If you are training new employees to start new jobs, you have a good opportunity to teach them healthy new habits you would like them to adopt when doing their jobs. Even though they might have come to your organization from previous jobs where they had habitual ways of working, you have a good chance to teach them new behaviors you would like them to adopt in your organization.

But if you are training current, longstanding employees, you are faced with a different, possibly bigger challenge . . .

You are tasked with the job of getting them to adopt new habits to replace old ones that might be less than ideal

Reading about the Power of Habit

What are habits? Where do they come from? What kind of habits are productive, and what kind are not?

Many books have been written about habits, including . . .

The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business, a new book by Charles Duhigg, is one of the best. Duhigg is a reporter for The New York Times who has, for years now, been investigating how changing habits can lead to new levels of success. Highly recommended.

The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen R. Covey has been around for so long that it has come to be regarded as a classic guide to building success. A pioneering book, it was among the first to point out that people who change their habits rewrite their ability to succeed.

How Can You Get Trainees to Exchange Unproductive Habits for Productive Ones?

The process is not easy. In most cases, it involves understanding what the habits are, where they came from, and why trainees have come to assume that they represent the best ways of doing their work.

But despite those complexities, it is worth knowing about some proven ways that can encourage employees to exchange old habits for new and more productive ones:

• Reinforce new habits through work simulations and other interactive exercises that let trainees “test drive” new ways of working and discover that they are more effective than what they have done in the past.
• Make it a group learning experience by letting trainees take part in group exercises alongside other trainees – or even in two-person training simulations where they try out new behaviors. When people learn from other people and discover better ways of working, habits change.
• Uncover and address the triggers that cause trainees to fall back into old habits. If a customer calls to complain about a product, for example, will your trainee reflexively fall back into the habit of apologizing unnecessarily, when you want him or her to take a more proactive approach by offering solutions? Or if your new employee is tasked with inputting a very large amount of data into your company system, will she habitually write down every piece of information before entering it? When you uncover triggers and make trainees aware of them, you empower them to perform tasks the way you would like them to.

The right training can lead employees to replace negative older habits with newer ones that bring higher levels of success.