If 2021 has taught us nothing else, it’s the importance of being nimble, flexible and meeting our employees where they thrive. The when, where and how of workforce collaboration is being redefined, and the hybrid workplace is quickly becoming a reality.
The pandemic accelerated changes in the workplace setting: You can now find employees who work entirely remote, employees who work in an office space and employees who split their time between home and office.
Of course, this concept isn’t all new.Virtual workers have been around for a while. The hybrid workplace shares many characteristics with the virtual model, but has one fundamental difference: The virtual workplace is a worker accommodation, but a hybrid workforce is a deliberate organizational strategy.
It’s important to enable a hybrid workforce wherever the employee is located. But what works today won’t necessarily work tomorrow, and those working in the learning and development space should be prepared to continually evolve to meet a range of in-the-moment-of-learning needs.
Actions learning leaders can take now
It’s on us to be prepared to meet the needs of the hybrid workforce. Here are five steps you can take to align your L&D strategy to the unique needs of your hybrid workforce.
Create a learner experience playbook. A learner experience playbook is a powerful tool in crafting intentional positive learning experiences across the hybrid workforce. If you’ve seen a customer experience playbook, you have a good idea of how one for learners can help. Learner experience playbooks are scalable and repeatable guides that enable an L&D organization to create a consistent, brand-aligned learner experience.
As the organization integrates new technologies effectively, these playbooks support the rollout. They help nurture a culture, define critical learner experience moments and provide clear visions of what good looks like.
These playbooks can help you meet your learners at any of the five moments of learning need. With a learner experience playbook, we meet our learners’ needs, whether they’re learning something new, learning more, applying what they’ve learned, solving problems or changing the way they do something.
Perhaps, most critically, these playbooks ensure consistency across learner journeys from start to finish. They expand to allow for the unique needs of each initiative, and empower designers to craft seamless, simple and consistent learning experiences for the hybrid workforce.
Refine your measurement map. As your employees adjust to a hybrid workplace model, L&D analytics are key to understanding how your programs are performing versus how they are expected to perform. It is vital to be able to prove your L&D programs are effective and impact the success of your organization.
Your measurement map and plan should help answer the tough questions every organization faces. Measurement maps offer visual logic chains that draw lines from the most lagging business indicators to the leading behaviors and metrics. A well-crafted measurement map will help answer these questions:
- Are the learning initiatives’ goals in alignment with the objectives of the business? Are you achieving those objectives? If not, why?
- Are the employees in the hybrid environment achieving mastery quicker?
- Are the employees transferring skills to the workplace?
- Are the employees having a positive impact on key business metrics?
In addition to the measurement map, you will need to identify when, where and how you will collect the data to gain insights. When you have a measurement map and a plan crafted to measure your hybrid workforce, you gain critical insights into how to improve your learning initiatives.
Develop leadership mindsets that enable the hybrid workforce. When leading a hybrid workforce, leaders need to first think digitally and virtually. In scenarios such as onboarding to collaborative meetings, leaders need to assume that at least some of their team will be virtual. A hybrid leader needs to think from the perspective of four key leadership mindsets — agile, inclusive, enterprise and growth — and apply these mindsets to this new context.
- Agile mindset: Leaders with this mindset recognize success in a complex and volatile world requires flexibility, adaptation, innovation and resilience. Agile leaders have set a goal and are disciplined about reaching it, and they happen to have an eraser at the end of their pencils so they can redraw the plan to reach the goal as necessary. With this mindset, we fail fast, recover just as quickly, and achieve success by being nimble in the ways we think and act. These lessons in agility remind leaders that they can approach their role differently and move with speed. An agile mindset includes keeping an open mind regarding technology.
- Inclusive mindset: Leaders with this mindset know that contribution and performance are unleashed in diverse and inclusive environments. When a significant portion of your workforce works at a distance, embracing this mindset becomes more challenging. The transition to hybrid will include an increased focus on inclusivity. Employees are speaking up, and want to be involved in the decision-making process regarding hybrid arrangements. Equity will be a key focus in leader communications, the structure of meetings and in the way career development is addressed to avoid an “us” versus “them” mentality among in-office and remote team members. Inclusive leaders create psychological safety. When psychological safety is present, individuals feel comfortable surfacing ideas — including those that may be out of the ordinary — and it is more likely that they will surface innovative ideas again in the future.
- Enterprise mindset: Leaders with this mindset see success is maximized when we prioritize the needs of the larger organization as it shifts to a hybrid workforce. With this mindset, all decisions in a team or business unit are made for the greater good of the company. A hybrid leader balances meeting individual and team needs while keeping the goals of the organization and customers top of mind regardless of physical scenarios.
- Growth mindset: Leaders with this mindset use effort to cultivate skills and behaviors. Challenges, obstacles and feedback become opportunities to grow and learn. The path to an effective hybrid workforce will take time to refine. These leaders have a high tolerance for failure, and view any issues not as setbacks but as opportunities to grow. After all, they know obstacles and impediments are not byproducts of innovation — they are drivers of it and create the space for further growth.
Incorporate a system of sustainable innovation. We live in a world of hype and shiny objects, and the L&D world is no different. But innovation is not about grabbing for the most-hyped innovation. It’s about exploring the art of the possible to find the business of the viable. It’s about answering our “how might we?” questions with the tools we can readily access.
Sustainable innovation is about working within parameters, taking measured steps and understanding the affordance of these tools at hand or the tools you want to use. It’s best supported with an innovation capability. Keep in mind that innovation is not an event. It is not a program. It is not even just an approach or a process. Innovation is a real-time, every day, across-time, multidimensional stream of vision, strategy, tactics, operations, expertise and performance execution. Innovation is applied by people to fundamentally add value to customers, owners, stakeholders and the workforce.
By establishing a sustainable approach, you can help identify a proactive learning technology roadmap, build meaningful relationships with IT and HR to map the tools to support the organization, and ultimately optimize the investments you have made already.
By design, a sustainable innovation program can help organizations avoid the “shiny object syndrome.” Innovation programs give organizations space to:
- Discover: Look at the business, organization and industry for ideas, inspirations, technologies, pain points and trends.
- Refine: Link the idea, inspiration, pain point or trend to a business need; hypothesize the impact and prioritize efforts.
- Experiment: Design an approach to experiment, test and learn.
- Reflect and share: Reflect on what was learned, what questions were answered, potential applications and new questions to explore.
- Integrate: Progress viable innovations from concept to relevant business practices.
Optimize your technology ecosystems. A seamless hybrid workplace experience is built, in part, with an optimized technology ecosystem. A strategy for establishing that ecosystem is developing a survive, revive and thrive roadmap. Most organizations find themselves in the first step of this roadmap — “survive.” Think of the early days of the pandemic, when we were quickly converting instructor-led training to a virtual setting, and working quickly to ramp up virtual delivery. “Revive” means breathing new energy into L&D. When we revive, we look at readily accessible tech and uncover new affordances for it, optimizing our investments. The “thrive” concept focuses beyond simply converting content we have to virtual formats and structuring L&Din new ways that can support employees’ preferred learning habits with the goal to build skills collaboratively over time.
Many companies might wrap matters up to survive, and never move on to revive or — the best part — thrive. The next steps aren’t difficult, but they do take consistency and forecasting. Start with a three-year roadmap.
During the pandemic, the priority was to create an alternative to face-to-face working and learning, such as finding a VILT or a MOOC. Beyond that, into year two, an organization might begin looking at alternatives to web-based training, perhaps by exploring adaptive learning. Year three might expand to curation-focused learning.
A roadmap to optimized technology ecosystems includes short-, middle- and long-term views of your workforce’s growth based on organizational tech growth. It’s about being more efficient in what you roll out and when and how you roll it out, rather than diving in headfirst. A roadmap provides an opportunity to stabilize and plan the best approaches for your hybrid workforce.
It all comes back to intentionality
As we continue to develop and hone our hybrid workforce models, it’s critical that we consistently create learning experiences that resonate with our hybrid workforces, wherever and whenever our employees are learning. When you work through these five actions, you give your organization intentionality, provide guidance to your leadership and employees, and build a resilient, continuously evolving hybrid workforce.
