How do we design 'engaging' learning?
For that matter, what does 'engaging' even mean?...
When working with clients to scope out new projects, I’ll often hear something approximating one of the following requests:
🫤 ‘We don’t want it to feel like e-learning.’
🤔 ‘We’d like to offer colleagues a different kind of experience.’
🫠 ‘We want it to be engaging!’
On the surface, these requests might seem delightfully vague. But I always interpret them as polite, corporate-friendly shorthand for: ‘We don’t want it to be s***’.
The subtext here is that a lot of workplace learning: i) feels unpleasant; ii) is dull and predictable; iii) isn’t engaging.
Fundamentally, the question is: ‘How do we design workplace learning that people actually care about?’
As Nick Shackleton-Jones often points out, we can do this by tapping into learners’ existing concerns, or by creating new ones.
Here are two illustrative examples of how we’ve done this at Mindtools:
🥾 Clean yer boots
Recently, we completed a project focused on encouraging staff to apply consistent biosecurity practices, with the goal of preventing the spread of invasive non-native species (INNS). INNS have a devastating impact on the natural environment, and are estimated to cost the UK economy billions every year.
By conducting focus groups with members of our target audience, we validated one of the assumptions we’d made during scoping — that colleagues genuinely cared about the environment, but that time pressure and perceived tolerance of bad practices had contributed to a sense that biosecurity wasn’t a priority.
In this case, learners were already predisposed to engage with the topic of biosecurity. They were also broadly aware of simple biosecurity practices they could apply to reduce the risk of spreading INNS, so knowledge wasn’t the main problem.
If our goal was to encourage a set of behaviors our audience already had the knowledge, skill, and motivation to perform, how would we design an intervention that supported this goal?
Through a literature review, we determined that ‘social norms’ held the answer — the idea that people are more likely to engage in a behavior if they believe others are also doing so.
What that meant in practice was that we intentionally incorporated video and imagery of colleagues applying biosecurity principles into our design. We also created a public commitment board, where staff could make individual biosecurity pledges and review commitments made by others.
The intended effect of this was to shift the perception of biosecurity from something that people ostensibly cared about but were willing to let slide, to something that was viewed as an expected part of daily work, something that there was a social cost to ignoring.
👬 Be your brother’s keeper
Of course, learning practitioners are often tasked with getting people to care about issues they might not find intrinsically motivating.
As an admittedly unusual example, let’s take getting members of a fraternity to moderate their alcohol consumption.
This is a challenge we faced when working with Phi Delta Theta, an international fraternity with 185 active chapters across the US and Canada.
So, how did we get college students to care about the dangers of alcohol?
One way we did this was by spotlighting a real case of an alcohol-related death on campus, including a recording of a 911 call that was made when a student was found non-responsive.
By incorporating this recording into our design, we allowed students to experience the tangible consequences of alcohol abuse through the voice of a peer — not a scolding, moralizing adult whom they might otherwise have been inclined to ignore.
The point of both of these examples is that designing ‘engaging’ learning starts with empathy for your audience.
If learners can see themselves in your design, and you can tap into issues they care about, there’s a good chance it won’t feel like training.
Want to share your thoughts on The L&D Dispatch? Then get in touch by emailing custom@mindtools.com or reply to this newsletter from your inbox.
🎧 On the podcast
We know that surrounding ourselves with diverse people at work brings variety in expertise, opinions and ways of working, which can boost creativity and productivity. Sometimes those differences, however, can be challenging. How can we make the most of difference?
Last week on The Mindtools L&D Podcast, Liggy Webb, author of Tolerance: How to respect and accept differences, joined Ross G and Gemma to examine the skill of tolerance. They discussed:
What tolerance means
The benefits of being tolerant
How to be tolerant, particularly towards differences in behavior or opinions that we find tricky.
Check out the episode below. 👇
You can subscribe to the podcast on iTunes, Spotify or the podcast page of our website.
📖 Deep dive
Picture the scene. It’s late in the afternoon, and you’ve just joined your eighth Teams call of the day.
The meeting is an all-hands, and a colleague is running through a presentation. You know you’re not going to be asked to speak, so you turn your camera off. You’re still listening, but you might as well catch up on some emails while you’re at it.
What could be the harm?
According to a new study from Helmut-Schmidt University, the harm might be greater than you think.
The research team ran two studies:
A controlled experiment: Participants either multitasked during a meeting (e.g., correcting a text while listening) or focused solely on the meeting.
A longitudinal study: Participants reported their multitasking habits over recurring online seminars, alongside measures of videoconference fatigue.
What the researchers found was that multitasking increased all forms of videoconference fatigue (general, motivational, emotional, social, and visual) in the experiment, and all but visual fatigue in the longitudinal study. Multitaskers also exhibited significantly poorer objective performance on a note-taking and a text-correction task.
The authors explain the implications of these findings for organizations:
‘Organizations may consider implementing strategies to minimize distractions during meetings, such as recommending that participants focus on the primary task and refrain from engaging in other activities. Additionally, promoting shorter meetings, regular breaks, and setting clear objectives for meetings could help reduce the cognitive strain associated with multitasking in virtual environments.
It may also be beneficial to educate employees about the cognitive costs of multitasking and provide guidelines for managing tasks more effectively during VCs. Such measures can improve both the quality of work and overall well-being in remote work settings, which have become more prevalent due to increased reliance on digital communication.’
Frontzkowski, Y., Krick, A., & Felfe, J. (2025). ‘Harder, better, faster, but more fatigued: The impact of multitasking on videoconferences, performance and fatigue.’ Computers in Human Behavior Reports, 19, 100736.
👹 Missing links
📊 Are we measuring the right things?
When we talk about ‘impact’ in L&D, what we’re often talking about is quantifiable impact: increased sales, decreased incidents, return on investment, etc. For the most part, I think this is a good thing. Too often, quantitative measurement of learning is relatively shallow, limited to completion stats and satisfaction scores. But as Fraser Macdonald points out in this article, reflecting on his own work in the social good space, not all ‘impact’ can be easily quantified. A dashboard might tell one story, but how people feel is arguably just as important.
🛫 Do you really need to get to the airport two hours in advance?
For domestic flights in the United States, airlines typically recommend that passengers plan to get to the airport at least two hours before their scheduled departure time. But how early do you really need to walk through the doors? In this edition of his newsletter, Nate Silver provides detailed heuristics for optimal air travel, based on his experience of approximately 800 flights over a fifteen-year period.
😊 Resist the snark and be happy
We all know that rudeness and bad manners can negatively affect our mood when we’re on the receiving end. But research shows that being impolite to others doesn’t just impact their wellbeing, it damages ours, too. For Arthur C. Brooks, excerising common courtesy, rejecting snark, and responding to rudeness with grace is a countercultural, almost punk‑rock act in the modern era. And like punk rock, it can be a vehicle for self-empowerment.
👋 And finally…
If there was a J.Lo musical, it might sound something like this:
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👍 Thanks!
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