Designing Effective Learning Transfer

By Peter Strupp A competent workforce needs to engage in lifelong professional learning. However successful learning transfer in the workplace is rare unless certain important steps are in place. A major study on global company human capital practices indicated that standardized corporate training may actually have a negative effect on shareholder value. But how can that be? Certainly training has value to it. To the researchers the likely answer was that it does create value-for the marketability of the employee. However when training does not carry over into day to day work process improvement, then the employees CV may look better, but there is no net effectiveness gain for the organization. Research indicates that less than 35% of all skills trained are still being used by employees one year after a training takes place. There are many reasons for this. Many leaders still do not know how to increase the value of their intangible assets that arent reflected on the balance sheets, but have a direct impact on the market value of the company. Assets such as organizational capability, effective corporate cultures, workforce competency, leadership depth, require immediate costing on the income statement, and are hard both to measure and to manage. What is worse is the missed opportunities (lost customers, lower sales) that occur due to improper employee developmental strategies which the accounting system simply does not capture. In addition, corporate learning is an offshoot from the model of knowledge transfer found in university settings. The lecturer delivers a verbal transmission of knowledge to the students. Much of this classroom transfer also occurs in corporate training, which often neglects the strategic, social, political and ethical context in which learning is taking place. Here are a few practical insights to help the learning transfer process become more successful within an organization. First, it is critical to understand that investment in corporate training and business coaching can be measured in terms of economic value created using conservative assumptions. Just as a company may analyze a fixed asset investment (and a required hurdle rate), the same can be done for investments in improving employee competencies. Senior leaders want to see greater impact in areas such as higher sales, higher team productivity, less customer complaints, greater customer retention, higher quality output measured, etc. All of these desired outputs can be monetized into a cash number. Even if the management team does not want to jump through these measurement hoops, they can do a pretty insightful analysis of

learning investment and operational improvement with the KPI data they already collect. For more practical information on this, I refer readers to the ROI Institute and their website at www.roiinstitute.net. Second, any learning initiative needs to be aligned to the organizational strategy and have an organizational structure to support the initiative. For example, if a retail chain is rebranding and needs to create a new customer experience to pursue higher margin customers, then the recruitment and development activities of employees need to be tied to the initiative. A key point may be to focus on those employee groups who have the highest overall effect on business results. What is still unfortunately very common is that corporate learning initiatives have nothing to do with alignment to strategy. Training is ad hoc and not even concentrated on business results improvement. I call this hygienic level training which means that an annual training budget has been created without a specific developmental purpose to support the strategy. The money is there to be used for short term employee motivation, but it rarely even accomplishes that objective. As far as strategic support, it is recommended that the senior team meet what are the organizational performance goals and work backwards. A clear dedicated workshop session(s) tying the learning initiatives to business results helps explicitly to create this alignment. Pilot testing with a smaller targeted learning group is also a good idea. Once the pilot testing has been evaluated, great care should be made on how fast the roll out for any organization wide training should take place in order not to dilute the intended effect. Another critical element for learning transfer success is whether or not managers have been trained on how to coach their direct reports as a competency. Managers also need to be trained in how to coach in the specific areas targeted in the learning initiatives. Critical is for the leaders to show employees how their new competency can be exercised through use in normal work processes and how those work processes effect better performance results. The new skills learned by employees need to be integrated into the day to day operational processes of the organization. When anything new is attempted, failure is often a result. This is of course normal until mastery occurs. Malcolm Gladwell, in his recent book Outliers, made the point that in order to be the best at a skill there are thousands of hours of practice time required. Leaders need to encourage and support with consistency the acquisition of new skills by employees. During the learning experiences, it is important for active engagement by the participants. Communication travels in both directions. Also, the ability to learn in teams and share experiences provides for greater motivation then lecture style learning. Different styles of learning should be employed within an initiative. This can

include business simulations, team coaching, e-learning, outside speakers, facilitation as well as traditional corporate training. Training and learning initiatives should be designed to simulate as much real world work as possible. This is where the Development Manager needs to ensure that their programs fit within the practical real life experiences that occur. Training should be carefully sequenced to master the basics of the skill before going on to higher level skills programs. Many in house corporate training programs are poorly designed and do not use proper instructional design methods which cause the training to be uneven. The training needs to be systematic and connect within a logical format. One of the most practical steps in a reinforcing learning is to properly design follow up and review. One-off event trainings have very poor success rates. Follow up learning applications should already be built into the learning process. A good way to do this is using group facilitation sessions. This is an effective way to build the competency further that has been learned in the classroom. Follow up is critical. Creating a genuine learning organization tied to business results can create very high employee engagement and build shareholder value. Very few global companies take full advantage of the opportunity. For those that do this well, it is a distinct competitive advantage. Organizations which employ learning initiatives to support strategic operational goals, have clear KPI targets as a desired result outcome, can obtain financial returns that are significantly higher than conventional investments. Instead of asking what is the bottom line?, companies should look above their top lines to see the enormous amount of business opportunity available when investing intelligently in people development.