Learning new habits

Suppose a company finds that its employees cooperate poorly on the production floor. Especially the shift change causes problems. Hardly any handover takes place. As a result, mistakes are made, targets are not met and the work atmosphere is bad. So how can training be used to get employees to work better together? If the HR manager decides to use a two-hour presentation to explain the theory of good cooperation to the employees, he assumes that offering knowledge is sufficient to change behavior.

Replacing habits

Often this means replacing old habits with new ones. Those old habits are there for a reason. This is what is called automation in psychology. Our brains evolved to automate behavior in the brain stem so we don't have to think about it any further, such as fight-or-flight behavior in crisis situations. This increases the chances of survival. Unfortunately, many habits are also bad or downright destructive. Consider smoking, for example. The idea that pure common sense - knowing that smoking is bad for you - will help you change your habit is vain hope. Someone who wants to change his own behavior must do more: he enters into a drastic and laborious learning process that involves practice, relapse and perseverance.

Good training

Interactive training gets this difficult learning process started in a formal, organized way. But when is good training? Such training:

1. confronts participants with their current behavior and lets them experience the negative consequences of this behavior;
2. gives participants confidence that the training is going to help them learn new behaviors. This motivates the participant to want to learn as much as possible from the training themselves. This motivation is really a prerequisite;
3. offers structured building blocks for the new behavior in the form of short theory and exercises, focused on practice. These building blocks must enable the participant to automate the new behavior: it must be suitable for practice in daily practice.

After training

The training is followed by the core learning process. Participants will have to actively practice daily. That means, for example, forcing themselves every day to properly and fully inform their colleagues at shift change. Just until they no longer have to think about it. Then it has become a habit. Unfortunately, many organizations go wrong with this. When a training course is formally completed, the hope is that employees now know how to do it and that they will change their behavior. However, the company must actively support this new behavior or nothing will happen. This can already be done, for example, by implementing some practical conditions, such as explicitly scheduling time for shift changes. If employees see that time is set aside for this, they understand that it is important. They then also feel free to spend time on it. So the company itself can make the difference. If training is the spark that starts the engine, then the company is the catalyst that gets the change going.