Why Your Employee Training May Be Failing—and Five Ways to Fix It

Despite the hectic pace of modern work, many organizations take an additive approach to learning initiatives. Whether the learners are leaders, managers, or staff, training participants are expected to develop new skills while also keeping up with their many day-to-day responsibilities. But how is it possible for people whose plates are already overflowing, even into evenings and weekends, to greet a new training program with enthusiasm? Busyness-based dread might be the predominant reaction, not relief and excitement for the help and development opportunity being offered.

The Missing Ingredient: Space

In the world of learning, training, and development, the amount of time and space available—or lack thereof—is often overlooked. People who already feel underwater are left gasping for air. No matter how wonderful the program, if there’s insufficient oxygen within the organizational system, that’s frequently the culprit when an initiative is launched but does not catch.

People need space at every stage of learning: space to wrap their heads around the new program and see how it will contribute to their work, space around the initial learning phases to understand and test the skills or ideas, and space for integration and internalizing anything new. It takes time, consistency, reinforcement, and (ideally) shared experience with colleagues for learning to go from an abstract idea to a tangible practice.

Five Ideas to Make Space for Learning

1.?????Clear the table. Examine programs you’ve delivered to this audience in the past two to four years. Create a map or simple chart of all the threads of these programs that are still active and using the participants’ time or mental energy, even in the mildest way. Retire practices and programs that are no longer critical to your success and may only be hanging around due to inertia.

2.?????Cut before you add. Next, if your new program will take, say, an hour a week, consider where learners will find that time in their schedules. Instead of viewing learning as only additive, think about being reductive first. In planning with leadership, ask what can be let go of—even for a little while. You can drop a recurring meeting, a report, or a task. You can postpone a project or simply slow the cadence or recurring activities. In your launch communications, show your target audience that you respect their current workload and that you’ve freed up space for learning. This gesture of empathy will go far to boost engagement.

3.?????Go further: Take less than you give. Because you have your reductive chopper out, consider challenging yourself with a stretch goal to free up more time than your training program will consume. Especially for skeptical participants, if they see you are taking two hours a month off of their plates and only requesting one back, you can apply their gratitude toward the success of your new program. This extra bandwidth may help calm the daily cadence of work and give your learners a bit more time each day to think, ponder, and apply your content.

4.?????Create space for feedback. When implementing a new initiative, it’s important to have an ear to the ground so you’re able to make necessary course corrections along the way. Make sure everyone is given the time and opportunity to share their feedback and offer ideas about how the program could support them more. Don’t assume that folks will go out of their way to give you these thoughts; they are too busy. Build the feedback space into your instructional design so it’s an integral part of the process and time commitment.

5.?????Have spacious dialogue: The most popular parts of the training programs at our company, JFG, are the huddles, where learners have time together to share best practices, talk about fears or objections, and generally hash out the practicality of turning theory into practice. Take a cue from this powerful model, and build similar peer-to-peer time into your next instructional design. A huge bonus unrelated to the learning, especially in this lonely hybrid world, is that this kind of conversational time brings teams together and forges new relationships.

These guidelines will give your learners the time to do the hardest part of context acquisition: behavior change. More space will let them apply themselves with more passion, create objectivity about their learning blocks, and generally forge ahead with more vim and vigor.

?Happy learning!