These seven virtual workshop facilitation tips help reduce meeting waste and increase the potential for virtual event learning.

These seven virtual workshop facilitation tips help reduce meeting waste. More importantly, they increase the potential for virtual event learning. As in person, HOW one facilitates a virtual workshop is what makes the difference.

For almost forty years of my work career, I was not a fan of virtual workshops. Virtual content delivery did not seem to provide the potential for enough interaction and skill practice. People would simply fail to retain what was shown and told to them. Now, virtual workshop facilitation is much of what I do.

Still, I struggle with the ‘loss’ of my face-to-face workshops. However, I see promise in the trainer-led virtual classroom. That is, if the facilitator effectively manages course content and delivery. It is a good thing such promise exists.

I don’t see myself going back to the 100 days per year in ‘airports and airplanes’ world. I want to teach from home. However, there is no way I can compromise the quality of my work.

Thus, the question becomes ‘What needs to change in order to teach a virtual course as well as I can teach an in-person course?’

In this week’s Real Life Work podcast, I provide ten answers to the ‘how to change a work culture’ question people so often ask.

In this week’s Real Life Work podcast, I provide ten answers to the ‘how to change a work culture’ question people so often ask. How long does it take to change a work culture?

If you want to change a work culture, and change that culture relatively quickly, you must fundamentally change your key work system designs. These new designs help leaders develop daily work habits that support a high performance workplace.

What do I mean by fundamental work systems change? Well, to help you gain a better perspective of what I mean, here is a list of ten key things that you can do right now.

Personally, I have seen the impact these changes make. I am confident that if you give at least a few of them a try, you too will begin see a noticeable difference in a short amount of time.

If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to ask!

Most importantly, keep this in mind. If you want to sustain a lean six sigma, operational excellence, or kaizen pursuit, you must first begin a culture change.

Few workplaces get to start from scratch and design your system...

This week’s Real Life Work podcast looks at how to use ten training effectiveness measures to measure training effectiveness.

Often, even the best organizations struggle to effectively measure workplace training. For example, multiple Baldrige recipients in recent years continue to rely on course participation and completion rates as primary training effectiveness indicators.

From an overall results and work systems design perspective, these companies are high performers. Why don’t they measure training differently?

Some do. They simply do not want to use their limited application space to show results they can more effectively, and completely, share on site.

However, only a small percentage of workplaces can use such an excuse. Most don’t measure training effectiveness at all. Some struggle to provide evidence of any formal training.

Organizations often measure training cost, training hours, and completion rates. Unfortunately, they rarely combine these metrics for the purpose of work systems effectiveness review.

For example, how do training investments affect process error, equipment failure, and workplace injury rates? How do we choose the best training investment if we need performance gains in a specific area?

In this podcast, I share a progressive list of possible training effectiveness metrics. Keep in mind those at the top of the list may seem familiar, but they are also the weakest gauges.

This week’s Real Life Work podcast looks at how to use predictive analytics at work to help predict process outcomes and optimize results.

Capture – analyze – use. Predict, prepare, and choose. This week’s Real Life Work podcast looks at how to use predictive analytics at work to help predict process outcomes and optimize results.

Plus, this content comes from the second day of my new ‘Measurement, Trending, and Predictive Analytics’ 2-day workshop. My goal is to provide an ‘easy-to-understand and use’ overview of what can be a complex topic. This is fresh material that will help you use predictive analytics more effectively at work.

For starters, what are predictive analytics? How do people use measures to predict the future? How might you benefit from the use of simple algorithms and data capture tech that exist?

Conversely, if you do not want to think about work for the next 30 or so minutes, use this content to help you pick a stronger fantasy baseball team. Predictive analytics might even help you understand why your bracket went bust in the early rounds of the women’s or men’s NCAA basketball tournaments.

At any rate, code and formulas make the digital world go around. Code rules.

Please SCROLL DOWN a bit for the podcast player. I hope you enjoy this podcast.

In this Real Life Work podcast, I share my personal profound Baldrige paradigm shift relative to the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award.

By Kevin McManus, Kaizen Coach and Facilitator

In this episode of the Real Life Work podcast, I share learnings from my personal profound Baldrige paradigm shift. No longer is the lens of a Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award Examiner dominant in my mind when I share the Award criteria. Now, the lens of a micro-business owner guides my learning and application.

I held off on posting these thoughts, but then Aaron Rodgers began all of his darkness retreat talk. For the past three years, I have lived in 95% isolation.

This has largely been by choice – go with the best safeguards, right? Only one other person has regularly been around me. We can discuss all of the potential ‘shift in sanity’ stuff later.

Just let Aaron know that if he does do the darkness thing, he should expect a profound performance paradigm shift or two like I received.

in this Real Life Work podcast episode, I let you explore my process measurement madness, and hopefully a measurement best practice or two.

By Kevin McManus, Kaizen Facilitator and Coach

In this podcast episode, I let you explore my process measurement madness. My hope is that this podcast inspires you to engage a little more with the practice of proactive, process-based daily measurement. I love measurement.

When I would teach the TapRooT® 5-day root cause analysis course, I would always chomp at the bit to teach the Trending module. Why do I love measurement so much? How has measurement helped me improve my own work processes as a small business owner?

Most, if not all, organizations measure something. Unfortunately, a very small percentage of organizations have what I would consider to be a high-performance measurement system. Some organizations measure too many things. Others focus primarily on those numbers that they must track in order to satisfy regulatory and legal requirements.

Some leaders tend to focus only on certain input and output numbers, such as those of a sales revenue, total customer volume, total expenses, and total units produced. Very few organizations trend their performance information in an effort to better understand their work systems.

My 40-plus years of experience have led me to conclude this. Less than 10% of the organizations out there have high performance measurement systems. My experiences as a national Baldrige Examiner, Judge, and leader in organizations that aspire to be high performers, further validate this belief. Even the best still struggle to capture, crunch, and improve daily, transaction-based process results.

More importantly, these experiences help me identify what I consider to be the Top Ten Measurement Work System Weaknesses. These weaknesses exist in a majority of the world’s businesses, hospitals, schools, governmental agencies, and service industries. You can find the list in the graphic on this page.

LISTEN to my ‘Measurement Madness’ post as a podcast!