Plant Learning in the Right Climate—and Watch It Bloom

After years of conducting impact and ROI studies for some of the top Fortune 100 companies in the world, it became glaringly obvious to me that the biggest factor predicting the effectiveness of training programs had little to do with the quality of the training, the method by which it was delivered, or even the nature of the audience. In fact, it had everything to do with the immediate work environments employees were returning to immediately following training. 

Understanding Your Organization’s Learning Climate 

All employees take their new knowledge and skills from training back to their own unique work environment. Depending on the many environmental influences in the workplace, employees are either inspired to or discouraged from applying that training on the job. In other words, based on these critical environmental influences, the same training program can work wonders for some employees and be a complete flop for others.  

Because post-training settings are diverse and unique for each employee—even in the same organization, it is absolutely crucial to measure the environment itself.  Be sure to understand the most common factors across your organization and pinpoint workplace situations and “climates” that are most effective when it comes to maximizing the impact of training.  

Enter Level 6: Transfer Climate 

While these climate factors certainly hold the key to defining a training success or failure, they can also be responsible for making training so hard to measure. Because workplace settings, situations, and climates vary across any given organization—and because they can influence employees in very unique ways—learning retention, business impact, and ROI of any one training program can be inconsistent and hard to quantify in any reliable way.  

However, by including some form of climate assessment within your measurement strategy, you can evolve the conversation from "How did training work?" to "How do we make it work better?" By adding this layer of climate measurement, you turn a static post-mortem report about the impact of training into a living, dynamic report about why training worked better for some rather than others, as well as how you can improve that impact in the future.  

For this reason, I added a Level 6, “Transfer Climate” analysis, to the traditional five levels of evaluation.  I call it “Transfer Climate” because it represents all the factors that can either help or hinder the transfer of learning from the training experience back to the job.  As with anything you try to transfer, plant, or replant somewhere else, no matter how strong the leaves or how pretty the flowers, you still need the perfect environment for growth—the right soil, sun, and amount of rain. 

Bloom and Grow 

Bottom line: No matter how thoughtful and well-designed your training solutions, you still need to make sure all the right factors are in place to care for and nurture it through that critical and precarious incubation period. If the climate is suitable for transfer of learning, the training sticks, thrives, and ultimately blooms into fruitful returns. If the climate is not suitable for learning transfer, training impact dies—and all your time and resources wither on the vine. 

So, if you want your training ROI to bloom and grow, make sure you plant solutions in the right environment, with the right climate, and water it often.