egyii blog

For our updated overview, please see:

Egyii Overview May 2009 

Thank you.

Trip & James, Team Egyii, Singapore

I am not sure how private and priority banks are addressing the investors’ search for alternatives, but when the press and the government are lashing out harshly against the institutions, and clients want to run from the banking institutions, what are they doing and where are they going?

Certainly this is not a secret but there are options and alternatives available – and clients are presenting very creative solutions.

We have spoken with many ’fat wallet” investors (ones with over $1 million to invest) and there are typically 2 responses we hear from them:

1) “I don’t want my brokers making any investment decisions. I want a purely transactional relationship. I am knowledgeable enough to make my own decision.”

2)  “Investing is all too complicated. I want someone who I can trust to make the right decisions.”

If clients don’t want “value added services” (item 1) and are shying away from people they don’t trust (item 2), where are they going? Here are some alternatives they are taking:

1) Online and discount brokerages. Low fees and some value add. If you feel you are as knowledgeable, the lure is to pay $12.99 per transaction. Online Brokerage’s Success

2) Pre-negotiated, set fees with banking institutions

3) Third party advisers (who are typically ex-bankers) such as AL Wealth in Singapore, who act as “middle men” between the investment institutions and the investors. These third party advisers charge an annual percentage and build their relationship by being neutral.

(One priority baking client has mentioned to me that he requested his relationship manager to put his commissions on the line. If he promises a ‘guaranteed” return, then his commissions will be paid and will be scalable. If the investment is in the red, then he loses his commissions and fees. For some strange reason, the relationship manager did not win this clients business.)

How to avoid this? Build the right skills and trust for your relationship managers with your Singapore and Asia Pacific banking clients, so that they don’t have to consider alternatives. For more information see Trust in Sales.

Trip Allen, Team Egyii, Singapore

www.egyii.com

The Singapore Government, through the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) has made a bold move into the world of Islamic Banking to step ahead of their “competitors.” Congratulations to MAS for putting egg on the faces of the Hong Kong business community (and the Malaysian banking community who has traditionally held this post in the region), as per the following posting in the HK Standard Charting a Safer Route…

The government has also instituted numerous learning and development programs in the banking community through a few of the local learning institutions to bring up the standards in the banking and finance personnel. I have heard from numerous sources that a lot of money and time has been put into this with little results.

Singapore’s business community relies heavily on the government to make decisions to protect the businesses and ultimately the working people. I am not knocking this and believe it has contributed to the success of Singapore. I am pretty sure  that the government and the business community are aware that this time around, things are different and that decisions from the top may not encompass all the answers.

Do they know the difference between the “old world” of business and the “new world” of business? Probably not as reflected in their actions. What about personal development, motivation and effectiveness skills in Singapore? These areas have been overlooked and need serious considerations.

We believe the solutions lie in the people. Your people upfront  make the difference- and that difference will move the business community ahead to an area of true cometitiveness.

For more see yesterday’s posting How to Repolish the Banking Image…

Trip Allen, Team Egyii, Singapore

In his new book Aligning Training for Results, Ron Drew Stone says, “It is vital that training professionals understand performance in order to identify needs and design, develop and deliver training solutions. …Training professionals should adopt a different thought pattern and a different performance framework that will allow us to see and communicate training and performance in a more results-centered way.”

As a training professional, what are you doing to ensure that your training leads directly to performance improvement on the job and that this improvement leads to tangible business results? In today’s budget-conscious, turbulent business environment it is vital that every dollar spent on training leads to some form of improvement in the following:

• The cost of doing business
• The profitability of the business
• The quality (effectiveness) of the organisation’s business products, processes and services
• The output (quantity) of products and services
• The time (efficiency) it takes to complete tasks and business processes, address and correct problem areas, and service the customer

It’s time for change.

Time to move on from a focus on learning requirements and participant evaluations, to a focus on execution. Do you have plans in place to identify the specific business results you want to achieve, the performance gap between where you are and where you want to be, and the execution needed to close that gap?

Have you identified all the various internal factors that need to be addressed to ensure that you are doing whatever it takes to achieve execution after the training is over?

It’s no good gaining knowledge, understanding, skills and a positive attitude if there is no execution, because this is the only thing that will lead to performance improvement and business results. If you can achieve all this, then you deserve to be sitting at the top table.

James Irvine, Team Egyii, Singapore

How much of new learning from a training programme actually gets applied in a value-enhancing way back on the job? It’s probably somewhere between 5% and 20%. That means out of a hundred learners, only a few are actually delivering performance improvement that leads directly to business results.

The solution? Most organisations would go on a search for a ‘new’ training programme that promises to solve their immediate problems. This training will then be seen as the ‘silver bullet’ that produces the long-awaited results. Hopes are raised amid an atmosphere of expectation and excitement. And more often than not, the training proceeds according to plan, the learners finish the programme highly motivated and determined to apply their new skills, and – nothing happens. Back at their jobs they react to the same interpersonal and environmental triggers that set off their familiar patterns of behaviour, and within a few days have lost their motivation and forgotten much of what they had learnt. The trouble is, they don’t return to the same situation they were in before they went for the training. Rather, they feel deflated and exhausted, and they work with a feeling of promises broken. The impact on morale can be devastating.

Often, the reasons why the learning was not applied on the job do not lie with the training programme. Much good training has met with similar results. It is a waste of time to blame the training programme and then go on to sign up an alternative training provider in the hope that this time it will be different.

Instead, a holistic approach needs to be taken. Training on its own will never result in performance improvement. What is needed is a whole-organisation approach to performance improvement and training support. Training effectiveness is influenced by many organisational, cultural and systemic issues.

For example, research indicates that new skills will only be applied back on the job if the employee receives proactive support for the change from his line manager. In many cases, learners return to work full of enthusiasm to try out their new skills only to receive at best a lack of interest and at worst an injunction to do things the way they’ve always been done. I have received feedback many times from participants on business writing skills courses that it is all very well learning new ways to communicate, but when they produce such writing in the office their boss changes it back to the ‘old’ style of writing. What a waste!

But merely acknowledging that the learner has some new skills and passively observing him trying them out is insufficient. The line manager needs to have a method for systematically following-up with the employee, monitoring the results he produces, giving regular feedback and support, and providing the Learning and Organisational Development Department with sound evaluations of performance resulting from the training.

This is but one of a variety of actions that can and should be taken before and after the training event so that training moves from being a one-off event to a performance improvement process. It requires the inclusion of all the stakeholders, from learning executives to line managers, senior managers and employees who all need to be aligned behind an agreed set of objectives and actions to be taken.

Training done the right way is one of the most powerful methods for creating positive business results, so let’s bring it out of the closet and let it show us what it can really do.

James Irvine and the Egyii team, Singapore

Web 2.0. Social networks. Twitter. Facebook. Mash ups. Wikis. Social feeds. Widgets. Blah, blah, blah…

Huh?

These are all a new language to the “digital foreigner” (those of us born before 1980) and Generation X and above. But for the “digital native” (born after 1980) and much of Generation Y, they talk about this in their sleep. Add to this iPods, personal communicators and mobile phones that we are all so familiar with and you have new means of communicating and learning.  It is amazing the changes technology has and will affect the world.

So what is all of this driving? It is driving a fast paced, information hungry society that wants variety, “everything now” with a very limited attention span. It may also be driving a different way of learning for the “Digital Learner.”

In a recent study “Living and Learning with New Media” by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, November 2008, the following was discovered: “New media allows for a degree of freedom and autonomy for people today that is less apparent in a classroom setting. People today respect one another’s authority online, and they are often more motivated to learn from peers than from elders or leaders. Their efforts are also largely self-directed, and the outcome emerges through exploration, in contrast to classroom learning that is oriented toward set, predefined goals.”

So how should learning be addressed? First let us describe learning platforms. “Formal learning’ is classroom. “Informal learning” is peers, friends, family, on the job. Together it gives you Workplace Integration learning. Workplace integration means you cannot separate training from work as you should constantly be learning. So the combination of the two is integral.

What needs to be done is to utilise the new technology platforms and social trends (Web 2.0, social networks) with effective learning platforms (Workplace Integration). How? Short and sharp programs (2-3 hours in length vs 8 hours) that can be done in a classroom environment (with peer interaction)supplemented by E learning (as E learning is difficult on its own), digital games (for FUN!) or on social platforms (peer to peer) and peer to peer interaction in the office and at home. This would cater to the attention span of the Digital Natives (and the Digital Foreigners who are bored with the same old programmes), would give them the ability to “learn in chunks,”would give themfun/new engaging environments (yes FUN!), and would allow them to learn from their “switched on” peers, too.

Now that is what I call TRUE blended learning!

Isn’t it time we started doing things differently? Isn’t it time for a change to adapt to the new world? The learning space needs a drastic overhaul to cater to the ”bored” learners and ot the new Digital Learners, who are today’s and tomorrow’s decisionmakers.

(For those of you interested, I suggest the book “Born Digital” by John Palfrey and Urs Gasser which explores the behaviours of digital natives in today’s society).

Trip Allen The Egyii Team