The path towards making great virtual programs

The L&D function is humankind’s response to uncertainty.

If there was no change, there would be perpetual stability, and people would not need to learn new things or develop themselves.

But change brings new problems and so the biggest skill an L&D professional needs is to keep moving through problems rather than being fazed by them.

Let me give you a recent example:

In Feb 2020, a nationwide lockdown was implemented in response to the coronavirus pandemic.

Problem: Every in-person workshop was cancelled for a year. Training companies like ours (Stillwater) were at risk of going bankrupt. L&D professionals were at a loss at how to help their people learn during this crisis.

Solution: Every training company tried to deliver virtual webinars through Zoom. Every L&D professional shrugged and decided to go for it.

Problem: More people were dying of boredom than from the virus. Webinars were often one person, or a small panel of people, talking while the audience watched passively with their cameras off. People very quickly got webinar aversion. But what was the alternative?

Solution: Different training companies tried different things. One of the things that ours tried was purely video-based courses, like Udemy or Coursera. Maybe if people learned at their own speed and pace, they would be more engaged, we hypothesized.

Problem: Only a very small number of people actually complete purely online programs at these sites (as low as 2-3%). There is no external accountability, and most people lack the discipline to schedule time to do an online course in addition to their daily operational work and family responsibilities. When people attend an in-person workshop, they are a captive audience, and we can coax them into the program over the course of a couple of days. In covid world training participants were not captive. They were wild and free :-o

Solution: We created a platform where people could fill in their answers to reflection questions after watching the videos, and we promised them that we (leadership coaches) would give them individualized feedback on their answers. We thought that would provide more incentive to watch the videos and do the homework.

Problem: Several of the participants called the program life changing and it was considered a huge success internally (the budget was tripled for the next program). However, we had to invest so much time in following up on participants and in writing feedback, that in normal times the program would have effectively been loss making for us. It wasn’t in covid times of course, since we had no other work coming our way for a while.

Solution: We decided to blend asynchronous prework (theory videos) combined with live virtual Zoom sessions (which took the place of time-consuming written feedback) that contained 0 theory and were very experiential and interactive.

Problem: Participants turned up to the live sessions without watching prework videos, and were lost in the live sessions that assumed basic knowledge from the video content that could be built on.

Solution: We designed the live sessions so that people would get value from them even if they hadn’t done the prework and sent the videos as an optional extra.

Problem: Hardly any business professionals watch ‘optional extra’ content in a training program. Although we found ways of doing complex interactive exercises in live virtual sessions, we felt that participants would get a lot more value from doing the prework theory as well.

Solution: We changed the questions in the prework to quantitative questions rather than reflection questions and sent the scores to the participants to create some pressure on them to not be near the bottom of the rankings.

Problem: We worried that we were putting too much pressure on people by giving them ‘marks’ that were sent to their entire ‘program batch’. And quantitative questions don’t create as much value for participants compared to written reflection answers. So we changed from quantitative questions to qualitative questions in the prework. But written answers might make the prework too long for participants to invest in.

Solution: We told participants to write as much or as little as they wanted and that seemed to work to an extent. Some wrote a lot; some wrote a little. But everybody seemed to appreciate the freedom they were given to determine the length of their responses. And most people seemed to answer the questions quite sincerely (if they did the prework).

Problem: One of the problems we faced in the live virtual sessions was that most participants prefer to keep their videos off. This makes them less likely to engage with questions put to the group, makes them more passive, and they get less value.

Note: These were not problems in small workshops of 15-20 people, which worked very well virtually (better than in-person workshops). These were problems with workshops with 30-75 people.

Solution: Ask participants to commit to keep their videos on.

Problem: Some have genuine issues with bandwidth, and it is hard to know if they’re keeping their videos off because of IT issues, or just because they want to passively absorb content rather than participate. It was impossible therefore to hold them accountable to their commitment of keeping their videos on, and very quickly many of them would switch their videos off. Attendance reports are also not helpful, because they only tell you how many minutes somebody was on a zoom session, but not whether they were actually multi-tasking while keeping their videos off.

Solution: The only really trustworthy indication of participant engagement (in absence of visual feedback) turned out to be their marks in quantitative quizzes in the prework. The solution we’re going to turn to is getting buy in from client HR to send this to participants so that they know that this is data that people are looking at. Once people do the prework, then they usually participate in the live sessions because they’ve become curious about the subject.

Problem: In our experience there are three kinds of people in a training program. 33% who are determined to learn no matter what, 33% who will learn if the training is interesting, 33% who are too distracted with urgent work pressures to really fully concentrate. In online trainings the top 33% create considerably more value, the middle 33% create about the same value, and the distracted 33% create almost no value. But then the bottom 33% use the excuse of ‘the training was virtual so not so helpful’ and that will put pressure on the L&D professionals to go back to in person programs as soon as the pandemic ends to not get those vocal negative reviews.

Solution: We need to create lots of case studies and testimonials of success stories while in person programs are still largely frowned upon, so that post pandemic we can make a case to L&D that virtual programs will be more impactful if we can change mindsets. We can only do that if we really believe that virtual trainings are a better way to do things (which we at Stillwater do).

Problem:

Let me stop here, because this problem-solution loop is going to exist as long as there is change in the universe, which is by my guess, likely to be till the end of the universe.

If you want to be a great L&D professional here’s what I feel you’ve got to internalize.

Problems aren’t bad news.

They are the reason for your existence ??.

Without problems, there would be nothing for you to do.

Don’t look for the day that you will finally have solved all those pesky problems. That would be setting yourself up for another frustrating day at the office tomorrow.

When a problem turns up, don’t give up or feel overwhelmed. Grin, roll up your sleeves, and go find the solution.

When you find the solution, don’t think that’s the end of the journey. Pat yourself on the back, go have a pizza party, and get ready for the next problem that’s just about to collide into your consciousness.

Don’t fight this reality.

Embrace it.

Enjoy it.

Cherish it.

This is your path.

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