This article was provided by Act2Manage.

For over a decade, we have been dedicated to finding ways to inspire managers to improve their people management habits, benefiting their subordinates, the company, and themselves. HR professionals and training providers are always in search of programmes and corporate training events that can ignite lasting behavioural change. The real challenge in the field is to design and deliver a learning experience that engages managers and builds a development process that truly results in change of behaviour.

Blend to impact behaviour

Ten years ago, we redesigned our leadership development programmes to become a 6-9 months process in which we insisted on a blended approach, combining a series of training days with follow-up coaching sessions that focus on the individuals and efficiently foster turning new knowledge into action. More than 70 groups of managers have gone through our Deliberate Leadership programme, giving us plenty of anecdotal evidence that this approach yields lots of observable changes in their behaviour, as well as improvements in interpersonal relationships and leadership culture in our client companies.

In 2015 we created Act2Manage, a mobile micro-learning app, based on the fundamentals of behavioural science and positive psychology. It provides on-the-job people management help for a larger population of mid-level managers and team leaders. Its primary focus is transferring existing or new knowledge into practice by providing instant tips & tricks in 3-5 minutes, whenever and wherever needed, for more than 130 of the most frequent people management dilemmas. It enables the (self-)assessment of managers, followed by suggestions for topics to explore incremental learning and development in a personalised way. Concrete and immediately applicable action steps foster change in behaviour through consequence management such as gamification elements (points, badges, fun quizzes), reinforce the progress team leaders have made, and make the journey fun. Facilitating content consumption with real challenges in the company or operating with external rewards proved to be very powerful in increasing the relevance of the learning.

The results were similar across industries and corporate customers. Usage rates are distributed according to a power-law graph. Simply said, it follows the Pareto principle: 20% of users are responsible for 80% of the learning activity. Whether we worked with more motivated and diligent groups or the less eager ones, we found the same distribution pattern. But we wanted to make even more impact and we were very excited to find ways to increase learning intensity.

In 2019, we made a step forward and combined our Deliberate Leadership programme involving skills development training and follow-up coaching with the Act2Manage app. We worked with three multinational companies and commenced 10 groups with 111 managers. The results showed that our blended learning approach had a bigger impact on behaviour.

#1. The number of commitments made has increased

At the end of each Deliberate Leadership module, participants made specific commitments to change or implement in practice whatever they found relevant from the training session. They used the Act2Manage app for follow-up and they discussed their experiences during the coaching sessions. Participants with access to our mobile learning tool have made on average 50% more commitments per module compared to participants of previous programmes where this service was not provided.

#2. Commitments tend to get completed

Participants were encouraged to follow up their commitments in Act2Manage, making use of its various reminder features. Close to two thirds of all commitments were completed, therefore the majority of changes or actions have most likely been implemented.

#3. In-person development programme doubled the proportion of high-activity users

It was delightful to see that the proportion of high-activity app users has increased from the 20% of our benchmark data to an average of 40%. Twice as many participants decided to really immerse themselves in the pool of intensive learning, compared to other client companies where the application was provided without the Deliberate Leadership programme.

#4. Participants got a taste for learning more

Interestingly enough, 80% of the app’s most popular topics and questions were not in the curriculum of our Deliberate Leadership programme. Users were browsing suggestions and making commitments related to Change Management, Personal Branding, Building Culture, Innovation or Building Commitment.

While the term “blended learning” has been around for about 20 years, there is little consensus about its definition, and there are more anecdotal stories and opinions than data to underpin its efficiency. We believe that our recent study is a step in the right direction in discovering how the use of technology combined with the personal involvement of experienced and skilful learning facilitators can result in better impact, improve employee engagement and performance, and eventually contribute to the development of the management culture in various businesses and organisations.