Happy New Year to all our friends, colleagues, and especially our clients and followers!
The start of a new year serves as an opportunity for many to set new goals and commit to better habits. That means January kicks off with grand plans and best intentions. But what about now, four weeks into the new year, as January winds down and the everyday pressures creep back in?
Research shows that while 38% of adults will make a New Year's resolution, only 9% of people stick to them all year long. And here’s how quickly those good intentions fade away: By February, 80% of resolutions are forgotten.
There’s a corollary to what we know about learning and behavior change in the workplace. Just think about some of the great training sessions or conference presentations you’ve attended. You probably took lots of notes and nodded throughout. You smiled, were engaged, maybe told someone that this was the best session you’d ever attended.
And then it was over. And you went back to work. And you struggled to remember the key points. You tried your best to implement at least one of them, but gradually, the experience shifted to the back of your mind and you carried on, business as usual.
Getting someone to learn something or get insights from a training session is fairly straightforward. Getting that person to actually use what they learned after the training is far more challenging and complex.
As you look at your talent development plans, commitments, and expectations for 2024, it’s important to recognize that the training sessions themselves are only the beginning of the developmental journey. Behavior change is a process. Without ongoing support, reinforcement, coaching, and follow-up, skills learned can quickly be forgotten.
With everything that goes on in the typical retail day, this is a good time to shore up your commitments and ensure you’re putting in place the structure to get results all year round. That includes things like:
- Senior leadership commitment and follow-up
- Self-directed microlearning to integrate learning into the workday
- Post-training, mobile-enabled reinforcement exercises and learning reminders that are quick, easily accessible, and engaging
- Coaching in real time for associates as well as coaching and development for leaders and emerging leaders
With all of this in mind, the MOHR Retail team is continuing to elevate service levels and enhance the quality and timeliness of our training solutions. Just as important, we’re also expanding the essential learning, reinforcement, and coaching components that surround and support our virtual and live classroom workshops.
In 2023, we learned that 100% of our session participants would recommend MOHR Retail to others in their organization for retail talent development. We’re resolving in 2024 to continually live up to that high bar—and do MOHR!
Read on to learn about the retail talent development trends and themes that need to be on your radar for 2024, as well as innovative strategies and solutions you can take advantage of to keep momentum high all year round.
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