Engagement and Training Spend

A question asked within one of the Forums of the American Society for Training and Development was:  “We’re spending $200 billion on training. Why can’t we involve and engage people in the workplace?”  Fresh Learning’s Managing Director gives his insights…

In my experience, there are a number of factors that inhibit employee engagement even when we are investing huge amounts of money in development:

    Reality does not match the learning opportunity provided – this can be as delivery content is too ‘off the shelf’ and therefore does not reflect the organizational need, culture or individual’s needs, or beacause the delivery sets false expectations that build apathy when the employee returns to the office from their learning

    Mid-Management (also at times senior and first-line management) do not support the learning and prohibit what was learned from being applied even though the content has been signed off by organizational development or even at times by the CEO – I would be a rich person if I had $1 for every candidate on training courses that I have heard say ‘I love the theory, and can see how it would make my performance and the engagement of myself and my team, but the reality is that I will not be allowed to apply this as it does not meet with that senior manager’s expectations’. I now refuse to deliver work where I feel that the organization just wants to hit certain groups of employees with training without considering the wider impact and ability to gain ROI and engagement.

    The wrong person is in the room (virtually or physically) – often the manager will desire a learning intervention for the employee when the issue is with the manager, building disengagement and apathy before the employee is even developed.

    The culture and methods of working within the organization has not been considered within the delivery of development – I see this within many organizations, eg in application of e-learning in the healthcare setting to groups of employees that don’t have access to computers – and often don’t even know how to turn one on or delivering examples and case studies that don’t reflect the culture and working practices in the team/department.

    Lack of application and follow through prevents creation of effective new habits by the attendee – A lack of ability to apply what is learned sees employees becoming disengaged beacuase the learning is not transferred into practical habit building that helps the employee. What action planning is done post-intervention and how is this supported in order to engage the employee in the learning and have a tangible result, has action-learning been used in order to move away from the estimated 90% loss of knowledge within the first few weeks after the learning intervention.

For me, the key aspects we must consider in order to use this large investment wisely in the future is how are we ensuring that the learning delivered matches the needs of the organization and of the individual, as well as how are we ensuring that we build the right culture in order to embrace learning and transfer learning points into learned points that have improved performance, productivity and engagement.

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