On May 14/ 15, I was asked to chair the 5th Corporate L&D Virtual Summit hosting an exciting group of L&D professionals on sharing their best practices and insights. In this post, you will read about my key take-aways.
Cognizant – Stefaan van Hooydonk, Chief Learning Officer
- As a child, we ask 73 questions per day; until we go to school, where our curiosity is killed, and we learn to sit and listen.
- Skill has become a C-Suite topic, and L&D needs to rethink how to reposition itself as a function to address the skilling challenge
- 76% of business leaders fear a daunting skill gap
- 73% believe that the skill gap will widen in the next five years
- 65% of employees (from 18-65) think they have the skills to last them a lifetime
- Cognizant approaches the skill challenge by focusing on Meta Skills: Curiosity, Growth Mindset, Learn2Learn.
- Curiosity opens our mind to learning
- Enable people to be curious about oneself, others, and the world
- Create an ecosystem for learning, democratise learning, partnering with managers to become an active part of the learning culture
- Cognizant found a positive correlation between learning & job satisfaction and the managers as role manager
Bayer – Frank Poschen, VP Human Resources BP, Global R&D
- Bayer sees significant changes in science and market dynamics and wants to become more broad product portfolio, have a deeper understanding of customers and have more flexible operating models
- 7 out of 10 transformation projects fail because the culture is not addressed enough. Culture is seen as a key enabler of transformation.
- 77% of people can do a change in behaviour (what is expected, what is in it for me, for the organisation/ reinforcing mechanisms/ challenge conventional practices and beliefs/ role modelling behaviour)
- Bayer focuses on a shift from tasks/ IQ to people/ EQ
- Make employees shift their thinking to what is best for Bayer, rather than for their silo inside Bayer
- Key points to successfully transform “knowledge-worker” organisations:
- The behaviour of leaders is critical (talk the walk)
- Measure change and recognition by leaders
- Leaders reaction to critical situations
- Example & advice given by leaders
- Other transformation success factors, according to Bayer:
- strong top support and visible behaviour change
- make it relevant for your employees
- activate formal & informal leaders
- Co-develop solutions with business, external stakeholders
- Keep change realistic and create a smooth transition
- Make a clear link between culture and strategy
- Over-communicate/ adapt the change processes
Philip Morris International – Nina Kreyer, Global Head of Learning
- PMI is radically changing its business model to “UNsmoke your world”, moving from B2B to B2C
- This results in new products & science, consumer expectations, careers and ways of working
- The business model is completely being redefined -> organisation needs to unlearn
- PMI moves from learning to performance support
- Using the learner centricity approach: 850 employees give input on what needed to change in L&D
- Survey at PMI showed that #1 place for learning is GOOGLE; 82% want more opportunities to share knowledge; 60% want to learn via laptop (under 25% this is 88%).
- It is crucial to involve employees in all stages of learning design
- Learning priorities during COVID-19: Remote leadership, health and well-being, tools to support remote working, new teamwork behaviours, new individual work behaviours.
- To define the future of learning, PMI looks at external/ organisational and employee drivers.
- Drivers inside PMI:
- Skills are changing, and careers are lengthening
- PMI’s business model change require different/ new capabilities
- Learning is not integrated into culture and strategy and requires alignment
Salesforce – Maria Jimena Vargas, Talent Development Senior Manager
- The feeling of belonging is now more critical than ever before
- Creating connections with people and not employees is a vital mind shift we need to make as employers
- Transforming leadership and capabilities: connectivity between individual/ organisation can create an empowered culture and can shape their world
- Compassion is a sign of strength
- Company purpose, combined with caring leadership, motivates people to go the extra mile (influence, inspirational motivation, intellectual stimulation, individual consideration).
Unlocking Team Potential for Establishing a Learning Culture, Anna Donato and Johan Murillo
- Reframing challenges can help lift moods and start to approach difficulties in different ways; provide other perspectives that give people new ways to look at known problems
- Fun to make free associations; freedom to explore ignite areas to innovate – an essential tool when a team is stuck in a specific frame of mind.
- Unlocking group potential virtually is possible and requires experienced moderators to facilitate the session. Preparation is much higher than with face-to-face workshops, but all content is digital, making the post-processing work go faster.
AstraZeneca – Caroline Ford, L&D Strategy Consultant
- the cornerstone for any L&D strategy is to set the foundations/measure returns / get creative
- Three critical strategic considerations for L&D:
- get to know your company (strategy, values and behaviours)
- research the opportunities where to add value
- measure the ROI of Learning from the view of the C-Suite
- Ways to create an impact through L&D with zero budget:
- create a strong brand
- create a clean, crisp LMS
- create your content inhouse
- use internal Subject Matter Experts to host Lightning Talks, Panel Interviews, TED Talk Cinema
- create a volunteer team & communicate
- get feedback
Novartis – Urs Karkoschka, Head Performance Innovation
- At Novartis, their new CEO Vas Narasimhan, started in 2018 and has been put a strong focus on cultural transformation.
- Unleash the power of people to enable their strategy, and cultural transformation is the key to executing their future strategy
- Culture: Inspired, Curious, Unbossed
- CEO = Chief Energy Officer, who inspires people to multiply energy
- We live in an overwhelming world and brain fog.
- 96% of senior leaders feel burned out
- 75% of professionals between 25-34 experience this same problem.
- Novartis started with “sustainable high impact” – being your best when it matters most to you
- Work-Life balance: working from home increases productivity, but we need to protect people from not burning out
- Factors predicting performance under knowledge workers:
- Group goals
- Perceived support for innovation
- Perceived supervisory support
- Information sharing
- Vision / goal clarity
- Social Cohesion
- External communication
- Team empowerment
- Psychological safety
- NPS for managers: 20% difference in employee engagement between managers that focus on these factors compared to those who don’t.
- Make soft factors real with numbers to create accountability
- Roadmap to transform: know / apply / experience/ sustain
- Rather than focussing on Big Bang improvements, Novartis looks at marginal impact to optimise brain and body by appreciating individuality: employees are corporate athletes
Ikea – Kim Blomqvist, Learning Developer
- Kim and her team created 23 standalone programs within four weeks that were
- Cross-functional
- Inhouse
- Using SME’s as facilitators
- IKEA used an iterative approach to adjust to learner needs
- The bloom taxonomy and learning spaces approach helped them with structuring the learning experiences
- individual for pre-read / max 30 mins
- voice over PPT, a workshop for group 80/20 approach
- post-work for individual/ tasks
- A flipped learning was introduced (Flexi Environment, Learning Culture, Intentional Content, Professional Educator)
- The learning journey should be inspiring people to inspire other people
- Mixing offline and online formats are essential to achieve scale and transfer of knowledge
- Implementing social apps into the learning experience, such as a meet app and yammer, to support transfer and knowledge exchange
- Branding to support internal awareness.
- Reevaluate user feedback continually and implement changes asap.
- Modular, get SME’s involved, don’t expect learning solutions to be valid for more than a year.
Boston Consulting Group – Elsa Blume, Expert Consultant Leadership & Talent Development
- Why is so challenging to drive learning engagement?
- Concentration/attention span is typically between 5 – 10 seconds.
- You need to put learners in the centre when looking at organisation and employees challenges, how are they going to deal with those challenges?
- Gamification can drive engagement; we use gamification already daily. Learn how we could use the gamification approaches in our corporate learning environment.
- Gamification is about learner centricity: it helps learners achieve their goal in a way that emotionally engages them
- start with emotion
- then motivation
- then engagement will be a result
- Four dimensions to gamification:
- personalised
- collaboration & competition
- rewards
- status
- Link engagement with career development to create relevance and impact for the employee
- Virtual environments offer psychological safety; more memorable and higher retention
- Opportunity to use gamification to link different learning offerings in your organisation
Reimagining the Digital Future of Learning and Development, Anne Haig Smith
- Challenges with digital training:
- getting used to new tech
- feedback not as direct as face to face training
- a place for concentration needed
- people prefer face to face
- finding ways to customise training approaches to different target groups
- the workforce might not always be able to access / capability to access the technology
- Solutions:
- Integrate digital learning solutions with different HR processes (e.g. development process)
- incorporate different tools and media to create experiences
- doing surveys to understand learning needs
- keep sessions short to focus trainers on key topics
- a good quality learning platform has been invaluable (canvas)
- COVID-19 forces people to make attempts on how digital learning can work
ING Belgium – Anneleen Arnold, Head of Learning
- Purpose can help navigate the change around you.
- How can we predict the next significant change? -> when you can’t go OUTside, go INside.
- ING Belgium saw a decline in
- sustainable engagement
- personal accomplishment
- belief in being able to reach annual goals/objectives
- People are reaching change fatigue
- To address change fatigue, ING Belgium focuses on people finding purposes “Do Your Thing” with respect for diversity, take the initiative, become a pioneer.
- Being a pioneer is needed to survive in the world of tomorrow.
- Purpose helps you to focus on what matters to you
- ING Belgium calls this Craftmanship
- Who am I and what is my purpose
- How do I stay relevant
- What does it mean for my career?
- Finding where the purpose of ING and the individual come together is where the magic happens
- Success factors for this change:
- Helping people find their use;
- Implementing the concept in agile ways
- Look for believers in the organisation (informal ambassadors)
Thank you to Mira Laine from Luxetia International for hosting the event.
WANT TO LEARN ABOUT TRANSFORMING L&D?
Learn more about transforming corporate learning to business impact in our self-learning tutorials at Corporate Learning Disrupted.
We offer you 1-month free access to try us out!
