Beyond Compliance: Cultivating Engagement in Workplace Learning

Dan Pink , author of New York Times bestseller Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us, explains that when it comes to motivation, “there's a mismatch between what science knows and what business does.” http://www.danpink.com/books/drive/ This was never truer than in the realm of learning services and professional development. Companies must bridge the gap between science and business by empowering their people to succeed in a landscape that requires increasingly higher cognitive skills. 

Pink's work examines the inadequacy of so-called “carrot and stick” models of motivation in business. Offering rewards as an incentive to boost productivity simply doesn’t work; in fact, studies show monetary incentives may diminish productivity and hinder creativity. His TED talk https://www.ted.com/talks/dan_pink_on_motivation on the topic has been viewed more than 17 million times and his book has become a seminal piece in studying what fuels human behavior.

At Sureskills, we believe Pink’s statement is also true of workplace training, where employees are subjected to inconvenient, inefficient, and sometimes irrelevant training that fails to add value to their practical skill set. Because of the way training is presented, it simply doesn’t help employees get better at what they do. 

Companies traditionally focus on compliance when it comes to training. Traditional professional development motivates the employee to comply with the most basic training requirements. But, studies show that compliance will only take you so far and can detract from the practical success of professional development. Ironically, compliance-based motivators push employees to do the bare minimum required, and can cause them to feel disconnected from the process. 

What’s the alternative? 

In a word...engagement! If you can encourage employees to take responsibility for their own professional skill developments, not only will they will be more successful in fulfilling their training requirements, they are more likely to apply the skills and knowledge learned in their day-to-day work. 

How do you cultivate engagement? 

Let’s return to Dan Pink’s antidote to “carrot and stick” approaches to motivation. If you want engaged learners, you need to facilitate autonomy, mastery, and purpose. Let’s look at each of these ideas in turn and examine how they might be incorporated into a new approach to Learning Services. 

Autonomy 

We have an inherent desire to be self-directed, to have control over what we do. For that reason, it is more important than ever to have a personalized learning service that is always on, always updated, and available across multiple platforms. Ross Bolton, CEO SureSkills Learning Services, explains: 

“We knew we had to develop a new approach to learning and enablement to cater to the 21st-century learner - this had to be highly accessible and on-demand through multiple devices so we could meet learners where they are in the real world.” 

It all starts with providing autonomy for your employees as they look to develop their professional skill-set. 

Mastery 

Once we have control, we like to see that we are getting better at what we do. We want to see incremental growth in our skills and to have a way of measuring ourselves against our past performance. For that reason, SureSkills uses Role-based Competency Assessments to benchmark employee capabilities and to allow them to see their growth from beginner, to advanced, and ultimately to mastery of any given skill. 

Purpose 

Finally, learners must have a sense of the bigger picture to fully engage learning in the workplace, i.e. practical application. Facilitating a personalized, growth-focused approach to learning outlined above ensures that employees will see the practical application of training within their roles. Not only is the employee more engaged in their own professional and personal development, they will have a clearer idea of their future goals and how those goals will integrate with those of the company. 

Ultimately, we want our employees to develop the skills they need to be effective in the workplace, to fill any role-specific gaps in knowledge they might have and to expand on their basic skillset. If we adopt an approach to workplace learning that puts the learner in charge, that challenges them to get better and gives them the measurement tools to watch it happen, that puts them in touch with what their learning means in terms of personal and professional development, then those employees will become stronger, more committed advocates of the company. 

Science knows this. Now you do too. 

Ebook: 6 Solutions for Transforming Learning

In the 21st-century business landscape, new learning strategies will need to be adopted to excel. Our eBook, available below outlines some of the pitfalls of traditional learning services and how to face them head on. It examines the impact of a competency based approach to learning, why we need to develop modularised, reusable content, and how to make more informed, data-driven decisions about training, investment, and talent management.