During the quest for self-improvement, the age-old struggle I often find myself thinking about time and time again is, how do you adopt new behaviors AND make lasting change?

This is the quandary for learning and development departments, tasked with supporting their organizations on how to be more productive, more engaged — happier even — by having employees learn new skills and behaviors and have a system in place that supports long-lasting sustainable change.

The theory is organizations invest in their people through training and reap the rewards of employees who produce more with their heads and hearts engaged. This theory, I would argue, is 100 percent correct, and companies would be better off if they invested more in their people in this way, but one critical piece missing is that we have to redefine a word — training.

WHY REDEFINE TRAINING?

Training is not a one-time event. It’s an on-going experience that involves multiple touch points as individuals go down the hard path of change.

In the last decade, there has been a lot of research on creating behaviors and learning new skills, such as the scary fact that PEOPLE WILL FORGET 90% OF WHAT THEY’VE LEARNED AFTER ONE MONTH. It’s true what they say — if you don’t use it, you lose it!

We know more about the brain and its emotional nature than we ever have before and yet this question, how do you make behavior changes stick, still is a big blue ocean of possibility.

My goal in this blog isn’t to say we have a definitive answer, but to rather help guide your thinking and provide some helpful insight on proven ways we know that support your people on their behavior change journey in order to maximize the company’s investment and your time.

The end goal? Sustainable behavior change.

TIPS TO MAXIMIZE LEARNING

Below are four actionable ways to make the learning stick:

1. Spot the Cue

Learning a new behavior can be like one of those I Spy pictures, where you don’t see the object until someone points it out to you, and then it becomes so obvious.

At Fierce, our data shows that most learners leave the classroom excited to flex their new muscles and yet, what we have heard before from Learning and Development leaders, is that once back immersed into their daily lives, old behaviors start to creep in.

This is when touch points can be critical in setting up your employees for success. For example, with Fierce Conversations, we advise our clients to prompt cues as to when the business wants their learners to use the new skillset.

We’ve had clients ask leaders to use our Coaching model in at least one 1:1 every month. Furthermore, in both our Confront and Feedback model, we spend time in the classroom identifying what conversations are appropriate for what situations and we have the learners identifying conversations they need to have and start the process in the training.

By spending time as a learning team identifying what business results would be better if certain conversations improved and then messaging that back out to your learners, you make identifying the cue of this new behavior so much easier.

2. Simplicity is King

Let’s be honest, in today’s world of Twitter and Instagram, anything that takes more than 160 characters to understand is almost too complicated. While I am all for fighting back against our modern lack of attention span, I think what we can learn from social media is that simpler is sometimes better when you want to make something sticky.

At Fierce, none of our frameworks have more than seven steps or take longer than one page to fill out. The brain can memorize it and, in fact, is designed to be deconstructed even further and made even more simple once you learn the skill set.

We Delegate at four levels, we Coach with just seven simple questions, you can Confront in 60 seconds and make big decisions with your team’s input by filling out one page of information.

The depth comes from the quality of the conversation that arises from the simplicity of the approach. If you make the skillset easy, it becomes a routine that can be applied and followed. Before you know, it’s happening all the time.

3. Make it Worth It

Even the most avid learner has to see the value in spending their time in order to learn and apply something new. People don’t do things without a clear why. When it comes to behavior change, if that why isn’t there, it doesn’t matter if your previous two steps are flawless, you won’t get a commitment. Period.

As learning and developing professionals, you can’t control someone’s intrinsic why. However, at Fierce, we have a few best practices we’ve seen clients leverage with great success to support the reward of using are:

• Tie the why of the training to the larger business strategies and organizational goals. Nobody likes to feel like they’re wasting their time. This best practice ties back to tip number 1 — by helping people understand the why behind the training in the context of the company, they better see themselves supporting those goals and seeing what’s in it for them to make the effort for the change.
• Give champions the chance to share their reward and wins. Inevitably, you will have people who adopt the behavior quicker and you want to give them a platform to share their win. Collective wins can be powerful and having a colleague you respect share how this has positively impacted them can be the best motivators for others to try.
• Literally have a reward! Whether the reward is monetary or recognition, sometimes an external reward helps people focus until other more intrinsic rewards make themselves known.

4. Choose a Training Provider that focuses on Reinforcement

Not every training provider prioritizes the pre or post experience, whether that’s through technology, tools, or strategy, you should partner with someone who has a strong point of view on adoption and sustaining the learning.

At Fierce, we prioritize this with our clients by looking at the bigger picture of continuous change in a strategic way. Pre-training, during the training, and post-training all have an impact on learners prioritizing and changing the quality of their conversations.

When you apply these steps to your learning initiatives, you’ll not only increase the chances of your investment in training being successful, but you’re setting your entire organization up for sustainable and meaningful achievement.

In my experience with prospective and current Fierce clients, one of the greatest leadership training-related concerns that surfaces is sustainability. More specifically, how do we successfully implement reinforcement tools in our organization to maintain behavioral shifts after we’ve invested in a training program?

Sustainability seems to be an anomaly for many and it’s often mistaken as complicated. But, here’s something every leader needs to hear: newsflash! It most definitely doesn’t have to be.

The Most Common Sustainability Roadblocks

Changing human behavior is hard — this is why taking steps for sustainability is so important. My conversations with leaders have revealed a couple of common sustainability roadblocks that if not addressed, can prevent organizations from achieving maximum results from their training initiatives.

1. Ownership

There’s often confusion within organizations around ownership. Without overall accountability, a training investment won’t produce the hoped-for ROI. When there’s clarity around who “owns” what, these people can be properly set up for success, whether it’s the leadership and development team, managers, or both.

Also, take into consideration who has undergone the training — if a manager is responsible for reinforcement yet they haven’t participated in the program, how can you get them up to speed on what, and how, to reinforce?

To overcome this roadblock, organizations need to nail down who is accountable for sustainability and have a delegation plan. For example, who will implement the various action steps within the sustainability plan? Who will send out emails to participants, have coaching conversations, and continue one-on-one communication around training? Who will implement the relational sustainability tasks, and who will handle the administrative aspects?

2. Systems

Organizations often run into difficulty when it comes time to disperse information. Some questions to ask yourself are, what is the cadence that you reach out post-training? What is the best way to organize the information and what technology platform works best for what type of communication method?

If you want to successfully reinforce learning, you need to have a strategy to carry it out. The strategy used will depend on your individual resources, but common best practices include keeping messages short and easy to consume. We recommend weekly reach out for the first 3-6 months post-training. Having a weekly “Fierce Friday” email, for example, is a great way to keep short content top of mind for your learners.

People get a ton of emails, so if you have an internal social site or can create private groups for participants, this can be the most effective at getting them to engage with the content.

This can be a simple process — you just have to determine how the information will be dispersed, who will be accountable for it, and at what cadence it will be rolled out.

3. Culture

One of the main reasons training and development fails and behavior doesn’t sustain is that an organization’s dysfunction is so deep that it contradicts what is learned in the training. Often times this dysfunction starts at the top of an organization — and this is when conversations are even more critical.

Where learning can become important to partners in the business is not only identifying the dysfunction and elevating its impact on the business but also in creating a plan that is backed by action and system changes. To overcome this roadblock, we recommend you don’t talk about culture separate from the business — the reality is that having high turnover or low engagement impacts your company’s bottom line.

You’ll need to discover the root causes of dysfunction, like through a company-wide survey to determine where it’s costing your company money. Sharing this data is critical to helping your executive leaders see where behavior is leading to wasted money.

You should also paint the picture for your executive team on how they can support/change the culture and support/change the business.

When making recommendations around training and sustaining learning, involve key members in a conversation about what internal changes can be made that will tie the training into the company’s new “way of being.”

Some Easy Steps to Help Sustain Learning

Here are some tips for sustainability that will help make the process less cumbersome:

• Start from the beginning

Sustainability needs to be top of mind, even during the training program vetting process. Logistically, you will need to have plans in place to measure effectiveness, which requires pre and post-feedback from participants. When planning for sustainability, keep in mind that using a variety of reinforcement tools is going to be the most effective. In fact, according to Biz Dev, adding multiple reinforcements to training programs will increase retention from approximately 20 percent to more than 90 percent.

• If it’s simple, do it

Send reinforcement emails for bite-sized learning. Find simple ways to communicate, like posting some of the core concepts on a visible wall for daily reinforcement. Have one-on-one conversations, with clear accountability around who will lead them. Encourage the use of any sustainability tools provided through the training company (more on that in a minute), but keep in mind that additional actions need to be taken aside from the tools we offer.

• Break up your rollout strategy

Instead of knocking out the training all at once, consider rolling out the courses in phases. This will provide an opportunity for participants to practice and refine their behavior from the first phase and bring any lingering questions or challenges into the second phase where they will continue to build their skills.

• Incorporate training concepts into your systems and culture

Companies large and small need to integrate the most important aspects of the training into their processes and systems. Leaders need to be asking, “How can we weave these concepts into our culture?” This requires both action and a shift in mindset. This could include integrating the training language into your meetings and conversations, as well as adjusting how your organization functions day-to-day in order to encompass the concepts and philosophies of the training.

• Utilize sustainability tools made available by the training company

This seems like a no-brainer, but participants don’t always make full use of the resources they have available to them. For example, one of the tools Fierce employs is Mindmarker, and this simple platform helps with weekly reinforcement of learned concepts to help maintain behavioral shifts. When used regularly, it makes a big difference in sustainability — and “used regularly” are the key words here. Implement what’s available, and do it consistently.

Fortunately, reinforcing training doesn’t have to be a daunting monster to take on. Use the tips and approaches here and begin having the conversations around accountability, culture, and logistics to get clear before moving forward. With a sustainability plan in place, training can lead to big results for your organization.