Rebranding Learning and Development

Learning and development departments are commonly perceived in companies as separate entities in charge of delivering training instead of a critical part of the business. Employees often dread reminders that they have to fulfill training requirements to remain in compliance. They have a lot of work to do, it can wait until tomorrow, or this report cannot wait are some excuses to postpone training until the last possible minute.

In many companies, L&D is really a group that only delivers compliance-related training and rarely breaks away from that role to offer opportunities for employees to gain or strengthen skills or even to reskill. As learning and development professionals, we therefore shouldn’t be surprised if employees dread the thought of spending an entire morning, afternoon, or day in a classroom or online hearing information “because they have to.”

Let’s meet Matilda.

Matilda is the training coordinator for a hospital. She’s friendly and outgoing and knows everyone by name. She is an expert in using the hospital’s learning management system to track compliance with training requirements, continued education hours, and license renewals. She creates and distributes the monthly training schedule and reminds employees and their supervisors of when they must take something. Constantly.

As the end of the year approaches, Matilda has noticed that employees seem to disappear whenever she enters an office or even the break room. It’s as if they expect her to remind them again about something they have to do. She is beginning to feel alienated.

Have you been in Matilda’s situation? What have you done? What can she do?

Employees associate Matilda with compliance-based training. They clearly do not see the value that learning and development adds to their capacity to do their work or to the business. For them, training is an obligation instead of something to look forward to because it is an opportunity to interact with others or gain insights on a topic of interest.

Instead of complaining, Matilda asked a few trusted colleagues to give her input about what was going on. Here are some of the comments she received.

“You are always sending reminders of what we need to do without giving a thought to our workload.”

“Everything is always scheduled for the worst times in our business cycle.”

“We often feel like school children in those training sessions.”

“We see the same people doing the same thing all the time. Can you get new people?”

“I don’t like spending a whole day on something just because we have to check a box.”

“For a change, we would like to choose what we want to learn about, or at least, when we want to do it.”

Clearly, learning and development had a negative reputation among employees. Matilda decided to examine further the current state of the hospital’s learning and development department. She confirmed that the same facilitators always delivered same topics. She also scheduled trainings based on the availability of the facilitators instead of participants’ preferences. Her department did not have a budget for non-compliance-related training, so no skills-related or developmental training had been offered for a long time. Requests for external learning events or coaching were only approved for middle management levels and above. Further, learning and development’s section in the hospital’s intranet only had information about upcoming mandatory training, and very few employees spent time there.

Equipped with the feedback and results of her analysis, Matilda made a business case for her manager to revamp how learning and development supported the hospital. She made the following suggestions.

• Increase the pool of facilitators by developing other subject matter experts to deliver training with the dual purpose of recognizing their expertise and expanding their skills set and bringing in outside consultants.
• Consider business cycles when scheduling training sessions.
• Advertisement
• Survey employees to determine topics of interest for short sessions with different formats and internal resources until funds are allocated for external resources.
• Turn learning and development’s space in the hospital’s intranet into a place where employees can find additional information and resources, such as short informational videos, about topics relevant for their work and personal lives.

After revamping itself, learning and development needed to create a new brand that portrayed it as a group with subject matter experts who could provide ways for employees to acquire skills and knowledge needed to succeed at their jobs and, subsequently, make a difference in business results. This brand had to position the group as a critical component of the business and as a valuable go-to resource for employees. L&D personnel had to be perceived as more than coordinators of typical classroom or online experiences.

Whether your company already has a learning and development department or is in the process of forming one, here are some recommendations for establishing (or re-establishing) department personnel as experts who contribute to the business.

• Partner with marketing, information technology, and communication departments or external experts.
• Create a new logo and visual identity to be used consistently in all communication and materials, including the intranet.
• Portray new identity focused on serving internal clients instead of completing transactions.
• Design coherent programs to address employee and business needs beyond compliance requirements.
• Offer a variety of options for employees to receive information, ranging from flexibility in scheduling to including different modalities to appeal to different learning styles.
• Provide an extensive and up-to-date online repository of information for employees to find answers to their questions.
• Design a communications strategy to support learning and development’s new way of doing business.
• Define what to communicate to different audiences and when to do so.
• Maintain consistency in messages delivered about the value of a learning and development experience.
• Use every available mechanism and media to reach out to employees and their managers.
• Emphasize what’s in it for participants to help them want to choose to attend instead of feeling they have to attend sessions.
• Highlight that skills need to be updated, practiced, and reinforced.
• Answer questions by electronic means within a short turnaround time (for example, 24 hours).

 
Published in ATD LINKS, November 19th 2019