This is a Marketing for Learning podcast, the only podcast in the world that's guaranteed to increase your knowledge, skills and capabilities when it comes to marketing for learning. Plus, there's a gratuitous amount of pineapples. You're welcome. Hello, hello, hello, and welcome back to the Marketing for Learning podcast. It's Hannah here with you today, and I want to talk to you about a topic I seem to be discussing quite a bit lately with my clients.
And that's about whether we should incentivise learning or not. Of course, we can all admit that we react to incentives as human beings we do, and there are incentives for almost everything we do in today's day and age. Your coffee shop loyalty card is an incentive to go back to them. You have companies like Vitality Health Insurance that incentivise things like walking. There are incentives everywhere, and we do react to them.
But what I want to discuss today is about whether incentivising learning through the likes of a competition, for example, is actually a help or a hindrance to your learning engagement rates. So, in this podcast, I want to talk you through a few things. Firstly, I want to talk about something called the Cobra Effect. Then I want to talk about why competitions might not be your best bet and some alternatives in learning and development.
And then I will talk about when I do think competitions can have a place in our marketing learning strategies. So let's get stuck in. Alright, so first things first, I want to talk about something called the Cobra Effect. The Cobra Effect describes the situation where the solution to a problem actually ends up making it worse. And it dates back to colonial India. When the British government decided there was too many Cobra's, it was a public health risk, it was dangerous. So they put a bounty.
When people handed in dead Cobra's, they got a cash reward for it. So what happened? Well, people started farming Cobra's. They were making more Cobra's so that they could kill them, hand the being, get the money for it. India was an incredibly poor country at the time. It was entrepreneurial. They were making money out of it. But then the British government realised that it was too much of a costly scheme and they put an end to it.
And then you don't want loads of Cobra's in your house when I reason. So people let them go. And then they went it up being more Cobra's than there was in the first place. Now I won't lie to you unless I have done a lot of research to validate that story, but it teaches us a lesson. So even if it is a parable, it's a lesson. But I think this teaches us a really, really valuable lesson about incentivising learning. And for us, the solution results in a short-term game.
A bit like it did in the Cobra effect. There was less Cobra's on the streets while the incentive was ongoing. But it leads us to a real long-term failure. No, we don't have more Cobra's. Go around our companies. But what we do have is a real lack of engagement. Perhaps even a bigger lack of engagement than we had in the first place. So picture this. You're incentivising employees at your organisation to get involved with learning.
There's a particular learning pathway and you're incentivising them with a cash bonus. That's going to be in their paid check at the end of the year if they complete all 12 months worth of this learning path. So people do it. I think all that's an easy way to make a bit more money. They get the cash bonus and they're incredibly happy. But then the next year you're not running that incentive because everybody did it.
So it actually ended up costing the business quite a lot of money, paying out all of these bonuses to all of these employees. So what happens in year two? Well nobody wants to do learning if they're not getting paid for it. Why should I do it for free? You paid me to do it last year. I don't want to do it for free now. So your engagement rates absolutely plummet. And that's quite an extreme scenario.
But consider when there's competition going on, say it's just the leaderboard and it's a team based competition. So your entire team has to complete X amount of learning or even just one piece of learning and then get on the leaderboard and your score gets you on the leaderboard, your team goal. I can imagine I have experienced one person in the team completing the learning and the rest of them clicking through to the end very, very quickly and getting the answers from that one person.
Have we achieved our goal of making more people learn? Have they actually learnt anything? Have they acquired any new skills, knowledge or otherwise? No. No, they have not. They have bounded together as a team. So if teamwork was the objective, then well done, you can take that box. But I doubt it was with L&D after all. And that's why I really think we need to be careful and actually somewhat reluctant to incentivise learning. Because when we incentivise learning, we do get a short term peak.
We get more people engaged and then they drop off when the incentive disappears. But not only that, that peak is somewhat artificial. Because are they really learning anything or are they just quickly hurrying up through the course so they can say, yeah, you've done it and get the incentive. Are they lily and over and copy in their co-exhaunts? Because they just want to get the incentive. Probably. We are in the business of learning and development.
Although having high numbers on our learning platform dashboard is incredible. That's a lovely thing to say. I know it makes us all full warm and fuzzy. That is just a vanity metric. If nobody is actually learning or developing. So when do incentives and competitions work in learning and development? Well, I think there's two answers to this question. I think it depends on the competition or incentive you're running and when you are running it.
Let's start with the first one about the type of insensible competition. You might run an incentive that picks people at complete random who have completed X amount of learning each year. So say you pick three people from a cross-organisation who have completed, I don't know, ten learning pathways in the last year and they get a reward of some type.
That kind of incentive works better than the kind of incentives that like if you get to the top of a leaderboard you will get X, Y or Z. And that's because some people won't get to the top of the leaderboard ever. And if you keep running those competitions over and over, that's all about getting to the top of the leaderboard. That incentive quite quickly turns into a deterrent.
I don't want to see myself at the bottom of the leaderboard so I'd rather not bother at all, I'd rather not be on the leaderboard than be down to the bottom. So unless you are making it completely random that it's completely fair and it's equal chances for absolutely everybody regardless of their skill set or their proficiency in a particular topic to win an award, I can see the competition becoming a deterrent rather than an incentive.
So that being said like I just said you'd have to run it over and over and over and over and over again, or we fall into the trap that I mentioned earlier of well why should I bother trying if there's no possibility of me winning anything out of this. If I'm not going to get reabulled why should I do this? So I think we need to ensure that we are consistent and completely equal if we are going to have competitions or incentives running attached to learning.
We don't want to put people off of getting involved with what we do so we need to be really, really careful about those people that don't win and the impact it will have for them. And the second time I think we could carefully run some incentives and competitions within our learning engagement strategies is actually at the beginning of the funnel.
If spoken about the Adolf funnel on this podcast before, it essentially copies the sales funnel that most businesses use but applies it to a learning context. We start with awareness, we go into interest, then desire, then action and then loyalty. In the awareness phase, a competition can work. It can get people to realise what's available.
So for example, if you run a competition when you're launching something completely new, maybe you've got an entirely new learning platform that you need people to log into and explore in some way, incentivise in that can work. But only if what you're offering them when they get there is that compelling that they're intrinsic motivations will bring them back again. So you have to be really, really confident in your learning platform, your learning offering, your learning product.
You have to be incredibly confident in that. Because in the awareness stage, people don't realise us, they don't have a prior relationship with us. So it's almost getting their foot through the door. Maybe you can liken it to, I don't know, a shop open in and it says, the first 100 people that come to this new store, get a glass of Prosecco in a goodie bag. You might be more inclined to just go in and browse and see what it is. You get your Prosecco, you get your goodie bag.
And then actually you realise you quite like the stuff in that store, so you might go back again. It works in those instances. But again, we should be incredibly, incredibly careful about using incentives and competitions for learning. I think another important thing we should consider when we're speaking about incentives and competitions to get people learning is what engagement really means to us.
And I always had a definition in my head and I never questioned that anyone would ever think anything differently. Until I saw Tom McDowell record his live podcast episode at Learning Network Connect last year, he was interviewing Elemarshal and she said engagement. He said, what do you mean? And apparently that's a bit of a thing that he does. He challenges people on what engagement really means.
And he got me thinking that I think a lot of people in learning are very happy with engagement meaning the number of people on our learning platform. And I think as an industry we need to push ourselves to do better than that. I think we need to think about genuine actual engagement. That means that people are there, they're willing, they're ready, they're motivated to learn in whatever way that is. So it might not even be on your learning platform.
I think somebody could be incredibly engaged with your learning culture and never step foot on your learning platform. There are so many different ways that we can learn away from digital learning. I learned so much on things like TikTok nowadays. I see stuff and I'm like, oh, that's interesting. It peaks my interest. I'm ready. I'm engaged. I'm ready to learn. And then I end up going to YouTube to learn more about it and I Google it and your audience are doing the same thing.
They're out there searching. And I think we need to think of engagement in a much deeper sense of our people actually acquiring the skills that we need them to for the future of our business. How will we impact in the business bottom line? That's the big thing. So like I said earlier, it's always great seeing like huge, huge numbers on learning platform dashboard. And I've been there myself. I love it when I've run a campaign and then I see the numbers shoot up.
But is that where we should be stopping our interest or should we be digging a little bit deeper? Let's look in really basic terms first. Did they even complete the learning? Visit so many tell you they got there. Did they actually continue through with it? Are they still coming back? Have they actually learnt something new? Have they applied anything from it? Is there a performance change? Is there actual skills acquisition? And I know that drifts off into more than engagement.
But I often find myself talking to learning professionals about looking at the big picture. And I think that's very important. And I think when we're focusing on incentives and competitions, we're not looking at the big picture. We're looking at small short term gains that actually could have a detrimental impact going forward.
Like I said, if you've incentivised something this year and then you're not going to incentivise it next year, you've removed a lot of the intrinsic motivation in somebody to actually go and do it anyway because their mindset will be, will you paid me last year? Will you incentivise me last year? I don't fancy doing it anymore. I think incentives can work if they help build a habit, but I've yet to come across a learning function being completely honest.
It has a budget to incentivise to that longer period that learning becomes a habit. Often when I talk to learning teams, it's quick, short, snappy incentives that run for perhaps a month, maybe three months. I have seen some companies do it for a year, but anything longer than that. It's just out of our realms of reality, isn't it? We don't have the budgets to be running long-term competitions like that.
There's a lot to think about when it comes to incentives and competition, so I really just wanted to give you some food for food today to think about, is it worthwhile? Is it going to help you create that long-term impact that you really want and need? Or is it going to be a deterrent in the long term?
Like I said, I'm yet to find a learning function that can invest in an incentive that will last long enough to create the habit of learning that if that incentive disappeared, people would still keep learning. Again, just put yourself in the shoes of a consumer. If you had a coffee shop card on your phone, for example, my husband's got a cafe nearer card, he absolutely loves it, they've recently changed how he gets the incentives.
I think they caught on dawn again, but they were losing too much money with it, and now he's not as inclined to go to cafe nearer. You could be doing the same if you're incentivising your learning, and then you need to stop it for a genuine valid business reason. So proceed with caution is the message I want you to take away from today's podcast. If you're thinking about incentivising or making a competition, attach to learning, proceed with caution.
Thank you so much for joining me for today's episode of the Marketing for Learning Podcast. I absolutely love doing these episodes where they're based off a conversation I've had with a learning practitioner. So if there are any topics that you want to discuss, please do reach out to me on LinkedIn. Not going to drag you on the podcast, but if you do want to come on the podcast and talk to me, that would be great, but if not, I'd just love talking to you guys.
And you know what, if you have some competitions that have really worked well for you in L&D, please send them to me, prove me wrong, I'd love to be proven wrong on this matter. But if not, I will see you on the next episode of the Marketing for Learning Podcast. Bye!