How to REALLY train your team: insights from building successful training courses at The Giles Agency

The adage “A company is only as good as its team” is as true today as it ever was. That’s why smart employers invest heavily in equipping their teams with the skills needed to compete in rapidly evolving markets.

However, as many training managers will tell you, ensuring that new skills stick is no easy task. You may have seen the depressing statistics mentioned in our article on professional development, stating that the average attendee will forget 90% of what they’ve been taught within a week of taking a traditional training course.

It was statistics like these that we were faced with when developing our own training courses: Write to the Top (effective business writing for go-getting professionals) and Write to Sell (copywriting for sales and marketing teams).

We didn’t want to create more of the same – we wanted our courses to truly transform our participants’ writing skills and empower them to achieve their career goals. That’s what we were promising, after all. And getting there was a learning curve in itself. Here are the insights we gained along the way:

The goal

From our 12 years’ experience producing effective communications for the region’s best-loved brands, we know just how powerful a few well-chosen words can be. Good writing has the power to inform, persuade, motivate, ignite, incite, inspire, open doors and move mountains.

We also noticed that professionals in all industries face the same challenges when it comes to written communication, and that few of us are taught to write well.

Our goal was to create training courses that help professionals iron out decades of bad habits and start to harness the power of the written word for themselves – to learn to express their ideas confidently, communicate with colleagues effectively, win clients successfully and achieve their career goals more rapidly.

The challenge

Initially, we wanted to create online courses that teams could complete at their own pace, from anywhere in the world. We knew that e-learning was a tried and tested method of imparting new skills effectively and efficiently. We used videos to cater to both visual and auditory learners, plus exercises to help students put their learnings into practice straight away.

However, we came across two main challenges:

1. We found that many students were signing up to the course but not completing it, no matter how much they were enjoying it. This was an issue because it meant we weren’t delivering our promise of turning students into master communicators!

2. Although the skills we teach are immediately applicable to all professionals in all industries, we weren’t able to see how the training was impacting the effectiveness of each company’s overall communications – and bottom line.

The solution

After much research and experimentation, we found that what works best is accountability: learners would only complete the course properly if they had a structure holding them accountable. We found several ways to provide this structure:

• Personal feedback

We assigned each student a coach to not only provide personal feedback on their work, but also give them a nudge when they’re lagging behind. This solved the non-completion issue immediately and students started to thrive with a personal coach cheering them on.

• Teamwork

We also discovered that companies who put whole teams through the course, rather than individuals, had much better results. Firstly, by blocking out an hour every week to do the training, teams were able to hold each other accountable and progress through the course at a steady pace. Secondly, they could ask questions and share learnings among themselves, which deepened the learning experience.

• Forum

To emulate this team spirit, we created an online forum for all our students around the world to use when they wanted to ask questions or discuss a topic with fellow learners. This was especially helpful for individual learners and business owners who were investing in their own futures and wanted to connect with others on the same journey for motivation.

To really make these new skills stick, we knew we had to transform the company’s overall communications in addition to individual team members’. So, we started offering flexible training packages with webinars and live training sessions to address particular issues noticed by the coaches and to deal with any weaknesses in the company’s marketing communications. This mix of online and offline training hit the mark.

For example, an events company in Singapore wanted to improve the effectiveness of their team’s sales emails. They put one team through the online training, and liked it so much they signed another team up within six months! On top of giving individual feedback, we held a day-long live training session addressing specific issues the company was facing and created a marketing strategy with email templates they could use to reliably achieve their goals going forward. They were very pleased with the results!

The results

By tracking what works and what doesn’t, and changing our offerings accordingly, we’ve at last found a formula that truly works. And the results are amazing.

We’re seeing team after team blossom in confidence as they start churning out targeted, powerful messages that get the results they’re after. We’re seeing individuals smash their targets and get raises. And we’re seeing companies harness the power of the written word to compete, grow and triumph.