Creating Behavioural Change from Learning
Let’s get back to basics!
Training or educating your staff, keeping them learning and growing, is essential in our world today maybe at this time more than any other. The world is moving at a pace as we’ve never seen before, in situations and circumstances that are uncertain, unpredictable and unprecedented. People are needed in organisations that can think creatively, problem-solve, communicate effectively, lead, be agile and be resilient. And to achieve this we will need to develop our people.
Far too often training and developing current employees is a time-consuming and often frustrating process, because employees prefer their old work habits and procedures, and at worse are reluctant to put new plans into action. Even at best they intend to maximise what they have learnt but the brains need for homeostasis makes it challenging for people to change and implement learning.
Companies struggle endlessly with the learning and development of current employees. Large corporations turn such efforts over to their CLO (Chief Learning Officer) while smaller companies look to their Human Resources department to schedule and conduct learning experiences. Whoever is responsible we need to start thinking holistically and differently about learning.
Now is the time to switch your focus from learning inputs – content, curation, experiences to outputs – performance, behavioural change, business impact.
Lever’s Turning Learning Into Action (TLA) approach enables organizations how to ensure that developmental programs for employees are implemented into business practices rather than shunned or forgotten as employees return to their workplace following a learning initiative or session. Even if that learning is conducted in the workplace. This transfer of learning ensures that your training processes are valuable and beneficial to your company’s success.
Plan for implementation
No matter what industry you are in, learning and development initiatives will be created with the intention of improving business outcomes. No business or individual calls for learning and development sessions that are unnecessary. It’s rare the training today is a drag on the day-to-day function of your company, and employees consider them mindless exercises which do not end up having anything to do with the performance of their duties. But it is equally rare that people attend training and implement the learning into the daily workflow.
But it is possible to deliver sustained behavioural change from learning and now is the time to create this shift. It is imperative that your learning and development session carries the weight of necessity in the performance of duties. You must be prepared to initiate changes in the manner in which your in-office work is accomplished so that it includes the instruction you are prepared to give your employees. Otherwise, you are wasting everyone’s time and wasting your own money.
Therefore, your first step, to be taken before any learning takes place, is to be prepared to make the learning exercise a vital part of an employee’s performance going forward. There must be the transfer of learning, the implementation of the learning skills and behaviours, or they will be forgotten or ignored once the employee returns to the workplace.
Education is more than words
The standard line is “if you give a man a fish, he will eat for a day. If you teach him how to fish, he will never go hungry.” And we all know this is never truer than with learning and development. You can tell employees or staff members what new skills or practices you want them to implement, you can give them practise scenarios, you can get them to the point they can demonstrate the skills but unless you support them in committing to what they will put into place in their role and then supporting them to follow through on this you are missing the opportunity to have them feeding themselves for life.
At Lever, our TLA programs are available through chatbots and/or human interaction. What once was inherently unscalable is now available to your whole workforce via the place where they will work. Many of our clients use our tool within MS Teams and have the learning ecosystem integrate with day-to-day work. The TLA process centre’s around structured reflection, which creates action which in turn creates self-accountability. Your company must be prepared to accept the effect of implementing new practices.
If you think back to school – where many of us have our earliest memories of learning – have you ever heard a math teacher try to explain to students why they need to know trigonometry? It can be sort of embarrassing if the example simply doesn’t play into the plans of the students. As learning professionals, we need to ensure the learning is relevant and applicable.
Your learners need to be able to grab the learning and see immediately how it can apply it to their work context. Intentions to put the learning into action, captured in action plans will be the first step in implementation. With reflection and accountability, when employees see that their new learned behaviour translating into their real-world functions, they will take the immediate wins and continue to and master the new behaviour.
An object in motion stays in motion
Isaac Newton’s first law of motion is “a body at rest stays at rest, and a body in motion stays in motion…” This law of physics, when applied to learning and development in the workplace, becomes a fundamental advance to your workplace performance.
Once committed to an action plan, taking the first steps supported with a reflective process will create initial motion and eventually momentum.
Which in turn will begin to impact the view of learning as a whole as well as delivering the immediate performance benefits of learning being applied.
If you enable your learners and staff, not only to learn but then support them to apply the new learning in their job performance, that new development will be implemented with surprising grace. While we may desire fully self-directed learners that take the learning and apply it without any scaffolded experiences most organizations need to help people reach this level of learning maturity. With the first step of Turning Learning into Action™, as staffers employ their new learning tool in the workplace daily, they will come to understand the benefit of the learning experience and are likely to be more enthusiastic about attending the next learning and development program you create.
Implementing learning encourages more learning. Elementary teachers have known this forever – the learning is in the play, it’s in the doing, building, creating and they have seen that lesson in action repeatedly.
The business world could learn a thing or two from elementary teachers. Support our adult learners to turn learning into action prompts a desire for more learning to be put into action. And personal growth and business growth ensue.