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How to engage people in learning in your organisation

As a Learning and Development, Organisational Development or HR professional, you know the value of good quality training. As a people professional, you want to see your staff thrive at work, and develop while adding value to your organisation’s purpose or mission. This requires people to focus on honing their skills, learning new skills, and putting learning into practice – alongside delivering their day job.

You’ll also know that investing in people and their development supports inclusion, enables innovation, is a means for engagement and can retain people for longer whilst underpinning your succession planning. Training programmes, whether a two hour workshop or a 12 month modular course, provide opportunities for cross-team relationship building and networking, professional  development, personal reflection and an opportunity to experiment with new ideas or tools.

 

To sum up, training, learning and development are crucial parts of your people agenda. Therefore it can be a bit of a disappointment when you have carefully curated a learning intervention and your staff don’t opt in, or even worse, opt out. As trainers we feel it too – when a group suddenly shrinks and participation rates are low, it’s often due to a clash in priorities – do you learn for the future or deliver work for right now?

So as a people professional, what can you do? The key is in turning this priority around; influence your people to rethink about learning and in doing so reprioritise. This will mean focusing your engagement efforts on what matters the most to them, what they need to understand or hear about, so that it’s not only the benefits you can see, but how these will benefit learners themselves in a direct way.

Here are our top tips to engage people in learning:

  1. Go large – focus on the big picture: Any learning intervention should have a clear and unambiguous intention or outcome. What can you show people regarding the practical difference this will make to their strategic priorities or annual goals? How will this learning help them deliver more or in better ways? Can this learning address a problem or reduce a barrier?

For example, providing skills-based programmes that explore management and leadership techniques would mean that your new or middle managers learn approaches to handle difficult situations and decisions. They are shown techniques to avoid performance issues from arising or escalating, therefore they leaving training more equipped to address staff problems meaning fewer gripes or complaints. For you this means fewer difficult conversations on their behalf. These are immediate gains. More strategically however, learners go on to support their teams in increasingly empowering ways, meaning an overall uptake in productivity or quality, better ways of working, less busy-work and tail-chasing – enabling them to reach their strategic ambitions.

Another example could be short, practical and hands-on courses like time management or influencing skills. Outcomes you could demonstrate here would be people having a shared understanding of how work is done so they’re more confident about doing work in agreed ways. This leads to less confusion and less time wasted on not understanding each other. At an individual level, learners can feel more in control and better equipped in how they work, leaving them free to focus more energy on what they deliver.

  1. Bring on the urgency – focus on why right now (rather than later): For anything to be a priority it needs to feel at least important and ideally a bit urgent too. Training however is never urgent in its nature – learning requires focus, deep thought and time. There will always be something urgent going on, so encouraging people to move into a slower pace can be tricky. It can help to move away from messages around “why you should do this training” to “why you need to focus on learning right now”.

For example, you see your managers are overloaded, busy, pulled in hundreds of different directions and always seem to be firefighting. You know they love nothing more than rescuing people in their teams, being supportive and are a font of wisdom. Taking a coaching approach or delegating more effectively could solve this – managers could then be more encouraging with their teams to help themselves while learning to let go a bit. This needs more than skills input – this needs a mindset shift. But to get them away from their busy day you’ll need them to feel the same way. Try coaching them yourself: ask them for their ideas on what success looks like at a really practical level; and then compare that to the discomfort they are feeling now.  Try questions like: if your team member is more competent, comfortable, confident and capable, what does that mean for you and your work? If your team member carries on exactly as they have done, what does that mean for your work? Make them feel excited about the possibilities, and frustrated about maintaining the status quo.

  1. Make it realistic to make it stick: Learning doesn’t come from simply understanding a new concept. It comes from understanding how that concept is relevant, and how it can make your life better / easier / more interesting. It needs to stick. A great way to make your learning sticky is to engage learners before you even get going. Give them ownership and get them involved. Ask for their experience, examples and expertise. Make the training content relevant and the learning realistic. Help them with the learning transfer process: ask them how it went, what they are doing next, check in regularly. Over time, memories can fade and habits either stick or don’t (or the wrong routines stick). But revisit the learning – remind them of what they picked up and heard about. Don’t  just refresh and rebook training. Instead review and re-learn.

For example, you want to bring in a shared approach to project management. The current approach is chaotic and everyone has their own way. This causes problems with handover, knowledge management, communication, plus it’s inefficient. Instead of going straight to a training catalogue, ask people how they have approached projects so far. What works? What are the frustrations? What is a typical project like? What is an unusual situation? Feed all of this into your intervention. That way participants can use learning straight away. Create agreed processes and pre-book review sessions to see how these are being used.

  1. Manage the managers of your learners: Making training stick can’t be done just by you and your learners. They also need the time, space, permission and freedom to put their learning into action. The biggest barrier to this can be their own manager – who either doesn’t see the value of the learning or isn’t sure how to unlock the value that the learning can bring to them directly. As above – they need to know what it means for them – not just the learner. Learners are not the only stakeholder with something at stake.

Being realistic is also about not overselling your learning and the problems you hope to address. So you might also need to manage expectations here.  For example, you have lots of people who are incredibly dedicated and busy. However there has also been a recruitment freeze lately. You’ve been asked to put on a time management course. It is a truth universally acknowledged that busy people and their managers won’t make time for a time management course. And a time management course can’t make up for a lack of resources no matter how practical it is. So explore this with your stakeholder. Try asking them: what barriers are people facing besides skill or technique? What else might contribute to this situation?

Getting managers or participants involved can unlock this. Taking the same example as earlier – project management – team leaders of participants might also need to understand how they need to adapt the way they work too. Get them involved at every stage: designing and developing the approach, show them how to follow up, give them bite-sized updates, perhaps even train them too.

Whilst you can mandate training attendance, you can’t force learning. As a people professional you are uniquely placed to see the strategic gains of having a learning-based people agenda. To help other people to understand this, work with your learners and their managers so they see this too – this way they’ll understand what they stand to gain from learning. Inspire, encourage, and engage them.

What’s next?

If you would like a discussion on learning in your organisation get in touch online, call us on 020 7978 1516 or email yvette@managementcentre.co.uk.

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Yvette Gyles

About Yvette Gyles

Yvette specialises in leadership, personal effectiveness, change and innovation. Before joining =mc, she worked in HR for several years in both the private and charity sector as an HR...

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