Training isn't working - part two

Last week, I think we covered enough statistics to convince even the hardiest sceptic that training isn’t working. The question this week, is why does this happen and the answer lies, in research by Geary Rummler and Alan Brache (1995), who found that 80% of performance problems relate to factors within the work environment. In other words, what happens outside of the training room gets in the way of application.

In my experience, three scenarios occur repeatedly, and make application difficult, if not impossible:

Training for no reason

I’m working with a multinational company training sixty of their managers, at great cost, simply because they haven’t had any training for a couple of years and the company thought some training might be a nice idea. Training is supposed to be performance enhancing: it's the bridge that takes you from point A to point B. If there isn’t a point B, why do it?

There is a reason – the delegates just don't know what it is

There is an idea that training can “fix” people. A manager has a member of staff with performance or behavioural issues; they don’t want to confront the issue directly, so they send the member of staff on a training course, in the hope that they’ll learn something and change. It’s not always that extreme, though: so many times, I see delegates who’ve had no conversation with their managers in advance of the workshop – they’ve just been sent there. What does that do to their willingness to learn?

Nothing happens afterwards

What happens after the workshop is crucial – if on-the-job reinforcement is missing, there's no reason or incentive to do anything. It’s difficult to sustain changes in behaviour and often we need help and support; if that’s not forthcoming, most of what we learn is gradually forgotten.

Of course, a fourth reason is that sometimes the training's just bad. A poor workshop or a poor trainer (and, lets face it, some are terrible) won’t generate any kind of change or application at all – but that’s a topic for another day!

So what’s the solution? There’s a great quote, attributed to both Einstein and Woody Guthrie (it’s easy to get them confused): “Any fool can make something complex; it takes a genius to make something simple.” The inspired philosophy is simple things, done well, repeatedly: the good news is, for all of these problems there some very simple solutions and we’ll look at them next week.

Training isn't working

Have you ever engaged a training company? What differences did you see as a result of the training? If the answer to that is “very little” then I’m not surprised because training, it seems, just isn’t working.

Plato said the beginning of wisdom is the definition of terms. When I say working, I mean there is a noticeable transfer of learning to the business: what happens in the training room doesn't stay in the training room but it leaks out into the business. That's important because it's one of Donald Kirkpatrick’s four key measures for training:

• Level one – Evaluation (did they like it?)
• Level two – Recollection (did they remember it?)
• Level three – Application (did they do anything with it?)
• Level four – Impact (did it make a difference?)

Level one (evaluation) tends to be done most but produces data of the least value. Data at Application and Impact levels is harder to come by but what information is about paints a depressing picture.

In 1985, John Newstrom studied the perceptions held by members of the ASTD and there was a commonly held belief amongst them that training was not effectively transferred to the workplace. They believed that:

• Only 40% of the training content was applied to the job by the learner immediately following training.
• Only 25% of the training content was still applied to the job by the learner after six months.
• Only 15% of the training content was still applied to the job by the learner after one year.

Remember, this is perception and not necessarily reality but it is supported by other figures. Baldwin and Ford (1988) conducted a survey of the academic literature of the time on training effectiveness, and concluded, “Not more than 10% of the estimated $100 billion spent each year on training by the American industries actually resulted in transfer to the job”. Although doubt has been cast on the validity of this statement, in terms of the exact percentage and the estimated spend, it’s very similar to studies carried out by USA Today and by Ford and Weissbein (1997).

In 1992, Tannenbaum and Yukl conducted a review of the available literature, and concluded that the transfer of learning to job performance was generally low. They reported that relatively few learners, as low as 5%, actually applied in the workplace what they had learned in the training room, figures similar to those found subsequently by Stolovich (2000).

Have I convinced you – or merely bored you with a whole bunch of figures? The fact is, as Stolovich concluded, “Training alone is not effective in achieving on-job application of knowledge”. Next week we’ll look at why that is and, more importantly, what you can do about it.

The dignity of labour

Are you busy? Feel like you’ve got too much to do? If you do, it would seem that you’re not alone: I was struck by some recent statistics from the Corporate Leadership Council showing that the average job “footprint” (i.e., what someone is expected to do as part of their job) has increased by a third since the beginning of the recession. The Hay Group has found that two-thirds of workers say they are regularly putting in unpaid overtime, in order to cope with this increased footprint.

But, you might argue, these are hard times and we must all pull together and do our best; it’s all hands to the pumps. Companies and workers understand that and the extra effort people put in now in order to help keep their employers afloat is appreciated. Except it isn’t: in the same Hay survey, 63% of workers say their employers do not appreciate their extra effort and 57% feel they are treated like “disposable commodities”. Around fifty per cent say that their current level of work is unsustainable. What are the consequences of those statistics?

This is a familiar theme on the inspiredblog – it’s one that we’ve returned to a number of times over the months. Booker T Washington said “no race can prosper until it learns there is as much dignity in tilling a field as in writing a poem” and it’s true. At inspired, we strongly believe that all jobs contain and provide dignity. Work defines us and having spent some time in the past without a job, we know how corrosive it can be, how meaningless and empty the days can become, and the crippling effect it can have on self esteem. But, to quote Camus, “there is dignity in work only when it is work freely accepted” and what we’re seeing increasingly is that work is not freely accepted; it’s forced on us. It doesn’t provide dignity, it provides anxiety and illness. Is it any wonder that absenteeism, disengagement and low level corporate crime are all increasing, at precisely the time we need people to stay and engage the most?

Have you ever heard anyone say that their employees are their company’s greatest asset? Next time you hear it, remind them that employees are people, not assets. We’re human beings, not “Human Resources.” Unless employers ensure their employees are treated like people – with care, with consideration, with respect – statistics like the ones quoted above will increase and I fear that this recession will get an awful lot worse before it gets better.

Challenging the status quo

One of Stephen Covey’s 7 Habits (Habit 7, fact fans) is “Sharpen the Saw.” It’s based on the idea of continuous improvement, on the idea that we have to continually learn, continually grow, continually expose ourselves to new interests and influences. Ghandi once said "we open the doors and the windows and allow all the currents to come in” and I think that’s a good philosophy: it’s important to let the tides come in occasionally, to mix things up. It’s not easy to set aside time to do these things – I’ve talked before about the tyranny of the urgent – but if we don’t continually improve ourselves, we’ll get left behind.

So here on the inspired blog, in addition to our regular weekly posts, we’ll occasionally be posting a series of interesting articles and videos for you to take a look at. Hopefully, they will spark thoughts in your mind or provoke a debate. I’d love to know what you think of them, so please do take a moment to leave comments or tick the little box below; the more I know what you like, the more I can deliver it!

This week, we bring you a video by Seth Godin from the ever-reliable TED website; if you’re not paying attention to what both Godin and TED are doing, you really need to give yourself a good talking to. As you watch this video, ask yourself what story you’re telling and how you’re challenging the status quo...

Engaging

Those of you who are regular readers will know that we here at inspired have been working on an Employee Engagement workshop over the last six months or so. We ran our first batch of workshops last year and they were very well received - there's a new round beginning soon and you can find details here. If you know someone who might be interested, please do forward the link on.

As well as the MacLeod Report, on which the "Engaging for Success" workshop was based, the CIPD have recently conducted their own survey into employee engagement and you can download it here. I was particularly struck by their assertion that "the extent to which employees find meaning in their work has a substantial impact on how they feel about their working life in general. Employees who believe that their work is important and that they can make a difference have much more positive perceptions about their work and their work environment."

I've talked about this a number of times, in particular in this post, and it's great to have it reconfirmed. I feel strongly about the subject and it almost feels like there's some momentum building. Perhaps this will be the year when employers move away from the old-fashioned industrial-age model of management and begin to truly engage with their workers.

A sticky situation

You find me in a grumpy mood this week. I had planned to post a piece on weekly planning but my eye was caught by a joint paper from Toronto and Chicago Universities, reported in the Economist. It seems that researchers at the universities worked with the managers of an electronics factory in China, to explore the ways in which bonus schemes might be made more effective. If you’re a regular reader of the blog, you’ll know that I’ve had a couple of things to say in the past on the way in which managers and leaders attempt to motivate their teams. It’s a particular interest of mine and what I read did nothing to improve my mood on the subject.

You can find the whole of the report from the Economist here but let me quote a couple of lines which, I feel, sum up the tone of the article and – if we assume the Economist to be reporting faithfully – the paper itself: “the fear of loss was a better motivator than the prospect of gain... Carrots... may work better if they can somehow be made to look like sticks.”

Let’s ignore the fact that this research paper is, in essence, a bulletin from the school of the bleedin’ obvious. Researchers find that workers are afraid of losing money they’ve been promised; who could have guessed it? Without wishing to be too political, let’s also overlook the fact that this research took place in China – not a haven of best management practice or the freedom of workers to withhold their labour and search for other employment. Instead, think for a moment about what this paper means and what it suggests. Are we honestly saying, as we enter the second decade of the 21st century, that it is acceptable working practice to threaten people in order to “motivate” them? At a time when workplace stress is increasing (and, interestingly, Chinese workers are the most stressed of all), do we really want to work in environments where that kind of management practice is even considered, never mind actually practiced?

I believe that, fundamentally, people come to work in order to do a good job. I believe that people will do a better job if they know their work has meaning. I believe that one of the roles of managers/leaders is to create the circumstances within which workers can do a good job and then, essentially, get out of the way. It always depresses me when I find there are still managers who think that threats, fear, bullying and intimidation are effective ways of “motivating” workers: the fact that this academic report adds a spurious veneer of legitimacy to that viewpoint just makes me angry.

Happy New Year

I don’t want to start 2010 on a depressing note but I wonder how many people have already failed their new year’s resolutions? If they have, they’re in good company – according to a recent report, around 80% of people won’t succeed in keeping their resolutions. If you’ve set yourself some goals or resolutions for 2010, I’d like to offer some practical advice on goal setting and, more importantly, goal achievement.

Whatever it is you’re trying to do, you’ll need three basic things to succeed. Firstly, of course, you need to know what you’re trying to do. This is where all that “SMART” stuff comes in handy – you need to make the goal specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and timed. The more you can phrase your goal using these guidelines, the clearer the goal is likely to be and clarity helps you both achieve and monitor achievement.

Secondly, you need to know how to do it. There are simple things you can do that dramatically increase your chances of success: breaking the goal down into smaller, interim, steps; telling other people what you’re trying to achieve; keeping a record of your progress. All these things will help keep you going, as will understanding that you will sometimes slip back into your old habits. It’s important not to beat yourself up for this; keep visualising the positive results that come from achieving your goal or keeping your resolution.

Often, we know what to do and we think we know how to do it although sometimes how we go about achieving our goals sabotages our attempts. That’s certainly the thrust of the research I quoted earlier. But those of you who have children – or who have ever been children – will recognise that there is a third, crucial element. You can know very clearly what to do; you can understand explicitly how to do it but if you don’t want to do it then nothing will happen.

I start my time management workshops off by asking people to list all the things they know about time management. They list the stuff you’d expect: keep lists, prioritise, say no, focus on important not urgent and so on. So I asked every group, “If you did these things, would they help you manage your time?” – they would all say yes. Then I would ask, “Do you do these things?” and they would all say no. Ultimately, they didn't do them because they didn't really want to.

People often talk about not being sufficiently motivated to do things and it’s true that motivation is important. But all too often, lack of motivation is just a code for a lack of discipline. Sometimes, the things we want to achieve are hard – they involve sacrifice or hard work. It’s at those times, the times when you don’t feel like it, when discipline – mind over mattress – is what you need. But ultimately, whatever goal you set for yourself, whatever your resolution, it has to be something that you actually want to achieve. Don’t set a goal because you think you should achieve it – spend your time, energy and effort achieving something you actually want.

Have a very happy, prosperous and peaceful New Year.

Should auld acquaintances be forgot?

Many years ago, I worked at the same company as a woman called Irene; we started at the company on the same day and we kept in touch over the ten years that we both worked in the firm. Over that period, I watched as her career took an interesting turn and, by the end of the ten years, she was taking, on average, around about 80 to 100 days a year off sick.

It wasn’t that there was anything particularly wrong with Irene – she didn’t break her leg or anything; that 80 to 100 days each year was made up of the odd day or two here and there. Coughs, colds, sprains, migraines – there were always reasons for each absence and, over the months and years, they added up.

During her time at the company, Irene had a number of different managers, each of whom went through the same process. Initially, they would be crestfallen to find that Irene had been assigned to their team; then they would decide to resolve the problem and tackle it head-on; this would inevitably meet with failure and so they would give up, finally working to transfer her on to yet another unfortunate manager. Irene was not an easy woman to talk to – she was forthright, opinionated and generally older than the people managing her, so she found it easy to intimidate them. Some, less confident, managers would move from the first to the last step, skipping the middle stages entirely.

Eventually, Irene was given redundancy and received a cash payment, together with one month’s salary for every year she’d worked there. Everyone around her breathed a sigh of relief and made a little note to themselves that the consequence of continued poor behaviour is a large cash payout.

She never worked a full year over that ten-year period. Interestingly, though, Irene also participated in a local light operatic society: to the best of my knowledge, she never missed a rehearsal or a performance and I was reminded of Irene when I read this article. In particular, I was struck by the quote from Professor Cary Cooper: “if employers entrust their workers with flexible working, stress-related illness and sickness absence is lower and performance and productivity increases.”

What he’s talking about is an effort on behalf of employers to demonstrate the same flexibility and commitment they demand of their employees. While BA and its employees fight each other in the courts, politicians vilify bank employees and the country wonders whether it will still have a job in twelve months, perhaps Professor Cooper’s words point to a better way of working in the New Year. Perhaps one day, people like Irene – disengaged, unhappy, and reacting to being treated like a problem to be passed from pillar to post – will be treated differently. Perhaps an enlightened manager will one day tap the level of engagement she showed to her operatic society.

As the snow floats down outside and we prepare for the Christmas festivities that seems like a hopeful place to end 2009. We’re taking a break next week so we’ll see you again on New Year’s Day. If I could have one wish granted by Santa, it would be that, if you’ve enjoyed anything you’ve read this year on the blog, you to pass it on to just one other person who might like it.

In the meantime, have a very Merry Christmas.

Learning to Lead

If you’ve ever spent time in a training room, you’ll have heard a trainer use the phrase “there’s no such thing as a stupid question.” I know it’s supposed to be supportive and encouraging but now and again I like to take it as a challenge and see if I can’t find some really stupid questions to ask. You know the sort – the kind of questions that five year olds ask and which parents find so difficult to answer: things like “why is the sky blue?” or “where does the sun go at night” or “is it actually possible to teach someone to be a leader?”

Many years ago, people who thought about this type of thing believed that leaders were born, not made. Leadership was a quality you were born with and the idea was known as the “great man” theory. The difficulty with this theory (leaving aside the obvious sexism) is that, followed to its natural conclusion, if you were born with this leadership quality you’d be a leader even if you never got out of bed. That led to a second series of ideas (known as behavioural theories) that involved what leaders actually did. Of course, anyone who’s been a leader knows that what you do usually depends on the circumstances, which led to a whole new set of ideas, known as contingency (or, “it depends”) theories.

Since the 1990s, leadership theory has fractured into a host of different schools: exchange and path led; charismatic and visionary; transformational; post-transformational, distributed and on and on. However, after people moved away from the “great man” theories, the idea that leadership could actually be taught was never much questioned: leadership was reduced to a series of tasks or activities, leading to the belief that leadership itself could be taught. But what if it can’t?

This is obviously a question that people in my position don’t really like to ask very often – after all, pretty much everything we do is predicated on the belief that it can. But I suspect that there is actually very little – including leadership – that can be taught. Instead, these things have to be learned.

That’s not just semantics. All learning involves change and psychologists say that in order to change, we need three things:

• understanding (knowing and appreciating the need to change);
• motivation (the desire to change);
• resources (the tools or environment to help them change).

As a trainer, I can only provide some of the resources and perhaps help with some of the understanding. The rest has to come from the individual. I was struck by this as I read a very interesting essay on leadership by Elena Antonacopoulou and Regina Bento; their assertion is that the most important thing leaders can learn is not how to create a vision, or to communicate or how to build trust. Instead, the best thing that leaders can learn to do is learn. I think they’re onto something.

Working to live - part two

I wrote a few weeks ago about the problems faced by France Telecom and the increase in the suicide rate amongst its workers (you can find the entry here). I can’t claim any credit (much as I’d like to) but the Schumpeter column in The Economist picked up on this story recently and added some worrying statistics to the mix.

America’s Bureau of Labour Statistics has calculated that work related suicides increased by 28% between 2007 and 2008. Think about that for a moment: the number of people who were so unhappy with their work that the only way out was for them to kill themselves increased by more than a quarter in the space of one year – and, in the words of the article, “suicide is only the tip of an iceberg of work-related unhappiness.”

The Centre for Work-Life Policy has found that between June 2007 and December 2008, the number of people who said they were loyal to their employers dropped from 95% to 39%. The number of people who said they trusted their employers fell from 79% to 22%. In other words, if the statistics are to be believed, 75% of people don’t trust their employers and 60% are disloyal or, at best, neutral. It seems that, increasingly, employees are finding themselves trapped in jobs they dislike for employers they distrust.

Unusually for The Economist, the article is deafening in its silence on what should be done about this. Telling managers to think more carefully about what they say or advising workers that longer term demographic trends mean they’ll have the upper hand eventually is, frankly, fatuous. Something has to change and it has to change now.

Much of this unhappiness comes from the drive for efficiency, which I’ve labelled previously as the drive to achieve more with less. This in itself stems from the work of Frederick Taylor, who believed that work could be studied scientifically in order to find the most efficient way of working. In his words, “through enforced standardization of methods, enforced adoption of the best implements and working conditions, and enforced cooperation... faster work can be assured. And the duty of enforcing the adoption of standards and enforcing this cooperation rests with management alone.”

There are two things that I’d like to point out: firstly, Taylor uses the word enforce (or variations of it), five times in two sentences. I don’t think that enforcement is a helpful or effective way of gaining co-operation. Secondly, Taylor – one of the first if not the first management consultant, the father of scientific management and the man whose theories permeate almost every part of business today – was a bit of a fraud.

I’ll be developing these ideas further over the coming weeks in a series of articles that challenge some of the sacred cows of business and I’d love to know your opinion; please do sign up, post comments and get involved in the debate.

Man's Search For Lego

One of the joys of being a parent is that you get to re-live your childhood and, in particular, play with a lot of toys. My favourite toy when I was a child – and, fortunately, my son’s favourite toy now – is Lego and I can happily spend hours building the most complex models, scrabbling around on my hands and knees, looking for the one tiny brick which I’ve misplaced and which completes the whole kit.

I was reminded of this when I came across an interesting research paper called “Man’s Search for Meaning: The Case for Legos”. The researchers conducted an experiment where they asked two groups of people to build Lego models. For one group, the completed models were placed on display while for the other group the models were disassembled in front of them and the pieces returned so they could build further models. What they found will probably surprise no one: the latter of those two groups built about 30% fewer models than the former. They felt the work was pointless and, regardless of what they were paid to do it, they didn’t match productivity of the first group, who thought there was some meaning in what they did.

It’s hardly a new finding: the title of the article itself is a play on Victor Frankl’s brilliant autobiography, “Man’s Search For Meaning” in which he outlined his finding that a key driver for mankind is the search for meaning in our lives. You’ve probably heard the old cliché about two builders: they’re both asked what they’re doing and one replies that he’s digging a ditch whilst the other says he’s building a beautiful cathedral. It’s a story echoed by the apocryphal story of Nixon’s visit to NASA, where he is supposed to have encountered a cleaner who described his job as “helping to put a man on the moon.”

A model I use to help managers understand how to work with their teams is one called the 4Cs – Context, Contribution, Coaching and Completion: Context and Completion are concerned with providing some form of meaning and sense of progress in the work that people do. Without this, paraphrasing a quote in the wonderful “Leadership Challenge” by Kouzes and Posner, life becomes “an endless series of Wednesdays”. Work is reduced to the Sisyphean task of endlessly rolling a boulder up a hill but never quite tipping it over the top.

As you go about your business this week, ask yourself what progress you’ve made; if you have made progress, is it progress towards a goal that matters to you? If you’re a manager, have you helped your team feel they’ve made progress towards achieving something important? If the answer to any of those questions is no, you might want to think about the implications for the quality of your/their work and, more importantly, the quality of your/their life.

Mehrabian Madness and the Lazy Trainer

If I showed you a pie chart with three slices, labelled 55%, 38% and 7%, the chances are you’d tell me it had something to do with communication. If I pushed you a little bit harder, you might (as a group did recently) tell me it means that when we communicate, 55% of our message is transmitted by the way we look, 38% by the way we sound and 7% by the words we use. You may be nodding as you read this, congratulating yourself on knowing that little statistic.

But think about it for a moment: if that was actually true, what would be the point of subtitles in foreign films? You’d be able to get 93% of the movie just by looking and listening. And why would you bother learning another language? You’d be able to get the vast majority of your message across just by looking and sounding right. This interpretation is such staggering nonsense that I’m constantly amazed that intelligent people are prepared to believe it. Not that I blame them, you understand: I blame the lazy trainer that told them in the first place.

The statistic comes from the work of Albert Mehrabian. He found that when talking about attitudes and feelings, the speaker’s body language tended to count for more than the words used when there was incongruence between them (ie, the words said one thing but the body language said something else). The application of the findings to other areas of communication is, to say the least, disputed and even Mehrabian himself doubts that they’re valid when the topic under discussion is anything other than the speaker’s feelings and attitudes.

So why is it that groups are still given a misleading (or, let’s be honest, a downright wrong) interpretation of the research? I’m afraid to say it’s because some trainers just don’t think about what they’re teaching groups and, for me, that’s a cardinal sin. I love my job and I take it seriously; without wanting to be precious about it, it’s a privilege to help people and make a difference in some small way. It frustrates me that some trainers seem to take their job so lightly as to repeat, parrot-fashion, such palpable rubbish – it’s their obligation to ensure that what they teach is correct. It’s vital that trainers engage with the material they teach and think deeply about it, at least as much as the delegates do, if not more. Anything less than that and they shouldn’t be doing the job.

One thing at a time

When I’m talking to delegates about time management, we inevitably come to the subject of multitasking. Once we’ve got past the jokes about men not being able to multitask and women being excellent at it we start to talk seriously about whether it’s either possible or even helpful.

Very often, delegates will boast of their ability to do two, three or more things at once – increasingly, they say they must multitask in order to stand any chance of doing all the things they need to do. Bear in mind that these are the same delegates who complain that they’re too busy and feel under stress, don’t have time to plan and so on. When I gently challenge them on their ability to multitask effectively, given the brain’s ability to focus on just one thing at a time, they’re adamant: they multitask and they’re good at it – it’s what keeps them afloat in the sea of work in which they’re nearly drowning.

It’s not just people with time management issues that do this. BIGresearch claims that 70% of media users consume more than one medium at a time: of those who are listening to the radio, 54% are also online, 47% are also reading a newspaper and 18% are also watching TV. The chances are you’re doing it now – scanning this article whilst listening to music, eating a sandwich, checking your emails and hiding from the boss!

There’s clearly a lot of it about but does multitasking actually help? Research released this week from Stanford University in the US would indicate that it doesn’t and there’s an interesting reason why. It would seem that the people who multitask the most are actually the people who are least able to multitask effectively. Not only do high multitaskers do poorly at multitasking, the more they do it the worse they get! Of course, this has a knock on effect on the quality of their work and the time it takes them to do it – probably prompting an even greater desire or perceived need to multitask.

It’s unclear whether poor multitaskers are more inclined to multitask or whether you get worse at multitasking the more you do it. Either way, I’m starting to build up my library of evidence supporting my theory that concentrating on one thing at a time is the quickest and most effective way to regain control of your time.