How to Effectively Train Millennial and Gen Z Employees

Millennials and Gen Z-ers have overtaken baby boomers as the largest part of the workforce. Expert Nile Nickel gives practical advice on how to engage these two generations, along with training techniques and methods that work to keep them motivated in the workplace.

Host: Sean O’Brien (Principal, Business Development Executive at Auzmor, Inc.)

Speakers: Nile Nickel ( Life-long engineer and entrepreneur, established within America’s leaders, AT&T, Paradyne, Rockwell, and IBM)

INTRODUCTION

Sean O’Brien: 

Hi everyone and thank you so much for attending the “How to Effectively Train Millennial and Gen Z employees. We’ve got an awesome one for you today, so we’re just going to hit the ground running here. So first and foremost, my name is Sean O’Brien. I am an HR Software as a Service Consultant, consultant and speaker, as well as the Principal Business Development Exec here with Auzmor and the resident Millennial here at Auzmor as well. But we’ll get to who you all came to see, our guest genius today, Mr. Nile Nickel, He’s the COO of Intelligent Consumer Experiences, the CIO of Corporate Dynamics. But you may have seen or heard about Nile if you’ve ever watched television and or ever listen to the radio. Nile how are you today? 

Nile Nickel: 

Okay, let’s try that. Is that working?

Sean O’Brien: 

Yes sir. Hey, how’s it going?

Nile Nickel: 

We’re coming. We’re connecting a slightly different way than what we discussed, but as long as it works, that’s all that matters.

Sean O’Brien: 

Awesome. Yeah, I just figured you’re giving folks time to read the entire slide about you because there’s so many accolades.

Nile Nickel: 

No, I appreciate that. I’m just another guy in the trenches, like most of us try to get our jobs done. That’s all.

Sean O’Brien: 

Well, Nile won’t tell everyone here, but he actually is a massive, has been a massive influence in the telecom space as well as technology as a whole. Sorry, I know I don’t think we told you we were going to include it, but fun fact is he was on the development team that first produced the commercially available 38, or 56K computer modems. So we’re happy to have you here now. 

Nile Nickel: 

Well that just told everybody how old I was. I’m not a millennial, but I appreciate that. Should we go back and restart this over? 

Sean O’Brien: 

No, I’ll tell you what, we’ll hit the ground running. Go to the next slide and take it from there. 

Nile Nickel: 

So on this slide, essentially as we review who the millennials and Gen Zs are and their values, what motivates them and how to engage them, you’re going to see a few themes that are going to emerge. So we’re going to use these themes, to build on the foundation.

Nile Nickel: 

As you’ll see why they tie into the training methods we’ll discuss today work so well. So next side here.

Sean O’Brien: 

The slides aren’t advancing on my screen. I don’t know if that’s true for everybody or not.

 Nile Nickel: 

Quick check with their marketing. Are they advancing on your screen?

Sean O’Brien: 

We’re still on the opening screen. Okay.

Nile Nickel: 

My shiny head is on both the screens you were talking about, so it really doesn’t matter much….There’s me, there’s Nile. Alright, get a good look everyone. So here’s our agenda. I. Three ways to work this workforce is different II. How we can engage a little bit differently with millennials and Gen Z’ers and III. The new training methods and things that are most effective in the training with Gen Z and millennials.

Sean O’Brien: 

So now we’re off to the races.

Nile Nickel: 

Now we’re off to the races. And the only thing that I want to say is for all the people that are dialed in here don’t get concerned. We’re going to spend a little bit of time on sort of the first topic there on the agenda. That’s not where we’re focused, but it’s foundational for everything else that we’re going to do. So when we understand some of these things and we talk about how to engage and then not only how to engage, but how new training techniques and methods work, it will make sense.

Sean O’Brien: 

Absolutely. And we promise we will move quickly through this section to get to the meat and bones of our discussion here. So first let’s go ahead and define these generations because there are multiple conflicting reports on who these generations are. So, a millennial, the data we’re going to use today is the 1981 through 1996. I would not be surprised that the vast majority of folks that are even on this call today are millennials, but Gen Z is in the workforce already. So it’s kind of silly. You see all of these different webinars and things that are getting ready for the millennial workforce. But as you’ll see here on our next slide, they’re already, in 2019, bridging the gap of being the most popular generation within the workforce today. Is that correct, Nile?

Nile Nickel: 

Yeah, that’s correct. And you know, by the time you take the millennials, or Gen Y as it’s sometimes called as well, and you put that together with Gen Z, those two generations alone exceed the majority of the people that used to be in the workforce, which were the boomers. So it falls into my category. I’m in the minority now, and I’m in the minority with just millennials. But like I said, you combine the two of them and we’re definitely in the minority.

Sean O’Brien: 

Right. Well, so let’s touch a little bit more on the millennials. You know who they are and why do they matter? Why do we matter? Right/ It’s all millennials. So first, we essentially grew up with a smartphone in hand. I think our conversation the other day, Nile, you were saying there’s a study out there is that an average millennial reaches for his or her phone 45 times a day and the pressure is mounting on companies to not try to get them off their phone but more or less roll with it. Could you expand on that a little?

How to Leverage Millennials’ Habits in the Workplace

Nile Nickel: 

Yeah. Obviously if we’re really connected to something, and there’s been a lot of of studies for that matter that talk about how addictive smartphone technology is. They found it’s more addictive than crack for that matter. So, you could either fight the addiction or you can embrace it and leverage it and use it to your advantage. And it’s one of the things that we’ll talk about because it is extremely important that that you recognize that smartphones are something that’s not just them playing around or anything else. They use it for everything now. So you absolutely want to consider that and engage that. We’ll be talking about that later as well.

Sean O’Brien: 

Yeah, absolutely. And I even made the joke with my wife, I’m like, “Is that a typo?” I could have sworn it would be 145 times a day instead of 45. We’re glued to these little screens in our hands. So we’ll touch on that as well as peer networks. And the bulk of the information there that millennials and Gen Z-ers are receiving today is from social networks. Is that correct?

Nile Nickel: 

Yeah. And it’s not so much that that’s where they’re getting all of their information from their news. But if they’re seeking advice or they’re trying to figure out what to do, they’ll ask people on these networks. And so the network has become much more than a social aspect. It’s really become sort of the group therapy session for a lot of millennials and even more so with Gen Z. So, and when you pair that with “they’re never without a smartphone,” which is of course where they engage on most of the peer networks or social media networks, you remember that. The last thing they do at night is look at that device, and the first thing they do in the morning is they pick up that device. Again, if you know these things, these are really valuable tools and resources that you could use and leverage to your goals.

Sean O’Brien: 

Yeah, and you got me. That’s exactly me as well. So, some of the stats, I believe you sent over by Kelton Research, found that a staggering 84% of millennials turn to user generated content to shape their decisions.

Nile Nickel: 

Yeah. That is an important point to note because when you talk about where they are, what they’re using to make decisions, the thing that is the opposite of that is they don’t trust the traditional authoritative sites any longer. They trust each other, even when they’re found to be wrong. Many times they still trust their peers more than they do anybody else? Again, another thing that you could leverage to your advantage.

Sean O’Brien: 

Yeah, absolutely so. I know another thing we need to touch on is greater diversity. Could you expand on that a little more?

Nile Nickel: 

Wow. We could spend literally a whole session on this. Millennials started the trend recognizing greater diversity. We wanted a society as Americans that race didn’t matter, color didn’t matter. Culture didn’t matter. Sexual orientation didn’t matter. And the Gen Z-ers actually took that and ran with that. But we do have the most diverse workforce in our history, significantly more diverse. And not only do we have greater diversity, but right now we have, and this isn’t to be offensive to anybody at all, but we have the great pronoun debate going on. What’s your preferred pronoun? And what that is really speaking to is the recognition of diversity and giving it respect and making sure that we’re being inclusive. We’re not trying to be offensive. That’s a really big deal to both millennials and Gen Z-ers. Gen Z-ers is more than millennials, but it’s certainly extremely powerful with millennials as well.

Sean O’Brien: 

Yeah, absolutely. So obviously fourth topic. The shorter attention span, right? More or less the need for more instant gratification, if you will?

Nile Nickel: 

Yeah. And you know that when you look at millennials and you look at Gen Z-ers, most of your adult working life, you’ve had things like SMS messages, text messages. Growing out of that Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, the posts that we’d get on there. And a lot of times those bits of communication are 140 characters or less. And so that whole generation has learned to focus on 140 characters or less, communicate a lot with very little. But it’s also driven another characteristic out of that. Right now they’ve measured attention spans and when I say they, Microsoft has done this more than anybody else currently because they want to capture your attention for all sorts of reasons. It used to be that it was a whopping 12 seconds when they measured it in 2000. They just measured it in 2016, a few years ago, and it’s down to 8 seconds, which they classify as being less than a goldfish.

Understanding Selective Attention Spans

Sean O’Brien: 

And to that point, with our previous discussions, wasn’t there a study that you pointed out to me where attention spans are not necessarily shrinking but becoming more selective?

Nile Nickel: 

They’re becoming more selective, they’re becoming more focused. And that’s absolutely true. And again, it’s because of the tools that they’ve used. So I don’t mean to say that the attention spans are short, but basically you have to catch somebody’s attention in that short period of time. If you catch their attention, and ideally you want to leave them with one goal when you’re trying to do this, and that is tell me more. And so if you get the tell me more part, you’ve got them as long as you want them, quite honestly. But you’ve got to capture them first.

Sean O’Brien: 

Yeah, absolutely. And it kind of lends itself to the next point, the answers on demand, right? The instantaneous information at our fingertips with cell phones, tablets, and things like that today.

Nile Nickel: 

Yeah. Google has probably changed more of that than anything else. And if we want to be more broad based, we could say the internet, because millennials and Gen Z-ers, certainly Gen Z-ers, but most of millennials, they’ve grown up and all of their adult working life, even college life for that matter, have these technology tools available. They’ve gotten better, but you embrace them early on so you don’t think about having to go and really dive into something to research it. You don’t think about training that is going to last for hours and hours and hours because you’re looking for a solution to a current problem. You want to grab it and go, and that is certainly one of the characteristics that are pervasive in both millennials and Gen Z-ers.

Sean O’Brien: 

Yeah, and that ability has been around for most of my life, and we’ve all seen it even just in family instances. You’ll be speaking on a topic, and you can see the different generational divides and it’s Gen Z first, millennial, maybe second are going, “Hey, why are we even talking about this? Let’s just Google it.” So, it definitely having that instantaneous information, but then obviously different motivations, right?

Nile Nickel: 

Yeah. So when, and we’re not going to cite specifics here, but when you go through the points that are above different motivations, obviously the way that millennials and Gen Z-ers approach, everything is different. They’re motivated differently. The diversity is just one issue. If you’re in a workplace that’s not very diverse or you don’t respect diversity, you are going to drive the millennials and Gen-Zers away. They’re going to look for better opportunities, even if that means that they’re taking a pay cut. So the things that you would use to motivate employees in the past really doesn’t work anymore.

Sean O’Brien: 

Right. Which leads us right into our next point here. We want to make sure everyone knows generations don’t just fit into a box. You can’t just label them entirely, every single individual one way or the other, as we all know. Right? But it can be confusing right now.

Nile Nickel: 

Well, it can be. And maybe to shed some light on that. If you were growing up a millennial or a Gen Z-er, or in a metropolitan area versus a rural area, you’re going to have different values, different motivations. There’s going to be a lot of things that were different. In a metropolitan area, you have fast internet all of your life. In some of the rural areas those modems that we were talking about that I developed many years ago. Some cases that’s still the best case connection that’s available. So there’s a lot of things that influence people. We talked about diversity, we’ve got people coming from different cultures, different backgrounds, and they bring different values to the table. So, you can’t just take the generations and say, “Oh, you’re a millennial. Okay, I know what you are and what you’re about.” Let me approach it this way. You still have to look for clues, the engagement, and basically everything that you do. If you’re not testing it to verify that you’re getting the results you want, you’re really not doing the service that you need to do.

Sean O’Brien: 

Absolutely. To that, even though millennials show they are the most consistent generation, you have to remember there’s millions of variables. Seconds can play into it as well. Absolutely. So let’s get into the values then. How do they differentiate now?

What Millennials Value in the Work Environment

Nile Nickel: 

So one of the biggest values that they have is we used to try to motivate people in the workplace with basically professional advancement that generally translated to a bigger salary, a bigger office, more perks, and things like that. When you look at millennials, and even more so Gen Z-ers, although there’s some differences, the way that they approach salary between those two generations, they don’t value salary as much. And that’s not saying it’s certainly not important. But when you look at the average earnings, and if you look at a four year college graduate, it’s going to be in the millennial generation. They’re probably right now in the range of $70,000 to $80,000.

Nile Nickel: 

Let’s just take a $76,000 as a nice figure. And I’m going to use that because, on average, when they were surveyed, millennials said that they’d be willing to give up $7,600 in salary every year to work in an environment that was better for them. And there’s a lot of things that we could talk about environmentally that make the workplace better for them, but that’s 10% of their salary. That’s huge. Especially when we look at salary increases year to year, typically less than 2%, that’s 5 years of salary increase. It’s big.

Sean O’Brien: 

Yeah, absolutely. And it lends itself, it’s one reason I’m here at Auzmor, right? I want to be some place where I am Sean O’Brien, not employee number one, six, two. Right? Making sure you have that great working culture and sense of community if you will, in that you’re an individual and a member of an organization as a whole, if you will.

Nile Nickel: 

Yeah. And because of just what you talked about there, it talks about a lot of values that are in the workplace beyond just the salary like we’re talking about. And those values, it’s probably a very transparent working environment. The working environment probably has a great sense of community. The working environment you’re in encourages a lot of collaboration, and all of these things are extremely important.

Sean O’Brien: 

Yeah. Which goes right into our next corporate social responsibility. Could you explain that a little more?

Nile Nickel: 

Yeah. This one is really big today. Millennials and Gen Z-ers don’t want to go to work for a company for a paycheck. They want to go to work for a company that they feel is making some difference. And not all companies with their primary product can make a difference, but they can be very conscious about their company and how they embrace the community, how they embrace the environment, and what they’re doing to make the community and the environment better.

Nile Nickel: 

And one of the things that’s becoming huge is volunteering and charitable efforts and programs inside these companies where you run certain contests. Based on the contest, you’re going to hit different charitable giving levels or you have volunteer hours that are recognized inside the corporate umbrella.

Nile Nickel: 

And then not only recognized but celebrated. And so they want to say companies that make a difference. And certainly if your primary product can’t do that, there’s so many ways to affiliate with causes that can make a difference. Again, there’s a whole lot to talk about here. We don’t have time for that. We’re talking about foundational issues. So I think that gives us enough background.

Sean O’Brien: 

Yeah. Make sure your company has a positive brand image and it’s giving back. So with the flexibility real quick here on schedule other things.

Nile Nickel: 

Yeah. The biggest thing that millennials look for is flexibility in the workplace. What does that mean? Well, it means that maybe they don’t have set hours. If they get the work done, then the hours don’t matter. Obviously if you’re in a customer facing position that you have to interface with the customer, hours are important. Ways that you might address the flexibility issues are that you allow employees to swap schedules as long as somebody is in place that’s qualified to be in that place to handle the customer issues. So you look for all the flexibility you could bring to the workplace, not only regarding schedules but vacations, time off, dress codes, a lot of things like that. And there might be things that you can’t be flexible on if you’re in a financial environment. Customers coming in don’t want to see somebody in jeans and a T-shirt unless it’s on a Saturday afternoon, and then they might actually expect that. But you want to look for those indications and clues, and you want to see how you could make the workplace more flexible.

Sean O’Brien: 

Absolutely. Awesome. So we’ll move on here to the motivations that are different. So first and foremost, being personal development. Could you explain a little more on why personal development is important?

The Importance of Personal Development Among Millennials

Nile Nickel: 

Yeah.

And notice that this is personal development, not professional development, right? So millennials want to know that they have the opportunity to grow and that might mean grow beyond the boundaries and the constraints of their position. That is the most important thing in the workplace. And you know, there’s just so much data there. Want to get your feedback and then I’ll jump back in.

Sean O’Brien: 

Yeah, absolutely. Well, we were speaking on the popular searches feature and the Auzmor LMS. Not to make a plug, but when I first got here, I didn’t really understand the use case for that. And it’s quickly become one of the favorite features in the system because it’s telling folks in an unbiased way what these individuals are looking for. And more often than not, it’s things like stress management, how to be a better leader. A communication, these types of things that are kind of outside of the spectrum that you’re probably not going to get folks coming to ask about these types of trainings.

Nile Nickel: 

No, but in some cases they’re going to be embarrassed to ask, but clearly it’s what they want. I saw a Richard Branson quote recently and he talked about training your employees to go beyond their job and go beyond your company, but give them a reason to stay and they probably will. And that’s really what we’re talking about here.

Sean O’Brien: 

Well, it lends itself to the earlier chat we had about the company. The company values me as a person and an individual, as well as a member of the larger group as a whole. It’s kind of the two-pronged approach.

Nile Nickel: 

Yeah. And that’s where I talked about some of these are going to overlap and it’s important to see that overlap because you’re starting to see certain themes emerge and it allows us to, therefore, understand how we could better train incorporating some of these differences.

Sean O’Brien: 

Yeah, absolutely. So we can jump here to feedback and growth. But one of the most consistent criticisms we’ve heard aimed at millennials is that they haven’t earned this right to receive development opportunities. They shouldn’t expect a company to invest in them until they can show they’re worthy of such an investment. Have you ever heard of this type of argument?

Nile Nickel: 

Yeah, and there’s a fine balance here. Some people might call that entitlement. If you talk to millennials, it’s called empowerment because they know that they could go a lot of different places and they could find exactly what they want. And if you’re not willing to give it to them, they’re going to go find it. So from an employer’s perspective or a manager’s perspective, they might look at it and say, “Hey, they’re nothing but entitled brats.” Don’t know if you’ve ever been called that or not recently, I don’t think I’m a boomer. I’ve been called out. So I’ll just leave that alone. They will say, “No, we don’t feel entitled at all. We’re willing to work.” In fact, they will work harder and longer than they have to. They feel empowered that they have these options and because they feel empowered, they’ll exercise those options so they don’t feel trapped to a 30 year relationship with an employer. Six months might be a long time. We started to see many links of employment shrink, and there was a lot of reasons for that. They don’t feel valued. There’s a lot of personal development that just doesn’t happen. So they look for the opportunities to make it happen.

Sean O’Brien: 

Absolutely. Which I completely agree, right? Just there’s kind of two sides to this. A lot of folks will say work-life balance is important to millennials, but I would dare to argue we want…I apologize, I’m a millennial speaking for everyone, but in my own case, I want my work to have meaning in my life. To be a positive motivator in a part of my life, not a complete separation. Does that make sense?

Nile Nickel: 

Yeah, it does. As a matter of fact, one of the things that I do quite frequently is I generate compensation plans for companies where they use a compensation as one of the motivators for employment. And when you look at those compensation plans, the big part that we’re starting to find is the stories that have been created from interactions are becoming more important and more valuable. They’re becoming one of the items that companies are compensating for because not only are they used in marketing efforts facing the customer, but they’re used motivationally within the company and the employees that are there. So being able to have an accomplishment, having the accomplishment recognized, talking about a successful outcome, whatever it may be, gives me a really positive feeling and you know what? I’m ready to work harder and longer even if I’m not paid for it than I would be otherwise.

Sean O’Brien: 

Yup. Absolutely. So moving right along here, feedback and growth, wanting more feedback on their performance or what are they looking for there now?

The Importance of Feedback for Growth

Nile Nickel: 

One of the things, and, and this goes to the short attention span, you know, one of the things that they want to know is, Hey, I did a great job yesterday, but today’s a new day. How am I doing today? You know, where can I improve? Where am I falling short? And you know, they’re not looking for necessarily something that’s being critical all the time. But let’s go back to the first point. They’re looking at, “How do I develop? How do I get better? And I can’t get better without feedback. If I get feedback, I could grow, I could get better.” All of a sudden we’ve started a cycle.

Sean O’Brien: 

Yeah, absolutely. Where are my skill gaps? How can I both develop positively, both personally and professionally? So that last being engagement and purpose.

How to Engage Millennials in the Workplace

Nile Nickel: 

So based on the way that we discussed development and feedback and growth, we already start to see them. We talked about the social purpose and all of that. So they don’t want to feel, in fact, the worst relationship a company could have with a millennial or Gen Z workforce is that they’re just there to do a job. Because if they’re just there to do a job, one thing that you could absolutely, positively count on and that is they won’t be there long just to do a job. So they want to know that their work matters. And there’s a lot of ways to make the work matter. They want to know that they’re working towards a goal. And this sort of also breaks the mold of the entitlement. If they know their work matters and they’re working towards a goal, they’re doing it together, collaborating with a team, they’re ready to go forward and they’re ready to do a whole lot. The thing that amazes me is when surveyed, the majority of millennials feel like they are not engaged. Only 29% feel engaged, which means 71% feel, I’m going to use a stronger word here. Disengaged from the workforce.

Sean O’Brien: 

Yeah. So by offering learning and development opportunities, when it all comes down to it, specifically learning plans, or just libraries tailored to help employees progress in their career, the millennial workers will have less incentive to jump ship to another employer in the name of a career progression.

Nile Nickel: 

Yeah. Absolutely. As a matter of fact, this is one of the things, and I don’t know how many HR people are on today, but from an HR perspective, one of the things that you might note is when you’re interviewing millennials and Gen Z, here’s one of the things that they will ask about in over 80% of the interviews is what’s your training program look like? How do you train me? How can I develop? This is critically important. So you know where it may have been something that you felt like you had to do before today. It’s something that you don’t have to do. It’s part of the requirements. It’s just you have to do, you’ve got to do it

Sean O’Brien: 

Right. Absolutely. So the workplaces we spoke about earlier is different. I’ll just throw the ball in your court. How does it differ with technology and communication?

Nile Nickel: 

One of the things that I’ll talk about, because I think it will bring this whole remote or virtual workspace into focus, is if you look at the number of co- working spaces developing, and while you might think co-working spaces are there for people that are just gig workers doing contract work or things like that. If you happen to show up in many co-working spaces and you talk to people in the spaces, a lot of those people work for a larger company and that’s their workplace. Now they could work at home. But one of the things that everybody complains about when they work at home because it’s too easy to get distracted and interrupted and everything else. So you’re starting to see a lot of this and in order to make those remote working environments successful, technology comes into play.

Nile Nickel: 

How do we communicate? How do we feel like these people really are engaged in the company? They’re not just out in left field on their own. And how do we make them feel not only included, but valued? Many tools are there to be able to help bridge that gap, like we’re doing today for example. There’s a lot of Skype messaging, there’s a lot of Slack systems. There’s a lot of Twitter messages. I mean it’s amazing the number of tools that are used. In fact, I don’t think a week goes by that I don’t learn a new tool that some group is using.

Sean O’Brien: 

Yeah, I was just actually thinking this myself here at Auzmor. We use Slack, WhatsApp, Google Hangouts, a lot of different ones on that end as well. So it keeps you engaged as well as being able to quickly work with individuals. On the flip side, social peer interaction. Why is that important in the workplace?

Why Millennials and Gen Z-ers Value Peer to Peer Interaction

Nile Nickel: 

Well, we talked about how millennials have sort of departed and they look for more feedback. They look to receive value and recognition from their peers more than they do their managers or supervisors. And so if we don’t allow for social or peer interaction in the workforce, and there’s a lot of companies that feel threatened by allowing people to talk about this stuff because they feel like they overshare and, and today, believe it or not, that’s almost impossible. I’m not going to say that it’s impossible. There are certainly situations that it does cause problems. But one of the things is because it happens that way because an edict could come down from the C level offices and maybe I don’t feel good about it, but I talked to some of the people that I’ve network within the company and I get a different perspective and I didn’t realize that. And all of a sudden I’m on board, I wouldn’t take the message from up high, but I’ll take the message from those around me.

Sean O’Brien: 

Absolutely. Yeah. And which lends itself, once again, we’re a good team here now because we’ve essentially covered why social impact is important. Right?

Nile Nickel: 

Yeah. Well, and obviously that’s the corporate message making a difference in the community, but they want to give back. They want to do it together. So that’s become a big thing. And banks are pretty conservative companies, but if you look at banks, they are embracing this philosophy more than almost any other industry right now. They’re making a difference and they’re not doing it out of the goodness of their heart. They’re doing it for the bottom line. It makes a difference.

Sean O’Brien: 

Yeah, absolutely. So, and we do have some stats here on millennial engagement, one of which we already covered that. 29% of millennials say they’re engaged in their jobs as opposed to the 71% on the flip side. Do any of these stats jump out to you that you’d like to expand on here now?

Nile Nickel: 

Yeah, I think we’ve covered most of those. The thing that we don’t cover here, and it would have been nice if I’d put comparative numbers there, but none of these numbers with boomers, which is what most of us are probably most familiar with working with. I mean it’s probably a lot of the generation that’s here, but every one of these, the differences, positively or negatively, are about 10% more. So the differences are substantial. It’s good to know where they are. And like I said, 10% are more. If you take a pay cut to work for a responsible company and you put it in the boomer generation, there’s almost no one willing to work for a responsible company and take a pay cut to do that. So, that’s closer to about 93% level. So about a 29% difference. So when you look at these numbers, it’s worth looking at them and just really understanding the impact that they have because they are very, very different. In fact, when you look at the 87% that I talked about their professional development, and you take non- millennials at 69%, that’s not quite 20%, but it’s close.

Sean O’Brien: 

Right? We’ll jump along to how do we engage millennials and then we’ll touch on the new training methods and things of that nature. So an engaged workforce.

Using Technology to Engage Millennials

Nile Nickel: 

Yeah. If you want to engage them, and again, this is where we talked about there’s some foundational things here. You want to be able to use collaborative technology and there’s a lot of technology out there. If we talk about some of the tools from Asana to Basecamp to Jira. We talked about Slack. We talked about a lot of things. There’s literally hundreds of these tools that you could use. And what they do is they allow employees to seamlessly and without respecting distance. It could be across states, across the country, across the globe. They could have conversations with each other and they solve a lot of their own problems before they rise to a higher level.

Sean O’Brien: 

Absolutely. And a lot of these types of solutions allow us to have different groups for different segments of your company. You could essentially oversee it at all times. So with the new training message, and gamifying systems, things like that. What are some things that are important to deliver, some important mediums in which to deliver training to millennials and Gen Z-ers?

Nile Nickel: 

From delivering material, and as you brought up one issue, which is gamifying your systems, one of the things that’s worked well, you and I haven’t talked about this, but if you look at virtually all of the fortune 500 companies, they’d been sending representatives to the video gaming conferences and they’re sending them to the video gaming conferences because understanding gaming technology, gaming strategy, and implementing gamification into their systems is getting people to engage in their systems more. They don’t just become a tool. They become fun and they incorporate a lot of human psychology into those things. So, that’s an important thing to do there. When we talk about how these things play together, we talk about again foundationally where things are different and between the generations. So when we’re using the collaborative tools, when we’re gamifying, what we’re ultimately doing is we’re engaging those employees. I got off so much on the gamification. Forgive me, I sidetracked on the question that you asked me. Can you restate that because I’m a long distance from that?

Sean O’Brien: 

So just a few of the tips on best practices for training. For example, I’ve seen a lot of folks come through past jobs, current, whatever it may be, who you’ve got in the system that’s the 900 pound gorilla in the room. But it didn’t catch on because it wasn’t self-explanatory and easy to access via a mobile device. And be able to click twice and be able to quickly take courses as opposed to long drawn out two, three hours in classroom trainings, especially on the compliance kind of check the box type courses that really are not a strategic growth culture moment. It’s just, “Hey, we need to get this, you need to train on this and have this information on a profile, wherever that may lie.’ Does that make sense? So are there any others?

How to Select Platforms for Millennials

Nile Nickel: 

We talked about the tools that are here. The big thing that you want to do here is you want to look at providing support and resources in a couple of different ways. You might have a learning path, and it’s critical that they get through a certain learning path. That’s all fine and good. But we talked about the shorter attention spans and the fact that they’ll engage on a mobile device wherever. So there’s three sort of important points. First thing you want to consider is you want your platforms that you’re offering training on to be completely platform agnostic. Meaning I might engage on my computer, I might engage on my cell phone, I might engage on a tablet and you know what, I might take a coffee break. A lot of people may cringe at this.

I may take a bathroom break and I may watch a two to three minute segment on a mobile device because I need it right now. And I’m confronting some sort of issue in the workplace. I know we’ve talked about it, I know there’s training on it. I might remember something about it or maybe I haven’t taken it yet, but I could go find it on demand. I could pull it day one and I could solve that issue. And not only is that engaging, but all of the other points that we’ve hit on, it’s critical for that. So if I’ve got platform independence, I could seamlessly transition between platforms and I could consume on demand. I’m really hitting all of the engagement, motivation. And value points that we’ve talked about through the presentation thus far.

Sean O’Brien: 

Absolutely. And like I said, having the information at your fingertips that’s relevant to your organization, and flexibility. It lends itself to flexibility, but then the fact that they have smartphones, tablets, things of that nature to be able to do the training on their own time so they don’t have to miss potentially crucial meetings or sales meetings, sales calls, whatever it may be in order to attend something in person. They could do it when they have the downtime. And then when you meet together, which I also believe is important, but you can focus more on bettering the company as a whole, the culture, and things of that nature. Does that make sense? Nile?

Nile Nickel: 

Yeah. You have an important point when you meet together. One of the things that we know, and when I say we collectively, all of us. Is social tools, virtual tools, virtual communications. It’s different than IRL. And for those that don’t get that, that’s in real life. So when we get in real life, all of a sudden things are different. And again, we could talk about just this one issue extensively. We do act differently behind a screen. Sometimes we’re more aggressive. Sometimes we’ll say things behind a screen that we’d never say to somebody in person, but behind a screen or even if we’re on a video conference, we don’t get all the same cues. The fact that I hurt somebody’s feelings, I may not be perceptive of that. And it’s not that I’m ignorant of that, it’s just that I didn’t have a certain intention. It came across a certain way, and I don’t have the ability to make amends for it in real life. We get all sorts of different cues. So it’s important to take those real life moments and allow them to build relationships as opposed to focusing on just things like training. In fact, team building exercises are a big thing for that. And they’re important for a lot of reasons.

Sean O’Brien: 

Absolutely. And we’ll speed up a little bit here, but for example, Auzmor and myself and Nile are looking to partner as he currently…One of the companies you’re the CIO or CTO of, there’s a ton of them, but it’s in the digital signage, right? So those kiosks that can be interactive. My first job in high school was in retail and I can see how that’d be an easy way on your break or whatever it may be to go through and click on that training if you’re not allowed to have your phone on the floor. If there’s anyone here from the manufacturing industry, I know you’ve been thinking that probably this whole time to have those places where they can step away. But on the flip side, use the tools that can track how much time they’re spent on training. If you do have to pay them for that time spent saying, “Hey, it’s mandatory, we do it before five during working hours,” or whatever that may be. Do you have anything to add to this slide here, Nile?

Nile Nickel: 

No, I just think a digital signage is a big thing. Again, we could talk about this a lot because it gives us another touchpoint. Sometimes we could put something in front of somebody and we’ve got that eight second window. We capture their attention. We may draw them into something that we want them to go do, but if we tried to tell him to go do it, they’re not going to do it.

Sean O’Brien: 

Right. Absolutely. And even for those tablets and things of that nature. I have a friend who a couple of years ago said, we don’t really have the money for the five tablets in the field, but just remember you don’t need to have the iPad 14 or whatever. We’re on night now. It can be a $50 tablet or whatever it may be. That sole purpose is for collaboration or for the training for them to access if there’s a rain delay or whatever. It may be on their own time as well. But I also want to speak on micro training and how important that is due to the shortened attention spans. Nile, could you take it away on that one?

Addressing Attention Spans with Micro-Learning

Nile Nickel: 

Sure. Micro training is something that we’ve known for a long time, and by the way, this baffles me when I say we’ve known it for a long time. We actually started learning and proving in psychological studies back to the late 1800s about micro training. If I say what is micro training? Micro training is training that addresses a specific topic and it’s delivered in one to two, maybe three minutes, but they’re short segments. And by the way, if you don’t think this works, if you look at the popularity of YouTube videos, the majority of YouTube videos that are popular are less than two minutes long. In fact, believe it or not, the majority are less than a minute long. There’s reasons for that. That’s what we as consumers want. But we know in micro training there’s another thing that comes out of this, and again this is something we’ve known since the late 1800s, it’s been proven in literally thousands of studies since then and replicated, is we tend to remember things when we start to study.

We remember the first few elements of studying something and maybe we remember the last one or two days. And so if we want to increase retention, we want to get them to learn more and learn faster. The easiest way to do it is create more starts and stops. Well the easiest way to do that is rather than doing a 30 minute training, do 15 two minute trainings and maybe it’s 17 two minute trainings because you have some overlap, and you have to refresh what you did and go back. But the principle works, and I don’t know if we’re going to do a demo because we’re short on time, but the flip side is this is what you want to do with your training. You want to break it up in those small segments. You want to make it available on demand. It may be part of a bigger segment, but you’re going to get better retention, you’re going to get better performance and all of that when you break the training into micro modules, thus micro training.

Sean O’Brien: 

Yeah, absolutely. And you know it’s like my CEO does a lot and I’ve done it a few times with sales guys and gals, but making a quick video, uploading it and then giving two questions like, “Hey guys, this is what we’re going to do this week. Let me know if there’s any questions.” And then having the, what did I say here? Select what are we all going to to accomplish this week? Select just to check for the retention of information there as well. Social, peer collaboration, and incorporating technology.

Nile Nickel: 

Yeah, and I think that we’ve addressed those pretty well and I know that we’re short on time, so I want to be respectful of that. The peer collaboration and training is important. You know what? We all know about dumb questions and we all know that people don’t want to ask dumb questions. We also know that there aren’t dumb questions, but that’s not the way sometimes people feel, but they might not want to raise their hand in a formal training environment, but an informal collaborative environment, they might say, “I didn’t get that. Did you?” And then they get it. So you want to make sure those opportunities are available. And we talk about incorporating technology, you want it to be seamless: device agnostic, system agnostic. And when I say seamless, you might want to start on a phone and you might switch to a digital sign and it may then end up on the computer. However that is you’d like to seamlessly transition through.

Sean O’Brien: 

Absolutely. And there are a lot of tools, and I always say this best practice is to have one for everything because you can create those groups as opposed to trying to have the social peer collaboration and every little bit of technology. You can make that core and make sure that it works with everything else that you’re using. So I wanted to do a quick word recall test. So for everyone that’s still on the line.Thank you so much. We’ll run through this real quick, but if you could all, if anyone’s taking notes, please put down your pen and pencil. I’m going to click through a few words just to kind of prove the methodology behind micro training and then we’ll have a little something fun we’ll do at the end so everyone could just pay attention here. We’ll go with the first word. Okay. So now try to write down, in the next minute or so, how many words we can recall from that list. So I’m doing it with everyone here so I can give you enough time.

All right, now we’ll go ahead and unveil the list here. Feel free to shoot us an email, give us a call, let us know what your results were. Mine were turkey, mind bee, traction, example and throne. Thank you Kelsey, our marketing team for putting this together to try to keep me in the dark on it. Now I see exactly what you mean because the only ones sort of near the middle I had was bee because I forgot exchange here. But I’d love to hear your guys’ results. Is there anything more that you’d like to speak on this quick test here, Nile?

Nile Nickel: 

No, but this really does, and by the way, this is something that we know is just human nature. You tend to remember, everybody tends to remember the first one or two and the last one. The middle section just gets dropped. There’s a lot you think about with training there, but if you want to obviously improve recall, more starts and stops, the better you’ll do.

Sean O’Brien: 

Absolutely. Well, we will take questions at the end. We do understand we ran just in time here at 2:00 PM central standard. Feel free, stick around. We will have brief Q&A here, but also write down our info. If you’re ever looking to speak more on this topic, the good, bad, ugly to argue or whatever it may be, take a look at what Nile is doing with the companies over there. Or if you want to take a look at the Auzmor Learn LMS and content here, we greatly appreciate you reaching out and we’d be happy to help any way we can. So with that we’ll jump to the chat here. Oh, we have some folks actually write it down here. So pause the share here. How did they do here? Oh, not advancing. Okay. Not advancing, New York. Okay.

Turkey, bee, throne, exchange. Yeah, so a lot like me. Mayday day here. We will share the recording. Mr Rob Greer. Yeah, see the beginning ones there and the end. I don’t know. Bee stuck out to me as well. I don’t know what it is. I’m probably afraid of being stung. Who knows. But yes, we will be sharing the video in the slides near the end as well. Once again, we’d be happy to answer any of your one off questions in person, but we’ll leave it open now for questions from participants here at the end. Yes it has. Thanks Mike. Any questions here?

Nile Nickel: 

It worries me when we don’t get questions.

Sean O’Brien: 

I know, I always run a little late. We’ve had some drop-off here, which I completely understand. You shouldn’t be taking questions when it’s supposed to end. I apologize. That’s me as the host. We’ll get better the next time. Obviously it’s my fault. Niles been on so many television channels here. Any thoughts? So Nile this is a good one. Any thoughts on how to best provide feedback for millennials?

The Best Time to Provide Feedback to Millennials

Nile Nickel: 

Yeah, what you want to do is you want to do it also in short bites. You want to do it quickly and as close to when feedback tends to be either an opportunity for improvement or course correction. You want to do it as close to the, I’ll say incidents, that whatever the issue is, you want to do it as close to the issue as you possibly can. You don’t want it to build up to be something big. And we all know about the compliment sandwich. Start out with something positive, talk about what the feedback is and on something positive, but make it short and sweet. If you could do it in 8 to 10 seconds, you don’t necessarily need to get into it. And some of the feedback, obviously we’re talking about training, but some of the feedback should be, I’ve seen this a lot, it’s not uncommon, and we’ve answered a lot of these questions.

You might want to look at this and because you’ve got training on it and some things like that. So onboarding millennials without boring them? I’m reading too. The best way to onboard without boring them is to give them absolutely, positively the minimum that you have to give them to get started. And the next thing is give them a mentor that they could work with and make sure that that’s a good connection. Just because the person’s qualified doesn’t mean that the two people will get along well. And then allow the mentor just to work with them. It’s a collaborative approach. In fact, you might give them two mentors, they might gravitate naturally to one. And you might have a checklist that the mentor works with just to go through to make sure that they’re on track. But the best way is to give them everything in small bite sized chunks like we’re talking about. Micro training might be called micro onboarding. Give them just small elements. Don’t overwhelm them, they’re already in a different place. They already feel different. They’re already not fitting in. They stand out. Try to incorporate them into just the social fabric of the company as quickly as you can.

Sean O’Brien: 

Absolutely. And remember positivity goes a long way. Just stopping by and saying, “Hey, great job.” Three seconds. It can have a huge impact as well. But we have another question here. How do you incorporate this style with a mixed bag kind of of employees covering multiple generations and they say that we have a wide variety of generations and populations working on the same software programs and jobs?

Nile Nickel: 

It’s a really great question and probably should have covered it in the overall presentation here, but just because we know that millennials and Gen Z-ers are different. As we’ve started to examine how we engage with them in the workplace, one of the things that we’re finding is not only the millennials, but even if you have some of the silent generation working in your workforce, and it’s a possibility, everybody seems to engage with this stuff pretty well. So just because it’s a different style and we’re addressing the style to target younger generations, the older generations seem to adapt to it. Well, the one thing that they, excuse me, the one thing they may hesitate with is they may hesitate with the collaboration, but then again, they may not, but so what? That they disengage with one part of your overall process, if they like the rest of the process it’s still a win-win.

Sean O’Brien: 

Yeah, absolutely. Just trying to cast the widest net possible and ensuring with multiple generations, whatever solutions you choose. A lot of the times folks say ease of use, but just keep that in the back of your mind that that should be the top feature. I tell folks all the time, the best way to figure out if it actually is easy to use, because everyone says the same thing. Find the most computer illiterate, technologically illiterate person you have in your office and put them on the demos and say, “Hey John Smith, could you do this without me training you?” And if that individual says yes, you’re in the clear. If they say no, maybe it’s time to look at a few more demos here. But absolutely. We’ll jump into the next question. So how successful, if at all, has it been to have short product videos you’ve made for your end users at your company?

Nile Nickel: 

Consulting is what I do, and so that means that we live and die based on our results. And when we talk about product videos, product videos in a micro fashion are even more critical than than some of your employee training issues because what a customer wants to know, which is typically what product videos are about. What a customer wants to know is they want to know, I’ve got a certain issue and I’m not sure how this works on the device. How do I do that? They’re not interested in anything else because they probably know a fair amount about something related to the product unless it’s just a game changing product. But they probably know a fair amount so they want to grab sort of that on demand thing. They want to grab what they need and they want to get their questions answered.

One of the goals that we have whenever we do micro training elements, or micro product engagement elements, is ultimately we would like to create the opportunity to have on the consumer’s mind. Whether it’s an employee, whether it’s a customer, we want them to say, “Wow, that was good. I want to know more.” That’s sort of the old Broadway thing. Always leave them wanting more. And so if we leave them saying, “give me more, ‘they tend to go deeper into the system. And remember, the more starts and stops we create, the more retention they have and the better engagement they have with what you’re trying to convey to them. Whether it’s training, whether it’s product knowledge, whatever it may be.

Sean O’Brien: 

Absolutely. Yeah. We’ll call that one answered here. I think on the whole, answered here. So what are the best strategies for service companies to embrace flexible schedules?

How Should a Service Company Embrace Flex Scheduling?

Nile Nickel: 

This is something that quite frankly a lot of service companies are embracing right now and trying to get better answers to. You have to remember if you’re delivering service, in many cases, the consumers of that service have somewhat of the same flexibility or inflexibility issues and they need you to be more flexible. For example, maybe you’re a plumbing service company. Ideally you’d like to be able to run from from 8:00 to 5:00 Monday through Friday. That’s not how things work. But you might have a workforce and you might have some people that that’s all they want is the 8:00 to 5:00. Great. They get the 8:00 to 5:00 jobs. You may have a lot of people that say, “You know what? I don’t mind taking one or two days, nights, whatever. And if something pops up, I’ll be happy to do it.”

You know, we called that “on call” before. What you want to try to do is sort of transitioning from an “on call” to recognizing that they’re the flexible floater or whatever you might want to say. And I’m using some of the collaboration tools. You may not have a person that’s assigned to that. You may have 4 or 5 or 10 people in the pool and the first one that grabs it, gets it. And then there’s some games that you play related to that rotational. You get this one, you have to be the second or third choice on the next one. Or you wait five minutes and if nobody’s responded, you could respond to it. So your overly ambitious, really go getters, don’t take away the opportunities from other people. So you just have to be creative. You have to think about it. There are ways to make it work and I’d love to tell you, I have a whole lot more. What I know is service companies are looking at this issue today, and they are really pushing to find better alternatives to it because it delivers not only a better service to the customer, but it also delivers a better employment opportunity for their employees.

Sean O’Brien: 

Absolutely. Yeah. One of the big things I’ve said, it’s not necessarily service, it is the difficulty of figuring out how to schedule and whatnot. But in sales, especially in Software as a Service, we don’t typically have an 8:00 to 5:00, right? Because we are all over the country, Eastern time, whatever it may be, and essentially its if you get the job, if you get the work done, get in 40 hours, doesn’t matter what time it is, but just make sure you’re getting in a minimum of 40 hours here and you’re all set. But like you alluded to, it’s tough to kind of time that, especially with the workflow on that end. So the next question we have, what’s the best method to onboard millennials without boring them? Thank you for adding that at the end.

How to Onboard Millennials and Gen Z Without Boring Them

Nile Nickel: 

Well I think I that was one that I touched base on a little bit earlier. And the biggest way to address that is to make the onboarding process the formal part of what you have to do. I mean, from an HR perspective there are certain things you just have to do before you put them in their position to do anything. Make that as small of a list as possible. Then assign one or two mentors that they could work with that could collaborate with mentors who have been through this before, most likely. And just go through a checklist.Give them, 20- 30 days, whatever it might be to go through the checklist and allow the new employee to see what that checklist is. They know what’s coming up. They might want to ask certain questions out of order. That’s fine too. You just want to make sure that they get everything through the onboarding process that they need. That is the better way to do it and the better way to not bore them at the same time.

Sean O’Brien: 

Right? Absolutely. Make sure you’re ready for them on day one and you have everything set up and they feel welcomed as well. Have that great first impression. You know, like folks use a lot of the learning management systems and things like that for it as well to just easily go in and get those check the box type courses done. Make sure to break it up a little bit and not have all compliance courses. Have some fun courses or whatever it may be. Even if it’s on a learning management system, that’s a little more about, ABC company as opposed to here’s the next thing we have to do this and to check the box type deal. I’ve also seen in the larger organizations, it’s sometimes difficult to match up a mentor with employees every single time. One of the biggest things, one of the easiest ways to have consistent information is to have your top performers take what they know, how they’re doing it, create some sort of a course out of it, and then you can pass it down for generations to come as well.

Right? So that’s just the flip side of that. What are they doing differently? Well, let’s materialize it and actually create a course out of that. The best content I’ve seen is from this legend John Smith was fantastic and here is his method and creating a custom training out of that because obviously, like we said earlier, it’s not that we want to learn, we want to know how to be successful. So if you can give me how to be successful within your organization that I just signed on board with, it’s going to be excellent results as well.

Nile Nickel: 

Yeah. And don’t hesitate, by the way, to do something that you do. We used to do it in a more formal fashion and that’s just introducing them around. But we talked about collaboration tools and how that’s important. The nice thing about collaboration tools is normally you get this nice little icon with a picture in it, and so the person’s able to say, “Hey, I’m Nile., I’m over here in this department or this is what I do. If I could be of any assistance, don’t hesitate to ask.” I know how I felt when I started to whatever it is and you don’t script it or whatever. But they will see people welcoming them on board. They’ll recognize the face with the name, it will reinforce it and just help them feel a little bit more part of the company.

Sean O’Brien: 

Absolutely. And make sure you have a centralized repository with that information for them to go back for. Number one, if they don’t want to seem dumb and raise their hand in front of the employees, and ask questions. And so to be able to just, instead of having to come to you and go, “Hey Nile, remember when you trained me on that topic for an hour yesterday? Could you repeat the last 45 minutes of that?”And taking up your time again. They can just go quickly, take a look at it and go, Okay, that’s right.”

Sean O’Brien: 

That’s how I do things with that central repository, if you will. Another question.

Nile Nickel: 

So before you get on the other question, I’m going to give you two things because I run into this all the time. Normally in a new position and company, everybody has their own acronyms internally for systems, procedures, policies, whatever, right? And you know what? You’ve been around forever and a day. You know what those are. You don’t think about it much. The new employees don’t know the acronyms. Sometimes it’s good to identify those, give them a lift, but also just let everybody know, “Hey, we talk in acronyms all the time. Remember, they don’t know the acronyms.” The other thing is to look for FAQs, frequently asked questions because as you start to get questions, time and time again, those are the best sources for little micro training elements because all of a sudden you’re getting 10, 20, 30 questions that are asked consistently in a 30 day period of time. And you’ve identified a gap. Fill the gap with just a small little micro training piece.

Sean O’Brien: 

Right. It’s funny you say that. We have a software company that has a word of the day learning path and it’s like implementation as a definition. So let’s move on. Thank you so much for the fantastic question, Rob, I’m getting to you. I promise. So the question is, with your expertise in IT and consulting, what’s your best advice for training engagement for Gen Z and millennials in the logistics industry, specifically a third party logistics company?

Nile Nickel: 

So I’m going to say a couple of things. And this isn’t to be insulting or egotistical or anything else. I’m not sure why logistics is different. One of the things that we run into all the time is you get into a company and they say, “Okay, you’ve done that before in different places, but we’re different here. This is a different company.” And what we find is that you might think you’re different, but we’re humans. We work roughly the same way. We do a lot of things the same and while you might have different terms, you might have different policies and procedures.

Generally the way people engage, what motivates them, their values. As we went through sort of foundationally at the beginning of this, they really don’t change a whole lot. We said that they don’t fit necessarily into a box, but you’re going to find the big challenge that you have is how to take these things that we know that just work. They’re human nature, they’ll work a hundred times out of a hundred and apply them to your company and that is what the uniqueness is.

Every company is different in that way. I work with literally hundreds of different telecom companies that are individual companies that sell Verizon, AT&T, T-Mobile, whatever. They use the same tools. They sell the same products, they sell for the same companies. Every one of them works differently. When you look at the basic things that they do, they’re all the same, but they do some things differently. So from an engagement perspective and the way to train and all of that, it’s going to be the same. You just have to put your personality on it. But as far as the procedures, the policies, the human psychology that goes behind all of these things, that’s not going to change.

Sean O’Brien: 

Yeah, and I will say for field employees, so I have expertise in the HR stats for different contracting and skilled trades if you will. So we worked with a lot of but those in the field, on the road, whatever it may be. Make sure they feel as if they have a tie directly to the home office in the company as a whole. More folks leave. Driving positions, like truck drivers, leave jobs because they feel as if they’re out in the middle of nowhere for no purpose because you have to remember they’re leaving their family, their kids or friends, whatever it may be. So they want, it’s even more important to feel as if you’re doing this for something bigger than yourself and just as a job because your home office cares about you as well, if that makes sense.

Sean O’Brien: 

So allowing, there’s other types of training you can do as well. So for example, if you do an onsite training and you have folks out in the field driving trucks, whatever it may be, you can record that training and maybe upload it into the LMS you’re using or whatever it may be, and send it to them as well to take on their own time. Like, “Hey, make sure you do this in the next few days.” And then also side note works very well. So you don’t have to continue to do the same training for all the people that are sick, maybe out of the office, on vacation, whatever it may be.

Nile Nickel: 

I will add one thing that dovetails into what you said because it is one of the things that we find in those remote type positions that they don’t have a lot of real person corporate interaction. And that is to get other people that may have done this in the past. If you’re running a route, for example, and you’ve been on this route, share tips, tricks and traps, what’s the good things to see, restaurants or whatever along the way. What are some things that that might not be apparent if you follow the directions and rules? You might not get to, but there’s some tricks around it as long as it’s ethical and legal and all that, that’s good. And then if there’s any traps, what do you do to avoid those traps? Because now all of a sudden they don’t feel like they are on their own. They feel like they’ve got a support system behind them and it’s good to develop that over time. It’s a nice thing to do. It’s a nice thing to make them feel included that way.

Sean O’Brien: 

Absolutely. So I think that, hopefully Rob, that answers your question, feel free to reach. Once again everyone, feel free to reach out to both myself here in Auzmor or Nile. If you have additional questions, I’d love to help out at the very least have a connection value just as much as the next guy, but Mr Nile Nickel, thank you so, so much for joining us. I apologize I ran a little late here in the Q&A, but your insight has been incredible and we greatly appreciate you being such a great friend here at Auzmor.

Nile Nickel: 

Appreciate a great tool that makes some of what we’re talking about easier to implement because you don’t find that all the time.

Sean O’Brien: 

Yeah, and we will tell you if we’re not a good fit. If you guys want to reach out to make sure on that end, but thank you so much. Once again, Nile Nickel. This is Sean O’Brien. Everyone have a great rest of your day and thank you for joining our webinar.

End of transcript.

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