Training in Turbulence, Part Two: Instructional Design During a Recession

If training departments are going to affect positive change or build any meaningful capacity during a recession, they must do so with a commitment to lightweight implementation, or a focus on learning culture over training courses.

Potential 20% reductions in training resources, paired with drop-offs in available learning hours, create an uncertain future for large learning programs. Programs and courses will continue to help employees to develop new, role-required skills. I expect many companies will continue to prioritize their new hire onboarding programs, for example. Still, formal learning, with its hefty administrative burdens like scheduling, content maintenance, and ongoing SME engagement, cannot build a recession-ready workplace.

What we need instead are techniques that enable skill development by rapidly converting theory into practice, and practice into habits. We need a strategy that makes social learning work! Fortunately, these techniques are not unfamiliar to talent development professionals, though they may be peripheral to much of our past work.

By focusing on micro-learning, nudges, and communities of practice, trainers can form a recession-ready learning culture defined by efficiency and efficacy. These three instructional design techniques form a robust "triad" of organizational development in that they can develop skills with little administrative overhead.

The root of this triad is micro-learning, which provides a mechanism for the distribution of essential procedural and declarative knowledge. ATD defines micro-learning as that which “enhances learning and performance in the most efficient and effective manner possible through short pieces of content. Assets can usually be accessed on-demand when the learner needs them.”

Micro-learning is not new to a time of recession. Just before the pandemic, Donald Taylor’s Global Sentiment Survey identified micro-learning as the sixth-hottest trend in L&D, indicating widespread interest in this emerging training tool. But what is new about micro-learning is that it will transition from a tangential measure deployed to support formal learning into a core strategy for the development of essential skills.

Nudges establish the middle note, or the third, of this triad. Whereas micro-learning involves actions to create and ship content, nudges involve actions that shape and optimize behaviors, thus turning theory into practice.

We can define a nudge as a "relatively subtle" action that encourages behaviors that are either individually beneficial or socially altruistic. Google's small cafeteria plates are a commonly cited example of a behavioral nudge. Google famously found that smaller plates lead employees to make more nutritious choices. As a former Google employee, I once shed over fifteen pounds by switching to Google's smaller plates and ensuring my lunches consisted primarily of vegetables served from the front of Google's buffet lines. While talent developers can use micro-learning to demonstrate essential skills for a time of uncertainty, nudges are needed to put skills into action and to ensure that social learning perpetuates skill development.

Communities of practice form the top note, or the fifth, of our triad. Harvard Business Review defines communities of practice as “groups of people informally bound together by shared expertise and passion for a joint enterprise.” Communities of practice can exist online or offline, within an organization or with like-minded individuals across organizations. They can be broad in scope and complex in operations, such as an international trade organization or a multinational CEO peer group. Or they can be narrow in scope and easily maintained, such as a Slack channel for instructional designers or a group of podiatrists on WhatsApp.

Whether these groups gather virtually or physically, synchronously, or via social media, a community of practice facilitates two needed elements of adult skill development: peer-to-peer learning, and opportunities for reflection. Communities of practice are a powerful form of “social” learning - the third “hottest” global trend in Learning and Development in 2020.

Social learning provides 70% of workplace learning and is especially popular with Millennials and Generation Z. All communities of practice are social learning, though not all social learning rises to the level of a community of practice. The difference is that a community of practice involves a commitment to constancy. Many social learning opportunities are “one and done” - but one can always turn to their communities of practice to take full advantage of social learning. Moreover, in a time of disruption, companies may verbalize a commitment to social learning - when, in fact, their hidden commitment is to avoid investing in L&D! In upcoming blog posts, we’ll reimagine communities of practice as more targeted towards specific skills, more supported by talent developers, and more appealing to workers in uncertain times.

Until the pandemic ends and the recession dissipates, bulky training programs will achieve limited traction. Fortunately, the triad of micro-learning, nudges, and communities of practice provide an objectively better alternative! With these strategies in mind, let us turn in the next blog post to the skills that we must build if our organizations are to withstand these turbulent times.

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@ryanpanzer is an instructional designer for Zendesk and a member of the board of directors for the Association for Talent Development Madison Area Chapter.

Training in Turbulence, Part One: Developing Talent Amidst Disruption and Volatility

The world has never experienced a recession like the one we recently entered. Still, we know that in a recession, the learning and development function tends to experience one of the bumpiest rides of all business units. Recent recessions reveal the extremity with which learning and development resources wax and wane proportionate to business and economic health. Such variability is shown most clearly through resource allocation at the level of the individual learner. When entering a recession, companies invest less money per learner while providing fewer overall learning opportunities. So what will happen to training and development in the coming months?

Most noticeably, companies will cut training investment. According to Workforce.com, investment in employee training and development during the 2008 recession contracted by over 10%. The US corporate training market reduced per-employee training expenditures from $1,202 in 2007 to $1,075 in 2008.

The 2013 ATD State of the Industry Report found that businesses cut training expenditures by an average of 18% during the 2008 Great Recession, with reductions bottoming out in 2010. If such trends carry over into future disruptions, companies will soon start asking talent developers to achieve their results on 80% of their standard operating budgets. If you’re anything like me, thinking about sustaining learning programs with one-fifth less budget causes natural knots in your stomach. A one-fifth reduction won’t just mean fewer courses, printouts, and learner materials. A one-fifth reduction means far less travel, considerably less time with learners, and perhaps even fewer people on learning and development teams.

Budget reduction was not the only effect that the 2008 recession had on training and development. With business leaders regarding training as “the most expensive activity with regard to employee management,” some companies ventured as far as to completely eliminate their professional development budgets. As cuts in expenditures and enrollments accelerated, many executives lamented the appearance of critical skill gaps within their organizations. Still, most businesses slashed travel opportunities for training delivery and facilitation, moving courses online and cancelling programs. Companies were especially likely to reduce investment in programs for “intangible” skills (critical thinking and change management, for example), and to tighten their control over training participation. Some companies even put a two-year moratorium on all learning initiatives.

Exacerbating these difficulties is the perception that training budgets are a “lagging indicator” of an organization’s fiscal health. As businesses recovered from 2008, investment in training sputtered with meager year over year increases. ATD’s 2019 State of the Industry Report found that as companies recovered from the Great Recession, growth in training expenditures hovered near two percent annually, lagging the pace of inflation until 2017.

But not every study of training during crises or recessions concluded that budget cuts were inevitable. It's possible that the coming months will create drastic change for talent developers, but may not lead to immediate resource reductions. A report from the UK Commission for Employment and Skills concluded that “institutional support for training activity… changed little between 2005 and 2011 – a period which spanned the 2008-09 recession.”

Their report, “Training in Recession: The impact of the 2008-2009 recession on training at work,” suggests that per-employee investment in training within the United Kingdom was declining for approximately ten years before the recession. According to their analysis, the effect of the 2008 recession on training investment was either neutral or ambiguous. Their findings suggest that the need to see more productivity and innovation out of a smaller employee base created more training opportunities. These data should reassure those who work in talent development. Not every company will slash its investment in training; not every talent developer will be asked to more with less.

Author Elaine Biech, who has written over 80 books on training and development, concurs with the data from the United Kingdom. Her recent works include The Art and Science of Training and The New Business of Consulting, both of which received considerable acclaim, and both of which I highly recommend reading. I sat down with Elaine for a Zoom conversation shortly into the COVID-19 lockdown for a discussion about the future of training in a time of uncertainty. Biech, who is the founder of the L&D consulting firm ebb associates, expressed a welcome note of optimism about the direction of learning relative to the course of the economy. Biech suggested that economic uncertainty previously led to cuts in training, but as training departments have proven their worth, they’ve buffered themselves from the worst effects of cutbacks.

“Every time something like this has happened in my over-forty years of working in this industry, whether it was a political crisis, changes in the labor market, or an economic recession, it hits L&D a little less hard,” she told me. “Every year, organizations see a little more value in training, and investment increases. Today’s executives know that skill gaps exist. They need strong L&D teams who can identify and act on those gaps. They need L&D teams who can serve as trusted advisors. Whether or not this (COVID-19) leads to a prolonged recession, this time will be more positive (for talent development professionals) than the last.”

Whatever our predictions, we also know for certain that disruption, volatility, and economic recessions are always temporary. Investment comes back. Learning hours go back up. Though it took until four years after the 2008 recession, per-employee learning hours eventually hit a new record high in 2012, at 57.7 hours per employee. As businesses recovered from 2008, they did eventually re-invest resources in the form of employee time, as they sought to close the skill gaps widened by the recession.

With so much uncertainty, how can talent developers keep their organizations focused on learning in the recession to come?

In the coming blog posts, we'll construct a blueprint for talent developers looking to build capacity in the most uncertain of times. Each week, we'll publish a post on how talent developers can train in turbulence. Each post features ideas from training thought leaders, data on how training has navigated past disruptions, and concrete ideas that share a commitment to lightweight implementation. Each post explores this challenge through the lenses of micro-learning, nudges, and communities of practice, three tools that can be deployed under limited resources and significant time constraints. The challenge facing our organizations is truly unprecedented. The need for impactful learning and development has never been greater.

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@ryanpanzer is an instructional designer at Zendesk and a member of the ATD-Madison Area Chapter board of directors.

Why churches should keep their buildings closed until a vaccine is widely available

As states have started to lift COVID-19 restrictions, "reopening" has become the new cultural and political battleground. Possibly no reopening debate has been as contentious as the reopening of houses of worship. It seems that everyone from the president to the pope has an opinion.

As a church-going Dane County liberal, my inclination is to listen to the public health authorities who caution against returns to mass gatherings like church. And like many Dane County liberals, my unfortunate bias is to cynically dismiss the arguments of those who would rush to reopen church buildings. In my rush to judgment, I imagine that many of the "reopen church now" crowd are less concerned with a return to in-person worship and more concerned with concealing flawed logic behind religious freedom platitudes.

But for a moment, let me attempt to set aside my biases and give the "reopen everything" crowd the benefit of the doubt. Let me imagine that the reopen church crowd is driven by a sincere yearning to return to the close-knit community of their home congregation, to find spiritual sustenance in seeking God while sitting next to their neighbor. Resolving to see this crowd not as the "other" but as fellow brothers and sisters in Christ, let me attempt to thoughtfully and politely explain why it is in all of our best interest not to open church buildings until a COVID-19 vaccine is widely available.

But before I make my case, allow me to state that I know church closings are sincerely difficult for many. I myself genuinely miss seeing my church community each week, in-person. I miss the calm that I experience each time we "pass the peace," the sounds of a peppy postlude played on an organ, the fellowship of coffee and donuts after church. I lament the loss of the sacred space in the sanctuary, where I unplug from digital distractions and the demands of my to-do list for one sweet hour of prayer every Sunday from 10-11 AM. I long to get back to chatting with my church friends, shaking the pastor's hand on the way out the door, and experiencing the small acts of peace and fellowship that I took for granted before the pandemic. And most personally, I grieve when I realize that two baptism dates for my daughter have come and gone, with another soon to pass. That joyful occasion is permanently on hold as I endure some of the disappointment that so many of us have shared in these past eleven weeks. When I suggest that church buildings must remain closed until we have a vaccine, I do so not out of some smug elitist sentiment, but with heartache and sadness.

Churches should keep their buildings closed until the wide availability of a vaccine for several reasons related to science and sound theology of ministry. Since the science is well-documented elsewhere, I won't belabor the points about the risks of mass indoor gatherings during a respiratory pandemic capable of spreading through aerosols. Instead, I'll make three brief points about what church buildings would need to do in order to reopen safely, and how such actions are contrary to the nature of ministry.

If churches were to open their buildings, safety protocols would dictate a phased approach. Churches would perhaps admit twenty-five percent of their typical capacity, then fifty, and so forth. Setting aside the logistical difficulty, such a burden forces church communities to immediately determine who is "in" and who is "out." Pastors and priests would no longer be concerned just with the proclamation of God's word and the administration of the sacraments. They would be concerned with keeping in-person attendance under a specified threshold, ensuring that those in attendance are "healthy enough." They would be tasked with blocking the vulnerable and the elderly at the church door. The pastoral call would be transfigured into something of an ecclesiological bouncer. The moment a church leader says the words "you can't come in, you're not on the list," is the moment that COVID-19 undoes decades of social justice and inclusivity work.

Throughout and beyond this phased approach, church buildings would require social distancing protocols, including physical distancing and masking. Implicitly, safety demands a church building characterized by uniformity. But who would ensure compliance with such protocols? Would the same church leader who takes ticket stubs at the sanctuary door also be tasked with keeping masks on faces and measuring six feet between non-cohabitants? Suddenly, this starts to look like a church that wants you to look like "us" and act like "us," and especially to dress like "us." As churches, we've been down this route too many times. It doesn't take us anywhere we want to go.

And then there's the question of what happens to our expressions of online worship. As 75% worship online while 25% gather in the building, perhaps a church continues to view virtual community as authentic and spiritually edifying. But does this change when the ratio shifts to 50-50? What happens when church leaders admit 75% but 25% remain online? I remain convinced that church in a digital age must be a hybrid experience, both fully online and fully offline. If we pivot too quickly, we risk relegating those worshipping from their living rooms to mere spectators at best, to outsiders at worst.

When we rush to reopen our church buildings, we risk more than the physical safety of our communities. We risk erasing years of efforts to create a church that is more communal, diverse, authentic, and gracious. Regrettably, there appear only to be less-than-ideal options for the time ahead. We can proceed with a phased reopening, knowing the physical and spiritual consequences.

Or we can prayerfully await a vaccine, which may well be widely available in early 2021. As we wait, we can continue to worship together on YouTube, Zoom, and Facebook. We can continue to study what it means to be church in a virtual community, knowing that the future of Christian practice is a future that is equal parts virtual and in-person. Most importantly, we can continue to protect the most vulnerable amongst us, finding innovative ways to support their spiritual, mental, and physical health.

This is not an easy time for any of us, the church included. Let's not make this any harder by putting our faith communities in untenable positions. Let's await a vaccine or widely viable treatment, because we know that in reality, the church was never closed. The grace of God never stopped flowing. Let's keep our doors closed a little while longer while the Spirit dances on, as we pray for the day we'll throw the doors open to all.

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@ryanpanzer is the author of "Grace and Gigabytes: Being Church in a Tech-Shaped Culture," coming December 2020 from Fortress Press.