Imagine the scene.
You’ve been saving up that box set for weeks. There are 9 episodes and you just can’t wait. Your friend comes round to watch with you and as you’re about to start, says – “Oh I thought we’d just watch episode 4 and 5”. Puzzled by the request, nonetheless you agree and about 15 minutes from the end of episode 5 as the heroine enters a spooky basement armed only with fetching knitwear and a flashlight, your friend leaps out of their seat and says: “I’ve got to go, otherwise I’ll get stuck in the traffic, you know how it can be, see ya!”
And with that they vanish into the night.
That would be odd wouldn’t it? Downright rude if nothing else, but also, your friend would not only miss most of the detail of the series but would probably spoil the experience for you too.
Now think about the last development programme you were involved in. Did anyone turn up to the classroom event having done little or none of the preparatory work? Did the same people leave just before the end failing to complete any action plan? When you went into the work-based assignments and discussion forum, were a few names notable by the absence?
Most of the time, as we extend our learning and development programmes beyond a simple classroom event, we find people don’t complete some of the elements. Most if not all will at least try to complete the initial activities – if only because they feel they might look stupid during the day if they’re the only one who has no idea why they are there and what the programme is about. But for many. Like your friend and the box set, they focus on one or two parts of the journey, usually in the middle, but skip the parts which tell the rest of the story and make the whole thing meaningful.
It is certainly true that after a classroom event has finished, completion rates go right down. Some would say because they are not relevant or useful, but most haven’t taken any time to check them out to judge their usefulness or otherwise. These who are challenged talk about being too busy, or – in some cases – overloaded with learning. They complain of learning fatigue.
I agree that a few may be learned out, but I doubt that fatigue is really the issue. So what is going on?
First, did we set expectations properly. Many programmes are based around the concept of a learning journey. They combine videos, resources and activities to start people thinking and generate initial ideas and questions. Usually delivered digitally, they are a mixture of created and curated content. Events, workshops and group discussions follow on and then there are activities and assignments designed to support experimentation, implementation and transfer to the workplace.
Despite the complexity of this increasingly typical programme structure, I still see communication to participants which describes this as a two-day course – as though the only learning which matters (and requires time to be set aside in a busy schedule) is the classroom event. As Paul Matthews puts it in his excellent soon to be released book about learning transfer, if an intervention requires three days activity over 6 months – of which one day happens to be in a classroom, tell people it’s a three-day event (of which one happens to be in a classroom). This seems eminently sensible to me.
This also raises the second challenge I see in organisations who have adopted this kind of multi-component event. What do we call the other bits?
Mos often I see the preparatory activities described as pre-work. Think about that: pre work. Before the work starts, or worse – pre-learning – before the learning starts. This might not be what we are saying, but what our target audience hears is:
“Use this – you won’t learn anything but we will be tracking it through the LMS. We want you to jump through a few unnecessary hoops.”
If this activity is an integral part of the learning process, then it’s not before anything – it’s the thing. Pre-work, pre-course and pre-learning feels optional and less important.
Think: What is this stage for? I tend to refer to it as the knowledge acquisition phase where what I want to do is get people up to speed so we can start form a common level of understanding when we’re all together. On other occasions, it might be to get the juices flowing so it’ll be stimulus materials or thought provokers. Or a combination of all of these.
The material which follows a classroom event is even more problematic. Post-work fails as a term for the same reasons as the pre-work activity. Post-course suggests the learning has finished and now there’s this other stuff (but only if you’re really interested and/or you haven’t got enough to do – you saddo!)
Follow up – optional. So what do we call it? Reinforcement – doesn’t fill me with excitement, refreshers? Ditto. Follow up testing (aagh!) despite Will Thalheimer’s excellent work on testing recall a period of time after the event, it just doesn’t feel compelling for the participant. Increasingly I’m referring to this as workplace transfer and while there may be resources and key point summaries or reminders in there, they are all optional. What I’m interested in is people doing things differently and doing different things. In this case, the important pieces are relevant, often bite sized, tasks – assignments to be completed in the workplace as fuel for reflection.
This is where our third issue comes in. Have we briefed line managers? In his study on the Conditions of Impact, Robert Brinkerhoff found that learning interventions had greatest impact when:
Without managers getting involved – and at least agreeing not to stop people doing things differently – no action plan emerging from a learning initiative has much chance of success. It will simply be brushed aside in the rush to make up for the time lost “while you were swanning around in that training”.
So, why don’t managers naturally support this type of activity? This is our fourth reason for so-called learning fatigue. Either we haven’t asked them to be involved or we have and they haven’t seen the value in being engaged. Sometimes that’s because there isn’t any or at least not enough.
If not, don’t expect them to be wholehearted supporters. And if we did do all that stuff and they aren’t supportive – where did we miss the brief? How could we help team leaders understand the value of what we propose and the benefits they – and their team will gain? Finally, what’s in it for them? We know that what gets measured gets done and what gets rewarded gets done first. Do our managers get recognition for supporting their team members? Is there a pat on the back, chance of promotion, any acknowledgement at all?
I’m not sure learning fatigue exists – or if it does how big an issue it is. Where you might hear it, it warrants further investigation. But be prepared, you might find you haven’t communicated accurately or well about what, why and for how long. You might find you need to do much more work selling what you are doing to team leaders and – above all – you might find you need to re-focus your learning activities in areas which are seen as relevant, applicable and needed.
A video associated with this topic is also available on demand at LearningNow TV