How to make your Common Sense a Common Sense?

Organizational Learning and Development is not a luxurious practice.

While paying for my groceries to a cashier in a well-known hypermarket, it stopped me how the cashier’s colleague, who was standing beside him, guided him with the following steps to provide the service to me:

1) Count the change in the specific segments.

2) Hand her the metal coins then put above them the paper money and at the top put above them all the invoice.

3) Tell her “Have a nice day”!

I smiled to them and told her something about that I would like her to train me as well.

Then, I thought of how I took such process for granted. At that moment, it seemed pretty common sense and convenient for me to be handed the coins before the paper money, so they don’t slip if they were handed to me in the opposite order. However, I don't think that I would have recognized this common sense, if I didn't witness this lady guiding her colleague.

The “Have a nice day!” statement is all about how to create a welcoming a returning customers strategy and culture.

This unification of process and style can’t be achieved if there are no proper learning and development programmes, such as onboarding, trainings, refreshers, and evaluation.

Through conversations with people handling managerial, HR and team leadership positions, I witnessed the notion of “it is common sense not to fall in such misconduct” despite they didn’t apply an evidence based and structured Learning and Develpment (L&D) function. This kind of notion is an essential element in the formula of forming an “unfunctional team”. A responsive L&D function/programme would be your solution to unify the practices that you consider right and reduce the number of mistakes and investigations.

The more complex is the workplace, the more investment you need to put into L&D.

But why all of this hassle, if I employ experts?

We all come from different walks of life that shaped-up the way we perceive ethics and even work process. Don’t consider what is common sense to you is another person’s common sense. Thus, to achieve your ambitions of business objectives, quality, ethic and image, your team has to go through proper steps of development, evaluation and reward for meeting written expectations.

Even if you own a small bakery with 2 team members, you have to cascade what is in your head to become reality. Your values, work process and language to be used with clients shall all be cascaded to your team properly and with structure.

Organizational Learning and Development is not a luxurious practice.

Thanks for reading Work-Related with Dina Newsletter! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.