Disengaged learners? Give them candy.
How learner engagement is driven my m&ms: managers, motivation and measurement.
Earlier this year, an immersive 'Willy Wonka'-themed chocolate experience in Glasgow went viral. Not because it offered a world of pure imagination — though a little imagination might have helped — but because of how bad it was.
Children were promised an 'Enchanted Garden', 'Twilight Tunnel' and 'Imagination Lab'. AI-generated promotional imagery depicted a world of wonder.
What visitors got instead was a near-empty warehouse, a bouncy castle, half a cup of lemonade and a few jelly beans.
Which sounds not unlike a good deal of workplace learning.
In 2023, it’s estimated that over $380bn was spent globally on workplace training. Much of it on tedious workshops, dusty content libraries and platforms that no one visits.
And just like the event in Glasgow, visitors to these experiences get put off. They log into an LMS and think: ‘Is this it?’. They stop being engaged in workplace learning.
How many of your colleagues would you describe as ‘disengaged learners’? Those who have little interest in what you offer, and no interest in finding out?
Every organization will have some. So in this week’s L&D Dispatch, we thought we’d look at some of the factors we can use to reverse this sentiment.
And at the risk of stretching the comparison too far, we can find the answer in a bag of candy: Managers, motivation and measurement. Or what we might call ‘m&ms’.
The red m&m: Managers
According to Gallup, 70% of variance in team engagement is determined solely by managers. Managers are the people best placed to connect day-to-day activities to organizational strategy; to identify the capabilities their teams need to deliver on those day-to-day activities; and to help frontline employees build those capabilities over the long-term.
Managers should therefore be at the heart of our learning strategy: not just helping colleagues identify the learning experiences that are right for them, but also making sure that colleagues have an opportunity to apply what they learned as soon as possible.
How do you involve your management population in wider workplace learning initiatives? 🤔
The blue m&m: Motivation
People engage in workplace learning for a variety of reasons: to grow as individuals, to progress in their careers, to earn more money, to gain qualifications or to move into a new role.
In our research, we see these motivations shift as colleagues get older. For instance, ‘Baby boomers’ tend to care less about career progression than ‘Millennials’.
There’s nothing wrong with that. People have different priorities.
But we should understand what’s motivating our people when we are designing learning experiences.
Our Custom team have worked on projects where learners had to pass an exam, and were therefore motivated to develop the skills they were being tested on. We’ve also worked on projects where learners have to take part in a process, but really don’t want to spend a lot of time on it.
For the first example, we made sure they had lots of practice opportunities. For the second, we designed walk-through guides to help them reach an acceptable standard as quickly as possible.
How do you find out what your people are motivated by? 🤔
The green m&m: Measurement
‘Urgh, Ross G is banging on about measurement again.’ Yes, yes I am.
Trying to measure what we do is a way of crystalizing what we want to achieve. It forces us to make decisions about what content or activities contribute to our goal, and what doesn’t.
In the absence of a clear measurement strategy, our learning interventions lack constraints. It’s easy just to 'add a section on X’ for the sake of it.
But, from the disengaged learner’s point of view, irrelevant content is just more time away from what they want to be doing (see ‘Motivation’ above).
To engage learners, we should be transparent about why learning is being offered, how it will help, and what we want the learner to be able to do afterwards.
Measurement forces us to be specific in how we define these things.
How do you define and measure your learning initiatives? 🤔
Finding answers
The Mind Tools Custom and Insights team have been putting managers, learner motivation and measurement at the heart of our development process for over 10 years. We like to think that our learning experiences are more inspiring than the example from Glasgow.
But we’ll let you decide.
If you’d like to hear examples of real-world projects that demonstrate how we answer the questions above, my colleague Nahdia Khan and I are presenting a webinar for Training Industry on this topic on April 3.
Register below, and I hope to see you there!
Of course, you can also chat to us direct. If you want to explore how we can help you leverage managers, understand learner motivation and measure your impact, feel free to book a call! Email custom@mindtools.com or reply to this newsletter from your inbox.
🎧 On the podcast
In many ways, the world of work is not well suited to learning. Learning requires time, practice and few distractions. More often than not, work demands the opposite.
But there are proven techniques for building capability.
In last week’s episode of The Mind Tools L&D Podcast, our friend Tony Manwani from People Unboxed joined us to discuss BentoBot: an adaptive learning tool that functions somewhat like Duolingo.
Mind Tools offer a similar feature, Skill Bites, in our online platform. So we thought we could trade experiences and offer advice to help you leverage spaced repetition and retrieval practice for workplace learning.
Check out the episode below. 👇
You can subscribe to the podcast on iTunes, Spotify or the podcast page of our website. Want to share your thoughts? Get in touch @RossDickieMT, @RossGarnerMT or #MindToolsPodcast
📖 Deep dive
Nobel prize-winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman died last week at the age of 90.
Best known for his book Thinking, Fast and Slow, Kahneman’s ideas have had a profound influence on how I approach workplace learning design, so it seemed only right to revisit some of those now.
His story takes us back to 1970s Jerusalem, and the publication of ‘Judgement Under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases’ (1974). Written with his friend Amos Tversky, this paper challenged the established notion in the social sciences that humans are rational, unless affected by extreme emotions.
In the decades since, the list of identified biases and heuristics has expanded and the concept of two cognitive systems has emerged. The first, System 1, is automatic: it requires almost no cognitive effort to walk to work. The second, System 2, is reflective: it requires a lot more cognitive effort to have a difficult conversation with one’s manager.
These two systems are not a biological construct, but act as a useful model for understanding how humans make choices.
And ‘making choices’ is what the world of workplace learning is often about.
When we are trying to understand how managers, motivations and measurement affect how people behave, we are implicitly drawing on the work of Daniel Kahneman.
We are taking for granted, now, that the factors affecting human behavior are complex: a mix of the automatic and the reflective; the rational and the instinctual.
We all have Daniel Kahneman to thank for helping us understand this, and shaping how we work.
Kahneman, D. (2011). Thinking, fast and slow. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
👹 Missing links
🤖 Have we reached Peak ChatGPT?
Recent estimates suggest that ChatGPT’s growth has flatlined for the past year. This chimes with previous observations I’ve shared: while the early adopters on my LinkedIn feed remain enthusiastic, most people I interact with IRL seem to have no interest in it whatsoever. That being said, there is another explanation: the general purpose ChatGPT is in competition with smaller and more dedicated tools (which ultimately use the ChatGPT API anyway).
🦾 Want your managers to start using AI tools?
When speaking to clients, we find lots of enthusiasm for new AI tools but a reluctance to ‘dive in’. Often, employees are worried about doing the wrong thing and getting into trouble. In this article from the Mind Tools content team, you’ll find simple ideas to help your people have a go with low-risk prompts.
🌟 Shameless logroll: My book is out next week
When I’m not nerding out on L&D topics, I can often be found writing fiction. My first novel, Centauri’s Shadow, is out next Monday (April 8)! And you can read the first chapter now for free. It’s a sprawling alien first contact story, taking place across the Earth, space, Mars and beyond. If that sounds up your street, do check it out!
Cover art below by Rob Richardson!
👋 And finally…
Since I’ve been wanging on about the importance of managers, it feels only right to note that they can also have a negative impact. See the below!
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👍 Thanks!
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