A Corporate Shift in the Making – Creating from within

Two positive psychology practitioners who have worked in a corporate shift world over the last 20 years take a look at the importance of creating practitioners in the workplace. They put a lens on the difference between finding yourself sitting in an environment that is eerily similar to a school classroom and afterward taking what you have learned back to reality.

Training is always a good thing, right?

For many of us, sitting in workplace training has happened more times than we care to recall. The intention and design always a one-way download of knowledge, techniques, and tricks to become better at what we do reasonably well or so we would like to believe. Being sent to the course is something that should benefit both the employee and the employer. Inadequate training has been shown as a predictor of stress (Bakker, Demerouti, & Schaufeli, 2003) in employees. Additionally, from an employer view, Job Demands-Resources Theory (JD-R Theory, (Bakker & Demerouti, 2016) has shown how complex the balance is between the demands placed on workers and the resource tools provided to deal with them.

How many of us, however, carry a minor amount of guilt about how many of these trainings have we later on junked down the garbage shoot? Why? Because the next new thing shows up soon enough. The next one often promising to be better, shinier, more advanced than the last. Some of us are even lucky enough to have employers with a training budget that exposes a large coterie of staff to the newest way to improve. Often, however, before we clearly and honestly define what we are to get out of it or the problems it should tackle.

Is it training we need?

A true, honest benefit to the actual employee is not often the reason we are sent to training. The drive for performance is at the heart of the decision for most companies. Even within positive psychology whilst it is easy to find suggestions on how to use strengths to improve well-being, this is often alongside research showing strengths also enhance performance, for example by optimizing goal striving (Buckingham & Clifton, 2001).

Training becomes one way to get you skilled up and ready to do more. Yet, true performance requires a healthy, well-balanced individual (Loehr, & Schwartz, 2001), meaning that to perform at its best, companies need to look wider. Positive psychologists have provided meta-theoretical models that can help with this. Evaluating your company to The LIFE Model for example, (Lomas, Hefferon, & Ivtzan, 2014) – even if just briefly – can bring new ideas on how to create a healthy workplace at all levels. The model has four quadrants that enable a look through internally and externally, through different strata such as company, individuals, society, culture. In the objective quadrant, you can find yourself putting a lens on ensuring the health of your employees. One suggestion for this is looking at their workplace environment (Knight & Haslam, 2010; Visher, 2008). Poor environments can induce stress, burnout, and absenteeism (Bakker, Demerouti, and Schaufeli, 2003; Ferreira & Saldiva, 2002).

Making it happen

There are countless positive psychology tools and ideas we could add but we are going to circle back here to the application of training. This is because, whichever tools or methods we want to apply to our company, it has to be beyond the classroom if we want to move what we learn from the classroom to reality. However, a shift may be starting in different companies. A shift that may be key in bringing change and improvement in the workplace, whichever model and practice you decide to follow. Big training houses like Aberkyn are busy creating facilitators which are employees of their clients to take the message of a new culture forward in these organizations.

The years of sitting in classrooms may continue for some time to come but there is a mindset change coming in how corporates tackle the significant losses incurred in trying to get people to be able to establish and demonstrate a return on investment (ROI). Currently, we come back from training; responding a little like an inefficient combustion engine. We splutter into action intermittent at best. Perhaps we learned the 7 habits of highly effective people (Covey, 1989) and came back with notes and some intention to try a few out of the 7, and soon we succumb to old habits.

Companies are waking up to this phenomenon by creating practitioners within the workforce. This encourages a broad instead of narrow view and reach. There are now meditators in corporate teams helping with team stress management. There are well-being practitioners. There are culture practitioners, helping drive mandates for businesses while ensuring the values that in the past were often relegated to billboard aesthetics are now finding guardians in the teams and across the ranks.

You might call it the oldest trick in the book, but these roles may be crucial. You have probably read it many times, that if you want to learn and are going to do something well you need to start teaching it too! It is difficult to shake off responsibility when it becomes your job to teach what you have learned. This will either sound familiar or enlightening to those of you reading this article that could have been alongside us in those classrooms over and over and can hardly remember the content.

The additional responsibility of being a practitioner is important. Have a look at how you want to operate, either within your company, or team, or simply just as yourself. What tools and training do you need and how can you create accountability of being a practitioner after you have gone to the course or bought the software? In a larger workplace, the responsibility of being a practitioner arguably can build ways of spreading the word, cascading knowledge, creating more practitioners to enable practices to flow down the ranks to bring about a culture shift. This, for many companies, may have become the elusive elixir of growth, innovation, and individual success, maybe even survival?

A corporate shift we might need to do away with traditional “train the trainer” lexicons and replace them with “How to create practitioners” soon. In fact, we think and hope that is coming. Coming really soon to a corporate near you!

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