GA 437 | Virtual Training with Steve Kane

So if you are using PowerPoint, remember to shut it off. Show your slide, shut it off, turn that screen black and continue your discussion. Right. And make sure that people are engaged in you and not just getting glazed over with whatever media you might be displaying.

Today I'm excited to welcome Steve Cain back to the show. Now, Steve is Gemba Academy's director of certification and coaching. Basically runs our whole certification department and also does a tremendous amount of virtual training and coaching with, with Game by Academy customers. So today Steve and I talk about the whole idea of virtual training, not to be confused with what we would also call online training. Online training would be, you know, watching some Gemba Academy video or some other video. But virtual training is going to be done over something like Zoom or Teams or Google Hangout, something like that. And so Steve's done a lot of virtual training and he talks about some of the trainings that we, that we offer at Gemba Academy later on in the episode. But so, so Steve kind of walks through some of the things that he's learned, some best practices, some pitfalls, some things that you want to definitely be thinking about as you do virtual training. But what's interesting is many of the things that he talks about also apply to just traditional in person training. So many of the things that we want to be doing in an in person training perhaps is even more important in a virtual environment. So really good stuff. I think you're going to enjoy this show. Notes can be found over@gembapodcast.com just look for episode 437. Again, gembapodcast.com look for episode 437. Okay, enough for me. Let's get to the show. Hey, Steve, welcome back to the show. How are you?

Hey, Ron. Doing well. Thanks. Thanks for having me.

Yeah, yeah, we were looking before we hit record. So episode 315 was the last time that you were on, so been a few episodes in between there. So how's everything been going?

Everything's been going really well. Really well. Busy as always and making lots of good things happen. But yeah, things are going well.

Awesome. All right, well, you know the drill. We'd like to get things rolling with our guests sharing a quote. So do you have one?

Yeah, you know, well, it's a bit of a paraphrase and so I can't remember it exactly. It comes from Jocko Willink and Leif Baben who wrote Extreme Ownership. Right. So they're prior U.S. navy SEALs and there's a, a part of the book where they're Telling the story of a SEAL team dropping out of an airplane. They drop a boat into the ocean and all the seals jump into the water and they swim, get on their boat, and they discover all of their electronic communications had been saturated with salt water. It was all fried and they couldn't use it. And my favorite quote was the way Jocko responded to that. He said, good, now we can learn how to be successful without electronic communication.

Yes.

I love it. Right. You know, it's like life happens and like, we don't get to choose our circumstances, but we do need to choose how we're going to respond to it and what we're going to do about it.

Yeah. Matter of fact, there's. I've been a long time since I've seen it, but there's a video. You can see it on YouTube if you just type in Jocko Jo CKO. And then good. There's a video called Good. And he goes through a bunch of that kind of stuff where he's like, yes, this bad thing happened. Good. You can learn from it. You know, this good. You can learn from. You know, so I play it for my kids, you know. Yeah. So no good stuff, man. All right, well, hey, Steve, obviously you and I know each other very well, but.

Yeah.

In case the. The audience isn't familiar with your background, just give us a little rundown on. On who was Steve Kane and. And what you're up to these days.

Yeah, yeah. So in college, I studied philosophy, so I've got a bachelor's degree in philosophy from UC Santa Cruz in California. And I got into continuous improvement when I went into the medical device industry. So I was making implantable components for medical devices, and so that's where I really started to study. And I did it on the production floor as an operator. I worked up through a management, became a plant manager and ultimately VP of operations. So I've been applying Lean over the years from various different perspectives and trying to learn as much as I can all along the way. And like anything else in life. Right. Some of your best lessons are from your failures. Right. So I've had quite a few struggles, but I've learned a lot from that.

Right.

And now with. At Gemba Academy, I'm kind of taking that experience and also have just kind of deepened my learning and now am coaching others to apply Lean and Six Sigma in their organizations.

Yeah. Fantastic. All right, well, so today we're going to kind of talk about a trend that. That we've obviously been involved in for. For many years.

But.

But I feel like there's been a shift almost within the last couple years, partly due to the pandemic, but also just because I think it's. There's a shift going on, and that is with virtual training. So I'm curious, maybe we could just begin with, first of all, like, when we say virtual training, like, what do we mean virtual training?

Right, right. There could be different meanings to the word virtual. Right. So what we mean is delivering training through essentially a video conference platform, something like Microsoft Teams, Zoom, you know, Google Meet, et cetera. So that's what we're talking about. So screen to screen, more than face to face.

Now, how would you define then kind of our more traditional business model, which is, you know, people subscribing to our video platforms where they're watching video. So if. If a group of people get together and they watch a Gemba Academy video, or not just any video that doesn't have to be Gemba Academy, like, what kind of training would that be? How would you define that? Like online learning or something like that?

Yeah, yeah, probably something like online learning. Yep, yep. On demand online. Yep.

Yeah. So I feel like it's important to differentiate, well, when we're saying virtual training versus say, you know, watching a video to learn and then go practice what you learn on the video. So. So, okay, well, what kind of trends have you been seeing, you know, maybe over just the last few years with virtual training?

Yeah, well, you know, you brought up the pandemic, and that I think that really caused the greatest shift that I've seen. So I've been using video conference for many years, and in particular with Gemba Academy, one of the. One of the things that. A pattern that I saw before the pandemic was people were unlikely to use the camera during training sessions. They wanted to treat it like it was a telephone. And that's fine, whatever your preference. Right. But with the pandemic, so many people got forced into the home and working from home, and now they had to conduct all of their internal meetings through video conference. They kind of got over that hump of feeling comfortable on camera. So that's been a big shift. Now people seem to be more open to being on camera and have learned to adapt to the technology a little bit because, of course, it's different than being face to face, just the way the technology works. So that's been the big shift. And now that we're on the downhill side of the pandemic and people are more experienced with using video conference platforms and more accepting of seems that Organizations are more, becoming more reliant on it because it's much more cost effective when you're dealing with people in various geographical locations. We eliminate, eliminate the need for travel. And so that's a big benefit. Now there's also being on the downhill side of the pandemic, a real desire to get back to face to face training. Right. People are really craving that and I think there might be kind of a, maybe a little bit of a struggle or conflict there where organizations really have started to realize the benefits of eliminating travel for training and that sort of thing and wanting to rely on virtual training. But then the participants really want to be in, you know, in the classroom as well. So that, you know, I think, I think we're learning how to balance that because, because, and that, you know, both of them are going to happen.

Yeah. No, it's interesting. I had this theory. It could be completely wrong, but my theory with, with the in person training desire is, I think a lot of it might come down to personality types. You know, if you have someone who's more naturally introverted or whatever, they just don't get their energy from people. Not that they, they're anti people, they just, they don't get energy from a room full of other people. You know, they're not desiring necessarily to charge back into a big conference or you know, an in person lean boot camp training or something like that. However, there's a lot of people out there who are right in the middle or they are more extroverted and they do get their energy from people. And you know, turning the camera on in a zoom call or teams call or whatever, that's a nice step forward for them and they appreciate that. But it's almost like sometimes the benefit of being in person can be those, the downtime, like the break time, you go over to get a cup of coffee and some snack or whatever, you know, and you're just chatting. You know, you don't necessarily get that experience with the virtual training. So that's why we're excited to be able to offer both really at Gemba Academy. You come here, do live training, we can do virtual training, we do online training. So we're trying to diversify because we realize that there's, there's a need for all of them. Right. And, and a place for all of them.

So. Right. And I kind of think, you know, you can make anything work. We'll make whatever platform work, whether it's a training room or you know, a virtual training session. I think the question for me Is which would be more effective for the specific training experience I would want the learners to have. And sometimes online is the best way to do it. Doing a virtual session, especially if it's something pretty brief and you're dealing with people spread out, that definitely is the most effective. But sometimes if you're doing something that requires any kind of interaction. So for the listeners that are familiar with the dominoes exercise that's really popular with kata, that's really difficult to do in a virtual environment. So what's the best tool for the job? I think that's really the question that you need to answer.

Exactly, exactly. So, all right, so when we think about training in a virtual environment versus face to face training, there's different, say, preparation and, and things that you need to do. So what have you, what have you done to. You've done a lot of this more than anybody here. Again, by academy, you've done more virtual training than any of us. Look, what have you had to do to adapt from that? More that face to face traditional approach to, you know, a bunch of people, you know, logging onto teams or zoom.

Yeah. People's endurance is a little bit different in a virtual environment than it is in a classroom. So in a classroom you can sit for a couple of hours between breaks. That's pretty common. And of course you'll build those breaks in. But what I found is having a long session virtually is very, very difficult because we have a hard time focusing on the computer screen and staying engaged for a long period of time. So we had to. For me, it's shifting from a marathon to multiple short sprints. So if I were to do, say an all day training in a classroom that would take eight hours, if I'm going to shift that over to virtual training, then I would probably want to switch that to maybe 30 to 90 minute sessions, depending on the logical places to break it up. But we can only pay attention for so long before we really get spent. And as soon as that happens, our minds start to drift. I mean, everybody will do that. And the thing is, our minds have drifted for who knows how long by the time we were aware of the fact that our mind drifted. Right. So, so that was like the first thing that it really had to adjust to was just marathons, change those into short sprints. And then also had to really think through how activities would work or any kind of an exercise, a group exercise that you want to do. So again, the, the kata example. Well, we can't do dominoes. Right. So how would we. Or a puzzle yeah, yeah. Anything like that. The marshmallow challenge can't do that on screen. So. So how do we adapt? One of the things that I'm working on right now is delivering job instruction virtually. And you know, the job instruction example of the, of the fire underwriters, not, which is really simple, if you're not familiar with that for the listeners, is just tying two pieces of wire. It's about as complicated as tying your shoes. It's just a different style of knot. But you need to be side by side to do that. And doing it in front of a camera is difficult because people are watching the wrong side of the demonstration. Yeah. So what? Yeah, so we have to turn that into something that anybody can do on screen. So we have to just be creative. And how do I turn this into a. Basically a digital exercise?

Yeah, well. And you've come up with some pretty cool. You know, I love caught on a classroom in person where we're using a jigsaw puzzle that's, that's, it's super fun and everybody loves it and we do it here in Keller, Texas. But we've, we've come up with a digital version of that where we're using a spreadsheet and we've got different activities that teams are doing on the spreadsheet. What have you learned from that? Like, what have you seen? Are people enjoying it or what do you think?

Yeah, yeah. Actually it's quite similar to the puzzles or the dominoes where you finish like, you finish around and people are a little upset that it's over because they know if just one more round they can get that time down. Right. You know? Yeah, so, so people are very engaged with that now. In order to make that work, of course, you have to really limit the number of people who can participate in any one time. And, and there are ways, ways to, ways to do that. Yep.

What about some pitfalls? Are there, is there anything that we need to be looking out for?

Yeah, so there are some, some pitfalls. So first we kind of alluded to it earlier, which is zoom fatigue. Right. And nothing about zoom in particular is just team zoom.

Google hangout, doesn't matter.

Right. It's all the same. Yeah, but, but somebody coined that phrase a while back, but I think early part of the pandemic. But people will get fatigued when. We have to keep in mind now that organizations are relying so much more on video conferencing, somebody's going to sit in a two hour session with you. They might have just gotten out of hours of Meetings on their video conferencing platform, which makes now your training session kind of tiring for them. So be aware of that. And that kind of goes back to short sprints. And so you just want to, want to be prepared for that. It's very easy also to lose engagement during the sessions. So you can just watch eyes glaze over, people starting to patient attention to something else. You can see that they're typing, maybe checking email, that sort of thing. So that is definitely a pitfall. So the way I kind of approach that is be prepared for it. It's human nature, people are going to do it. It's not about the presenter, it' about the people involved. So, so kind of design your, your training experience in anticipation of that and how are we going to keep people really engaged? Yeah. And then also, you know, people work, people working from home, many people working from home don't like to have the camera on. Right. They just don't want to, you know, bring home into the office.

Right.

So, so that can be a bit of a pitfall. You know, people, some people may want to keep the cameras off. And something I really try to drive in my sessions is cameras on, microphones on the whole time because I want it to be as much as a face to face experience as possible. And there's like, I think, I don't have any data behind this, no psychological studies, but I think that there's a shift in mindset once we decide to hit the mute button or once we decide the camera's not off, it's a completely different experience. We're now removed from it and we're just observers. We're watching television, it's completely passive. So that can be a pitfall as well. If you're really relying on people to grasp the content of your training session and being able to take action with it, that can be a real struggle if they're disconnected in any way. Yeah. And then the other thing is, I think a big pitfall is that because these virtual sessions are brief, you know, we make them right around an hour or so, give or take. They tend to happen right in the middle of a workday for people. So if they're in the office and participating from their desk, people are walking in, disrupting them, asking questions. They have this feeling of, I have to get to my next meeting I've got. Right. So the attention isn't the same as if somebody actually left the office for a training experience. Because when you leave the office, you don't have any expectations of yourself that you're going to be able to participate in other meetings during work, you know, at work. So, so that having that frame of mind of being completely present can be a real challenge. So again, that's something that you're, you're going to want to address in planning of your, your session and preparing your participants.

Yeah. So you, you've offered some, some good countermeasures there for, for many of those pitfalls. But I'm wondering if there's any other, I don't know, practical tips that, you know, someone's, almost everybody listening. This has probably been involved in some virtual training and many of them have delivered it. So what kind of practical tips do you have for folks who are going to be doing this?

So yeah, so the first thing applies to virtual or face to face any training that you do have a training plan that incorporates the real world application and a follow up plan. So we, so we're going to go into a training session, you're going to learn some specific things. Well, the real learning happens at the Gemba and how do we make sure that happens properly? So we want to be able to follow up with people with practical application of what's being learned. And if you might be thinking, I don't know what a training plan would look like, just do a quick Google search or search Gemba Academy and look for job instruction. Four steps. Prepare the learner, present the operation, try out performance and follow up. And now there's some more details under that, but right there you're getting the framework of a solid training plan and it doesn't need to be anything terribly complicated. Again, plan for brief sessions. So what will that mean for you? What are the logical breaks in your, in your training plan for those individual sessions? Also prepare people in advance for what they should expect. We're going to go into this training event. So for example, I'm working with a client right now with job instruction. So I send out a five day plan. This is what we're going to do. Here are the expectations. I explained that I'm asking them to be on camera, be on microphone, be prepared for that, have a break beforehand and be prepared to sit in the session for the full hour, that sort of thing. Also, I explain how the video conference system works. So for this session I'm using Zoom. But most of the clients that we work with seem to be familiar with teams and there's a tough transition. They don't work any differently. It's just all the controls are in different places. So teach them how Zoom works. If they need to mute. How are they going to do that? If they need to change their audio settings, how will they do that? And just help them be successful before they go into the room. And then also suggest that people use a headset. I think that it's a little more effective than using the regular speakers and microphone on a computer. There's a little bit. There's a technology thing going on there. Right. Because your computer's going to basically have a bias toward one or the other. Either sounds coming in or sounds going out, and it's going to switch back and forth, forth. And that doesn't happen so much with headsets. So headsets work more like a phone. Right, Right. Give people instructions on how to use the virtual background. They really appreciate that.

Yeah.

And with your sessions, one way, this is one way to keep people engaged as well, but it's also a great learning experience is leverage breakout rooms in your video conference platform. So you assign people to teams, give them a really quick assignment, and put them into breakout rooms for two minutes, and then work through your breakout rooms. And then you can bring everybody back, but you want to keep everybody kind of intellectually moving throughout your session, right?

Yep.

And then the other thing is get people in the right state of mind at the beginning. And this is virtual face to face. But it really helps with a virtual training session because people are entering it in the TV watching mindset. Right. They're a little bit. No, not a little bit. They're passive. So we need to break that and we need to get them active. So I like to have a really simple icebreaker kind of exercise. And I ask people, we're going to go around the room and tell everybody two things that you're excited about, one thing related to work and one thing not related to work. And when you do that, and of course, the facilitator needs to start. Right. You got to break the ice for folks. But when you do that, and I'm watching like, you know, the Brady Bunch of display, you know, the gallery display on the screen, and you start seeing faces changing. People start talking about what they're excited about, they start smiling, their eyes open up, their eyebrows go up, and we're getting them into this positive state of mind. And then we transition into the training topic. But it's. It's an Absolutely. A different experience from just trying to go straight into the training topic.

Yeah. Well, and the one thing that I've been in many of your sessions as well, that, that, that you do such a great job of is, is really Making it experiential, you know, and like, because again, if you're face to face and you're up there just going, death by PowerPoint, not by Zoom, but by PowerPoint, you know, and it's just, oh my gosh, can this guy read any more slides? People are done, man. They're done. Four minutes into it, maybe 30 seconds into it, versus go a little bit. Hey, get up, everybody. Move your desk. And what, what's going on? You know, now your blood's going, pumping and you know, it's. It's just, you got to keep people engaged.

And.

And I would argue in a virtual environment, even more so. Even more so. You know, like you said, even just sending them off to a breakout room to chat about something, you know, that's way better than just pummeling them with slides or lecture.

Right, right. You know, and you know something else, you just sparked a memory that, you know, from school, I took a business communications class and, you know, we were giving PowerPoint presentations and all of that. And whether you do this virtually or live, I think this point really rings true. The professor, you know, explained that you are the presentation. Your slide deck is not right. Your media, not the presentation. So if you are using PowerPoint, remember to shut it off. Show your slide, shut it off, turn that screen black and continue your discussion. Right. And make sure that people are engaged in you and not just getting glazed over with whatever media you might be displaying.

So what I love about Jeff Koss and the Koss tailored people there in Washington, when they do some of their training, there is no slides. You got a whiteboard. News seven ways.

Seven ways.

And then he just starts talking, you know, and.

Yeah, it's.

It's wonderful.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

So what do you think, Steve? As far as. Here we are in July, we're recording this at least in Latter part of July 2022. So, you know, a year from now, two years from now, where do you see virtual training going?

Well, I think it's definitely here to stay. So it's so I don't see it going away. So I see people building more and more skill, specializing in delivering training through video conference platforms and the latest technology. I'm sure everybody's at least heard of augmented reality and virtual reality. So this is really kind of a question that I have in my mind. These technologies are bound to merge, so sooner or later we're going to see augmented reality in virtual training and I think some virtual reality as well. So I think there are a couple of hurdles to overcome. There you know, in the workplace, like, is a company going to buy everybody a set of VR goggles? Right. How's that going to work? Right. And with the pandemic, you know, I think we're hyper aware of spreading infection, so it's not likely that anybody's going to share goggles, that sort of thing. So, so how would that work? But I would anticipate that technology is just going to get to the, going to merge with video conferencing to make training much more realistic and much more effortless. Because it's not only happening in business, it's happening in education, primary school, secondary school, and at the university level as well. And I think with that market demanding a better experience, we're likely to see that spread over into business training as well.

Yeah, no, I would agree, I would agree. You know, I think in the end, the most important thing with any type of training, whether it's in person, online, virtual, doesn't matter, is. And something that we're so passionate about as a company is it's not about the video, it's not about Steve's workshop. It's like, what are you doing with what you just received? You know, if you're not doing something, if you're not invoking some sort of positive change in your work and you're in the world at home or whatever, then really it was for not. Right. So make sure that we're always focused on the end is a positive change to your, to your work, to your, to the world. Right. And the means is, is this training or that book that you're reading or you know, whatever podcast you're listening to kind of thing is, is this is information to make the world better?

Yeah, yeah. And I think you bring up a really good point here. When, when we train people or we're teaching people, we're always teaching something and, and it may not what be what we intended to deliver. So, so what does that really mean? You know, we have so many organizations, you know, here at Gemba Academy, so many organizations come to us and they're asking for, for this quality training material and they're delivering training. And as I'm coaching people with that, like, what's the beginning and the end of your training experience? Well, you know, I started with a plan. I delivered the training in a classroom, we went through the videos, we talked about it, and then that was it. Okay, well, I'd like to reframe your understanding of the training experience. The training begins at the end of your training session. So you've given them the awareness and enough knowledge to move forward. But the real learning happens at the Gemba and that's really what we need to focus on. So if there's no real world purpose for the training, and I think this might be what you were talking about, Ron, don't invest everybody's time into it because you're going to teach them something. So, for example, let's teach everybody 5s might be the idea, but we're not following up with it by actually practicing 5s. Yeah. So we taught people some, some things about 5s, but what they really learned is that we don't follow through. And that's what we're teaching them. And we. And you really have to be careful about that. Training should be a means to an end and. Right. It's a thing that's going to bridge the gap from our future state, the gap between the future state and our current state. And not just training for the sake of training, because people will learn to tune out. And we don't want to teach people to do that.

Exactly, exactly. So we don't normally do this and I don't. And we're coming towards the end. So I suppose if folks want to switch off, they can. But from a Gemba Academy perspective, why don't you tell everybody a little bit about what we offer with respect to virtual training certifications, you know, all that kind of stuff. Sure. You run the department, so.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Yeah. So with virtual training, you know, we do virtual workshops, so all of twi, so job instruction, job methods, job relations. We've done quite a bit of kata training virtually, and we teach Six Sigma and pretty much anything Lean. We're prepared to teach virtually or at our training center either way. And as far as our certification programs go, we have a Lean practitioner program which is, it's a rigorous course, it's in depth, and it will take many months to get through. For most people, the fastest I've seen is six months. But the idea is we're teaching 10 general areas of lean. But in our program, you have to practice and show that you're proficient in each area. So when we teach practical problem solving, you have to go and solve a real world problem for your company using the method. And we're going to teach value stream mapping, for example. You're going to do this. And what I love about it is people are, they're not alone, they're doing it with a coach. So we're coaching them step by step, giving them lots of feedback and making real world improvements for the company, you know, as that's happening. And then on the Six Sigma side, all of our Six Sigma training is Lean Six Sigma. We don't want to exclude any Lean from our Six Sigma programs, but we've got a robust yellow belt program that's quite popular. Our green belt program is, I think is the most popular and really solid black belt program. So we do that with the core of it is online video. And then we have these weekly coaching sessions where we're on video conference and going through a coaching session. We're working through the kata, we're working through all of their problems, doing screen share and again, making sure that people are not alone, going through the learning experience experience and they're getting the most out of out of the program that we can possibly provide. Fantastic.

Steve, if folks want to connect with you or Gemba Academy, what's the best way?

Yeah, LinkedIn. Yeah, you can just look me up. Steve Kane, and it's Stephen with a V and last name is K A N E. So if you just search for Stephen Kane, Gemba Academy, you'll find me. That would be the best way to connect.

Fantastic. Awesome. All right, man, well get back to work. All right, thanks, Steve.

Hey, thank you, Ron.

Thanks for listening. Whether you've been on the continuous improvement journey for many years or perhaps you're just getting started, Gemba Academy is here to support you. And while we're best known for our more than 1500 Lean and Six Sigma teaching and virtual tour videos, we also have a team of experienced Lean and Six Sigma practitioners available for one on one coaching, as well as a variety of Lean and Six Sigma certification options. To learn more and to schedule a demo, head on over to gembaacademy.com.