CHAPTER 10

How Do You Align Learning With Organizational Requirements?

Most organizations view learning as a strategic enabler, making it imperative that talent development aligns with organizational requirements and strategic objectives. Unfortunately, Managing the Learning Landscape, a whitepaper by ATD and PMI (2014), suggests that only 45 percent of organizations have “significant” or “good” alignment of talent development to organizational strategy.

What difference does it make? Untrained employees may lack knowledge about company resources or procedures that affect customer retention, ultimately leading to waste or decreased profits. The Value of Training, a research report funded by IBM (2014), demonstrates these data:

• 84 percent of employees in best performing organizations are receiving the training they need, compared with 16 percent in the worst performing companies.

• 71 percent of CEOs (4,183 leaders in 70 countries) identified human capital as a key source of sustained economic value.

• 62 percent of new hires intend to stay at companies that offer training for their current jobs; however, 21 percent do not intend to stay if training is not provided.

Organizations need to take measures to drive performance. Skilled employees are a strategic part of an organization’s performance.

Linking Learning to Performance

Aligning learning with your business needs starts by building a business case and cost justification for the investment. Organizations whose learning strategy is aligned to organizational requirements are more agile and competive. Learning and development exists to drive business value rather than to only provide training.

To align with your organizations’ business objectives, you might consider these questions:

• Do you speak the language of business?

• Do you understand and communicate with all your stakeholders—business leaders, line managers, and employees—especially about their learning needs?

• Can you help to quantify the potential impact of the solution? What are the key metrics of business success? What difference would these key performance indicators make to your organization’s bottom line?

• Review your capacity. What are the capabilities required to achieve your business goals based on defined metrics? Does your current infrastructure support talent development goals?

• Can you show evidence that you have the ability to measure the impact of learning activities against the business goals?

• Have you involved key stakeholders in generating and championing the agenda?

• How will you create a plan to ensure that learning and development activities reflect the demands of the business goals?

• How can you ensure the learning evaluation metrics align with the valued business measures?

• How can you use data to help justify your budget, using relevant indicators important to your organization and stakeholders?

• How can you be proactive in both tactical and strategic organizational goals and analyze the business problem before recommending a solution?

• Who will work with senior managers to identify specific business metrics that need to be improved?

• On what timeline might you demonstrate value back to the business by revisiting objectives with senior managers and reporting on the results?

Throughout the process, stay focused. Business moves rapidly and strategies change quickly. This means that you need to deliver knowledge and skills for any new direction. Of course this isn’t easy, but it is critical. One final thought: You need to determine what you will not do to make time for what you will do for your organization. A good resource for more details is the third edition of Performance Consulting by Dana Robinson and her colleagues (2008). Linking learning to your organizational needs will coincide with beginning to create a culture of learning.

Building a Culture of Learning

The ATD research report Building a Culture of Learning reveals that only 31 percent of organizations have well-developed learning cultures (ATD 2016). Essential traits include closely aligned business and learning strategies; values that affirm the importance of learning; and an “ingrained learning atmosphere.” Change is embraced and employees have developmental and growth mindsets.

The report determined that a culture of learning pays off in many ways:

• Top companies are almost five times more likely than lower performers to have extensive learning cultures.

• High performers are nearly two times more apt to say their learning functions help meet organizational business goals.

• Employees at high-performing organizations share knowledge with their colleagues at a rate four times greater than that of workers in lower-performing firms.

• Communication is supported by rewarding workers for learning, providing tools and resources for creating and sharing learning content, and making knowledge sharing a performance expectation at all levels.

• Discussing an employer’s commitments to ongoing talent development during prehire interviews is a distinguishing trait.

• Three practices related to supporting a learning culture are performance standouts:

o regularly updated personalized development plans for every employee

o worker accountability for the learning specified in those plans

o nonfinancial rewards and recognition for employee learning.

The study also found that top performers are three times more likely to use the learning culture for recruitment and three times more likely to hold leaders accountable for demonstrating learning’s importance.

What’s involved in building a culture of learning? First and foremost, make time for learning and create accountability from the top down. These two steps will result in personalized development plans.

The time required does not refer to the amount of time invested attending formal learning events. Instead it refers to the time that employees need on the job to learn; for example, time that is a part of everyday work to learn from reviews and receive feedback about projects and tasks from their immediate supervisor. Supervisors must provide coaching and development daily and create plans for future learning with employees.

As I mentioned in the last section, you must think about what you will stop doing so you can do a better job of what you will do. Just as our brains have patterns and mindsets that may need to be changed or shifted, our organizations also have organizational patterns and mindsets—“the way we do things around here.” Changing the culture may require you to uncover some of these established organizational patterns and challenge them.

To be a true culture of learning, we must tolerate and celebrate creativity, risk, and failure. To transform itself, an organization must accept failure as part of the learning process—just as you try and learn and fail until you get it right. And like individual success, learning occurs when you reflect on what happened, what it means, and what you will do differently as a result.

All of these are elements in learning to learn. In the process of building a learning culture, you need to remember the importance of attending to a brain-friendly workplace and how motivation is changing.

Influencing the Brain-Friendly Workplace

Covering all the possibilities to align learning means you need to consider future workplace issues. A report by Bersin (2016) predicts that a revolution in corporate learning is continuing. Specifics include MOOCs; low-cost (often free) online courses; high-quality, low-cost video production; an increased passion for self-directed learning; and a changing audience.

Today’s learners are mobile, short on time, and want to learn on their schedules. They are collaborative, distracted, impatient, and overwhelmed. The Center for Creative Leadership’s 70-20-10 framework for learning has renewed interest, especially in the 70 percent (on the job learning) and the 20 percent (learning from others). All of these facts add up to a need to attend to a changing world.

In her book The Brain-Friendly Workplace, Erika Garms (2014) also identifies organizational challenges on the horizon. She suggests that we will need to identify and work toward improving a brain-friendly workplace to ensure increased creativity and productivity. Among the challenges she sees converging in the workplace are upheaval in management; continuous, overlapping, accelerated transition; and new and different employee motivators.

Motivation: It’s a New Game

Raymond Wlodkowski (2003), a psychologist, researcher, and national consultant in adult and professional learning, surmises that four motivational conditions are essential in creating intrinsic motivation in an adult learning setting:

• Establish inclusion. Create a learning atmosphere in which learners and trainers feel respected.

• Develop attitude. Create a positive disposition toward the learning experience through personal relevance and choice.

• Enhance meaning. Create challenging, thoughtful learning experiences that include learners’ perspectives and values.

• Engender competence. Create an understanding that learners are effective in learning something they value.

It is important to note that these conditions are established collaboratively by the trainer and the learners. Even though the workplace is experiencing a change in what motivates some employees, these are basic enough that I predict they will not change. Note also that these are all intrinsic motivators, even though we can influence all of them externally. Researchers at the Center for Creative Leadership say that external motivation is not bad, but “lack of internal motivation appears to be problematic. Managers who lack internal motivation are likely to have unfavorable job attitudes and may leave the organization” (Cullen-Lester 2016).

Other studies show that what motivates employees on the job has changed dramatically. The Brain Friendly Workplace suggests at least four key shifts to consider (Garms 2014):

• The definition of the employee contract has changed to be virtually unrecognizable and nonexistent.

• Personal satisfaction is driven by different factors.

• Managerial demographics have shifted to younger and less experienced.

• Increasing performance is almost entirely dependent on employee motivators.

Even though these all relate to on-the-job motivation, you should extract assumptions for motiving your learners.

Many studies conducted around motivation in learners have found that it is influenced by personality traits and openness to the experience. Motivation to learn can be enhanced by organizational and supervisory support: Adults have a higher motivation to learn when they see the training content is related to their jobs. Eduardo Salas and colleagues (2012) state that “motivation to learn matters, before, during and after training and it should be promoted throughout the learning process.” Sounds like another dose of Malcolm Knowles to me and it’s great to have confirmation.

Remember that self-determined motivation (whether a consequence of values or pure interest) leads to better long-term outcomes than controlled motivation (Davis and Middleton 2006). Data gathered from a report by the Corporate Learning Consortium asked, “What motivates you to learn online?” Respondents could select two options and the results were (Jennings, Overton, and Dixon 2016):

• 76 percent want to do their job faster and better.

• 75 percent learn for their own personal development.

• 60 percent want to increase their productivity.

• 47 percent want to keep up with new technology.

• 42 percent are motivated by working toward professional certification.

Each of these instances should be tempered by the fact that the world is changing, the workplace is changing, employees are changing, and motivation is in the process of evolving.

Based on my experience, the first step toward motivation is helping learners understand “what’s in it for me.” Jennifer Hofmann (2006) agrees in her e-book 101 Tips to Motivate the Online Learner. She states: “In order for online learning to be successful, we need to create environments in which people can effectively learn. Motivation often comes down to answering the question, ‘What’s in it for me?’”

Attend to answering that question, “What’s in it for me?” If there is nothing that will help learners solve a problem or make their work faster or better, you have a difficult task ahead of you. On the other hand, once you are over that hurdle (and perhaps there wasn’t one) you can use all the other ideas presented in this book to maintain motivation: respect your learners, allow maximum participation, provide options, build community, create active learning, stretch through games, add a dose of novelty, individualize the learning, encourage learning through mistakes, and create an experience—not just a training session.

Cost of Not Training

Every organization steps back on occasion to explore whether it is doing the best job it can to develop the talent that is so critical for success. It is likely that a discussion about cutting back on training or even not providing any training may arise.

What is the cost of not training? Well let’s start with my perspective: Training is not a cost. It’s an investment. Does it matter what we pay for an investment? What’s relevant is the ROI—what we get in return. One of the best ways to jeopardize an organization’s future and increase the probability of difficulty is to look at training as a cost and pay the price of not training or providing substandard training.

 

 

Sometimes the argument is that once employees are trained, they will leave for a better paying job. Another excuse for not training is that there isn’t enough time. Consider that if an employee takes a day to attend training and learns something that saves an hour per week, it takes only eight weeks to recoup the time. That means the ROI for that single training session approaches 600 percent for the year. Sometimes speaking in terms of the return on investment helps to make the case.

Lack of training can cause an increase in staff turnover and the costs associated with bringing in new employees, decreased morale and engagement, and lower profits and reduced productivity. Training and retaining employees is less expensive than hiring new employees. Trained employees work smarter. There are many ways to examine the cost of “not doing training,” but I am sure you can see that one of the biggest drawbacks is having an organization of employees who have not reached their full potential. Organizations must invest in employees to be successful.

What We Know for Sure

Science tells us that we can rely on several proven facts:

• Learning must be aligned to the organization for success.

• Skilled employees are a strategic part of an organization’s performance.

• Organizations whose learning strategy is aligned to organizational requirements are more agile and competitive (ATD 2016).

• Only 31 percent of organizations have well-developed learning cultures.

• Multiple changes in the future require attention to the brain-friendly workplace.

• Motivation requires four conditions created by the trainer and learners: inclusion, attitude, meaning, and engendered competence.

• Motivation expectations are changing with the youngest workforce.

• There is a cost to not training.

The Art Part

Your success will depend upon how well you adapt to the situation and your learners’ needs. Tap into some of these ideas to help your learners grow, to develop yourself, and to add your personal creative touch.

Questions for learning. Help your employees make the switch to a more self-directed learning strategy. Suggest that they use three questions to begin their individual development plan:

• What do I need to support my success right now?

• What do I need to develop in my current role?

• What do I need to grow in my career?

Interview the C-suite. You may wish to interview the members of your C-suite, asking questions such as:

• What do you see changing in our future that may require changes in our processes?

• What does being in a culture of learning mean to you?

• How can we help you now? In the future?

Motivate online. Download 101 Tips to Motivate the Online Learner. Challenge yourself to implement at least five new motivational strategies in your next online class.

Art and Science Questions You Might Ask

These questions provide potential challenges for your personal growth and development:

• What is the best way for your organization to start to link the learning strategy with your organization’s requirements?

• Are you able to clearly articulate the critical priorities to which your company is committed over the next three years?

• Does your team know the key metrics of your business success?

• Can you articulate the capabilities required of your leaders over the next three years?

• How well do current courses align with strategic priorities?

• Can you measure the impact of learning activities against the strategic business goals?

• How well have you involved key stakeholders in developing and championing your development plans?

• How have you linked instructional design to the strategic priorities?

• What organizational “pattern” (the way we’ve always done it) do you need to challenge?

• How brain friendly is your organization? How do you address change?

• How can you learn more about what to expect in your workplace in the future?

• Intrinsic motivation seems to be the winner for success on the job and long-term results, so how can trainers influence it?

• Do you know what motivates your staff to learn?

• Do you know how you can better motivate your participants to learn?

How Do You Align Learning With Organizational Requirements?

Aligning learning with your organizational needs requires everyone to be on board. It is not an undertaking for the faint of heart. As you embark on this journey, remember to examine what you will start doing and what you will stop doing. Recognize that you will meet challenges along the way regarding “the way we’ve always done it around here.” Pay attention to new workplace challenges and what’s motivating to help guide your process. Also remember that nothing was ever learned that was easy. You will have stops, starts, restarts, and failures. Making changes in an organization mirrors some of the changes you go through as you learn.

Resources

ATD. 2016. Building a Culture of Learning: The Foundation of a Successful Organization. Alexandria, VA: ATD Press.

ASTD and PMI. 2014. Managing the Learning Landscape. Alexandria, VA: ASTD Press.

Bersin, J. 2016. Predictions for 2016: A Bold New World of Talent, Learning, Leadership, and HR Technology Ahead. New York: Deloitte Development.

Biech, E. 2010. The ASTD Leadership Handbook. Alexandria, VA: ASTD Press.

———. 2012. Developing Talent for Organizational Results: Training Tools From the Best in the Field. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons.

———. 2014. ASTD Handbook: The Definitive Reference for Training and Development. 2nd ed. Alexandria, VA: ASTD Press.

Cullen-Lester, K., M. Ruderman, and B. Gentry. 2016. Motivating Your Managers: What’s the Right Strategy? Greensboro, NC: Center for Creative Leadership.

Davis, K., A. Winsler, and M. Middleton. 2006. “Students’ Perceptions of Rewards for Academic Performance by Parents and Teachers: Relations With Achievement and Motivation in College.” Journal of Genetic Psychology 167(2):211-220.

Garms, E. 2014. The Brain-Friendly Workplace: 5 Big Ideas From Neuroscience That Address Organizational Challenges. Alexandria, VA: ASTD Press.

Hofmann, J. 2006. 101 Tips to Motivate the Online Learner. East Lyme, CT: InSync Training.

IBM. 2014. “The Value of Training: Building Skills for a Smarter Planet.” Somers, NY: IBM Corporation.

Jennings, C., L. Overton, and G. Dixon. 2016. “70+20+10=100: The Evidence Behind the Numbers.” Towards Maturity, February 2. www.towardsmaturity.org/article/2016/02/02/in-focus-702010-100-evidence-behind-numbers.

Robinson, D., and J. Robinson. 2008. Performance Consulting: A Practical Guide for HR and Learning Professionals. 2nd ed. San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler.

Robinson, D., J. Robinson, J. Phillips, P. Phillips, and D. Handshaw. 2015. Performance Consulting: A Strategic Process to Improve, Measure, and Sustain Organizational Results. 3rd ed. San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler.

Salas, E., S. Tannenbaum, K. Kraiger, and K. Smith-Jentsch. 2012. “The Science of Training and Development in Organizations: What Matters in Practice.” Psychological Science in the Public Interest 13(2): 74-101.

Wlodkowski, R. 2003. “Fostering Motivation in Professional Development Programs.” New Directions for Adult and Continuing Education, 2003(98):39-48.