Learning Culture Starts At The Top
Anyone who has worked in corporate training for even a few months will likely recognize one massive problem: most people simply don’t want to complete their training.
And it makes sense. Employees are chronically overworked (and often underpaid, considering the economy). The last thing they want to do is squeeze in more work, even if it’s only completing a 10-minute course.
At many companies, training managers and directors watch their teams expend massive efforts to pump out good training content, only for it to be largely ignored or unappreciated.
This is why Instructional Designers strive to make training fun and vibrant. It’s why we work so hard to write clear, clean, concise content. It’s why we spend hours upon hours learning skills like Photoshop and After Effects just to add some interest to a course. We keep making training more and more engaging in the hopes that more of our audience will care.
But what if I told you this wasn’t actually the best way to move the needle on training completions? That, in fact, it may not be making much of a difference on completions at all?
One of the biggest factors in whether an audience will complete its training has less to do with the training itself and more to do with your company’s learning culture.
In this article, we’ll discuss:
- Your Current Strategy: Push More Content And Make It Better
- Your New Strategy: Engage Leadership to Build a Learning Culture
- If It’s This Simple, Why Don’t All Leaders Already Push Training?
Let’s dive in!
Your Current Strategy: Push More Content And Make It Better
Across my twelve years of Instructional Design experience in retail, pharmaceuticals, communications infrastructure, and more, I’ve mostly experienced the same situation.
Every team meeting consists of discussing new modalities and technology. We share tools and techniques we’ve learned so we can upskill each other. We pull reports to look at previous training completions. We discuss how formatting a document this way or a course that way will help improve completions. We’re told to focus on these types of modules, less content, shorter courses, this type of delivery, that type of launch schedule—all in order to boost completions.
And somehow, as years pass, the conversations stay the same—and so do the results. We knock our heads against the wall trying to convince our audience to pay attention.
And just to be clear, it isn’t that these things are unimportant. Vibrant, clean, concise training helps learners pay better attention and, therefore, retain more. It helps them perceive courses as more trustworthy. And it helps maintain the training’s reputation in the company. If courses are consistently too long, rambling, or messy, that will drop training completions over time, and a bad reputation is hard to overcome without years of effort.
So, these things do matter—I’ve made a living off caring about them! But when it comes to completions, the biggest piece of the puzzle isn’t directly within your team’s control.
Your New Strategy: Engage Leadership To Build A Learning Culture
No matter the industry or audience, the one consistency I’ve noticed is this: organizations with strong learning cultures consistently achieve better training execution.
And that culture primarily starts with leadership.
To put it simply: the companies I’ve worked for that regularly had the highest training completions were the companies where leadership fully backed the training team and regularly pushed for completions.
Company leadership drives company culture. As just one example, if leaders push employees to take all their PTO every year in order to detach from work and recharge, most managers will personally ensure it happens. It will get done because the leaders say it must. It might not be one hundred percent of the entire company—there will always be some dissenters—but it will be nearly everyone, even more so if the message is repeated.
The same is true of a learning culture: when leaders consistently reinforce the importance of training, managers begin treating it as operationally critical rather than optional. In fact, research conducted by Truist Leadership Institute says that one of the top five factors that create an effective talent development culture is the organization’s overall support for employee growth and development.
Even more important is this: when there are consequences for not completing training, completions will skyrocket. This is what it means to enforce training—not merely saying it needs to be done but showing people how important it is through actions.
Now, to be clear, I’m not suggesting companies start firing employees for not finishing a 10-minute course on the company’s mission and vision. I’m saying that when leaders see value in training and regularly reinforce that value, their people will see it, too. When directors know their VP will call them if someone on their team hasn’t completed a training, directors are a lot less likely to get on the non-complete list in the first place.
Here’s an example of what leadership involvement can look like. Let’s say your team is supporting a large company initiative with a structured training program where one module is rolled out each month over a six-month period. Leadership involvement could include any or all of the following ideas:
- A three-minute speech about the training program in the latest company all-hands meeting, given either by the CEO or the project’s executive sponsor.
- A ten-minute video heading the program that shows the CEO or executive sponsor talking about the initiative, what it means to the company, and (most importantly) what it means for the audience, good and challenging.
- A town hall led by the executive sponsor and/or functional directors discussing the program, encouraging the training, and inviting the audience to ask questions.
- A forum where learners can ask questions about the program, which will be answered by the executive sponsor, either live in a meeting or sent out via email.
And don’t forget, these ideas only cover one particular initiative. If leaders want their people to take any training assigned to them, large or small, they should be talking about training all the time. In general, completing all training on time should be mentioned in townhalls. VPs should regularly push their directors to ensure their teams prioritize training, who should in turn push their managers to ensure their teams complete training. In organizations with strong learning cultures, training isn’t viewed as separate from operational work—it’s part of operational excellence.
If a learning culture isn’t created, only managers who see the value in training on their own will enforce their teams to do it, creating a patchy and inconsistent experience where some teammates are well trained but most aren’t. Hence, why you might be seeing poor completion rates in your company.
If It’s This Simple, Why Don’t All Leaders Already Push Training?
Two of the biggest reasons are time and money.
Think about what a company does. Its sole purpose for existing is to make money (non-profits excluded). Yes, the company provides a valuable product or service, and yes, they make the world better by doing so, but at the end of the day, they are generating profit. So, the company’s C-suite has the role of making sure it runs as efficiently as possible and makes as much money as it can.
By the very purpose of their role, telling people to focus on work that doesn’t map directly to the company’s bottom line feels counterintuitive.
I’ve worked directly in Operations teams at a couple of companies versus being siloed in HR. Whether they cared about training came down to whether they understood its value and ROI. Interestingly, in some cases, those were the teams that understood that when their people are highly trained, they do better and more efficient work. Other times, though, they only focused on hitting KPIs and maximizing time spent working. Training we developed was greatly shortened, stripping out most of what made it effective in the first place.
Remember, too, that most employees have more on their plates than they can realistically manage. Employees are burning out faster than we can refresh them and disengaging as a result, which I could discuss in a whole other article on its own. So, carving out even single minutes for training feels like an unnecessary time expenditure compared to whatever else they could get done during that time. In fact, according to Gallup in 2025, 41% of employees say the time demands of their job are the biggest barrier to Learning and Development. Companies value bottom line, output, and efficiency, and the more a single person can do in a 40-hour work week, the better.
So, What Can You Do?
If you’re a training leader at your company, your best role in training completions is to help push your C-suite to care about training. Show them the ROI of training completions so they understand the benefits to the company, such as 94% of employees say they would stay at a company longer if it invested in their Learning and Development, and companies with comprehensive training programs have a 24% higher profit margin.
If you’re an individual contributor on a training team, next time you’re scoping a large project, suggest getting your leaders involved with some of the ideas we discussed.
And above all else, remember this: your effort building beautiful, clean training modules is deeply valuable to your company. To help employees see that, the learning culture needs to be built up around it.