Workers are ‘habit hugging’ despite new training, survey finds

A new survey from learning management platform TalentLMS has put a name to a phenomenon many L&D professionals already sense in their data: 'habit hugging,' the tendency of employees to cling to familiar processes even after receiving formal training on better alternatives.

The survey, which polled 1,500 U.S. employees, found that fewer than half consistently use new ways of working following training. Among the subset of respondents expected to use artificial intelligence in their roles, more than a third said they sometimes return to older methods — and 73% reported mixing both old and new approaches in their day-to-day work. A telling 60% said their organizations placed greater value on getting results than on using a prescribed new method, which may implicitly sanction the reversion.

**The Manager Multiplier** The most striking finding concerns leadership behavior. Employees whose managers consistently adopted new ways of working did so themselves at a rate of 49% — more than double the 22% adoption rate observed among employees whose managers did not model the change. The implication is clear: learning programs that ignore manager behavior are operating at a structural disadvantage.

That finding aligns with a broader pattern of leadership unpreparedness documented elsewhere. Only 3% of decision-makers surveyed by ManpowerGroup Talent Solutions in a July report rated their leaders as 'highly prepared' to lead AI adoption. Separately, half of the CHROs participating in Gallup's Global CHRO Roundtable in August said they lacked confidence in managers' ability to guide employees through AI transitions.

**A Wider Upskilling Crisis** Habit hugging does not exist in a vacuum. A Randstad Digital report published earlier in the year found that many training programs have failed to keep pace with the speed of AI-driven platform deployment. That research also noted that 1 in 4 workers globally had left their jobs citing a lack of upskilling opportunities — underscoring that the stakes of the adoption gap extend beyond productivity to retention.

**What L&D Leaders Should Do** Epignosis CEO Dimitris Tsingos, whose company is the parent of TalentLMS, framed the challenge in terms of AI's broader promise. 'The real opportunity with AI is to free up human time and brainpower for higher-value work, like judgment, leadership, and problem-solving,' he said in a statement. 'But achieving that potential depends on making new ways of working an integral part of everyday work.'

Practitioners responding to this research are increasingly being asked to do more than design courses. The L&D function must also invest in human skills — emotional intelligence, communication, and collaboration — alongside technical upskilling, while building learning experiences that are job-specific and person-specific rather than generic. Immersive, AI-enabled learning formats are gaining traction as replacements for traditional, classroom-style training modules.

For HR technology buyers, the data adds urgency to evaluating not just what platforms employees are trained on, but how adoption is tracked, reinforced, and socially modeled from the top down.