Turning Research Into Results

A major challenge for those who develop the human assets in organizations is choosing from the bewildering array of performance improvement products. Team-building, Myers-Briggs type profiling, empowerment, web-based training, multimedia, corporate culture transformation, job and work re-engineering, and management by storytelling are only a few of the huge variety of products and services offered to help us manage our opportunities and problems. New training and performance improvement companies appear every day, offering just-in-time technologies that promise to manage our knowledge and skills, motivate our people, and improve team communication and efficiency. Our in-boxes overflow with slick brochures; our email spits out a daily ration of e-ads, and our faxes grind out amazing performance improvement offers by the pound.

Do any of these things do what they promise? How do you pick and choose? Their proponents claim they are working in successful organizations, that they provide the most recent technology, and that they are based on the work of world-renowned experts. If that is true, why do many of us notice little or no improvement from some of these products? Finding programs that live up to their claims can be more difficult than it sounds.

In this increasingly complicated world of training and performance improvement, what can you rely on to guide your decision-making process? Research, say Dick Clark and Fred Estes, authors of Turning Research into Results: A Guide to Selecting the Right Performance Solutions. Just as a doctor needs the latest medical equipment and research to deliver the best care to a patient, training and performance improvement professionals need to equip themselves with the latest developments in the field in order to better serve their clients. Research is uncovering powerful truths about what works and what doesn't - guidelines that affect how you do your job, what products you choose, and the programs you support. For example, over the years, research has proven that:

• Poorly designed or delivered training can actually cut productivity.
  It's simply not true that poor training has no consequences. Just as a doctor or CEO produces consequences when he or she does a poor job, bad training can cause more problems than existed initially. One problem is that it can cause the scrambling of previously well-organized memory for a work-related topic. As a result, people are slower or unable to remember the information after training then they were before, and the investment in training has made the situation worse. In other cases, management team-building exercises have been found to increase destructive competition between management groups in the same organization. These negative results refute the belief that any training will produce at least some positive results.
  
  
• Reaction questionnaires or "smile sheets" often indicate the opposite of what actually happened in a performance improvement program.
  People often give very positive ratings to ineffective performance programs. Reaction forms ask people what they liked the most. What they like, however, is not always what helps them perform better. They may have liked the training because of the ease with which it was applied or the personality of the trainer. In these cases, people are affected by the less important aspects of a program and may rate it highly even if it made them less productive. Products that feel comfortable may not be challenging our current paradigms enough. For example, research has shown that training programs may receive high smile sheet ratings for client satisfaction, yet participants who are tested to see if they learned the course content show no learning gains. People report that they gained the most from a new approach when they may actually have gained little or lost ground.

  The reverse can also happen. A successful program can be judged to be ineffective because it asks participants to change something very basic about their beliefs, expectations, and behavior. This counterintuitive result occurs, in part, because some interventions that make us more productive also challenge comfortable routine and our mental models of the world. This change process can make some of us uncomfortable. Some people don't like change in any form. Yet solving significant problems often requires change, and when we are feeling too comfortable we may choose the wrong medicine or too small a dosage. The result is like taking snake oil for a serious medical condition - the alcohol content may make you feel good for a while, but it does nothing to solve the real problem.

• When experts design and present training in their area of expertise, they often give wrong information or fail to give complete information.
  The knowledge and skills of experts, including the way that they make decisions and solve problems, are highly automated and unconscious. They can't teach what they are not aware of doing even if they are committed to passing on what they do so well. Worse yet, experts are not aware that most of their knowledge and almost all of their skills are unconscious. Yet research shows that almost all of them believe that they are giving accurate and complete information to trainees. Since most training in organizations is based on content derived from interviewing experts, this is a major problem.
  
  
• When the performance of work teams is evaluated as a group, rather than evaluating individual members, individual productivity declines significantly.
  This researched phenomenon, called social loafing, occurs when group members reduce their individual effort, believing that their contribution won't be missed. It also appears that when managers add more members to groups to increase their output, individual performance falls even farther if group members do not believe that their individual contributions are being assessed.
  
  
• Employment empowerment strategies can have both positive AND negative effects.
  Many people are more motivated when empowerment strategies allow them to participate in deciding how they do a job. These strategies are called by various names - Quality Circles, Leaderless Teams, and Self-Directed Work Groups are a few examples. However, in some organizational cultures, giving people control of how they do their jobs has been shown to backfire and cause lower motivation and increased employee turnover. In some organizational cultures, people are more motivated by a strong managerial presence, and empowerment is seen as disruptive and interfering with an effective manager.
  
  
• Some competency-based approaches do not work.
  Many performance improvement vendors now emphasize "competency-based" systems. Advocates of competency-based systems analyze your operation and suggest performance competencies necessary to ensure success. A possible outcome would be to require that people be able to: "Manage profit and loss, control expenses, and set and manage financial goals." Who could disagree? If high level and abstract competencies help you get support for the specific work goals that drive performance, they are positive. But if general goals replace concrete, specific, and timely goals, they can be both distracting and destructive. The competencies you need from people will change as business goals change. General competencies are only the beginning and cannot serve as adequate work goals for teams or individuals.

Developments in research have a very real impact on how training and performance improvement products should be designed and implemented. Taking advantage of those developments means increased certainty that the decisions you make about performance improvement will be the right ones.

Excerpted from Turning Research into Results: A Guide to Selecting the Right
Performance Solutions, by Richard E. Clark and Fred Estes (List Price $26.95, 198 pgs., 1-879618-28-1, CEP Press, 2002).

Richard E. Clark, Ed.D., is a professor of educational psychology at the University of Southern California (USC). He previously served as Division Head for USC's Educational Psychology and Technology Department and as Director of USC's Professional Studies and Community Programs. He is the 2002 recipient of the prestigious Thomas F. Gilbert Distinguished Professional Achievement Award from the International Society for Performance Improvement.

Fred Estes has worked for several years managing training and performance improvement projects for large companies, including Hewlett-Packard and Bank of America. He has worked as an internal performance consultant, an instructional designer, and an educational program manager. He has contributed to several professional journals and books.