Teaching Strategies to Improve Employee Productivity
Today’s business leaders know that having a strong talent pool is an essential ingredient for growing their companies and maintaining a competitive edge. As a former educator, I suggest that leaders can take a page from my educator’s handbook and use some of the teaching strategies for improving employee productivity.
First and foremost, leaders need to nurture their stable of talent with continuous learning opportunities. Engaged employees find satisfaction when professional development strategies are injected into the workplace goals. New hires also feel more comfortable and perform better when the onboarding process includes people who can assist them in becoming proficient in their new assignments.
Back to my educator’s perspective. Learning takes place with the employee’s active participation within the context of the workplace environment. Leaders are a major participant in this learning process. Leaders, either personally or by proxy, need to assist the performance of their staff so that continuous improvement is embedded in the organization’s culture.
Two levels of learning
Learning is a constructive process that has two different levels. There is a social level. This level of learning begins between people, with a more experienced mentor directing the situation with the mentee employee. The employee practices with the mentor listening to the instructions. The second level is within the mentee’s internal thinking. This employee then begins to remember the process internally before being able to handle the process independently.
Without delving into too much of the psychological theory of learning, suffice it to say that a more experienced peer has an opportunity to assist the performance of less experienced staff in both understanding the norms of the business culture and the processes needed to complete workplace assignments. What is interesting is that, as individuals transfer their new knowledge into their own internal thinking, they add their own personal twist on how it makes sense to them.
There is an inventive role of the learner in transforming what is internalized. It is a type of guided reinvention; in other words, this is the crux of innovation. At this time company leaders should harness this part of the learning process to maintain a competitive edge. Process improvement ideas, product redesign ideas, or marketing strategic thinking are all business functions that can be recipients of this new learner’s perspective.
Assisted performance
When many businesses are searching for ways to recruit good talent and expand current talent capabilities, practicing the theory of assisted performance offers tremendous possibilities. Assisted performance defines what a learner can do with help from a more experienced peer. The contrast between assisted performance and unassisted performance identifies the nexus of learning and development. It identifies the sweet spot for learning.
When designing professional development strategies for employees, goals should be created that focus on developing the individual’s capabilities in these sweet spots. Employees and companies will experience success when they see that they are continuously building on what they can accomplish independently, add new capabilities they can accomplish with assistance, practice until mastered, and continue to add capabilities in this manner.
To be of assistance to the learner, the more experienced peer must be responsive to the learner’s current effort and understanding of the task. In a sense, the initial work with the mentor may have well-defined structure of instruction. As the learner becomes more proficient, the scaffolding of instruction can be lessened, until finally eliminated.
The process for a learner to move from assisted to unassisted to automatic performance depends on the task. But learning in the workplace is a continuous occurrence and leaders need to find ways to assist the performance of their workplace staff to maintain a competitive edge.
