David James is CLO at 360Learning, host of The Learning & Development Podcast and former Director of L&D for The Walt Disney Company.
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On the annual employee engagement survey at Disney, one question was guaranteed to get a low score—one of the lowest, in fact. Despite being the survey lead, I just couldn’t get the score to rise. What hurt most was that the responses were squarely seen as my responsibility. There was no apportioning blame anywhere else. I had nowhere to hide. You’ve got to remember that Disney is a pretty awesome place to work, so low scores really stood out.
"What was the question?" I hear you ask. It was "Do you have enough time for learning?'
I remember only around 25% of respondents said they did. It wasn’t for the lack of opportunity either. We had a fairly comprehensive learning offering at the company, as you’d expect. So people wanted to learn. They just didn’t have time, and they told us every year.
What did this mean?
During focus groups, participants told us they were too busy doing their jobs to take time out for a course or to engage in e-learning. But we discovered that they were still learning; it was taking place during the course of their work. So we embarked on an internal marketing campaign espousing the 70:20:10 principle. It's the premise that learning happens all the time, with approximately 70% of the time being while people work, 20% happening because of interpersonal relationships and only 10% coming from formal learning. We wanted to reinforce that learning didn’t just mean completing coursework.
But the following year, the scores were still abysmal. What can you do?
Well, our next strategy was to further distinguish learning from engagement in our learning and development programs. We thought going on a course would give everyone a day to reflect, recharge, engage with work in a different way and be inspired to think differently. The opportunity to take the pace out of their day to engage in some thought-provoking e-learning would surely be popular as well. But would it work? Would people be better equipped to perform and achieve their career goals having done so?
In one focus group for the engagement survey, an attendee told me that she’d been on all the courses available but was still no closer to being promoted. So lack of time clearly wasn't her issue.
What’s the real problem?
When I left Disney, it was with the same low scores for that engagement question. But in the time since, I’ve discovered this is a big problem for the industry as a whole. Most L&D leaders I’ve spoken to say the same thing: "People tell me they don’t have time to learn." But what’s the part that needs the greater investigation, the time or the learning? And what learning are we talking about?
The harsh reality is that people will never have enough time to learn and the question we were asking ourselves was wrong. Of course, people would rather spend time learning new things and engaging in new experiences than trudging into work to do the same job every day. That’s just reality. So what are we really measuring here—the hours spent learning or the actual outcome of learning the right things? And if our people are learning the right things, then surely we want to achieve efficiency of outcomes rather than having prolonged periods of formal learning be the end in itself?
In the absence of knowing what people need help with, we leave it to them to figure it out, and the answer is often beyond their reach. Even if they had more time to learn, would they be any more effective in their work? I mean, what would they learn? What interests them, or what would make them better and improve their prospects? The two aren’t necessarily linked.
What’s the solution?
I think the problem is that when the learning and development department sees itself as the provider of learning, then mere engagement with the content is the aim. We provide; they consume. But do they develop in the expected and rewarded ways? This takes us back to the question that haunts our profession: What’s the return on investment?
Instead of providers of learning, we need to think of ourselves as business enablers and problem solvers. Learning isn’t the problem. Performance, skills and progress are. We should be looking at the objective success measures—achievement of KPIs, retention, internal mobility and more—and asking ourselves how we can effectively and efficiently affect these. In the areas of our organizations where we have problems of performance, skills shortages, retention and internal mobility, we should explore how we bake in more learning to achieve the outcomes we need. More for more’s sake is bad business sense, and we want to be taken seriously, right?
We’re all being expected to do more with less or better with less. So how do we help people get better, improve their prospects and develop new skills, as well as deepen our talent pools as efficiently as we can? That’s the true question we must answer.
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