Imagine a new leader joined your organization during the pandemic. They’re mid-career, juggling the demands of family life and managing a team whom they’ve never met in person. They want to develop leadership skills and authentically connect. They took this job because it offered flexibility to work where and when they want — autonomy they’ve long craved. But after reviewing the various ways to engage in learning, suddenly these myriad choices feel overwhelming. How do they choose the optimal way to spend precious and limited time to learn?
Many learning leaders are now on the brink of redesigning new pathways to professional greatness. Choices in how to learn are in abundance. What worked before may not work at all now, or won’t yield the same results. Empowering learners to choose what works best for them can enable growth rather than facilitate the passive consumption of information. But how might learning executives use more choices in learning as an advantage?
Here are four key steps for learning leaders to consider when evaluating plentiful learning options:
- Define what business objectives align to the benefits of remote learning experiences.
- Define what business objectives align to the benefits of in-person learning.
- Evaluate and challenge the organization’s beliefs about collaboration and creativity at work and analyze data that support them.
- Co-design personalized paths with learners to optimize for choice in our new world of work.
Let’s dive into each step.
Remote learning offers newly discovered benefits. By early 2020, learning executives assumed the responsibility of bringing learning into virtual environments. For some, this meant rapid transformation in the delivery approach, including eliminating in-person experiences and migrating them online.
Remote learning presents unique challenges. In the early days of the pandemic, I facilitated a workshop with a mix of participants: those at home, those onsite with masks and those with cameras turned off. Without consistent real-time visual feedback cues, I suspect my ability to “read the room” was severely impaired. With experimentation and a healthy dose of humility, I discovered new ways to connect.
But the benefits of remote learning can be significant:
- Reduced friction to achieve participation at the click of a button.
- Increased modes of oral and written communication streams, from live chat feeds to emojis to sharing ideas in live collaboration platforms.
- More scalable, on demand, cost-effective solutions that reach larger audiences.
- The potential for reducing implicit or unconscious bias.
This last discovered benefit to the remote learning environment may be the most significant insight. Video conferences reduce us to small squares on the screen. In many ways, it’s the great equalizer. By making the owner of ideas essentially anonymous, content may be evaluated based on merit, rather than the source.
Naomi Davidson, a former L&D executive and now head of people at Anyscale, shared, “My brother is in a wheelchair. He’s a quadriplegic and a lawyer. He was one of those people dialing in remotely whereas everyone else was in the room. That diminishes his presence in the room dramatically. Now that we’re all on camera now, there’s almost no difference between him, you and me. While we may be moving around more, he’s equally in the room and equally present. Things like his wheelchair that a lot of people are distracted by suddenly don’t matter as much.”
Consider:
- Does the business need ways to quickly distribute learning in multiple places?
- How can the business use technology to its advantage to collaborate, reduce bias and achieve greater scale?
The skills needed to maximize the benefit of remote learning can be acquired with effort and practice. Many have taken important steps of creating breakout room discussions and building regular, diverse modes of interaction. Leaders can now engage technology to host listening circles or meetings for pure social connection. And some have adopted parallel online working hours to mimic the experience of working alongside colleagues in the office or signal when they’re open to an unsolicited chat.
Davidson says she recalled a moment mid-pandemic when she remotely joined her new company’s team-building event. “I turned off my camera and listened to them talking and I felt like wow, this [is] what it felt like to go to my office and hear people talking about the challenges of the day. I learned about this team, I got closer to one of the leaders, and I could see the love that his team had for him. It gave me a real feel for things that I would normally not have been able to pick up. They were really interacting, and I was able to be a part of the room without being in the room.”
These new ways of engaging technology can move us beyond a passive e-learning course. Even if some live online learning experiences don’t scale, they may enable virtual sharing of energy, ideas and build real-time connections. In some situations, these have the potential for higher impact and may outweigh the benefits of in-person learning experiences. As more companies migrate to hybrid or remote-first structures, remote learning is here to stay.
In-person learning offers deeper skill building and social stickiness. When we come together to share a meal or co-create a tactile project, we cement human relationships. These moments can build meaningful shared history within an organization. I vividly remember a pre-pandemic team-building exercise where colleagues and I built guitars for charity. It was hands on, creative and required collaboration and teamwork. Non-verbal messages were transmitted. We bonded. Some experiences simply can’t be replicated remotely.
Because of these rich layers of in-person communication, some believe the content of those experiences can go deeper, exploring controversial topics that may evoke strong emotions. In person, learning leaders can move beyond Bloom’s Taxonomy’s “understanding” level of learning and into “evaluation” and “creation.” With a trusted guide, these learning experiences can be transformational.
But in-person learning also comes at a cost. John Foster, chief people officer of TrueCar, explains, “Bringing people together in-person is precious, expensive and rare. So only use that mode when you’re going to get the best possible return on investment. It’s not that we shouldn’t do it. When we do it, we should be aware of how expensive it is.”
Consider:
- Does the business require learning and interaction with physical material, and if so, is there a creative way to replicate the experience virtually?
- Is the content of the learning sensitive or emotionally charged? (For example, discussing race relations at work or learning about a reorganization of your team.)
- Is the business objective to build relationships and strengthen social bonds, particularly among people who don’t know each other well?
These investments may become less frequent in the future, which demands a bigger emphasis on the quality and a commitment to measuring results and ROI. We can then thoughtfully select moments to learn in co-located spaces to maximize their impact.
Commonly held beliefs and opportunity for myth busting. After aligning business goals to the benefits of remote and in-person learning, shift to evaluate and challenge the organization’s beliefs about collaboration and creativity at work. There may be leaders who are concerned that more remote learning will result in lost moments of spontaneity and a fractured culture. As learning leaders, it’s important to lean into data versus conjecture. It’s time to bust some myths.
Myth #1: We can’t collaborate online. With the advent of new technology tools, collaboration may require a different approach, but there are new benefits. Davidson runs regular hackathons remotely. “I don’t notice a big difference between the hacks I’ve run in person and the hacks I run [remotely],” she says. “We’re immediately productive and have an artifact coming out of it.”
Myth #2: We lose spontaneous interaction online. While you may enjoy the serendipity of bumping into a colleague in the hallway, Foster is quick to acknowledge that we should reassess the value gained from those micro interactions. Technology can enable organic moments of shared learning. It merely requires a social contract between parties to co-create, something we don’t always achieve through spontaneous in-person interaction.
Myth #3: We can’t build authentic relationships online. Many coaching and mentorship relationships have always been virtual. And global teams have long relied on technology to successfully build trusted relationships. Much like in-person connection, it often comes down to the emotional intelligence of each party. Greater empathy and social awareness can be brought into virtual spaces, but those underlying skills still take practice.
Myth #4: We can’t innovate creatively online. Research reveals there’s little evidence to support that requiring people to work together in an office leads to more innovation and creativity. In fact, there’s a greater risk of losing the innovative and diverse talent you’re trying to attract.
Optimizing for choice. There isn’t a one-size-fits-all solution. In many ways, having more choice in how we learn is both a blessing and a curse. After assessing the pros and cons of different methods of learning and dispelling myths, leaders can then focus on optimizing for choice.
Consider:
- Are we falling back on old habits and approaches to learning? Simply because you did it one way before and you can do it that way again, doesn’t mean that’s the best option.
- Are we personalizing learning paths or overly relying on learning that scales? Davidson encourages taking a closer look at how changes actually happen and scale through organizational influencers. “Find those bright spots and invest in them – with deep learning, coaching and cohort-based learning,” she says.
- Are we empowering learners to make wise learning choices? “Spend more time helping people figure out what they need and how they’re going to get it and less time teaching it,” Foster says. “Teach them how to fish. Don’t give the fish.”
- Are we using technology to its fullest? Take time to learn and invest in technology that facilitates stronger connection and collaboration among your audience. Don’t try to replicate an in-person experience and simply move it online.
With multiple ways to learn, learning executives can focus on empowerment. “Empowerment has two parts: opportunity and capacity,” Foster says. “[Learners] now have the opportunity, but maybe not the capacity to make the right choice. Why do I not make choices that are better for me, like learning? Being aware of those choices is the critical factor.”
Remember the new leader who started a job during the pandemic? Imagine they have the option to listen to a curated podcast while walking the dog, read a hand-picked article after the kids are asleep, watch a 30-second video from a peer (to which they can send an instant message of appreciation), engage in a listening circle from their home office to strengthen connection with colleagues and experience quarterly in-person learning experiences that go deep on transformational behavioral change. This is how they can choose their personalized learning journey.
Let’s use choice to our advantage. Let’s do the hard work of elevating the learning experience whenever possible. And, let’s help learners choose what’s best for them – and empower them to seize the opportunity and build capacity in this new era of learning at work.
