While 2020 was an interesting year all around and presented a multitude of challenges, it also represented a milestone for our team, hitting the 10,000 mark for people who have participated in our cultural development and leadership programs. It has seen us deliver services across three continents and seven countries, and provided us with some great insights into what organisations can do to make development programs more successful.

One thing which is always apparent no matter where we are in the world is that cultural change involves several steps, one of these being the preparation of people for change. This means, giving them the knowledge and skills of what to do in this new ‘state of play’.

As training and development workshops are an integral part of making this happen, below are four simple insights on how to make your training work more effectively.

What we know about the human brain is that it has a limited attentional capacity. When we overwhelm that capacity, it reduces the brains’ ability to learn and process new information. In fact, studies have shown that attempting to ‘multi-task’ reduces a person’s intelligence by 11%. Even more concerning is that the same study highlighted that sitting next to a ‘multi-tasker’ reduced your intelligence by 17%.

If you want to get the best out of your workshops and have people who can retain what they have learned, then we recommend taking the sessions off-site. Our experience has taught us that holding sessions on-site can lead to people being pulled out by peers and leaders to deal with operational issues.

If you are a leader attending training, work to clear your schedule so that you can role model being present and engaged. More importantly, if you are the leader of a team who are attending training – let them stay focused, and resist the temptation to distract them throughout the day. How a business approaches this issue sends a clear message around what is important.

As the saying goes, what interests my boss, absolutely fascinates me. This holds true when we are embarking on cultural change in an organisation.

Our research has found, where clients whose leadership take an active role in pre-framing (or opening) each workshop, we have significantly greater engagement from participants.

More than this though, participants have a stronger intention to apply what they have learnt. We are talking here about having a rotating roster of senior leaders attending the beginning of each and every workshop to give a five-minute introduction. This can look like explaining what it is about, why it’s important, and what they commit to doing to role model the change.

In 1943, Abraham Maslow published a paper outlining the hierarchy of needs he saw as the drivers, or motivators for human behaviour. Right down the bottom of that list is physiological needs. These are the things we physically need to stay alive. We have found that this need is often either neglected by organisations when they run training and development workshops or that there is simply not enough food, coffee or snacks to maintain energy for an entire day of learning.

We have found that quality, appropriate catering for development workshops, assist participants on two levels. The first being, it meets their physiological needs; and secondly, it provides a further indication to participants that the company sees the process as important.

When large scale change is being implemented, there are a lot of moving parts, and of course, normal operations can be significantly impacted. That of course, is the point though.

We embark on change because the current way of operating isn’t where we want it to be. What we’ve found is that despite the desire to change at an organisational level, if front line leaders are not on board (or not being held to account through the line), then it can create significant challenges for front line employee participation.

Putting it simply, we have seen change initiatives fall over time and time again because people weren’t released to participate in critical development workshops. This usually occurs because the change was being driven by Human Resources or Health Safety and Environment rather than being owned by the operational teams. If you want to increase your chances of success, create clear expectations for operational leaders at each level, and hold them accountable to these expectations.

 As we progress through 2021, we’ll continue to share our learning, and sincerely hope you can apply these to your cultural change initiatives.