Stop to Start Engagement

By Doug Bolger is the Chief L(earn)ing Officer of L(earn)²

Engaging employees in work is no longer a challenge with only one generation. Employees of all ages and tenures struggle to find meaning at work. Not all leaders are inspired and inspire their teams. Incentives and time off reward and reinforce extrinsic reasons to engage rather than intrinsic reasons to engage.

What if your training approach could be the key to engagement at work? The way employees learn either reinforces disconnection or creates meaningful connections. Your approach matters. How you do what you do matters so much that your future and the future of your organization can depend on how you engage your learners. The learning and development field has a wide variety of approaches, so there is opportunity.

Imagine the competitive advantage of two companies that—in essence—deliver the same product or service. One company’s employees are engaged and inspired to innovate and transform those similar tasks. The other company’s employees complete the tasks without being personally invested. The companies would produce different results.

Engagement levels within the learning environment determine the amount of learning and application possible in the work environment. The following principles guide you to cause engagement, which transforms culture:

1. Stop being responsible. Consider the fact that if you are responsible, then your learners are not responsible. You hinder their ability to create emotional connections to the learning. Start finding ways to cause active participation and start holding participants responsible for their learning and application.
2. Stop speaking. When participants speak, learning is more likely to happen. Participants forget more than 90 percent of what you say within days, yet connect emotionally to their peers’ comments. Start HEARing them: Hint at connections; ask for Elaboration or an Example; offer Affirmation by agreeing, encouraging, or praising; and Reflect to connect to how they could apply what they learned.
3. Stop telling. Being told, sold, or lectured to decreases learner esteem and increases passiveness. Start liberating learning by offering real problems to solve; allow all answers to be valid; time their ability to produce results; and leverage competition to generate the best application back to work. Start every learning experience with the participants finding their voice through sharing their best practices, challenges, or conditions in which they apply the skills to be learned.
4. Stop coaching. Move the focus from your ability to coach to developing the participants’ ability to coach each other. Start asking participants to identify and give feedback to their peers. Identification and feedback skills become necessary abilities to implement the learning insights back at work. Start building the skills and tools required for application to shift engagement from the learning environment to the workplace.
5. Stop using PowerPoint. Relying on PowerPoint illustrates a lack of preparation and understanding of your own content—which causes disengagement. Start designing learning to give the participants the content and let them discover and invent links to their workplace.
6. Stop using binders. Binders illustrate your commitment to content rather than learning. Content is not value. Learning is value, so focus on fewer concepts and more application to increase engagement inside and outside the learning environment. If your participants are leaving and require a binder to apply the learning, have they learned? Start focusing on application during the learning so participants learn to apply the content rather than remember the content. Application trumps all other learning. Choose the conditions, environments, and tasks where the learning will be applied and build application challenges.
7. Stop focusing on a fragment. Skills no longer get applied one at a time. Participants operate in complex situations with multiple skills, so stop teaching one skill at a time. Start integrating multiple skills into activities so participants are better prepared for real-life situations.
8. Stop following the script. Start following the participants’ desire to find value in the learning. When participants connect, then follow the connection and encourage application. Your willingness to ensure relevance to the participants will be rewarded with engagement.

Engagement is a precursor to application, which is where your participants and your organization receive return on investment from you. Participants question the value of their time investment when the learning fails to connect to their situation. Follow the principles to increase the engagement and discover a new level of application. High engagement and application environments help increase participants’ ability to adapt to their changing situation and increases the ability to innovate. The result—engagement cascades throughout the organization.

Engagement changes the emotional context in the learning environment and in the organization. Participants respond differently from being told because they are ignorant, to learning because they are responsible. Learning recall improves tremendously from emotional connection. More importantly, emotional connection creates lasting engagement for the organization. Recent research proves the importance of connections in decision-making so your ability to leverage an emotional connection for the organization is valuable.

How do I measure my progress?

1. Measure your time speaking. Have a friend or colleague track the amount of time you speak per module. Use a stop watch and discover the amount of time participants spend listening to you. Best practice is well under 10 percent.
2. Count the number of times participants share an “aha” moment. The moments when a participant recognizes an insight and shares the insight with the room are clear indications of engagement. Leverage these aha moments into application through immediately challenging the participants to apply the learning in their work environment.
3. Count the number of PowerPoint slides and content pages. Consider that less is more for participants. Walking out with the ability to perform important tasks with greater skill exceeds the value of a 100-page binder that sits on the shelf. Focus learning on the application of models and skills to the conditions, environment, and tasks of the participants. Your ability to perform needs assessments will improve because of your focus on the learning.
4. Are you asked for more? Smile sheets measure the obligatory responses of the participants. Requests to work further, involve other participants or team, and requests for more are the best indication of value. Participants organizing into a practice community illustrates your mastery with engagement.

Doug Bolger is the Chief L(earn)ing Officer of L(earn)² and is focused on inspiring transformation through L(earn)2’s learning experiences. Bolger gets actively involved and offers his energy, insight, and himself to inspire as many people as possible to transform their lives with learning. For more information, visit http://ilearn2.com.