Optimizing Learning & Development in our New Reality

As the world continues its battle with COVID-19, most employees who can are working from home. In this new remote environment, learning & development (L&D) are crucial not only for employee growth and retention, but also for enabling workforce agility and closing future skills gaps. As McKinsey recently pointed out, businesses can’t afford to put capability building on hold. Whether they are focused on upskilling within business units or corporate-wide transformation, companies must move forward with critical workplace L&D initiatives, especially as the world will be dealing with the pandemic well into 2021.

The benefits of investing in L&D are many. It leads to increased employee loyalty and retention, a more skilled workforce, increased corporate agility, and better business results. L&D upskills employees through course content and self-learning – which could come from massive open online courses (MOOCs) such as UDEMY or micro-learning platforms which allow corporations to add documents, video attachments and hyperlinks to enrich content, enabling organizational knowledge to be shared. L&D also is crucial for understanding how to comply with new policy and legislation introduced by COVID-19. Finally, L&D builds psychological resilience by disrupting routine and enabling employees to connect in a way that many are missing by facilitating engagement among peers and leaders, and even fostering mentoring relationships. Such resilience directly develops employees’ agility and flexibility, and an organization can only be as agile and flexible as its employees.

Rethinking Employee L&D

First, let’s define learning and development and address how our current situation impacts both. While they are often lumped together, there is a distinction between the two. From an HR perspective, learning is a process that increases knowledge. Development is about mastering skills, incorporating them into behavior, and turning them into habits. In other words, learning happens first and development is the ongoing practice and refinement of what was learned to turn those skills into behaviors.

Learning in socially distant times

Humans are social creatures. Even “antisocial” people get close enough to the group to let you know they are antisocial. When it comes to learning, the current environment has presented a number of obstacles. Being physically isolated has removed the natural situations in which we congregate, connect, and learn. Logistically, learning no longer is as easy as finding an instructor, reserving a room or meeting link, and signing people up for classes. In a sometimes chaotic work-from-home environment, finding time to sit down to complete several hours of course work can seem daunting. “Bite-sized” learning sessions can be more manageable, and personalized for the employee.

How we communicate is more important than ever before, too. There is an opportunity to improve organizations’ digital communications and innovation capabilities to meet the transformation of today’s corporate workforce. New technologies offer communities, collaboration, check-ins, polls, policy, and sentiment reporting all from a single platform.

Stress and mental health are compounding the challenges in this area. According to the World Health Organization, depression and anxiety cost the global economy $1 trillion per year in lost productivity. In the United States, for every $1 put into scaled up treatment for common mental disorders, there is a return of $4 in improved health and productivity. Your employees might be worrying about job stability, suffering financially, contending with working while also teaching children, and more. Many are dealing with more than one of these struggles, creating a perfect storm for chronic stress, in which sustained levels of the stress hormone cortisol affect cognition and memory and thereby an ability to learn.

Development in a work-from-home environment

Development requires consistent practice and refinement. In this time that is anything but consistent, its biggest challenge is intentionality in two areas: the practice and the person. It's not as easy to grab an impromptu lunch or coffee, or gather together to work on specific development. Instead, employees must be much more intentional, scheduling Zoom or Microsoft Teams meetings or phone calls during which they might practice a particular skill. Then, after they practice and receive feedback, they must intentionally practice again, without prompts from a manager or colleague that would come more naturally if they saw each other regularly in an office.

When it comes to measuring performance in this area, check-ins are a trust-based approach that can help ensure employee development is on track through relationship building, providing clarifications, coaching, and mentoring around specific projects and goals to get the best development and business outcome.

Embracing L&D in a Remote World

For most sectors of the market, the first six months of the pandemic were reactionary. When offices shut down and sent employees home, organizations that weren’t already remote were not prepared for this new way of working. L&D programs took a hit. However, as companies settle into better rhythms and become adept at using technology to stay connected, they are embracing new strategies and solutions for delivering these much-needed L&D programs.

A clear understanding of corporate culture and receptivity to change is the first place to start. If employees weren’t receptive to change before, they likely will be resistant to newly proposed training and processes. To address this, leaders must ask themselves (and preemptively answer for employees):

·      Why are we doing something “new?”

·      Why now?

·      What is the benefit for the employee?

·      How will we support the initiative?

·      When do we expect our employees to engage in this initiative?

Again, intentionality is crucial. Pre-pandemic, the daily workings of the organization – from new hires to new products to new procedures – likely drove L&D programs. Now, however, L&D has an opportunity to proactively and intentionally engage its workforce. By talking with leaders and employees, L&D can uncover learning gaps and pain points, delivering solutions that solve current problems and positioning the organization strongly for the future.

To this end, employees should be encouraged to do more self-learning. There is an amazing array of self-learning and development platforms available allowing employees to partake in individual development at a very low cost. This concept works well with the idea of life-long learning.  

Leaders can leverage remote mentoring, coaching, check-ins, and wellbeing, as well as new measures of performance to ensure their employees are taking responsibility for self-development and enable organizations to develop their own specific content, which can be done through solutions such as People First communities.

Finally, make L&D a part of your HR system. This allows you to recognize and reward the behaviors and skills you desire as an organization, whether at the individual or small group level, or across the entire business. Then, you can encourage others to follow by highlighting the desired behavior or activity and then link it to courses that can help employees learn that particular skill or behavior. When L&D is integrated with your HRIS, you can associate it with rewards and recognition, thus empowering employees – and the organizations they work for – to reach their full potential.

Investing in L&D is Investing in the Future

The new normal of constant change and upheaval amplifies the return an L&D investment will yield. Why? When employees feel invested in, they feel valued. When they feel valued, they willingly give more. When they willingly give more, they feel more fulfilled, and the business reaps the benefits of investing. Moreover, L&D is a way to close future skills gaps, enable workforce agility, and ensure your business will perform better with more skilled, resilient employees who effectively can meet shifting market demands.

This has been a very difficult season for many people and organizations, yet some of the greatest discoveries come from times of great challenge. If a business chooses to invest in the resilience of its employees through L&D, it will come out of this time more agile, adaptable, and ready to take on whatever the future might bring. Feel free to reach out to me at [email protected] if you’d like to speak more about L&D in times of uncertainty.