Now I’m telling you for the 3rd time, so listen carefully!
VELUX: Spot The Talent
Date: 15 April 2021
By: Ole Magni, Business Improvement Partner at VELUX A/S
and John Vellema, Partner and Senior Enabler at Business Through People ApS
What characterizes a good Job Trainer
Have you ever experienced comments like this, or maybe, “Now I’m showing it for the last time, you must have learned it by now!”. The examples are diverse in how we have reacted when a new or existing employee has been in training and has had difficulty learning.
What considerations do we actually use when a colleague needs to be trained for a new task or when a new employee needs to be trained for a new job? Who should train the employee? How should the employee be trained? Is there anything special we need to ensure when an employee is trained?
VELUX is an international company that produces and sells skylights, light tunnels and skylight domes as well as accessories for the same. The VELUX Group has 16 production companies in 9 countries and sales companies in 35 countries
Industry: Windows
Company Size: 10.000+ employees
Location: Global
In many companies, the answer is straightforward. The experienced employee who is available at the given time. Most of all, we want to use the most experienced, the fastest, the one who is always quick to just explain how things should be done. Often without relating to how training takes place/has taken place because we know who has completed the training, the best competencies we have, so it cannot fail?
Have you ever, after training new or experienced employees, participated in a dialogue about, or overheard a dialogue where the topic has been that “Simon” will never learn it. Again, we have not achieved our KPIs, because there were many “new” and we even had our very best employee to train “Simon”?
In the same context, have you allowed yourself to ask what values and competencies the very best employee that you used for the training had in order to succeed in completing a good training?
Is it a given that the most skilled and fastest employee is also the best at completing good training? Have you really considered what the consequences and costs might be if the very best employee is not the very best at providing good training?
The person or persons responsible for training or educating new and experienced employees are in fact the ambassadors who convey the company’s values, give the direction of how we relate to quality, safety, tone of voice, care, and in general being the example of how an employee of our company is expected to act. So, educating or training is not just about passing on information about how a job is done, it is to a much greater extent the very best opportunity a company has to ensure the culture you want in the company. That task often requires something completely different than being the most experienced, fastest, best employee. That task will often require a patient, careful, easy-going person who, with a sense of simple structure and with good analytical skills, will be able to create followers. Followers who obviously want to follow because it makes sense and not because they have to.
VELUX sells roof windows for pitched and flat roofs to bring daylight and fresh air indoors. They also sell sun tunnels, blinds, and shutters.
Spot The Trainer Talent – Trainer selection
But how do we get there? As with most other challenges where we want different results, we must approach it and act differently than we are used to. To find the right profiles that can both do the job and train others we must search among our staff, this often requires a different and structured approach. By using the “Spot The Trainer Talent” program, we can build the competences to select the right profiles to handle the important task as Job Trainer.
The “Spot The Trainer Talent” program is built around a structured interview guide that will help us find facts about a candidate’s cognitive, communicative and analytical skills as well as social attitude and motivation to handle the task as a Job Trainer. We find the facts through an interview with the candidate. A series of open-ended questions and some practical exercises provide us with a solid foundation to support selecting the right candidates. By using the “Spot The Trainer Talent” program, we will provide fact-based feedback to the candidate, who can get constructive feedback on strengths and potential opportunities for improvement, regardless of whether they get the job.
The competence to use the “Spot The Trainer Talent” program is built up through a 2-day practical training course where the participants are introduced to and learn to use the interview guide. Knowledge and competence are built up by the participants conducting practical interviews with invited candidates.
How have we done in VELUX
For decades, and still in many areas, the training and coaching of new and experienced employees is done by the person or persons who are available with the best skills to perform the job – maybe the person with the longest experience, the fastest or perhaps the one the area manager has the most confidence in. At the start of the TWI program, Job Instruction at our factories in Slovakia and the Czech Republic, VELUX was introduced to the “Spot The Trainer Talent” course. It was taken in as an attempt to spot other candidates for the important role of Job Trainer than the usual “chosen few”. The result turned out to be overwhelming and the spot the talent approach has since been a regular part of TWI start-up in VELUX (now 7 factories).
The road to this has gone through local HR business partners and area managers who have needed to select TWI JI Job Trainers. They have completed the “Spot The Trainer Talent” course and subsequently the competences and the guide have been used in connection with the selection of Job Trainers.
Before we got there, however, there were challenges that needed to be addressed. How do you find candidates other than “the chosen few”? How do we handle the people we have previously used as Job Trainers? etc. The worries were many before the first courses, subsequently it has formed a school for a structured process that has proved its worth. The process involves the Campus manager, the area manager and other employees.
1. HR business partners and area managers undergo the “Spot The Trainer Talent” course.
2. The campus manager, area manager and HR launch a campaign that informs briefly
– About TWI and what it can give
– That we want employees who want to train others to apply for the job/role as TWI JI Job Trainer
3. Employees apply for TWI JI Job Trainer. Very simple application: Name and a sentence about why
4. Interview with and feedback to all applicants, both selected and non-selected.
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