Relevance drives out resistance

The most recent Towards Maturity Benchmark Study was largely positive about the inroads being made by e-learning in the UK, but there was also evidence that quality may be being sacrificed in the drive for cost and time savings. Most alarming of all was the finding that only 51% of organisations feel that the e-learning that employees are receiving is relevant to their job. The e-learning is not relevant? The obvious question is why are they receiving it then? Surely when money is tight, the first priority should be to prune the training that is not relevant, not to rework it in a new format.

If learning is not aligned to business need (and the needs of employees) then it is much more than useless, it is positively harmful. You can try as hard as you like to engage learners, using flashy media, games, quizzes and other interactions, but if the learner does not feel the content is relevant then engagement is just about impossible.

There are two possible reasons why an organisation is delivering irrelevant learning. One is that they haven't taken the trouble to find out where the business is going and to determine, as a result, the competencies that will be required. This could happen through ignorance, laziness, a lack of l&d clout in the organisation or just plain non-assertiveness. The second and just as likely reason is that the training is being conducted for compliance purposes and that competency is the last thing on anyone's mind.

When compliance training is mapped to meaningful competences then you stand a chance. When the sole purpose is to tick boxes and cover management backsides then you're wasting your time trying to engage learners. It's all a game and employees know this.

It's not as if you can get employees to be motivated to take the training seriously by offering incentives. As Daniel Pink explains in his excellent book Drive, incentives can cause more problems than they solve:

"The problem with making an extrinsic reward the only destination that matters is that some people will choose the quickest route there, even if it means taking the low road."

Pink does suggest a role for incentives and disincentives when the performance you are seeking to encourage is routine, and now I think about it, clicking Next to progress through a series of slides is probably about as routine a task as you can get, so I do take some of that back. But is clicking through what you're really looking to achieve? Surely at least some of what you cover in those compliance courses is interesting and useful. Are you really trying hard enough to make this work?

Let's face it, irrelevant training means disgruntled learners, and when that training is delivered online, then it's e-learning that tends to take the blame. Eventually the novelty of saving money using e-learning will rub off and there'll be a return to quality. Let's hope that the medium (e-learning) doesn't get blamed for what is a fault of management.

As a participant on a recent workshop advised me, 'relevance drives out resistance.' If you're encountering resistance from your e-learners, you might try providing them with e-learning that matters.