4 Ways to Avoid a Learning Transfer Fail
I have the deepest respect for everyone that works in the Learning & Development industry, who give their heart and soul to get results for their organisations. However, it would be remiss of me not to share my most recent learning transfer horror story! And I do this with the best intentions – to help people improve their results from learning, and try and avoid learning transfer fails!
So – the recent horror story!
When I heard of an organisation experiencing attendance rates for follow up learning transfer coaching sessions at only 50% it almost brought me to tears. 1 in 2 attending and engaging just isn’t enough in my view, however they were happy because they felt their organisation was… “different”.
I’m sure you have experienced this in the past. Or experienced a training program where someone has said “sorry I can’t implement this learning because my situation is different”. “My team is different”. “My country is different”. We’ve all heard the different excuses.
A follow up process that is set up effectively should be able to get over 80% attendance. From my personal experience working with my team in 12 languages across 20 countries, from China to the Czech Republic to Colombia – I have yet to experience an exception to 80%+ attendance for cultural or organisational reasons. The only time we have ever seen this drop is when something significant happens in the workshop to derail the process. Thankfully this is few and far between.
I challenge you as a learning professional not to fall into the same trap as our learners do of and say – “my situation is different”. Here at Lever, it’s not unusual for us to achieve 98% attendance, and if we can do it then you can too! A solid 80% should be very achievable.
The 4 ways to avoid a Learning Transfer #Fail.
As my regular readers know, I believe learning transfer should be based on accountability and reflection. As comes with the territory – most accountability and reflection processes have coaching at their core.
I would advocate that any form of follow up coaching to support learning transfer should have the following 4 things:
1) An absolutely consistent model, used across all learning transfer coaches or practitioners.
Many would argue that coaching is such an intimate dynamic conversation between two people that if you put a model behind it, it becomes sterile and “tick the box”. I am passionately against any process which “ticks the box”, however there can be principles and philosophies within coaching that any session can be measured by, such as leaving the ownership and accountability with the participant and creating outcomes and behavioural change rather than just powerful insights. Just because it’s a powerful, fluid process and conversation it doesn’t mean there can’t be a level playing field for standards and styles to be assessed against. (As an aside – if you’d like to know more about how we go about assessing coaches for capabilities in learning transfer coaching then please let me know. This is a new service we have been developing – and I think it’s an important one).
2) Sessions that never last longer than 30 minutes long.
People today are driven by efficiency and the premise that a follow up session needs to be face to face and 90 minutes is long gone. Effective transfer specialists should be able to dive deep and facilitate change in short, short 30 minute sessions.
3) Supervision or mentoring
It’s crucial for any coaching style learning transfer follow up to have supervision or mentoring in place for the learning transfer coaches or practitioners so that you can maintain a commitment to quality and address any challenges.
4) Evaluation and attendance metrics collected
It’s essential to get some kind of metrics, not only on attendance but also on program outcomes, and this should be easy to achieve. However big the program, however many employees involved – insist upon reporting so you know what’s happening with your resources and, as an absolute minimum, what attendance rates you’re getting. My preference is to go way beyond attendance rates and create reporting dashboards. We’ve worked with over 6,000 participants, and for the last 10 years we’ve created a feedback dashboard for every cohort including measurement such as an NPS recommendation score, the percentage uplift in individual objectives with transfer, the percentage uplift in ability to achieve objectives with vs. without learning transfer, and comments on the changes that have been made and business benefits created. Of course, there are more robust forms of measurement – such as ROI in line with Jack & Patti Phillips’ teachings from the ROI Institute. (For those in the Southern Hemisphere who want to go deeper into ROI Patti is heading to New Zealand to run an ROI certification open program in Auckland in May). In many cases we find that a simple dashboard is way more than what a lot of organisations have access to after a learning initiative. You can see an example of our impact dashboard here.
—
If you’re experiencing any of the challenges outlined in this article or you’re simply intrigued to know how we achieve what we achieve in 30-minute sessions – please do get in touch and talk through effective learning transfer with me. It’s work I’m committed to, excited to be sharing and really do want to be making a difference to worldwide.