These are demanding times for eLearning courses. Any eLearningcourse designed for in-house corporate training programs must meet severaldifficult constraints on a training efficacy checklist.
The course must:
- Meet an ROI threshold
- Make valuable use of learners’ time
- Disseminate information on subjects ranging fromhard facts about policies to the softer aspects of customer service
- Change learner behavior, improving theirperformance on the job
A case study
Changing behavior, in the best of times, is tough. Changingbehavior through an eLearning courseis tougher still. Yet, with careful instructional design, one just may be ableto pull it off the way we did for one client.
The client is a large energy and public utility company. Itsgoal was to train its field personnel in the following two areas:
- Work AreaProtection–where workers learn how to execute maintenance projects on roadsefficiently and safely.
- CustomerService Orientation–where workers learn to be more sensitive to customers.This goal arose after the company found that, although proficient in theirtasks, the employees were usually brusque with the public.
The company identified eLearning modules as the trainingintervention for these requirements. They were also very clear that they wantedengaging eLearning modules where their field personnel wouldn’t just click “Next”to get through the training. They wanted the employees to click “Next” and, theyhoped, change their behavior.
After an initial discussion with management and apreliminary review of the material, our training team wondered about the extentto which an eLearning course could meet the company’s goals. As it turns out,quite a lot, if you do it right.
The strategy
We took our design approach from Switch by Chip and Dan Heath. This book addresses the issue ofachieving lasting behavioral change, especially when the training is hard. Thebook’s insights seemed relevant to the design of the eLearning modules in theproject. For any lasting behavioral change to occur, according to the authors,training must impact three areas:
- The objective understanding of a situation
- The subjective response to a situation
- The environment in which the change takes place
We devised an instructional strategy that would have the eLearningmodules for the client address all three aspects.
Step by step
1) Affecting the objective understanding of asituation:
The book makes it clear that the learner must have clear, directinstruction as to what do in a particular situation.
Most of the client’s employees working in the field had manualsshowing diagrams of correct work area protection. Usually the supervisors whoplanned the projects followed these instructions. However, workers who executedthe instructions often did not understand them. To help them we:
- Made the diagrams solution-focused. We did awaywith isolated diagrams. Instead, we used scenarios to explain how a diagram wasactually a solution for a specific problem. This helped workers and supervisorsget a context for reading diagrams and understanding the underlying strategy ofthese diagrams.
- Outlined specific behavior. Here, we focused ontraining workers and supervisors to get a “preparation and troubleshooting”mindset that is critical in work area protection. We created training nuggetsthat had specific information, including:
- A checklist of factors to consider whiledesigning a work area
- How to read a blueprint
- Methods to ensure that work areas were underfrequent supervision, with details on where to focus
- Critical mistakes to avoid and methods to correctany errors
2) The subjective response to the situation:
As the book notes, more information does not mean creating lastingchange. A deeper engagement, however, does. The key is to get people to feel more about something instead ofsimply knowing more about it.
Most of the customer’s field personnel believed thatcustomer service was the responsibility of the customer service department.They did not see the “payoff” of being polite.
To address this gap, we worked on a strategy that first got workersto care about their job and then moveon to caring about who the job was for.So,
- We developed a campaign, not a course. Weleveraged the company’s history of innovation and service to design an eCommercial.The aim here was to sensitize employees to the fact that their work affectedmillions of people. We got them to see that their range of operations was notsimply a road or an avenue, but the whole city.
- Narratives and videos were used to buildempathy. We utilized the company’s stock of videos showing work performed onroads. We wove a strong storyline around these videos to show every situationfrom three vantage points: (1) theway the public views a work area, (2) the way workers themselves view the workarea, and (3) the way the work area actually looked. This strategy was used toget learners to empathize with their customers, the public.
- We taught specific behaviors that conveyed a “customer-focused”mindset.
3) The work environment where the situation mustchange:
Lastly, the book shows that effecting change could depend ontweaking the situation. Many times, altering a situation to support change canbe the catalyst for lasting change to occur. In order to keep the trainingrelevant and fresh in the learners’ minds, we worked on bringing training closeto the task. We developed a strong repository of job aids that learners coulduse in the field. These aids included checklists, diagram configurations, and do’sand don’ts on how to respond to customers. This way, there would be constantreinforcement of the training.
With these three areas addressed, we were able to get eLearningto accomplish that elusive learning objective, creating change that lasts.
