Yes, you probably had to read the title again. While we have been striving to embed learning into the flow of work, a year or so back, I began wondering what would happen if I could orchestrate the opposite: get some work done while learning. In this article, I will share some simple tweaks I have been trying out over the past year.
But first, some background: In my first 60 days at a new job, I took a 12-hour flight to meet the seniormost stakeholders and present the awesome learning and development plan that I had put together for the business function that I would be supporting. I was armed with the slickest slide deck that I had vetted several times over with my manager, the global director of learning for the company, as well as the HR director for that function and a couple of peers for good measure.
That Monday, I expected to present my plan in 30 minutes to the leadership team and sweep them off their feet. Adrenalin pumping high, passion for L&D gleaming in my eyes, I started the presentation referring to Josh Bersin and some other very credible research, building up to my 5-point plan for the year. As I read the room, I was not sure of the expressions around the long conference table on the eighth floor — just one below the C-suite. Perhaps it was just a cultural difference, I thought, for I could not yet see anyone gripping the edges of their seat.
I paused for questions and comments. Finally, the head of the function, a senior director in the company, leaned back and said, “This is great.” Good, I thought, but he continued — “…for a Thursday afternoon discourse at the university!” And with that, the bubble burst.
Determined to bounce back, I managed to get multiple one-on-one meetings from members of that leadership team later that day where I desperately tried to piece together where my perfect plan was derailed. In one of those meetings, I received probably the best advice of my career so far. I was told that while my 5-point plan was not the issue (we committed to it later that quarter), and neither were the great research and models, but when the function is already going through several transformations at that point, it simply all seems too academic. While still brilliant, the leadership team couldn’t care less about it, which led to the advice: “All you need, Anjan, is to get sh!t done.” This was indeed valuable advice, arguably in any context, which over the years became my litmus test for designing any learning intervention.
I realized the importance of positioning learning in the right way, so that the benefits become immediately clear to the business. The L&D heart is in the right place while designing, however, care is needed while communicating the plan. A few simple tweaks might be needed to amplify the importance of learning and drive adoption. In the rest of this article, I would like to explore a general design idea and three not-so-conventional learning interventions that help get work done in the flow of learning.
The design – content in context
Strange as it may sound, L&D is not about education. It’s about getting the job done. L&D has a clear mandate to change behaviors in order to align with business strategy and contribute measurably to organizational success.
The occasional perception is that in isolation, courses, workshops and training sessions don’t really get the job done, struggling to make the connection between the content and the business impact. However, when they are side by side in a learning journey that works toward improving a business metric or socializing a desired behavior, learners will embrace a narrative that can help the business see measurable value in adopting it. For the learner, it makes the experience relevant, effortful, spaced, generative and social, which in turn makes the learning stick, as supported by Accenture’s Durable Learning Model.
A learning journey such as the one I share in the diagram below also allows for scalability, based on the number of modules or the complexity of the content.
In addition to creating a clear narrative and thereby an amplified context, learning journeys such as these allow for including a few not-so-conventional elements that have the potential to give back to the business while working toward improving results or changing behavior. Here are three such elements that may be of interest.
Crowdsourcing
Crowdsourcing can be traced back to as early as 594 BC in ancient Athens, but it has a renewed importance in the context of organizations, with the workforce becoming more distributed than ever. Leadership teams operating out of central or regional headquarters often miss out on the insights that front line colleagues gather, and, in many cases, there are no systematic channels to harness these insights for analysis. This is where learning design has an opportunity.
At AkzoNobel, we developed a learning journey to build awareness of the continuous improvement, or simply, “CI,” mindset in the global business services function. We used self-paced and virtual instructor-led sessions to build awareness around the core concepts of identifying and defining problem statements and the various approaches to solving them.
We also designed an exercise to identify real issues on the front lines of the business around the globe. To do this, we leveraged an idea generation platform, which was normally used by the innovation team in research and development, and created a campaign as part of the learning journey where every learner was asked to submit a real business challenge that they personally experienced in their day-to-day work. This helped the central CI teams gain visibility of the front line challenges, and identify global issue patterns where CI projects could be initiated.
Following these learning journey elements, in another, we further leveraged the idea generation platform to distribute each problem statement to several others in the cohort and asked for their objective and subjective inputs on how to address that particular issue. In this way, each problem had already a crowdsourced solution approach, which helped the CI team in their analysis. This simple exercise provided learners with an immediate opportunity to apply the concepts they had just learnt and in return the business gathered valuable insight, which otherwise would not have been visible. Win-win.
Gigs
Another great way to build cross-functional collaboration is to introduce an internal gig platform. Different functions often need the same competencies to be developed, such as an agile way of working or customer centricity. Gig or project-based opportunities within the organization can facilitate collaboration while developing individual competencies.
Let’s take the example of Robin in HR, who is very interested in developing her agility skills, and as part of her development objective had completed advanced courses on how to be a Scrum Master. She is now looking for an agility project to polish her newly acquired skills, but there isn’t a project available right away in her function. Many thousands of miles away, Nikhil in marketing is working on a CRM localization project and is shorthanded for a Scrum Master who can run the daily standups. Enter the gig platform: Robin gets to apply her skills, Nikhil gets to complete his project. As a bonus, in addition to being a Scrum Master, Robin also brings the project a fresh perspective, which really helps the team!
Internal job portals can easily be modified to post such project-based opportunities. Each gig or task can be tagged to competencies and proficiency levels and the expected time commitment. This opens up the talent pool, allows for cross-functional and global collaboration and reduces attrition. L&D can play a powerful role by simply linking a filtered feed from the gig platform to the learning experience platform, and with messaging about the importance of development through exposure and experience. Projects tagged to specific competencies can also be included as elements in a learning journey.
Social
One of the effective ways of democratizing learning is by making it social. A lot of knowledge lives in individual heads and hard drives. A couple of years back, we started a challenge on the enterprise social network to mine these tips, tricks and templates using the hashtag #tagaguru. The ask was simple: to share a piece of knowledge and tag three colleagues they knew who were experts or “gurus” in certain areas to take the challenge forward. Those who were tagged had to do the same, continuing the movement. We promoted the movement offline in team meetings and town halls. The initiative involved a target audience of about 1,000 employees and yielded about 5x the number of tips and interactions in about 6 months. It also helped mine a few tools and templates from individuals that were adopted across the function.
Wrapping up
To conclude, a distributed workforce already has enough on their plate with the demands of our “new normal,” in addition to their personal commitments such as homeschooling, caring for the unwell and usual daily household upkeep and chores. They still have an intent to learn and upskill, but strong relevance and convincing context can push them to act on that intention. This poses an interesting challenge for learning experience and program design, which heralds exciting opportunities for closer and more meaningful integration of learning with work in the near future.
Based in Pune, India, Anjan Acharya is a curious learning geek and a technology enthusiast, working as a global faculty lead at AkzoNobel to pay the bills. To comment, email editor@clomedia.com.
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May 18, 2021 at 11:01PM
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Work in the flow of learning - Chief Learning Officer
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