The challenge of COVID-19
With the onset of COVID-19, the challenge for all Learning and Development teams is how to maintain individual development without the need for any face-to-face workshops and seminars.
The challenge of getting people to workshops has now been replaced with the challenge of providing everyone with learning and development that fits around their new way of working and covers everything they need, when they need it.
Changing the way our team works
We’ve seen the whole business adapt in an agile and flexible way to the new ways of working. As a team, we ensure we meet every morning to discuss what we have going on each day. This is particularly important as there are key meetings happening in the business that may drive what we need to do, sometimes on a daily basis. Where focus may be one day on developing something, the focus may need to switch following an update from the business, and need to be delivered rapidly to meet the needs of our customers.
We’re working on Focus Phases. Phase One has been to ensure we help the business adapt to the new ways of working and ensuring they set themselves up to be effective in this early transition time. We curated guidance, tips and tools under the heading of ‘8 Dimensions to Wellbeing’ focusing on areas such as Social, Environmental, Emotional and Physical aspects.
Phase Two will be to look at the short-term development that might be needed once the transition to the current ways of working becomes ‘Business as Unusual’, where the support that has been curated in Phase One is less important to individuals.
Phase 3 will then be considering what things might look like in the longer term, with an understanding that everything might look very different. However, we now see this as an opportunity for L&D to be at the forefront of the new ‘Business as Unusual’ format!
Making use of our existing tools and technology
We’ve experimented with a few tools but will be looking to make use of those that we currently have in the business. We’ll be looking to deliver our virtual sessions with individuals and groups over Teams, which we’re learning ourselves on the hoof! It’s a very different way of working to having people sharing exercises in the classroom.
We’re also encouraging self-learning and development through Yammer. It’s a great tool for the business to start to share learning together and we’ll be encouraging everyone to start using #TodayILearned and #TIL – we all know the power of the hashtag from other social sites.
Business-led learning and development
We’ll be looking at a mixture of really current courses and how we can deliver them in a very different way, but also encouraging the business to start asking for development as well. Over the past decade, the term 70:20:10 has been a mantra for Learning &Development teams (Learning & developing through Experience [70], Each other [20] and Classroom [10]) and the current situation gives everyone a great opportunity to now focus on the 90% outside the classroom.
We’ll still run some of those structured courses, but they might look and feel very different to before. Terms such as ‘Blended Learning’ (where we learn via electronic and online media as well as traditional face-to-face workshops) and ‘Flipped Learning’ (where we are introduced to learning prior to a session, with ‘classroom’ time being used to deepen knowledge and understanding through peer discussion and activities – again the 90%).
As the social distancing measures look to be here to stay for a while yet, it’s important that organisations adapt. We need to stay focused on the future as well as the present and adapt to a new normal. It’s also important to remember that the changes and developments we are making in these times won’t be wasted when things go back to normal, whenever that may be.
It is likely that we can expect to see changes to how we work carried forward in the future. While being forced so suddenly to work in a more agile way has been a challenge, it has also allowed people to see how organisations can successfully continue to function when colleagues are outside of an office environment – we continue to work hard and deliver what is needed and beyond. I expect that agile working in one form or another will be a positive to come out of this situation, and thus developing more flexible means of learning and development is not only needed now, but moving out of COVID19 too.
People Development Advisor