Provide training
Eisenlau is well experienced in the industry and isn’t interested in participating in long hours of additional training, but just because it’s not something he’s passionate about for himself doesn’t mean he doesn’t see excitement in others about it — particularly the younger generation of his work force.
“They’re much more motivated to learn more, to expand their skills and to reach out to any new opportunities,” he says. “It’s very interesting.”
And that’s consistent across all of the HOK offices globally. Staff members are asked to complete 40 hours of additional training in a calendar year, and those young people are eating it up.
“You have a lot of people motivated by something different than I am, and they’re not necessarily motivated by money — they’re motivated by thought, by creativity, by new challenges every day and by not being told when to come and go,” he says. “It’s a very unique mindset to manage and to stimulate.”
The additional training opportunities through HOK University offers a way to stimulate them. For example, someone may be interested in the design of one particular type of facility, such as hospitals or airports, and if that’s what the person is interested in but not necessarily working on, it gives the employee a chance to learn about that area where his or her interest lies.
“The sort of bandwidth of your employees is much broader, and the fact that it’s wrapped into a normal work year — this is not something we expect somebody to go out on a Saturday and sit around and study this information,” he says. “We expect it to be done within the normal course of the business year.”
Employees are compensated for the time they spend in training, as well.
“So you don’t have people saying, ‘I don’t have time after hours to visit my kids or my significant other or I don’t want to burn up my Saturday doing this,” he says.
If you’re not sure where to start with putting together a training program, Eisenlau suggests beginning with the basics. First, define what the skills for each position are.
“Once you define very clearly what everybody’s roles and responsibilities are, then you can offer them the proper guidance and then you can offer them the proper training modules within your organization,” he says.
Then look at what are the basic skills needed to execute on those responsibilities.
“I would probably start with getting a firm understanding of what the proper skills are to sort of execute the product that that particular business leader was producing and make sure that the skill sets were properly addressed,” he says.
For example, for him, that could be basic things, such as defining what the roles of certain positions are or going over basic safety-code issues. Then from there, you can take it up a notch.
“Develop a varied training model that addresses everything from immediate skill sets to the creative side of your business, as well, and develop those training modules,” Eisenlau says.
Once you develop training programs, then you can gauge whether or not they’re effective by how employees apply what they learn to their work.
“A simple example to illustrate would be, let’s say someone takes an HOK-U learning module on handicapped accessibility within the building, and they learn a number of features in a learning module,” he says. “Well, when the actual project that they’re working on would have a code evaluation, there would be clues as to whether or not the training module was effective for that particular individual.”
