You’ve worked so hard to build a learning culture in your organization but sometimes, well, things get quiet.
Or boring.
There could very well be training complacency in your organization—not necessarily dissatisfaction—but perhaps a feeling that because everything is going well, there’s no need to make a change.
Even if everyone is receiving the training they need, and are generally satisfied with the results, complacency is still not a good thing. Complacency might even encourage employees to decelerate their interest in training, thinking, well, it’s there if I need it.
The following are some signs that there might be some training complacency within your workforce:
- A reduction in the number of training requests
- A decrease in the number of employees taking courses to completion
- A decrease in the ratings of courses completed by employees
- An increase in the amount of time that has passed since internal training wiki’s or other employee-generated training content has been updated
- A decrease in an employee’s productivity after undergoing training
How can learning leaders re-energize and re-engage the organization and get rid of complacency when it occurs?
Let’s take a look.
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How to Disrupt Training Complacency
One or more of these together will get things flowing again.
Increase internal marketing and awareness
Complacency toward training and skills development could be because employees are simply unaware of current offerings.
As such, find any and all ways to promote L&D’s work via internal, digital communication methods, including email.
Your company might have a corporate intranet or an internal “news” section—exploit these not only with descriptions and a link to the training intake system but also with graphics, images, and videos. Even an “explainer” video or animation would be perfect for this.
You might have to contact your company’s internal webmaster or corporate communications team in order to share and publish this content. To facilitate this, make sure that it’s “out of the box” for them—that they don’t need to do any special editing or coding in order to get your content on these internal sites.
Better yet, if there’s a way to measure the views, clicks, or engagement of these links and content, do it. Measurement can tell you what’s working and what’s not, so you can increase or decrease your marketing “push.”
Increase positive word of mouth by course engagement
Every L&D team needs ist ambassadors to spread the good word about training.
Of course, no one is going to promote something if it doesn’t work, or if it’s just something that employees must undergo without fully understanding why it’s important or relevant to their job.
As a way to increase positive word of mouth, have the courses do the marketing for you. Increase the engagement of your courses—make them richer, deeper, and more relevant—and the learners will not be able to shut up afterwards.
Engagement is a tricky word among learning leaders for a few reasons. For one, it’s difficult to measure, and two, there is no single magic bullet. However, it stands to reason that when learners happily complete a course, rate it highly, and demonstrate a dramatic improvement in job performance afterwards, the course was a success.
Lean on managers
As we’ve long advocated here, learning leaders and talent developers need to join forces and build bridges with those internally who can help them spread the good word.
Individual managers may go rogue and build their own courses, circumventing L&D. However, this is OK, especially as learning has become a shared responsibility across most organizaitons.
Business partners are also in a position to promote the training intake system because in many organizations, most employees cannot submit training requests directly. Oftentimes, it’s only business partners and managers who are permitted to submit training requests on behalf of other employees.
However, this is a benefit. With fewer people given the ability to use the system, there are fewer people that you need to directly market to.
Indeed, leveraging managers is an area of opportunity. Talent developers will benefit from continuing to lean on managers to promote learning because 75% of employees say they would take a course their manager assigned, according to LinkedIn Learning.
Want to learn more about what training intake processes can do for your learning organization? Check out this free ebook:
Training Intake to the Rescue! How to Make L&D the Superheroes of Your Organization
