8
Learning
Introduction
You can hire the best people, design the best jobs and have the most engaged workforce, but if you don't get learning right, your organization is destined to underachieve. But we all know that, don't we? When we talk about providing training or learning opportunities to our staff, no one really disagrees—we're all in vehement agreement that it's a good thing. But then training is the first thing that gets cut, last in the line for budget because we know we can always do it next year.
“People at McDonald's get trained for their positions, but people with far more complicated jobs don't. It makes no sense. Would you want to stand on the line of the untrained person at McDonald's? Would you want to use the software written by the engineer who was never told how the rest of the code worked? A lot of companies think their employees are so smart that they require no training. That's silly.”
—Ben Horowitz, Partner at Andreessen‐Horowitz and author of The Hard Thing About Hard Things
At Reward Gateway, we never invested heavily in what you'd call formal training—a very modest budget existed and only as recently as 2015 did we even have a single member of staff dedicated to training. But despite this, we created a learning culture. An analysis of 108 anonymous reviews of Reward Gateway on Glassdoor between January 2012 and February 2017 showed that 62 of them mentioned “professional development” as a positive—way ahead of “employee benefits,” which got the next most mentions at 32, and “leadership” at 31.
How have we ended up with at least some semblance of a learning culture with what we feel internally involves very limited resources or effort? The answer is in technology and culture. Technology, the internet in particular, has disrupted learning hugely. When I started my career 25 years ago, we learned by being sent on expensive residential courses—we even did these to learn a new software package or technical skill.
Now we have YouTube, TED Talks, conference presentations and keynotes filmed and available on the internet just hours after being recorded; ebooks, real books, book summaries, blogs—vast swathes of information, coaching and training available online at our fingertips. We've realized that for a lot of the professional development we want to provide, the task for our L&D team is now less content creation and more content curation—helping our staff pick through the mass of content out there to find the best, most relevant support. And through the search engine, we have the world's reference library at our fingertips—the effect that has on our ability to learn as we go is incredible.
“When someone is stuck and doesn't attempt to find the answer themselves, when they don't think about the problem enough to form a good question they are delegating their thinking. And when you delegate thinking, it appears that you view other people as your assistant, or that you are lazy. Both of these options come with social cost.”
—Sam Dunn, Founder & CEO at Robin
The Learning Culture
A learning culture is one of the greatest gifts you can give your organization because it inspires the very people already on staff to develop and be able to do more. Three key components of a learning culture include:
- Freedom and autonomy—jobs designed with room for people to step outside their comfort zone, learn and try new approaches.
- Ambition—key to learning is wanting to keep doing better and look for the next stepping stone; without that, there is just inertia and a drift to safety, which means no growth, no development.
- Acceptance of failure—we can't grow and develop if we're afraid to put a foot wrong. Babies learn to walk while falling over; if your culture doesn't embrace that, staff won't develop.
Overall at Reward Gateway, I think the biggest things we did that helped people grow and develop was to give everyone a lot of responsibility and then be ambitious for results. We were good at celebrating the wins, but always used them as a platform to reach for the next, higher goal. We very much had what we now call a growth‐mindset baked into the culture from the start.
Employees are encouraged to learn; are recognized for learning; look at failures as opportunities; and regularly share links to TED talks, blogs on various topics or talk to other companies to understand best practices. There is a constant mindset of constructive challenge, helping each other and sharing information we find, along with an expectation that there is always something new to learn or try. This experimentation mindset extends to technology, too—the bar for us in trying out a new tool or technology is very low; we're always trying new things. It's too low for some people, who see the abandoned tools as failures, but for most, it's all part of the iteration and experimentation that you have when you embrace a learning and developing way of working.
Shift the Power
Too many times, I've seen organizations push, force or threaten employees to learn, where learning is something you do “to” employees. “You must attend this class, you must take this test”; the list goes on and on. This doesn't really work, because, at the end of the day, only your employees can decide if they're going to learn. They have to “show up” and “want” to learn.
Companies need to accept this and make a critical shift in the power, moving it from the company owning learning to employees owning it and having the power; changing it from a push to a pull.
We relaunched our in‐house Reward Gateway University in 2017. During the planning stage, we started with a traditional matrix of courses and job roles, marking off which courses were mandatory or optional and available for different types of roles. Then we realized this was wrong—learning is a very personal activity, requiring personal commitment and investment in terms of time and attention. With the exception of security and privacy courses, which are mandatory for all of our staff, we shouldn't be forcing learning upon anyone. If our culture is about trust and treating people as responsible adults, we should be providing all the training and courses we're asked for and then letting people decide as individuals which ones are useful to them, depending on the stage they are at, the problems and issues they face at work, and the ambition or interests they have for themselves.
Lose the Swim Lanes
In the past, jobs were designed in swim lanes—nice and neat; you do your job and I do mine. But based on changes in how we do business and how we do our jobs, as mentioned in the previous chapter, the lane separators have been widened or removed, with our workforce and their jobs swimming in a more integrated way, often in one big swimming pool. Processes are less rigid, people are sharing more, thanks to team and cloud technology, and companies are asking employees at all levels to contribute to the business and the bottom line.
Management guru Peter Drucker came up with the term “knowledge worker” in 1959, in his book The Landmarks of Tomorrow, at a time when businesses were shifting from manual jobs to those that required education and experience to create and share knowledge. But in the evolving world where innovation is a key differentiator between businesses, is knowledge enough? Instead, should we be developing what Jacob Morgan, author of The Future of Work, calls “learning workers”? These are employees who have not only the knowledge required to do their jobs, but a learning mindset and attitude to learn as they go, adapt and apply their learning to new situations and issues.
Our learning programs have to adapt to support this new kind of worker and this new kind of swimmer. They need to have access to learning they can pick up and use as they change lanes. Learning that will help them develop attitudes and skills in collaboration, problem resolution and innovation.
In Practice
Learning is a critical part of the Engagement Bridge™. I've rarely seen good people leave an organization when they're learning and constantly developing. It just doesn't happen. When people have the right amount of challenge and learning in their roles, they're just not open to other opportunities in the same way; they're engaged in what they're doing, engrossed in what they are learning. It is stagnation in learning that starts the seeds of disengagement.
Outcomes of Success
The best companies know the positive impact learning can have on their organization, striving for the following.
Greater Productivity and Innovation Learning programs that help employees at all levels develop the right skills, behaviors and mindsets to lead to higher performance and innovation.
Higher Retention Employees stick around because they feel the company cares about their development, investing time and money in programs to support them with this. Seven in 10 employees surveyed said that learning opportunities directly influence their decision to stay with a company.
Culture of Learning Learning is a visible part of the organization and its culture, with people at all levels embracing and taking ownership for it. Employees take charge of their learning and their career development, with managers partnering to support and manage their learning outcomes.
Key Rebel Behaviors
- Know their workforce
Rebels know their workforces well enough to understand how, when and what they need to learn. They know how to create a high‐quality learning program that's easy to use and access, no matter how employees like to learn or where they are. They also know their employees' diverse learning styles, and design learning to support each of them.
- Understand learning as a business driver
Rebels understand that learning is more than just delivering an engaging and fun experience. It's about focusing on learning goals and developing the workforce for the future, having the skills and behaviors that will provide what the business needs to succeed and to retain their key talent.
- Create a bit of “magic”
Rebels understand the need to capture the hearts and minds of the workforce so they'll make the decision to begin or continue on their learning journey. Besides having relevant content, they do this by creating their own “magic” in learning programs. They know that this is unique to them, and not something they can take off the shelves.
- Leverage their talent
Rebels understand that they have a wealth of talent within their organizations, and leverage it to provide additional depth and breadth of learning offerings and experiences to their workforce. Whether it's creating or delivering learning, the workforce helps them keep up with the pace of change and learning requirements.
- Constantly refresh
Rebels understand the need to constantly update and refresh their learning offerings, and aren't afraid to make the tough choices and remove programs. They constantly ask for employee feedback and review the latest and greatest offerings to ensure they have what will best meet the needs of the business and the workforce.
Making a Start
Develop Your Strategy You need to go back to basics and ask yourself “why.” Why are you providing learning programs to your workforce and what change are you hoping to deliver through them to the business? This will help you set the direction to follow, making sure that all you do aligns with your needs.
Assess Your Current Offerings Based on your strategy, go back and assess your current offerings, asking yourself: Will my programs deliver against them? Will they meet the needs of my diverse workforce and their diverse learning styles? Will they take my company to the next level or keep us where we are now?
Map Out Learning Journeys Create a visual of your company's learning journeys, showing what is offered to employees as they learn and progress in your organization. Use this for two purposes—first to identify gaps, and second to communicate with your workforce, engaging them with the programs and their development at your organization.
THE PLAYS
Learning Based on Einstein's Theories: Stonegate Pub Company
Situation
The UK‐based Stonegate Pub Company was faced with the challenge of creating a learning program and career path to support and drive a newly merged business with a combined workforce of 13,500 in 700 locations. No easy task. But for a company that believes in promoting talent from within, and creating a workforce that delivers best‐in‐class customer service, this was critical to their success.
They decided the best way to achieve this was to create an engaging and unique program, one based on no other than Albert Einstein and his theories of continuous learning. According to Lee Woolley,1 Head of Learning and Development, “We're in the people business and we know our staff are brilliant at interacting with customers and delivering great service. What we wanted to achieve with Albert was to bring a fun approach to the important business of learning and development. We're not a boring company, so we didn't want a boring program.”
In the four years since the program launched, they've made an additional $4.1 million in profit from those attending management courses, have increased internal promotions to 75% and have halved turnover.
Play
The star of Stonegate's award‐winning program is Albert, the infamous theoretical physicist. He's everywhere, and not just in name, but having an active role in helping employees along their learning journey. On the online learning portal, named Elsa after one of Einstein's wives, Albert narrates the content, runs competitions, interacts through social media and even has his own cartoon avatar. This clever use of theming and strong branding based on Albert creates engagement with the program, as well as an ongoing connection with employees.
The learning journey begins with “Albert's Law”, an online program completed by employees 24 hours before they begin their first shifts, and continues for an additional six weeks. It's packaged in short e‐learning modules, and gives employees control of the learning process. The journey continues with programs to take employees from team leader through to general manager, providing a combination of online and classroom‐based learning aimed at stretching participants to be the best leaders they can be.
Stonegate (and Albert) have truly created a continuous learning approach to support the company's employees and their business. As the real‐life Albert Einstein said, “Life is like a bicycle; to keep your balance you must keep moving,” which is exactly what Stonegate is doing with its exciting and innovative learning program.
Deliver On‐demand Learning to Gig Workers: Zeel
Situation
Zeel, a company with more than 10,000 massage therapists delivering on‐demand massages throughout the US, had a number of interesting challenges when it came to providing learning programs to employees in its network.
First, the information had to be delivered to a workforce composed of on‐demand, independent workers. Second, and possibly an even bigger challenge, was that most employees worked not just with Zeel, but for other organizations. Someone would, for example, work as a massage therapist at a doctor's office during the day and then, later in the evening, work as a therapist with Zeel. From a learning perspective, this meant finding ways to communicate effectively with employees using just‐in‐time learning (i.e. learning when they needed it) and mobile tools. Since Zeel therapists can start appointments as early as 8 a.m. and as late as 10:30 p.m., 365 days a year, in more than 70 cities, any solution had to be mobile, portable and on‐demand.
Play
Zeel's solution was to place reminders directly in the Zeel Massage Therapist app, which all employees use to access appointments. This resource allows therapists to perform Zeel massages “their way and in their own time,” says Zeel founder and CEO Samer Hamadeh. Checklists and reminders are built into the app, giving therapists easy and constant access to tools to help them. The suite of learning tools also includes short educational videos, followed by quizzes to further engage and educate employees on the protocols and behaviors Zeel customers expect.
“Learning is a constant process for us, since our business and customer service expectations are constantly changing,” says Hamadeh. He cited an example of receiving customer feedback about a therapist who tracked in mud from their shoes. To prevent similar situations, the company quickly responded within hours by adding a programmed reminder to the app for therapists to be on the alert for such issues. For Zeel, its customer feedback—both praise and suggestions for improvement—is invaluable in helping therapists evaluate their performance.
The on‐demand learning tools have helped Zeel's on‐demand gig workers feel more confident in their day‐to‐day practice and the challenges of their business.
Creating Development Plans to Help a Young Workforce: KFC Australia
Situation
KFC Australia had what Rob Phipps,2 Chief People Officer, would describe as traditional individual development plans (IDPs) for the fast food organization's 34,000 team members. That's fine for some organizations, but for a company that's committed to making a difference in the Australian community, with one out of 700 Australians working there at some point in their careers, they felt they needed to do more—to help their young workforce, with an average age of 17, understand and map out their life goals, and to align with the KFC people promise of “be your best self,” “make a difference” and “have fun.”
Working with the Career Industry Council of Australia, KFC created a new online program called “#myplan”, which helps team members create personal career and development plans, and recognize career opportunities both within and outside KFC. According to Phipps, “We didn't want to replace the job of a career counselor at school because our managers aren't trained to do that. We wanted to start a conversation and then get team members to go home and talk to their parents or career counselors to go further.”
Play
The #myplan program includes two modules, one for managers and one for team members. The manager module helps managers feel comfortable with the process, providing coaching and mentoring tips and practical information about steps and actions to be taken. The 20‐minute team member module asks questions about what they want to be and do, and what goals they want to achieve. The result is an action plan providing a framework for self‐reflection, self‐evaluation and setting life goals. It can be used in discussions internally with managers, as well as externally with career counselors and parents.
The program has only been in place for a year, but 4,000 team members have already gone through it. Phipps says the company is already seeing positive results and even individual success stories, such as one team member who was thinking of going into a career in nutrition and, by flagging this through the program, received training and support to achieve this by working in the KFC food innovation team.
#myplan is a great example of a company giving back to its employees. As Phipps says, “It's filling a gap by offering a program to help team members set a direction and achieve their goals. Whether it's deciding they want to become a teacher or a nurse, saving for a holiday or a new car, or deciding they want to lose weight, #myplan helps them with this journey.”
Using Learning Academies to Drive Results: MVF
Situation
MVF, which operates sales acceleration technology, realized it needed this same level of acceleration when it came to inducting new employees. How could the company speed up learning through the induction process, making employees productive as quickly as possible?
The answer was with learning academies, something that Titus Sharpe,3 President and founder, heard about from talking to the former CEO of Qlik tech, one of the fastest‐growth software companies in the world. He was shown a graph illustrating the profound difference in sales their academy had made, so he set off to develop his own version of academies for MVF.
The results have been just as profound, with 2.6 times higher sales for those attending the academy. In addition, it's contributed to increased collaboration between academy attendees, and increased retention of staff.
Play
MVF's sales academy was developed by asking one simple question: “What makes our best salespeople great?” Using the best practices the team uncovered, a six‐step process became the foundation of the sales academy. The program lasts for three months, with the first week focusing on understanding the company and the remaining weeks getting into the details behind each of the six steps.
Learning comprises 60% of the academy, with the other 40% involving practical work, creating the right balance between learning and doing. To continue with the concept of balance, attendees must pass written exams, make presentations and participate in practical selling activities. “Our three‐month long sales academy has had a profound influence on MVF's growth trajectory. The impact has been so large, we are rolling the learning academy concept out across the business, starting with marketing and SEO,” says Sharpe.
Put Gaming into Your Learning Program: GAME
Situation
The gaming industry has changed massively over the years, with a greater number of games on a wider range of devices. It's great for consumers, but for companies like GAME, the computer game retailer, this creates the challenge of constantly training front‐line employees, making sure they have the most up‐to‐date information on the latest and greatest games.
A few years ago, store managers were responsible for sharing this information with employees. However, due to this faster pace, it was taking a huge amount of their time. Craig Mills,4 Learning Manager, was a Store Manager then, and put forward a proposal to the business to develop an e‐learning system, one that would share this critical information and free up managers to, well, manage.
The result is GAME’s innovative e‐learning system that aligns with the organization's business and culture, while using the great techniques and motivational tools featured in the games employees sell. According to Mills, “We wanted to create a place that people wanted to go, making it a special reward for working at GAME.” Has it worked? On launch day, employees were on the system until 3 a.m. so they could earn the top spot on the leaderboard, and currently there are around 14,000 logins each month, with employees going into the system about once a week. I think you’d agree it’s working.
Play
GAME's e‐learning system has all the features of a winning computer game, with learning modules designed to get employees involved, wanting to come back over and over again. Like a game, it's designed to be interactive, so instead of a normal quiz at the end of a module, employees can engage with content in a variety of ways to test their knowledge and keep the experience fresh. It also makes use of the competitive nature of gaming, with employees earning points for completing modules, helping them “level up” to the next level of training, earning a spot on the leaderboard. These encourage employees not only to complete the training, but do well enough to score the highest number of points—a winning combination.
There's also an important social aspect to the system that is common in gaming: creating a learning community. Employees post messages and videos, join chats, and tag people in different stores as knowledge is shared real‐time.
The system has created a positive and engaging learning experience for employees, one that's been built to adapt as quickly as new games are released. According to Mills, “We are constantly changing and updating our system, reinventing what we are doing to keep it fresh.”
The performance stats put GAME at the top of the employee engagement leaderboard, with 68% of employees accessing the platform at least twice a week and 82% believing the learning zone helps them in their day‐to‐day jobs. It's also making a positive impact on customer service, with 19% more praise from customers than in the past. GAME has truly earned a high score in creating something unique, aligning it with how their business operates and how their employees like to learn.
A High‐Touch Approach to Learning: The Estée Lauder Companies
Situation
At the Estée Lauder Companies they have a secret ingredient for delivering outstanding service and education to create a strong emotional bond with customers, and that's through what's called a “high‐touch” approach. “High‐touch” is all about personalizing your approach, and going above and beyond to ensure that the customer has a satisfying and memorable experience. With this in mind, the Australian HR team set out to create an executive leadership training program, using this approach to guide them in developing and engaging leaders from across all of the company's brands.
The result has been a hugely successful program that delivers learning in a unique and creative way—inspiring and, yes, touching their current and future leaders. According to Magda Lategan,5 Vice President HR Australia, New Zealand and South Africa, “It's been such a powerful program, creating more meaningful interactions and collaboration across all the brand teams, and at the same time helping leaders to begin to see things through a different lens.”
Play
The Estée Lauder Companies' week‐long residential leadership program brings together the top 50 high potential leaders from across Australia and New Zealand. Working with Macquarie Graduate School of Management, the program has been created to develop what Lategan calls “the whole person,” developing their mind, their body and their spirit. Aiding this are external speakers who conduct workshops on a variety of topics that stretch the abilities of the participants. Past speakers have included the Wharton School's Dr. Kathy Pearson, who is an expert on strategic decision‐making skills, social researcher Mark McCrindle and the Human Performance Institute's Bill McAlpine.
The daily schedule is comprehensive with all participants commencing exercise sessions at daybreak and finishing the day's workshops with guided meditation classes before embarking on evening team‐building activities. Participants are taught to maintain their energy levels throughout the day with nutritious food choices, regular breaks and impromptu dance sessions—learning that they can then apply these choices to manage their energy levels and engagement in the workplace. To add to the overall learning experience, attendees are divided into learning action groups who get together each day to review their personal development goals, and discuss how they can move theory into practice.
This high‐touch approach to learning and the creation of an overall experience has shown that, as with customers, the organization has also been able to create educated and engaged advocates amongst the workforce, who are loyal to their brands and passionate about leading their teams.