One way to break through corporate inertia

A couple of postings ago I mentioned working with a very traditional organisation trying to promote the brain friendly message. Since then quite a few of you have asked what happened next.

Here is a little background.

The organisation was quite traditional but not averse to change IF it could be justified. They did little in the way of soft skills training but a lot around health and safety and regulatory stuff. So some behavioural change was involved but a lot of it was simply “do you know these facts or don’t you”

This was to be to our advantage in the end.

Here is what we did:

If you recall, one of the main barriers to making any progress at all was the fact that the “happy sheets” were universally good (although no-one could say why) so getting any buy-in for change wasn’t easy.

A couple of like minded colleagues and I decided to see what retention was like over a period of 4 weeks, 8 weeks and 6 months so we devised a simple knowledge based quiz and tested people from the relevant time frames.

Everyone scored really well.  Doh!

We next decided to dig a little deeper to see why people had apparently retained the knowledge from a class-room style chalk and talk session when our instincts and experience indicated that this shouldn’t be happening.

And this is when we hit the answer. Everyone who went through the course realised that the health and safety of employees and complying with regulations was really important so they all spent quite of lot of time in the months and weeks after the course re-reading their training manuals, checking references on the internet and checking their understanding with colleagues.

However, they were taking time out of their working day to do this and so, while their knowledge was increasing, their productivity was dropping. We were able to cost this drop in productivity.

We took our initial findings to the board and asked for permission and budget to develop and trial a brain friendly version of one of the health and safety courses following which we would monitor not only retention but time spent on revision and, therefore, any subsequent drop in productivity.

They agreed.

Unsurprisingly, participants who went through the brain friendly version need to spend less time re-reading their training manuals and while retention remained good and happy sheet scores stayed well up, there was a measurable reduction in productivity time lost due to revising.

We were then able to develop a fully costed proposal showing how, by switching all training to a brain friendly format, lost productivity could be reclaimed. And the saving this generated would pay for the development costs of the brain friendly approach in six months. After that it went straight to the bottom line in profit.

The board loved it, the trainers loved it and the participants loved it – not least because they came away with a sense of “knowing” their subject rather than a sense of “I’m going to have to re-read this lot before I am happy I know it”.

I called that a bit of a result!

change image by David Reece
reading image by dhammza

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