Your organization has likely purchased software that promised to solve your problems and help you achieve corporate goals, like growth, cost reduction or efficiency improvement. Someone in your company purchased the software, perhaps thinking it would be a silver bullet resulting in goal attainment, recognition or promotions. Then, he or she put it into your hands to make sure employees learned how to use it. However, as many companies have discovered, your company doesn’t reap the full benefits or achieve the promised results — or at least not to the degree that it hoped for.
Your leadership team may have then thought, “Perhaps that software works for other people but not for our specific use cases, in our industry, within the constraints of our company or considering the way we do business.” As a result, they may have gone looking for the next shiny thing that might work, and the hours your team spent training employees went down the drain.
Shifting the Focus From Software to People
The problem isn’t software, though; it’s people. Software and tools are only as good as the people using them. You can invest hours of training on the implementation and daily functions of the software, but if employees have never been trained on business objectives that create real value, the desired outcome is unattainable. It is crucial to understand the difference between functionality and creating real value in order to close this gap — and learning and development (L&D) leaders can spearhead the charge.
Your company hired employees to do a job, but that job morphs over time. They received a set of responsibilities to carry out, but other tasks have been added to their plate over time. They are asked to fulfill these responsibilities on a regular cadence, which they do over and over again, never understanding how the business uses their work or whether it creates any value.
Often, it is because no one has told them or given them a clear line of sight from their work to its measurable financial impacts on the company. It’s the equivalent of pushing the red button because you were told to, but no one is sure of what would happen if you stopped pushing it (remember the TV show “Lost”?).
The Missing Link For Effective Corporate Training
In most organizations, there is a disconnect between what executives are thinking and worried about and what everyone else is doing, and there’s no clarity regarding the connection between the tactical level and the strategic level.
In fact, according to Stephen Covey’s “The 8th Habit: From Effectiveness to Greatness” (2004), a Harris poll discovered that most employees have no idea how their efforts contribute to business results. Here are some of the results of the survey:
- Thirty-seven percent of respondents said they have a clear understanding of what their company is trying to achieve and why.
- Twenty percent of respondents were enthusiastic about their team’s and organization’s goals.
- Twenty percent of workers said they have a clear “line of sight” between their tasks and their team’s and organization’s goals.
- Seventeen percent of respondents felt that their organization fosters open communication and better ideas.
- Ten percent of respondents felt that their organization holds people accountable for results.
- Twenty percent of respondents trust the organization they work for, and 13% have high-trust, highly cooperative working relationships with other groups or departments.
L&D leaders have a burden and an opportunity: We have to help fill that gap!
It’s more than simply creating a good learning environment using the latest learning management system (LMS) or hiring an engaging instructor to teach the new software. Employees have to understand the business, its context and how their efforts fit in. From there, they need to understand how the tools they use (or could be using) help them with those efforts.
A manager once said to me, “Listen to the earnings call. You’ll see what we’re thinking about.” But, I was left trying to connect the dots on how my work had anything to do with what they talked about on the call. At best, employees may have a glimpse into leaders’ decision-making and then figure it out. At worst, they’re left wondering why they ever hired them in the first place and if they should leave for other opportunities. Somewhere in the middle are the statistics from the Harris poll.
How L&D Leaders Can Bridge the Gap
Even if employees learn how to use new software, that training alone doesn’t solve the problems of the business. The promised returns will still be unrealized, and people will go searching for a new solution. What employees really need training on is how to connect what they do or are expected to do on a daily or weekly basis with the key strategic initiatives of the company, whether it’s generating revenue, reducing costs, improving efficiency, boosting profits, increasing customer satisfaction, improving employee and customer retention and loyalty, minimizing risk, or ensuring compliance to legal and political requirements.
Here’s a great example from Avinash Kaushik, the digital marketing evangelist at Google and an expert on cutting through the noise to what matters. He takes a high-level business objective, like “sell product”; attaches a goal and time frame to it ($100,000 per week); and then breaks down the various strategies used to achieve that goal and drive net income or profitability. He then associates it with key measures to track as well as a target or threshold for each person to know whether he or she is on track. This approach leaves no room for doubt.
3 Pillars of Successful Software Training
To realize the promised value of a software or a training investment, employees need to know how to use the tools available to them and what to use them for. Focusing on both is how you drive adoption.
In order for a training course to be successful, people need to know three things: how training applies to their job, why their company cares and how to achieve results quickly. Let’s take a look at each of these three pillars of software training.
1. How Does This Apply to My Job?
During a corporate onsite training class offered as part of customized Tableau training, a student had already made up her mind that she didn’t want to be there. The department had adopted Tableau to improve the team’s reporting, but this particular student didn’t understand why they were switching from Excel. She was concerned that she wouldn’t be able to learn the tool effectively. With all that fear and pushback, no amount of good teaching or answering her questions was going to be able to help.
The bottom line was that she had no idea what was in it for her. The trainer helped remove her fear and resistance by helping her understand how Tableau could automate pieces of her work, how it could give her more time to learn and explore, and its similarities to what she was already doing.
2. Why Does My Company Care?
There’s often a disconnect between what an individual learner wants and what the company wants. Helping to bring everyone onto the same page is critical to ensuring transference of skills and adoption after the class. If learners understand the company goals and know that helping the company achieve these goals will benefit them in their jobs, they tend to be far more motivated.
For example, in a data analysis course, an instructor could show learners how to tie the data they are reporting to the company’s actual strategic objectives and teach them using their own data. The more practical the training curriculum, the more likely participants are to retain and adopt training.
3. How Can We Achieve Results Quickly?
Have your trainers ever found, upon showing learners what is possible with the software they are providing training on, they hear the question, “How long does it take to create something like that?”
Most likely you have, because people are busy, and change is hard. Training needs to be as quick and painless as possible to adopt, or adoption is unlikely to last. This part can be tricky for many training professionals. We want to teach everything that could be useful and end up prolonging the process from learning to application. While some skills inherently take time to learn and implement, we must include ways for participants to achieve results quickly and painlessly.
If L&D managers work with departmental heads to define a desired end state and then set incremental milestones, they are much more likely to achieve results. When an end state is clearly articulated, people understand how to measure progress without being overwhelmed.
How to Drive Post-training Adoption
Bestselling authors and brothers Chip and Dan Heath have written several books on human behavior. One of them, “Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard,” offers three points on how to make change easier (or, in our case, drive adoption of behaviors after training):
- Appeal to the rational mind for understanding.
- Appeal to the emotional side for motivation.
- Appeal to the environment or surrounding context to make it possible.
When you appeal to all three of these elements, it’s easier to drive the results and desired improvements that the software promised initially. Your employees now have the skills, the internal motivation to apply them and the context of why they are doing what they are doing. Ultimately, these skills, motivation and context lead to more innovation.
The more we, as drivers of learning and development, can help employees with skills, motivation and the purpose of their work, the more we help drive innovation and make the promised results of our software tools.
