Cultural Learning Starts at the Top
Anyone who has worked in business training for even a few months will know one big problem: most people don’t want to finish their training.
And it makes sense. Workers are always overworked (and often underpaid, given the economy). The last thing they want to do is squeeze in extra work, even if it’s just a 10-minute lesson.
In many companies, training managers and directors watch their teams make great efforts to produce great training content, only to be ignored or unappreciated.
That’s why Instructional Designers strive to make training fun and effective. That’s why we work hard to write clear, clean, and concise content. That’s why we spend hours upon hours learning skills like Photoshop and After Effects just to add some interest to the course. We continue to make training more engaging in the hope that more of our audience will care.
But what if I told you that this is not the best way to move the needle on training completion? That, in fact, may not make much of a difference in the finish at all?
One of the biggest factors in whether an audience will complete their training has less to do with the training itself and more to do with your company’s learning culture.
In this article, we will discuss:
- Your Current Strategy: Push More Content and Make It Better
- Your New Strategy: Engage Leadership to Build a Culture of Learning
- If It’s This Easy, Why Don’t All Leaders Remove Coaching?
Let’s dive in!
Your Current Strategy: Push More Content and Make It Better
Throughout my twelve years of Instructional Design experience in retail, pharmaceuticals, telecommunications infrastructure, and more, I have faced the same situation.
Every team meeting consists of discussing new methods and technologies. We share the tools and techniques we’ve learned so we can improve each other. We pull reports to look at previous training completions. We discuss how formatting a document this way or a lesson that way will help with completion. We are told to focus on these types of modules, small content, short courses, this type of delivery, that type of implementation plan—all to improve completion.
And somehow, as the years go by, the conversations don’t change—and so do the results. We are banging our heads against the wall trying to convince our audience to pay attention.
And to be clear, it’s not that these things aren’t important. Intense, clean, and concise training helps students pay better attention and, therefore, retain more. It helps them to see the lessons as more reliable. It also helps to maintain the reputation of the training in the company. If the lessons are always too long, rushed, or dirty, that will reduce the completion of the training in the long run, and the bad reputation is difficult to overcome without years of effort.
So, these things do it matters—I make a living caring for them! But when it comes to completion, a big piece of the puzzle is not directly under your team’s control.
Your New Strategy: Engage Leadership to Build a Culture of Learning
Regardless of industry or audience, one commonality I’ve noticed is this: organizations with strong learning cultures always get the best training.
And that culture primarily starts with leadership.
To put it simply: the companies I’ve worked for that tend to complete the highest training were companies where the leadership fully supported the training team and always pushed for completion.
Company leadership drives company culture. As just one example, if leaders pressure employees to take all of their PTO every year to get off work and recharge, most managers will make sure it happens. It will happen because the leaders say it must. It may not be 100 percent of the entire company—there will always be naysayers—but it will be almost everyone, even more if the message is repeated.
It’s the same with the culture of learning: when leaders emphasize the importance of training, managers start to take it for granted critical performance rather than choosing them. In fact, research by the Truist Leadership Institute states that one of the top five factors that make for a successful talent development culture is the organization’s full support for employee growth and development.
Even more important is this: if there are consequences for not to complete training, graduation will increase significantly. This is what enforcing training means—not just saying it should be done but showing people how important it is through action.
Now, to be clear, I’m not suggesting that companies start firing employees for not completing a 10-minute lecture on the company’s mission and vision. I say that if leaders see the importance of training and always reinforce that importance, their people will see it, too. When directors know that their VP will call them if someone on their team hasn’t completed training, directors are much less likely to enter an incomplete list in the first place.
Here is an example of what leadership involvement can look like. Let’s say your team supports a large company’s campaign with a structured training program where one module is introduced each month over a six-month period. Leadership involvement may include any or all of the following concepts:
- A three-minute speech about the training program at the company’s recent all-hands meeting, given by the CEO or major project sponsor.
- A ten minute video about the program that shows the CEO or major sponsor talking about the program, what it means to the company, and (most importantly) what it means to the audience, which is beautiful and challenging.
- A town hall led by senior sponsors and/or executive directors discussing the program, promoting training, and inviting the audience to ask questions.
- A forum where students can ask questions about the program, which will be answered by the main sponsor, either live at the meeting or sent by email.
And don’t forget, these ideas cover only one step. If leaders want their people to take any training they are given, big or small, they must talk about training all the time. In general, completing all training on time should be discussed in cities. VPs should always push their managers to make sure their teams prioritize training, who in turn should push their managers to make sure their teams complete training. In organizations with strong learning cultures, training is not considered separate from work—it’s part of the best practice.
If a culture of learning is not built, only managers who see value in training will force their teams to do it, creating an unsatisfactory and inconsistent experience when some teammates are well trained but many are not. So, why you might see low completion rates in your company.
If It’s This Easy, Why Don’t All Leaders Remove Coaching?
The two biggest reasons are time and money.
Think about what the company does. Its sole purpose of existence is to make money (non-profits are not included). Yes, the company provides a valuable product or service, and yes, it makes the world better by doing so, but ultimately, it generates profit. Therefore, the C-suite of a company has a role to make sure that it runs as efficiently as possible and makes as much money as possible.
With the very purpose of their role, telling people to focus on work that doesn’t directly align with the company’s mission sounds counterintuitive.
I have worked directly on functional teams in several companies compared to sales and HR. Whether they cared about training came down to whether they understood its value and ROI. Interestingly, in some cases, those were teams that understood that the more trained their people were, the better and more efficient they were. Sometimes, however, they focused only on hitting KPIs and increasing time spent on operations. The training we developed was very short, removing much of what made it work in the first place.
Also remember that most employees have more on their plates than they can realistically handle. Employees burn out faster than we can cool them down and are disorganized as a result, which I can discuss in a separate article. Therefore, taking out even one minute of training feels like an unnecessary cost of time compared to anything else they could be doing at the time. In fact, according to Gallup by 2025, 41% of employees say the time demands of their work are a major barrier to Learning and Development. Companies value bottom line, output, and efficiency, and the more one person can do in a 40-hour work week, the better.
So, What Can You Do?
If you are the leader of training in your company, your best role in completing training is to help push your C-suite to care about training. They have shown the ROI of completing training to understand the company’s benefits, such as 94% of employees say they will stay with the company longer if they invest in their learning and development, and companies with extensive training programs have a 24% higher turnover rate.
If you’re an individual on a training team, the next time you’re evaluating a large project, suggest holding your leaders in some of the ideas we’ve discussed.
And above all else, remember this: Your effort to create good, clean training modules is very important to your company. To help employees realize that, a culture of learning needs to be built around it.
