Keeping Learning Alive During and After COVID-19

The current pandemic has demonstrated L&D's flexibility and adaptability, as well as its importance.

Let’s meet Lizzie.

Lizzie is a training coordinator responsible for scheduling mandatory trainings for and ensuring attendance 328 employees. She also is responsible for the corporate learning management system (LMS) where she tracks employee compliance. The company offers learning experiences in a variety of formats, but employees consistently request in-person sessions.

One afternoon in March, Lizzie was scheduling in-person sessions for the following quarter. She had already lined up SMEs to serve as facilitators, reserved the conference rooms, and updated content and training designs. All she needed to do was open course registration and track enrollment. Lizzie thought that her work was done.

By the following Monday, Lizzie was working from home. By 2:00 pm she had already met with her manager and other training coordinators several times from her kitchen table exchanging ideas to address the new needs of employees who had to learn to perform different jobs and to work from home to maintain business continuity. Other employees needed to maintain skills they acquired recently until they could return to the workplace to use them.

Suddenly, Lizzie, the other training coordinators, and her manager had to rethink their entire learning program beyond mandatory trainings and fast. The business could not wait for extensive discussions and consultations. They had to respond quickly because the future of the company and its capacity to respond to the situation depended significantly on the team’s decisions under highly uncertain conditions.

They took several steps:

• Reassigned responsibilities within the team based on areas of expertise and interest to distribute the work to be done
• Identified which roles would be performed remotely and how many employees either were already in those roles or would be assuming them temporarily
• Reviewed the training program required to perform those roles
• Classified the components of the training program in terms of critical, additional value, and nice to have to perform the roles
• Found out which components were already available in virtual format and which would have to be converted
• Divided the audience into two main groups: currently in role but new to remote work versus new to role and remote work to differentiate training content
• Determined which facilitators would be able to design and conduct virtual learning experiences based on their previous experiences and on their willingness to grow professionally
• Surveyed potential participants about their preferences for training duration and scheduling because the line between work and personal lives became very blurred
• Confirmed the type and length of sessions employees preferred
• Prepared a video tutorial with guidelines and best practices for facilitators to become familiar with what they needed to do to convert in-person training into virtual training courses
• Streamlined and chunked the content of each track to accommodate for participants’ shorter attention span, time to practice, and technological challenges
• Asked facilitators to adhere to the guidelines and participant requests as they converted in-person trainings into virtual training courses
• Designed and delivered a general session to address issues about working remotely for both groups with many real-life examples based on anecdotes that employees were already sharing with the L&D team
• Used situations that emerged during the session about remote work—such as a lost Internet connection, dog barking in the background, and someone speaking too quickly—to demonstrate what remote work entailed and, most importantly, what they could do to handle issues

From those first sessions the team learned that:

• Employees needed to reconnect with each other and feel part of a larger community
• Training agendas had to allow time for potential interruptions as well as time for people to share experiences unrelated to training
• Often the same questions had to be answered several times because not everyone was able to hear the answer
• Stories and examples were better than slides to convey information
• Materials had to be prepared for the minimal technological capabilities to make sure that everyone would be able to use them

Now they were ready to fine-tune the training program.

The day before launching the new program, the regional manager asked what the plan was for employees who weren’t currently returning to work. She’d received texts asking what they could do while they waited, and she noted feeling particularly concerned about one employee who did not like to participate in anything virtual.

That’s when the team realized they had focused on shifting gears to the urgent issue at hand—revamping training for critical roles to keep the business going during the emergency—and had lost sight of what the business would need after the pandemic had ended.

Not all employees had embraced technology in the same way, but the L&D team was just as responsible for their learning as they were for everyone else. Back to the drawing board.
The L&D team invited the virtual learning-averse employee to give her input about how they could support her learning during and after the emergency. She became the representative of those employees whose learning styles required other approaches, and her feedback contributed to the creation of a parallel learning track keep employees engaged in learning during the emergency and that could potentially complement other experiences after the business reopened.

This learning track included:

• Easy-to-read flowcharts and diagrams about processes and procedures
• Short videos with tips to work remotely recorded by other employees
• Inspirational quotes related to their roles
• Brief job aids that could be read from a cell phone
• Check-in calls from managers once or twice per week
• Recommended readings on topics related to their roles
• Availability of resources to discuss personal issues
• Boxes of company swag and special customized treats delivered to their homes
• Short videoconferences to allow employees to increase their comfort levels with the technology

Now the L&D team was ready to forge ahead into the new normal while paving the way for an increase in virtual learning experiences.

Lizzie’s experience is an example of how L&D’s role is just as important now—if not more so. A May 2020 LinkedIn Learning study surveyed 864 L&D professionals from 21 countries and 3,155 workplace learners in 31 countries and further supports this heightened level of importance.

According to the study:

• 66 percent of L&D professionals agree that their function is more strategic than before the pandemic
• 68 percent agree that the level of urgency to launch initiatives has increased
• 66 percent expect more time in virtual instructor led training (VILT) than in 2019
• 60 percent expect more spending on online learning than in 2019

What do you think? Has L&D become more important these past few months? Share your thoughts and experiences in the Comments below.

Reference
LinkedIn Learning. (2020). "Leading with Learning: Insights and Advice About the New State of L&D."

​(As published in ATD Links / July 14th, 2020)