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With school now in session, it’s time for a test. In the spirit of the back-to-school season, which one of the following items does not belong on the list?

• You start a new job with a telecommunications company handling customer service calls. Before you’re allowed to speak with your first caller, you spend six weeks learning about the company, going through sales and product training and handling simulated problems. Your calls will be monitored for effectiveness.
• You’re hired to do electrical maintenance for your local power company. You’ve got to master specific processes and practice procedures on deadlines. Before you touch a live wire, you’ve practiced and been tested to make sure you know what to do.
• You have a law license. To keep it active, you have to complete several hours of continuing education per year. You can take course work online and are required to click forward periodically to prove you’re actually in front of your computer. Or, you can attend a lecture of your choice, sit in the back of a large room, read what you want, send emails and work. By verifying you completed the online course or attended the lecture, you’ll meet the bar’s requirements.
• You’re 50 years old and want a new job with your employer requiring a new skill. You enroll in an intense course. You have to study the material, complete projects, go to class and pass a test to be qualified to move into your desired job area.

Obviously, number 3 does not belong. In the other instances, you have to learn and know to apply what you’ve been taught to perform your job or pick up a new skill. There is personal motivation and significance to mastering course lessons.
But the situation outlined in number 3 is different and typifies a lot of what is going on in today’s workplace – not just in the legal example, but particularly as it relates to how lessons on workplace conduct and ethics are taught.
Too much of what passes for today’s workplace training focuses on the delivery of information. Then, HR and training professionals verify that learners receive the information, document their attendance and prove compliance. When this becomes an organization’s primary focus, its outcomes are quite different than when they are trying to ensure that the learning is delivered with the same importance, focus and retention stressed in examples 1, 2 and 4.
What organizations choose to emphasize in what they teach impacts how much attention learners pay to the material – and ultimately, it affects the urgency that participants feel in mastering and applying what has been taught.
With so many priorities facing all of us, when training is delivered solely to document its delivery, that shallow objective becomes obvious to the learner. The training becomes just one more task to get through in a blizzard of irrelevant, if not annoying, ongoing to-dos. Course completed, content forgotten, but objective met.
The temptation for organizations to simply spread information and document receipt is greater now than ever due to the flood of information we all have to absorb, the ease and economy of superficial communication options, and the crush of demands in these economically uncertain times. However, I suspect that we have already paid a great price in devaluing learning, particularly as it relates to ethics, how people are treated on the job and their role in bringing serious issues to light.
Take a moment and read about current environmental and safety catastrophes in the past four months, as well as rising instances of gross harassment and ethical lapses. The BP and Massey coal-mining disasters, and the ethical questions raised in the forced resignation of former HP CEO Mark Hurd are just a few of the cases that will probably leap to your mind.

The failure of check-the-box training approaches

These cases didn’t occur because individuals failed to get information, attend a lecture or complete an online course. Instead, these ethical, environmental and safety failures resulted precisely because many thought that was all they really had to do to meet the expectations of their organizations. So, that’s all they did.
Organizations can provide the structure to either foster or impede learner motivation and the ultimate question – not multiple choice but true/false – is: What is your organization doing or not doing to foster motivation to learn important topics? So here’s a brief quiz
 

 
While you won’t be graded on this quiz, let me suggest that anything less than 100% “True” answers to all of the above, and your organization is failing to set standards and change behavior in a way that has a lasting impact on ethics and civil treatment in your workplace.