time periods, as it has to be sustainable in the long run. Adequate sleep and rest are equally important, as the brain is working all the time and cannot work endlessly on focused mode.
5. Taking constant feedback and measurement:
“Feedback turns good into better and better into best.”
― Frank Sonnenberg, Listen to Your Conscience: That’s Why You Have One
Practicing something without constantly evaluating yourself is pointless. During deliberate practice, you need to constantly measure your performance metrics to check if there is an improvement or not. Just like how a film actor might go over his acting performance in a movie – frame by frame. This gives him valuable feedback, and helps him figure out how he could improve his performance and what might have held him back from performing better.
6. Engaging a coach or a teacher
“A good teacher always makes you do something a little bit more than you thought that you could do”.
– John B. Goodenough
Though mastering any skill involves a lot of solitary practice, having a specialist coach or a good teacher has been found to be very beneficial. It is very common for most achievers, especially in the field of music or sports, to have a coach. A good teacher can give feedback, point out errors, suggest techniques for improvement, and provide vital motivation.
They help you correct the mistakes which you might be repeating again and again, without knowing it. An experienced coach or a good mentor can see your performance from the outside, identify blind spots and will be able to push you to outperform yourself.
7. Tapping on to intrinsic motivation:
“If you are working on something that you really care about, you don’t have to be pushed. The vision pulls you.”
– Steve Jobs
If you’re planning to engage in deliberate practice to reach expert-level performance, make sure you feel excited about it and enjoy it even if it won’t always be fun. Intrinsic motivation basically means that it should come from inside you, because you want it or you feel passionately about it. Extrinsic motivations like getting a reward or winning a competition are not always ineffective. But, since deliberate practice involves a lot of hard work, facing repeated failures and requires dedicated time and focus, it is imperative to focus on intrinsic reasons and benefits, such as feeling fulfilled or the feeling of having achieved something.
8. Investing time and making a lifelong commitment:
“Success doesn’t happen overnight. Patience and persistence are the keys to long-term success”.
– Veronica Stahl
Mastering any skill can take years or even decades – it is a lifelong process. When we felicitate any achiever in any field, little do we know the sweat, toil, and years of hard work that have gone behind his achievement.
Even Winston Churchill, who was known as a great orator and had given about 3000 speeches in his career, would rehearse his speeches before a mirror, taking notes, planning his pauses and movements and memorizing the works of history’s great orators. No one is born an expert, not even prodigies. Behind every great achievement, are hours and hours of strenuous practice and extensive preparation.
9. Putting in intense focus:
“I don’t focus on what I’m up against. I focus on my goals and I try to ignore the rest.”
— Venus Williams
Intense focus is required to increase skills and break through plateaus.Top performers need to keep an eye on the metrics and keep away any distractions in life. In addition to a long attention span, they need to concentrate on the micro and macro levels. You need to focus your attention on the current practice sessions at the micro level as well as, at the macro level – have the knowledge of where your practice fits into the bigger picture.
10. Spaced repetitions or the spacing effect:
“Don’t practice until you get it right. Practice until you can’t get it wrong……ever”.
– Ziad K. Abdelnour
In order to commit more to memory and retain information better, you need repeated exposure to the same material, over a period of time, rather than a longer exposure in a single session. We simply cannot practice something once and expect to remember it. By leveraging the spacing effect, we are better able to recall information and concepts if we learn them in multiple sessions with increasingly large intervals between them.
These 10 strategies are obviously not the only ways of practicing deliberately when you seek to achieve expertise.
Have you used other strategies that have worked well for you? Do share it with us and join the conversation!
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Would you like to know more about our storified self-paced courses? Contact us today at academy@focusu.com
Melissa is a Client Advisor at a larger software development firm, based in Australia. She is aiming for a promotion in her organisation and hence, is trying to pick up skills which will help enhance her leadership skills. While looking for an online course, she spots a course offered by a premium institute and studies the detailed curriculum. It matches her interest.
Melissa is thrilled and immediately reaches out to her manager and the Learning & Development Team for necessary approvals. She is sure that the certification would be a good addition to her career prospects.
Halfway across the world, Graham is looking for a similar course but for a completely different purpose. He is the founder and director of a Design Thinking company headquartered in the Netherlands. There is a client engagement coming up, where Graham has to lead a large multi-functional team to redesign their service. His business partner Neela, recommends a course that could be useful. Neela has completed it herself and found it to be very practical.
Without wasting any time, Graham opens the link that Neela has shared and goes through the details of the course. He is delighted to find that the objectives match his requirements to a T and gets himself enrolled, immediately.
Like Melissa and Graham, are you also trying to find the right online course for yourself? Wondering how to go about it?
Here are some guiding questions that you can consider:
Does the course fulfil your objective?
Easier said than done, this one requires your proper attention. Before you enrol yourself and invest that money or convince your organization to sponsor for it, be clear on the objective. Without a clear goal, you are likely to lose motivation very soon and may not be able to complete the course.
The future of organisational landscape looks LIT! The latest generation entering the workforce in the near future is about to reinvent leadership and work styles, alike. With values as their guiding star, Gen-Zers are here to revolutionise everything we know about the corporate world. As the first digital native generation, using technology to influence the world around is child’s play to them.
The following blog has been contributed by Marcus – Editor, founder, and dating coach for men at MarcusNeo.Com. Unlikely bedmates, Marcus and FocusU share one common interest. It’s our passion for enabling action through inspired frameworks. His methods and courses continue to enable thousands of men find their most confident selves by honing their relationship management skills. And, in the following article, he shares insights on how leaders, across industries, can benefit from effective relationship management skills.
Continue reading “How Effective Relationship Management Can Make You A Better Leader?”
We live in a world where social media constantly encourages us to lead the conversation and share our experiences. There doesn’t seem to be enough emphasis on actually listening to others. Many times, we find ourselves interrupted and inundated with tasks and stresses that make us feel disconnected from others. This is making us lonelier, more isolated, and less tolerant than ever before.
Continue reading “Active Listening : An Underrated Skill Of 21st Century”