Only 41% of trained employees consistently use the new way. Why teams revert to old habits after training, and the manager move that more than doubles use.
Most employees who go back to the old way after training aren't resisting the change.
They're remembering every change that didn't last.
And the single biggest factor in whether they let go is whether their manager uses the new way first.
Somewhere in your company right now, there's a spreadsheet that isn't supposed to exist anymore.
Somebody built it the old way last Thursday, pasted the result into the new system so the new system would look right, and closed the laptop and went home.
They weren't being difficult.
They finished the training and said fine, and then, quietly, they went back to the version with their own formulas in it.
The one they can run with their eyes closed, and that has never once made them look foolish in a meeting.
If that stings a little, it should.
A report out last week put a number on it: 29% of employees say their company is investing in tools they've quietly stopped using, according to TalentLMS.
That's nearly a third of your people, and they aren't refusing or arguing.
They're waiting it out.
I know that move. I learned it in the nineties.
I was in those rooms, back when the words were re-engineering, restructuring, and continuous improvement meetings, which was that year's term for process improvement.
Then came the big one: empowerment.
If we empower our employees and give them boundaries to live inside, all shall be fixed. We shall never have any problems again.
That was the bill of goods, and it was sold hard.
When something went wrong, nobody asked what happened.
They asked: did you empower them?
Did you give them their boundaries?
Looking back, it's a little comical, and not because the ideas were bad. Some of them were good.
It's because of what everybody on the floor figured out long before the people running the meetings did.
This too shall pass.
Keep your head down, because next year there'll be a new word on the wall.
I've watched the word change ever since, from digital transformation to hybrid to return to office to DEI, and now it's AI first.
The word keeps changing.
What people learned about waiting hasn't.
The report is from TalentLMS, and they gave the move a name: "habit hugging."
They surveyed 1,500 full-time U.S. employees in September 2026, every one trained in the past year on a new tool, a new process, or both.
Only 41% consistently use the new way.
65% say letting go of an old habit is harder than learning a new one.
42% are still using something their manager thinks was replaced.
And the company rarely knows, because companies are more likely to track whether the training got completed (41%) than whether anyone actually uses it (36%).
Here's what I want to be careful about.
The story leaders tell themselves is resistance.
The story the team is living is memory.
I wrote in September that an announced change that never takes hold is almost never a resistance problem.
This is what that looks like one desk at a time.
Everyone on your team has lived through at least one flavor of the day.
They learned, the hard way, that the old way outlasts the new one.
So they keep it, in a bookmark that still works, a notebook under the keyboard, a text to the one coworker who knows the real way.
Not out of spite, but because it's the one thing that's still theirs.
And they're doing it tired.
Gallup reported last week that U.S. employee engagement fell to 29%, the lowest since 2011, and that the sharpest drop was among remote and hybrid employees, particularly in organizations that have adopted AI.
A new tool landing on a worn-out team isn't a change.
It's one more thing to survive.
When the manager uses the new way, 49% of employees use it consistently.
When the manager doesn't, it drops to 22%, less than half, and nothing else in the report comes close.
I'd love to tell you I've never been that manager, but I have, more than once.
You hand something off, and it comes back close but not right, and you can see the three things you'd have done differently before you've finished reading it.
And you take it back, because in the moment you're thinking, I'll just do it myself.
It feels efficient.
What it actually does is tell everyone watching which way is real.
In my first issue I wrote that every culture change has two finish lines, and only one of them ever gets a date.
The training date is the first finish line.
The second is the day the manager stops doing it the old way.
That one never gets scheduled, and it's the only one that counts.
In the spreadsheet. Ask to see how the last report was actually built. If the new system fed a spreadsheet that fed a slide, the new system is decoration.
In the one number anyone reports. "Everyone's been trained" is a date. It isn't a result.
In the manager's workaround. If your managers have a private way of getting it done that skips the new process, so does everyone who reports to them.
In the silence. Nobody saying the new way is wrong isn't agreement. It's people waiting to see if this one lasts.
Pick one thing your company rolled out this year.
Ask three people how they really did that work last week, not how they were supposed to, but how they actually did.
Then ask their manager the same question.
If the answers don't match, you've found exactly where the change stopped, and it probably isn't where you thought.
Then do three things.
Count use, not completion. A finished training is a date on a calendar. Use is the result.
Retire the old way out loud. A new way that arrives without the old way leaving isn't a change, it's two ways, and people pick the one they know.
Pick fewer things to roll out, and keep them longer. Every flavor of the day you abandon teaches your team to wait out the next one.
A new owner brings new systems, and the team that stayed keeps the old ones in a drawer, because the old way is the last thing that's still theirs.
Finding out which way people are actually working in the first weeks, and getting the managers to go first, is the work I do as a fractional culture and organizational development leader.
If that's where your company is, here's how I work.
And I'd like to hear from you: what's the tool or process your company rolled out that quietly went back in the drawer?
Tell me about it. With your permission, and no names, I'd like to share a few in a later piece.
The Hampton Roads Acquisition Record, 65 local deals since 2023 with a source for each, is free.
Shelley D. Smith, the culture curator behind Premier Rapport, is its CEO and the author of Thirsty. A Certified Predictive Index Partner, executive coach, and speaker, she has spent 35+ years across hospitality, franchise operations, and organizational leadership helping companies detect and repair culture before it shows up in the numbers.
Learn more at premierrapport.com/about or start a conversation at premierrapport.com/contact.
TalentLMS, Habit hugging: When old habits block new ways of working, survey of 1,500 full-time U.S. employees, September 2026; released Oct. 27, 2026.
Jim Harter, "U.S. Employee Engagement Below 30% for First Time in 15 Years," Gallup, Oct. 28, 2026.
Premier Rapport, "Nobody Schedules the End of a Culture Change (And That's Exactly the Problem)," The Second Finish Line, issue 1, Sept. 2, 2026.
Premier Rapport, "You've Been Asked to Change How People Work. You Can't Tell Them To," The Second Finish Line, issue 2, Sept. 9, 2026.
What is habit hugging at work?
Habit hugging is TalentLMS's name for employees who finish training on a new tool or process and then quietly go back to the old way. In its September 2026 survey of 1,500 full-time U.S. employees, only 41% consistently used the new way after training, and 42% still used something their manager thought had been replaced.
Why do employees go back to old habits after training?
Usually it's memory, not resistance. Most people have lived through initiatives that were abandoned, so they keep the old way as insurance until they see whether the new one lasts. In the same survey, 65% said letting go of an old habit is harder than learning a new one.
How do managers affect whether a new process sticks?
More than anything else in the data. When managers use the new way themselves, 49% of employees use it consistently. When they don't, it drops to 22%. A manager's private workaround tells the whole team which way is real.
How do you measure whether a change has actually been adopted?
Count use, not completion. Ask three people how they actually did the work last week, then ask their manager the same question. If the answers don't match, that's where the change stopped. TalentLMS found companies are more likely to track whether training was completed (41%) than whether people use what they learned (36%).
Why do culture change initiatives fail?
Every culture change has two finish lines, and only one of them gets a date. The first is the training or launch date. The second is the day managers stop doing it the old way. That second finish line rarely gets scheduled, and it's the one that decides whether the change holds.
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