We are often all too quick to dismiss attendance records as data with limited application. After all, attendance doesn’t mean learning. But something I discovered very recently is that bums on seats data can tell you a lot about your learning culture (or lack of it).
For the fifth year running, our organisation had successfully grown the annual knowledge-sharing campaign. The concept was simple – give business leaders a platform to casually share their expertise on a range of topics. Some technical skills, some people skills, some wellbeing. This helped prevent silo working, enabled networking across all levels of the business and kept everyone up to date with the big projects and industry innovations.
It had started small in year one with five webinars across one campaign month. But in year five, we were oversubscribed with multiple sessions running each day throughout the month.
It looked fantastic!
- The number of sessions had increased.
- The number of training hours delivered had increased.
- The number of people attending each session had increased.
I looked down the list of attendees and a name caught my eye. Ally Brisbane (not her real name) based in the US. She was a recent participant on the early career programme, but due to travel restrictions imposed by Covid her year group had missed out on a trip to London for their training.
She had found out that the current year group were invited to London and she had been emailing reasons why she should be allowed to attend in person too – in spite of the fact that she had already completed the programme. Over the course of three months, she had taken her grievance to everyone who would listen (and those who wouldn’t) only stopping short of emailing the CEO himself. So yes, Ally was on my radar… and she was on every single attendee list for the sessions in her time zone.
Curious…
I found a couple of other frequent attendees, all new hires within the previous six months…
I decided to take a closer look at my attendee data – this time looking not only at the attendee numbers, but who these people were. What country were they in, what level of seniority, what gender? And I compared the output against last year’s data.
Disappointing…
Despite the numbers, we had only engaged 15% of our global employees. Initially, it had looked like an explosion of numbers from last year and we had attributed it to the hard work we’d put into diversifying our internal marketing strategy to reach more people and promote the session recordings.
But looking at the people behind the numbers, the reality couldn’t have been clearer. We had successfully engaged the people who were already engaged.
Furthermore, due to the male-dominated nature of the client industry, we had focused more of our efforts this time on ensuring all of our materials, language and topics were accessible to female employees (supported by a specialist D&I resource).
But as the data showed, women were actually overrepresented in the attendee data – and they had been for the previous year too.
The big surprise
The people who were least represented are our biggest cohort – male, operations, approx. 3-5 years into their careers. These people were too busy running around executing projects on site to sign up for the sessions or watch the recordings.
I spoke to the operations manager, he didn’t seem surprised. This population were fee earners, or significantly contributed to the fee earners so they were measured and managed by their capacity metrics. This cohort has to spend 80% of time on project work, and have 20% remaining for non-chargeable work, including meeting performance objectives, submitting expenses and attending team meetings. They simply don’t have time to broaden their industry knowledge with optional knowledge-sharing sessions.
I presented my findings to the talent director.
It was clear we had the attention of the leaders in the business, because they wanted to deliver sessions. And we had a captive audience of office-based, early-career attendees. But there was a huge attendance black hole after that. Together, we worked on a revised engagement plan, working with operations to establish permitted “learning hours” that could be included within the 80% utilisation metric.
So next time you are tasked with gathering bums-on-seats data, don’t baulk at the task. Instead, look for opportunities to explore the narrative behind it.
Two key takeaways
Not all bums are created equal
Whilst we certainly didn’t lament the number of early-career attendees, the sessions were more beneficial to established employees. We also didn’t need to worry ourselves so much with the targeted marketing for female employees, as they seemed to find the sessions accessible with or without our interference.
Absent bums matter too
When analysing your attendee data, look for who isn’t there. Those who don’t sign up, or sign up then don’t attend, can tell you a lot about how your learning culture manifests in the business during the normal day-to-day running of things.
