There’s a negative ROI of training that few people talk about. Here's how to avoid it.
by Ana Maria Sencovici
May 5, 2021
A change is underway in your organization, and you are the lucky leader tasked with ensuring it goes well. You naturally realize, as the seasoned professional you are, that employees will need to be equipped with the new mindsets and skills necessary to help them do whatever you’re asking of them in support of said change.
Your chief talent officer and the rest of the executive team are all looking to you to make an impact, and fast! So you create an organization-wide training plan, customized across three employee segments. It gleams with solid learning objectives, a wonderful case of “why,” a crystal-clear articulation of the mindset and behavior shifts needed, quality upskilling components to enable those shifts, and practice elements and follow-up job aids to overcome the forgetting curve.
Well done! … buuuut that may well be the worst thing you could have done right now.
How can that possibly be?
One shot
You only have one shot, two at best, to get people to try what you’re asking of them. Do you know what they’ll encounter when they try?
Let’s break down what happens leading up to employees taking that leap of faith.
- First, they remember it. Kudos! You created enough mental space for them to recall the ask and hold it in their mind long enough to access it (cognitive win!).
- Second, they want to do it. Fabulous! You helped them relate to a meaningful enough “why” to fuel their intention to try it (emotive win!).
- Third, they actually try it. Amazing! You enabled them to convert their intention into actual action (behavioral win!).
On your end, you have overcome some of the most significant barriers to learning and changing. On the employees’ end, while these distinct phases may sound trivial, they represent material investments on their part that created an opening of trust, a promise and a possibility that if they try this thing you are asking them to try, it will be worth it. They put forth significant cognitive, emotive and behavioral effort to even get to this point.
Therefore, the first time they actually take the risk to try the thing you ask of them, their thinking will be along the lines of, “Was my investment worth it?” Their brain will be actively scanning for all spoken and unspoken signals across the entirety of their environment to determine the answer.
What will they encounter when they try?
Let’s look at a set of typical informal and formal possibilities that may arise at or close to the moment of trying.
Informal examples, from best to worst:
- Silence: No signal; nobody else is doing that thing; colleagues either don’t know, don’t understand or don’t want to try it. (Relatedness diminishes, reinforcement is nonexistent and out-group dynamics surface.)
- Dilution: Manager acknowledges but diminishes or dilutes the attempt: “Don’t worry about it *wink*.” (Active signaling that it’s not important or needed.)
- Ridicule: Colleagues or peers acknowledge the act and note failed attempts to do the thing. (Social proof of the folly of doing the thing increases and becomes self-reinforcing.)
- Punishment: Manager or leader displays negative body language (frown or snicker) and/or criticizes the thing, the people behind the thing, or the employee. (Active discouragement with negative informal consequences.)
Formal examples:
- Flawed: The app, platform or system requiring them to do said thing shuts down or is buggy (inability to do said thing).
- Onerous: Access to the tool, artifact or person required to do said thing is difficult or requires too many steps (difficulty in doing said thing).
- Unsupported: The compensation or performance management structure does not incorporate said actions or behaviors and therefore disincentives employees from taking them by defaulting to other priorities (directly conflicting forces).
- Opposing: The organizational structure and reporting lines are legacy designs that reinforce previous behaviors vs. desired ones, such as siloed or heavily matrixed structures (directly conflicting forces).
The first attempt is key
If the first time your “trained” employees try that new behavior they encounter any combination of the above, you’ve likely lost them. “Oh, that’s not so bad,” you may say. “They’ll try again.” Maybe. Maybe not.
You see, they took a risk, trusted enough, put themselves out there and … guess what? The new behavior didn’t get reinforced; instead, they felt “pain.” Unless their buy-in to your case for change was quite high, the likelihood of trying that thing a second time is small; their investment wasn’t worth it. Instead, their brains will predict encountering the same pain (and create feelings of being duped, naive or gullible, often directed toward their own beliefs that this time it could have been different).
Worse yet, the next time you come to your employees with a change initiative compelling them to do something different, risky or difficult, their brains will remember this instance and this pain. Their experience of this future case for change will be defined by the cognitive and emotive residue from their last experience. Welcome indifference, change fatigue and cynicism.
Much like antibiotics, wherein resistance builds up, requiring stronger drugs to cure the infection, your story has to get bigger, stronger and more compelling to even have a shot at being heard.
Welcome the negative ROI of training:
- For your team: low impact, increasing irrelevance.
- For the organization: wasted time and money, dilution of other efforts.
- For employees: increased immunity to change, distraction.
So, what SHOULD you do?
Ecosystem first, training second (or third or fourth): Training employees on the skills and tools that support a new behavior that can’t be supported and sustained by their ecosystem only creates a downward cycle of reinforcing cynicism; we’re teaching employees to become increasingly immune to our nudges, to buying in and to believing, at a time when we need them to lean in most. Focus first on the organizational levers that need to be aligned to the change (organizational design, reporting lines, goal alignment, processes, etc.). Then, and only then, should you train.
Intrinsic ease first, extrinsic incentives second: Rewards and incentives are a short-term solution that quickly loses steam. Not only are these payoffs transparent to employees, but they chip away at the very intrinsic sources of meaning and connectedness that are the real long-term drivers of sustainable change.
Instead of adding rewards and incentives, focus on eliminating the obstacles that stand in the way of the desired behaviors in the first place. For example: Get rid of burdensome layers of approval if you’re looking to engender entrepreneurialism; decrease physical barriers if you’re looking for increased cross-pollination; reduce the 20 templated questions in your performance management process if you’re looking for authentic developmental conversations. The goal is to support employees in attempting that behavior again and again, long enough for it to take hold as a habit.
So the next time you see someone pushing training as the “solution” to enabling change, ask them and yourself: “What will our employees encounter when they first try?” Remembering the ecosystem and intrinsic ease will help you avoid the negative ROI of training.