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I am not sure if we should call this “organizational heredity” or some other term.  Regardless, we have found that when we have two populations of users to train; (1) supervisors and (2) the employees for whom the supervisor is responsible, we observe a interesting but consistent phenomenon.  Here is how it goes…

As part of the feedback loop we provide our clients, when we train and quiz the supervisor, we can determine the supervisor’s “weak points” in the content we deliver.  To supplement these weak spots, we work with our clients to generate “refresher content” for these supervisors. We find that this is critical – you’ll see because of our observations.

When we deliver that same training to the supervisor’s employees and rate their performance, we find that when we aggregate the results of the employees’ performance, in most cases the weak points of the supervisor are the weak points of the employee group as a whole.

Learning lesson?  No – its not that the section with which they had issues was poorly formatted (we sampled enough companies for that). The less on is that it isn’t outside of the realm of possibility that the people who “onboard”, coach, and train employees will focus on where they are strong and dance around where they are weak. Without re-enforcement, managers will see that the performance “apple” does not fall that far from the supervisory tree.

That is one of the components of our training framework.  We understand that this is bound to happen and we work with our clients to manage through this.

If you’re trying this on your own, make sure you take this into consideration.

Filed under: eLearning, improving employee performance, training