I thought the biggest challenge of the pandemics would be transferring trainings to the virtual. Now I see how wrong I was…

When in March, all work went to home-office, and all meetings moved to Teams, Zoom and Hangout corporate training had to adjust and evolve. As the business got frozen, we had to keep our budget and do everything by ourselves. First, we trained internal trainers in conducting virtual trainings. Later, we created training programs on virtual meetings and teamwork for all the people who started using apps to contact their teams.

In the meantime, we had to switch our onboarding to online. Keeping in mind that the most significant part of Sodexo employees is located in our Client’s sites, not in our offices, we had to ensure the best possible onboarding experience for people who don’t have their computers.

We prepared all sorts of movies, podcasts, and remote exercises for the managers who wanted to conduct trainings by themselves. Sometimes I joke that we switched from Learning & Development department to Movies and Radio production department.

But now, as all of our activities fit into their place, I see the biggest challenge for L&D departments – the mental health of employees.

Since March, we all struggle with situations and emotions which are widespread among the whole world:

1. Anxiety and fear for the health and lives of ours and our families. 
2. Lack of privacy and personal space due to home-schooling, and both parents are working from home.
3. Lack of boundaries between work and private time – many people lost their work-life balance and sit on their laptops for many many hours after COB.
4. Fear of losing financial stability – constant media information about crisis and potential lay-offs can undermine every employee. 

 All of the above affects our psychological condition, stress levels, and motivation. Someone could say that mental health is not L&D business, but even if we do our job right, if we create the best possible virtual trainings but people get depression or burnout – I won’t have anyone to teach. 

So, my responsibility is to teach them the psychological first-aid kit. But the difficulties show up like a mole in a popular childens’ game. I cannot do relaxation training when my participants sit in one room with their children on home-schooling. I can’t teach work-life balance when people are afraid of the crisis. And even if I create the best e-learning on emotional well-being, people read it in between e-mails, the whole project is pointless.

I’m not sure if this project possible, but I know one thing. If we, L&D execs, won’t do anything about it – we will be in the front seat of a short drive to a global psychological crisis.

However, I trust in people’s need to help each other. We have to show them how and one of the possible solutions is coaching, or as I sometimes call it, pulling people up one-by-one. First, we need to focus on the company’s top-level and the most trusted people. If we equip them with the right tools and resilience, they may spread it across the company. We must keep in mind that we are fighting not only for the business outcome but for the survival of families, friendships, and businesses.