Increasing the likelihood of success in your eLearning journey: The Right Type of Content to the Right People at the Right Time.
Last week, I attended a roundtable session with various FTSE 100 HR leaders. One weary L&D Director was unhappy, and rightfully so. Despite investing heavily in both quality eLearning content and a modern LMS his workforce wasn’t engaging with it as regularly as hoped. There were nods of recognition around the table when he summed up; “You can lead a horse to water but you can’t make it drink.”
Whenever I meet new clients, variations on this observation are a common theme. People have spent good money on implementing flashy technology and they’ve carefully thought through their learning strategy and processes. Yet their workforce just doesn’t adopt it and so they don’t see the expected ROI. Why?
In my experience, the most common reason is that they’ve neglected thinking about the culture change that needs to go with the new technology. Has the organisational culture been one where staff have been spoon-fed their eLearning? Has content been confined to mandatory compliance-led subjects? Is it usually a simple ‘click-read-test’ format? Is completion of mandatory training typically ensured by increasingly threatening emails as the compliance deadline nears?
If so, you simply cannot make the jump overnight from that starting point to class-leading learning culture. By this, I mean a culture where you have a workforce motivated to pro-actively access corporate learning systems and self-serve relevant learning and development material appropriate to their personal growth or relevant job tasks, whilst sharing their experiential knowledge in a helpful and accessible way to their peers. That may be the vision, and you may have implemented the technology that theoretically supports the vision but like any change project, the technology and process implementation is the easy bit. It’s the people bit that’s difficult and often overlooked.
I get clients to think of the above in terms of a classic ‘capability maturity’ journey. Think of the starting point described above as ‘level 1’ and the vision described as ‘level 5’. There are steps 2,3 and 4 to be taken before you can reach level 5. Attempting to leapfrog any of these steps invites failure. Time and again though, you see that is exactly what people try to do. I’ll explain what each of these levels looks like in more detail, and how to accelerate the journey through them, in future blog posts.
The important point for this post is to realise that for some organisations, shooting straight for a level 5 is simply the wrong thing to do. The nature of the business, the complexity of the jobs, the educational profile of the employees may all mean you don’t need a thoroughbred if a trekking-pony will do. Thinking through the level of ambition that is right for your organisation, and understanding where you start from culturally will help you to set an achievable end goal and also better plan the change management strategy that complements the technology implementation.
Just because, another organisation has nailed social learning in their organisation, doesn’t necessarily mean that their approach or the technology they chose is right for you. The takeaway point – and my last equine metaphor – is that you need to think about it as: ‘horses for courses’.
The above post is by our CEO, Guy McEvoy, and was originally shared on his LinkedIn feed.