When a Top Down Approach to Training Is Not the Answer

As it happens for most of our clients, training groups are asked by internal business units to address this or that need: "We need training for XXXX on YYYY by WWWW."

Sound familiar? Couple that with the high percentage of training and is mandatory and you have a perfect storm of training that while being done (and occupying most of our attention) does little to address the needs of the employees.

I don’t even want to try to address the basic issues that training does not always address lack of performance, since such gaps or shortfalls can have sources that have absolutely nothing to do with lack or the quality of the training itself.

Assuming we can leave this type of "whack a mole approach" to using training interventions—what can become of the litmus test that training groups can undertake?

During the last few years, we have reviewed projects we are involved in and noticed our thoughts gravitating towards one basic question:

Is the learning population ready for learning?

Many years ago, this “Ah ha!” moment was brought to the forefront in the following engagement:Allen was asked to bid on systems training for a large transportation company. After an initial analysis, we felt we could not bid on the project. Our hesitancy was based on a clear mistrust we were able to identify by the employees to the training objectives and the training itself. Since as a company, we are always keen on making sure our learning is impactful, we felt this was not a good scenario to be involved in.

Clearly, in this case, there was a disconnect between management and the learning population. While this story may be extreme, it is not atypical of a top down approach to training.

Last week, we touched on some learning models like the Gange model and the ACRS model, but what I want to focus on today is that very few models address where motivation comes from. In fact, I specifically want to address the threshold for training readiness. The ACRS in particular does a great job in helping us identify motivational tactics, but is this enough. Training as opposed to learning almost always happens structurally. I know very few cases where training happens organically. Informal learning is a great example of training happening organically; it is controlled by the learners with what the learners want to know, giving them a level of choice that does not exist in formal corporate training. We’ve blogged on this before. As informal learning becomes more structured, it then becomes an oxymoron.

To get back to client story, what we found was a pretty big distrust between management and the line employees. Employees felt that new technology was being brought in to make their jobs redundant and reduce the workforce. Management felt this training was necessary so that the learners could be successful in their jobs and the company would be more competitive using this new technology.

So, when asked for a recommendation by the client, we said there needed to be a pre-step. That pre-step needed to find the common ground between these two divergent views on the training to be developed. What we needed was to find some commonalities between management and employees and break down the layers of mistrust and lack of understanding.

What we found was that people from this company didn’t just end up in management. Many had started lower in the organization. In addition, management has family members going back years that had themselves been on jobs working on the line. What could bring these groups together is the commonality of deep history of people working for the company.Something else we discovered was a common theme of country music as well as the shared history.

Using these two commonalities, an important readiness or lack of was addressed through the process of creating and producing a song and music video. The client created the very infrastructure for the training to be successful.

In recent years, we have been more and more unwilling to just take content and develop training without asking questions around the environment the learners are in. For example, have the learners been hit with a lot of training recently? Hitting training too hard and too often begins to become a distraction or background noise like a teacher in the old Charlie Brown cartoons.

This story is an example of not accepting the top down approach, but looking at how we spend time with learners and look for a way for them to articulate their own view of the training. Having these answers helps us plan better training through defining scenarios, themes, lay-out, and even language. How will we address compliance training, are we checking the box or is there a readiness to try to change behavior?

Getting back to the story, we can’t do this every time and in fact, this story is an extreme. But we can contribute by making sure that the way we structure and communicate our training to learners is conducive to that learning population. By marketing training from the top down and covering the needs of learners from the bottom up, your end result should create more impactful training.

A Familiar Phrase: "Content is (fill in the blank)"

Today in the mail, I got a flier from an organization advertising an upcoming conference. In the headline was a reference to a phrase that I feel intimately familiar with: Content is King.

I remember the first time I heard that term. It was about fifteen years ago as a friend of mine entered into the world of web development and programming. He and I were “geeking out” about the possibilities and promises of the “information super highway.” Avid board sport enthusiasts (snowboarding, surfing, skateboarding, etc.), we had been working on a website dedicated to these sports (if you want to travel in time and see a rough, slow-loading, lost-image version of it, then check it out on the Wayback Machine, here). We were getting pretty good traffic and interest, but began asking questions about how to gain more traffic and traction. As the writer/communicator of the duo, I wanted to push out journalistically styled stories and articles, thinking simply that this approach would lend the site some interest. My friend agreed, and uttered those words, which he apparently picked up somewhere, “Yeah, well, content is king.”

That definitive statement struck me at the time. It seemed so right on, and so common sense, especially considering our thought process at the time. In the many years since then, I’ve heard that phrase over and over. In the Dot Com emergence, and even more after it popped, the phrase became nearly ubiquitous and indisputable. While I wish I had a dollar for every time I’ve heard that statement since the first time I heard it from my friend, I readily admit that I’m glad a few years ago people began questioning its veracity as applied to the online world. As a result, we don’t have to be so subjected to it so much anymore.

Not that I would argue against the core value of content. But since the late 90’s as I became more and more immersed in developing for the web, I came to understand that content certainly can’t be the only thing. I think we can all see this clearly now, particularly in the world of learning and education. Otherwise, why not just throw an encyclopedia at every learner? No, content obviously isn’t king. Rather, it’s a partner to delivery, motivation, and other factors like clarity, timing, and priority. Any good communication will take these factors into account and balance them accordingly.

While I feel significantly experienced in the world of online content, three and a half years after entering the world of learning and development, I still feel like a “newbie.” And maybe that’s why I really appreciate the constant attention our industry pays to balancing content, design, delivery, etc. Do we have work to do? Certainly. But at least we’re focused on it. As we move forward in time, I believe the next few years are going to be significant. The economy will either improve…or implode. Either way, it will provide new opportunities and challenges. And who knows what new technology or innovation will await? Through whatever may come, though, our challenge as it pertains to corporate learning will be the same as it has always been: balancing our ability to marry content and delivery, motivation and clarity.

Finally, I have this quote from Winston Churchill in my office space: “A pessimist sees the difficulty in every opportunity; an optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty.” As we take on the upcoming as well as ongoing challenges of employee learning and development, let’s always be optimistic in our approach to content and its delivery.

Breakthrough Ideas on Learner Motivation? Or Just Looking More Deeply at What You Already Knew?

The January/February issue of Harvard Business Review this year addressed a few “breakthrough ideas” for the year. The first one, “What Really Motivates Workers: Understanding the Power of Progress” by Teresa M Amabile and Steven J Kramer really stood out. As a training company, we base a lot of the success of our courses on learner engagement and learners are often engaged when they are motivated.

Mostly, the article validated what we have already known, but maybe didn’t want to admit. A couple of passages express these breakthrough ideas on learner motivation and I’d like to apply it specifically to training.

“It turns out that being recognized for your hard work by your boss or having incentives to complete something doesn’t actually make employees feel as good about their job as progress does.”

Source of motivation isn’t just someone recognizing you—it is being successful. Everyone knows what it takes to be successful. You are assigned a task, you complete the task, you feel pleasure in completing the task. This means you are successful, but it doesn’t mean you feel successful. While it is important to offer incentives for success (whether it is recognition, prizes, what-have-you), if that employee isn’t being successful in fulfilling his/her job, then recognition for what the employee does accomplish isn’t going to resonate.

People want to encounter something that is pleasurable to them, or avoid something that’s distasteful. This is what motivates them to make decisions. At that basic level, from a training company perspective, we want to make sure people want to take the training. If people don’t want to take the training and instead are made to take the training—like many compliance areas where it is just a tick on the box, then yeah, they’ll take it, they’ll pass the competency test—but the transfer of information to knowledge through to performance (i.e. that the company will have less regulatory problems or an employee will anticipate a problem, or that the people will recognize signs before there is a problem) may not happen.

You are counting on fear—yes, you are motivating through fear of losing their job—so yes, you have motivated them to take the training, but you haven’t motivated them to actually learn about the topic.

“When workers sense they’re making headway, their drive to succeed is at its peak.”

You can pressure them, provide incentives, recognize them, etc. but these are skin deep. This could be positive or negative (as in, if you don’t take this training, you will get a negative review.), but if employees do not feel they are making progress, then they are missing the drive to actually learn.

There have been some models that try to go deeper. When it comes to design, the ARCS model is one of them—it relies on four basic motivations that focus on the learner: Attention, Relevance, Confidence, and Satisfaction. What ARCS model doesn’t do is help us understand the context the training is taken in.

For our company, we use a blend of Gagne, Merrill, and Keller. These models contribute to the structure within the web-based training or classroom activities that help us make learning more receptive, help us engage the learners. These models act as catalysts, enzymes that will induce psychological processes that make learning more receptive to good training i.e. learning and transfer.

But I found these models a bit unsatisfactory because they focus on the learning activity itself and not on if learners are ready for training, or if they are ready for the learning engagement. If we are not careful, these models, rich in detail and approach, will become something akin to a pleasure/pain approach.

“As managers or trainers, this means you can further progress by removing obstacles and providing valuable information like resources, encouragement, and clear feedback”—maybe even get your own hands dirty to really cultivate that helpfulness.

So what motivates learners isn’t their tie to employee/manager relations, but to an interpersonal process. What is considered a good day, what is considered a good week, is tied to when learners achieve something and how managers have helped/hindered that process. It really has nothing to do specifically with managers or co-workers, though these will play an influence on learners’ satisfaction.

We need to make sure that when we design our specific training projects that they are tying into important learning drivers within our target learning population. This will be the motivation learners are searching for and will impact any training event.

At the end of the day, if we are sensitive enough to it, we can project the success of the training activity by the learning environment it is delivered in.

Social Media and the Art of Self-regulation

Training has long been part of the art of internal corporate communication.

In the recent past, one of the drivers for elearning was consistent messaging, scaled for both employees and customers. Now, we use social media, like Twitter and discussion groups, to communicate—often to both employees and customers—incongruous ideas without a moderator. And while this isn’t necessarily a bad thing, one of the least discussed (at least from my examination) aspects of social learning is the degradation of the message. For instance, when you read tweets or retweet, you are not always getting information firsthand. You are getting it through the eyes and ears of the tweeter. It is the tweeter’s impressions, take, and angle on the original information. Same is true for discussion groups.

Yes, it’s news, it’s filtered, but for many of us, it’s become the acceptable source of good information and opportunity.

It’s quite fascinating really. One of the early criticism’s of Craig’s List as an honest billboard or Wikipedia as a good source of information was that people were going to get taken for a ride because it wasn’t regulated. And yet, look at how acceptable these two resources have become—all because of self-policing. We’ve been self-regulating journalism for quite some time, so it isn’t surprising that it would extend itself into social media. (For example, see http://press-freedom.suite101.com/article.cfm/what_is_the_social_responsibility_theory)

Shocking isn’t it … we trust people to be experts even though they have a totally unrelated degree. We even trust their expertise without a degree because they seem to know more than we do and they sound reliable.

But is it really that shocking? Isn’t this the social learning that has always existed in the corporate environment? It was just called something like informal learning or even informal leadership. Some of the common venues were around the water cooler, in the parking lot, at social events after work, or even at the sales summit or sales/executive retreat. In fact, some of the early criticisms of virtual learning was that we would take away some of the face-to-face informal learning at classroom or seminar events.

Social media isn’t something new—don’t tell me it’s something new—it has evolved in an important way not evident in the water cooler meeting place. And that is because of self-regulation.

Since many of us have lived through the old version of social learning, we know full well that in such environments we can create a positive social dynamic or a negative one. Social learning communities break up because people complain or leave, or it flourishes because they’ve built a self-regulating mechanism that allows the continuation of providing great information to many of the participants. Self-regulation relies on the high number of participants that weigh in to provide social pressure through rating s and comments on flamers and people that spread false or unverified information.

Moreover, in such environments, peers discover and recognize experts in their network–not because of job title or position—but because of the value of the information these experts provide to the network.

The strength of self-regulation—i.e. the large number of users willing to weigh in—is also its weakness in the corporate world. Insuring large scale involvement and cooperation is hard to drive with consistency. This is why if social media is vital to corporate social responsibility, it is vital for social media in the corporation to be self-regulated.

Still, social learning is a great way to strengthen the norms in training and the use of information. Maybe we could look at using social tools to strengthen the exploration and verification of the training we do. For example, after new hire training, have mentors address and ask questions through discussion and tweets or Facebook to help new hires get comfortable with their new working environment.But this can end up being a gimmick if we don’t follow through with mechanisms to sustain the value of peer to peer communication.

How will you encourage participation in the long haul? What recognition will be given to good contributors? Will the corporate world let the self-regulation dynamic work its way into the corporate environment? Whether social media works well in the corporate world is still up for grabs.

For further reading, try .eduGuru, or Erik Qualman. Both believe social media has a purpose and is here to stay.