Rooted In Learning

One of the most critical aspects to navigate business change is to transform the organizational attitude towards learning. The need to continuously develop and evolve with learning has emerged as an instrumental factor for organizational success.

The opportunities today for the learning professionals are immense. The L&D space is seeing significant enhancement in terms of maturity, rapid and constant upgradation of learning systems. Today, traditional training and formal classroom formats are giving way to mobile and e-learning solutions combined with gamification. All of this is characterized by faster access to content, diminished lines between personal and professional time, and greater reliance on tools and technology. Gen Y joining the workforce is also contributing to these fast-changing trends.

This is where the role of the Chief Learning Officer becomes critical to architect an organization’s learning and development culture. With a number of different learning tools being scattered, it is the CLOs who need to identify the business problem at hand, thread the needle and leverage all tools at their disposal. “Leadership at the top has to set the tone when establishing a learning organizational culture,” says Dr. Parul Pandey, Head Talent & Development, Deutsche Bank India.

The Chief Learning Officer, while formulating a learning module, needs to align training and development outcomes with business outcome. “Alignment is the first and foremost thing that CLOs need to understand; they need to be able to successfully align learning with the strategic objectives of the company. CLOs who can do that are the ones who get the seat at the table and have a say when it comes to budgeting priorities,” says Jerry Nine, Chief Operating Officer and Co-Founder, Skillsoft.

However, defocusing the attention from the internal learning vertical of organizations to include factors such as the global market, technological advancement and changing workforce, it becomes necessary that the new age CLO wears different hats in rotation. The role of the CLO has changed dramatically over the last few years. Increased focus on ‘no one-size-fits-all’ within the Learning & Development space has led innovation to take a pivotal role when it comes to framing development techniques for employees. Further, with the growing number of HR and learning technologies entering the market, the scope for innovatively customizing learning for each employee has increased exponentially. L&D professionals today are expected to be not only learning experts but also fluent technology purveyors with the ability to select the best fit-for-purpose and cost-effective learning solution. Therefore, the modern CLO must take on a bigger and more important role.

Capability builder: “While there are many emerging trends within the L&D space, a prominent one observed in organizations in general is an effort to move to a competency-based framework,” says Jerry Nine. Rather than just training people and running the L&D organization, CLOs need to focus on understanding the detailed capability requirements of critical positions in the company. “The Learning officer should not only be wearing the policing hat but should also monitor as to whether enough time is being spent on the right kind of learning and how employees are taking to such training,” says Dr. Pandey. Companies that focus on capability building are most likely to outperform those who deliver skill-based training.

Driver of change: A key differentiator between a high-performing organization and its competitors is its ability to adapt to and create change. CLOs play an integral role when it comes to not just change management but also change creation. Through management of training and development, CLOs have become the backbone for employees adapting to organizational change. But this can be successful when CLOs formulate an innovative approach to training and development. “CLOs need to have a sustainable people-centric approach to talent expansion in order to become more effective in their roles. Those who are looking to successfully change the way learning works in organizations and can successfully improve, quantify and optimize the performance of their people will be key catalysts to improving the organization’s overall performance,” says Jerry Nine.

Technology today has taken a center-stage within the learning space and the corporate world is being driven by Big Data. CLOs therefore not only need to cover L&D, but they also need to understand technology and communicate outside of L&D and talk about outcomes that are in the language of business rather than around adoption. The role of the CLO has metamorphosed. Measurement of values added by learning and development initiatives taken by learning leaders can help business leaders understand the benefits of learning and whether these can outnumber cost.

Learning and development is one of many actions that an organization can take to improve its performance and profitability. Moreover, L&D is a great source of motivation for employees to think differently and make the most of emerging opportunities along with delivering on bottom-line objectives.

The step-by-step approach to analyze and measure the impact of training is:

Engagement: Engagement monitoring is one of the first moves that organizations need to take to understand whether the training and coaching programs are transforming into outcomes. To ensure a high engagement level, it is crucial to adopt tools and technique whose usage comes about intuitively and can be rolled into employees’ daily work schedule. For instance, use of Whatsapp or Facebook groups can be a useful platform for sharing training and development content. “Today, social portals like Whatsapp or Facebook groups are very effective in the learning process since these portals are already an existing part of employees’ daily lifestyle. Employees share content, articles, video clips on a regular basis on such networking groups making learning more non-traditional and decentralized,” says Anup Lewis, Head HR, Schneider Electric. Even inserting calendar notification for training and coaching can be a great way to ensure engagement.

Knowledge and skill enhancement: While engagement comes in the initial stage of learning effort transforming into outcomes, it is important for companies to keep track of the actual benefits that are emerging from employees’ engagement with various learning tools.

Key factors to trace are new skills, knowledge, as well as attitude: For this, gamification can emerge as a highly effective method, especially when it is tied together with rewards and recognition. “There’s a strong linkage between engagement and the outcome from an employee’s perspective i.e. what are the benefits and rewards for the employee attached to it? If these two are married, there can be a great partnership between engagement, learning and skill enhancement. Learning becomes larger and more impactful when rewards & recognition are associated with it,” says Amith Prakash, Global HR - Employee Engagement, HCL Technologies. Therefore, companies today need to work on the push factors by aligning benefits, rewards and compensations and thereby attract employees to participate in training and learning programs.

Application of learning: Skill and knowledge expansion become meaningless when they cannot be woven into everyday functionality; this is not just about showcasing professional skills but also includes demonstration of behavioral and attitude change in and out of the workplace.

Business outcome: Lastly, the application of both soft and hard skills in day-to-day activities needs to reflect in business outcomes of the organization. In absence of identifying business outcomes from training and development, evaluating the ROI on such programs becomes vague and irrelevant. However, evaluating effectiveness can become particularly challenging when the targeted outcomes involve softer skills such as improved collaboration, decision making, innovativeness and the ability to think strategically. It is difficult to assign a hard-revenue value to such skills, or to show a correlation between the learning initiative and the acquisition of the targeted skills. In such cases, learning professionals need to work with senior leaders, HR and talent management professionals to mutually identify ROI measures that are linked to the organization’s strategic objectives or its KPIs.

SMAC is the buzz word today and is the key to creating an organizational culture of learning. “The demand for social, mobile, analytics and cloud is ever-increasing, however, how can companies get there? What are the parameters?” says Madhuri Sen, Managing Director and Vice President at Waggener Edstrom, India. The trick is to enhance accessibility of learning resources and to create a continuous learning environment by adopting and leveraging technology that is already on the fingertips of people today. “When learning is integrated in employees’ daily routine, it’s likely to increase employee efficiency and boost business results,” says Vinay Pradhan, Manager, Skillsoft India. Today, social networks and connecting portals have become a part of the personal lives of people. Therefore, leveraging such tools can encourage an increase in learning engagement.

Further, it is also important to create content that is easily accessible for the “mobile” employees of today who have rapidly taken to remote and virtual work-life. This kind of work environment has led to an extensive focus on e-learning. Research by the Impact Instruction Group conducted last year, showed that investment in e-learning continues to be high at 87 per cent. However, there has also been rapid adoption of cloud-based learning systems to make content easily accessible to the mobile workforce. “There’s been a lot faster adoption of the cloud in the last few years; so that’s really working. Even institutions that have traditionally been concerned about security like financial institutions have rapidly taken to cloud-based systems,” says Jerry Nine.

With smartphones being the handiest tool for both professional and personal use, the focus on mobile learning has also increased greatly. For instance, Whatsapp as both a formal and an informal platform to share content, links and/or video bites, has been largely adopted by employees. Further, the Skillsoft Study on the role of mobile learning in India reveals that 72 per cent of learners and decisions makers agree that mobile learning is likely to increase engagement.

Technology is a driving factor for organizational efficiency and accuracy and it is no longer an option for organizations to adapt out of choice; it has emerged as necessity in almost all spheres of businesses and verticals.

Going forward, we look at some of the best industry practices from the finalists of People Matters L&D League Awards 2015.