The best L&D resources of February 2022
Lavinia Mehedin?u
Co-Founder & Learning Architect @ Offbeat | Learning & Development ??
Pretty hard to find a way to introduce February's best resources in L&D with everything that's been happening so close to my home. I don't want to start without acknowledging that some people in my network couldn't care less about work these days. But maybe for others, who are a bit further away from the events, this will be a welcomed distraction and hopefully a helpful resource. I know it is for me.
So here we go. We've been pretty busy at Offbeat in February, launching new programs, revamping old ones, partnering up with really, really cool people, and meeting others that are inspiring us and teaching us important lessons.
In terms of topics, we've seen a lot of chatter about how important leaders are in new workplace set-ups such as the hybrid one. We've also read a lot about shaping the organizational culture in a way that impacts long-term retention and business growth, about performance reviews, how can L&D impact mental health, hence wellbeing, or how facilitation is such an important skill we should all acquire. Without further ado here's what we've been up to and the best L&D resources we shared in February.
First, our programs:
Second, our partners:
Now, enough about us. Let's dive in into the best resources of February 2022.
An interesting view of how strategic planning doesn’t just help organizations move forward by aligning everyone towards the same goal, but it’s also a proactive coping mechanism proven to reduce stress and help us feel more in control. In a world full of uncertainty, Better Up suggests that people who balance optimistic action with thoughtful pragmatism and create space to reflect on and ready themselves for potential outcomes tend to be more successful, hopeful, and less stressed than their peers. I was left with a question. How can we embody these traits and help others with acquiring them as well?
A list you should share with all your people managers. Given how important their role is in retaining employees, they should have the context and the tools to support a balanced, productive environment for their team members. Humu suggests a couple of tips people managers can embrace to re-energize employees.
A very simple tool you can encourage leaders to use in their teams to measure psychological safety levels and reflect on ways to improve it. Additionally, these types of questions can be used in eNPS surveys or any other engagement research you’re doing.
A Notion full of onboarding resources coming from Gather. You'll explore why onboarding matters, every element you should have in your onboarding process, build your own onboarding template, and onboarding best practices & resources.
A deep-dive into how 18F improved their onboarding process while growing from 15 employees to 160, as a global organization. Melody talks about the research they did, the learning modules they started with and how the final product is Intentional, comprehensive, and human-centered.
Now this is a hard question to answer. Although we’re all well aware of the importance of trust in organizations, going from awareness to action might be quite a challenge. This article explores some steps leaders can take to diagnose trust levels and gaps at different levels in the organization, how to prioritize, act, and build trust equity.
One of the most comprehensive resources I’ve ever read about building culture. It gives short, but thoughtful answers to questions such as: at what stage should a company start defining and communicating culture, how do you transform values into behaviors, or how can we build a sense of belonging throughout teams when working remotely?
An interesting overview of some of the culture problems that might go unnoticed in an organization: (1) how decisions are made and executed, (2) how teams communicate and collaborate, (3) how are rewards and recognition structured, and (4) how are mistakes and failures handled. Each category comes with concrete behaviors you can watch out for.
This article brings an interesting point: to make a difference we don’t always have to keep adding, but we can also turn to subtraction. One of the reasons we use adding is because it’s visible, whereas subtracting is not. It left me with a question. Is there anything I should stop doing or what projects, tasks, meetings can we get rid of to improve our life, our programs as L&Ds, and our impact?
This article is marketed to teachers working with children but I think it has huge implications for L&D professionals as well. The questions at the beginning of the article are so relatable to the grown-up world and the underlying idea that behavioral science can and will start impacting learning experience design is applicable to us as well. The three advices at the end of the article are really interesting, and the one I will look more into is focusing on habits, rather than motivation.
This new article from Scott Young introduced me to the ACT-R theory. First, it talks about the two memory systems ACT-R claims we own: procedural & declarative and describes both of them. Second, it explores how we acquire skills, how we solve problems according to ACT-R, and the key implications in learning transfer.
领英推荐
Although it feels like we’re adding something else to our plate, mental health should be something L&D should be concerned with if there’s no other function taking care of it. The success of the business and the success of our programs depend on supporting mental health as well. The nicest idea I got out of Lauren’s article is stimulating awareness and de-stigmatising mental wellbeing as a first step of our involvement.
There’s a shift happening in our industry. In the past we had to go through needs assessment, training plans design, developing and buying content, implementing courses & reinforce completion, and evaluating learning outcomes. Nowadays, we’re moving towards a more data-centric skill assessment, encouraging individuals to identify strengths, guiding people towards relevant opportunities, learning via content, other people & experiences. I think the last shift is one of the most powerful because it’s less about developing content and more about creating experiences.
I think this is the most useful mentorship resource I’ve found out there. The mentoring techniques presented in the infographic were completely new to me. It also clarified the different types of mentors you can have, different mentoring programs you can build, and the types of mentoring. Amazing infographic!
In this resource, Melissa Emler puts a spotlight on why learner agency is important and breaks it down into smaller steps and actions learners can take on the road to agency and learning impact. The journey requires intentionality, forethought, sense-making, self-reactiveness, and self-reflectiveness.
A very good description of why apprenticeships are a better way of helping people learn and grow in comparison to the classroom. I was left with the question of how can we introduce apprenticeships in a world that focuses on scale and where everyone needs to be time-efficient, or if where even supposed to do that.
This Humu article explores the difference between coaching & mentoring and how coaching became a very important responsibility of people managers. If you're looking into deploying coaching programs in your company, you can also get some inspiration from their guidelines on how to identify and empower internal coaches.
This article starts with a definition of learning pathways: a designated sequence of activities, often from different sources and in different formats, devised to develop the skills and behaviors of colleagues. And it goes on with a checklist for how to choose, curate, and motivate people to embark upon eye-opening, horizon-broadening, career-enhancing learning pathways.
Asking people if they need a career coach or not might not be effective. Some might say no because they lack awareness, some might say yes because they say yes to every development opportunity. I liked this article because it gives some concrete examples of when you need a career coach.
Another simple but actionable toolkit from LifeLabs Learning. This one tackles goal-setting from two points of view. First, it explores different organizational competencies regarding goal setting. Second, it walks you through a strategic planning template, pushing you to reflect on goals, links to organizational initiatives, lead indicators, the definition of done, DACI, & others.
A very interesting report packed with data about what drives engagement, retention, and productivity. Beyond that, the strategies section is full of actionable advice and resources for different use cases: (1) supporting people managers, (2) goal setting and reinforcement, (3) improving meetings, and (4) improving one on ones.
A pretty cool guide for LifeLabs Learning talking about chronemics, prioritization, organization, and focus, the challenges you might encounter for each of them, and some easy-to-use tools to apply and overcome all these challenges. I already applied time-audit, pomodoro, and kanban, but I took away the MIT Method and the Time Integrity approach.
The team at Know Your Team (pun intended) put some time into researching performance reviews: their history, purpose, different initiatives to redesign the process, and thoughts or opinions of over 1000 people managers. This is part of what you’ll get from this guide. The other part is the approach they propose based on 7 principles and ways to implement it.
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Truly a pleasure to support Offbeat and everything you're doing to support the L&D sector ?
10+ years in Marketing | Specialist in Social Media & Influencer | Open to Work, now booking 2025 projects ?
3 年Learnerbly ?
Thank you for including us, Lavinia! Every Offbeat subscriber gets a free 7taps Business license this month ??
I'm on a mission to humanize workplaces & learning spaces to accelerate high performance culture. | Chief Learning Officer | Learning Experience Designer | Facilitator | Psychological Safety Trainer | LinkedIn Top Voice
3 年Thrilled to be a part of it! Thank you so much Lavinia Mehedin?u!
Learning & Development, Workplace Conflict Resolution, Meeting Facilitation, Scholar-Practitioner
3 年OFFBEAT has some of the most useful and well curated resources for L&D practitioners. Thank you for your contribution to our profession ??