How Can Learning, During Covid, Drive Better Future For Employee Development?

Remote learning changes the way we engage, train and develop competency

As an anthropologist working with organizations that need or want to change, I have been administering Leadership Academies for several years for clients of my company SAMC in the professional services and healthcare industries. These clients knew that they needed innovative training to develop their future leaders but were not sure how to do that effectively and efficiently. Most of the sessions were in-person and had multiple purposes, including acquiring new skills, developing practical insights, team building and network development. 

Then Covid hit. I often preach that if you want to change, you need to have a crisis or create one. I never expected a crisis of this proportion, but neither should a crisis ever be wasted. The participants and I quickly pivoted, moving everything to remote learning, which changed the way we would engage, train and develop competency.

Likewise, there is an abundance of literature celebrating the swift change to online communication as the Covid pandemic hit. We have healthcare clients who switched to providing telehealth over a weekend. Other clients in higher education went to online teaching in a day. And a behavioral health client went completely remote overnight. What all of this has taught us is that we must not waste a crisis if we’re going to change.

Before Covid, research routinely told us how learning worked best in-person, with engagement that was interpersonal, and with the empowerment of the learner being a key component. We knew even back then that experiential or active learning was far better than sitting and listening to a lecture on a computer screen or being self-taught alone. Now the question is, why can’t that be done in a remote fashion going forward? 

One thing we know for sure: Your brain hates to change. The amygdala will hijack new input that is foreign, unfamiliar and feels “painful.” Yet the brain can indeed change. So how do you overcome this pain of change to enable the growth and development of your employees? 

Anthropology, the neurosciences and many other fields offer an answer, which can be summed up in the following three points:
 

What we at SAMC have done with remarkable success is to fully engage with the participants in our Leadership Academies and teach them how to develop a new way of experiencing something unfamiliar. The content is not that unfamiliar. It’s the process of learning it that appears to be uncomfortable, until you break down the barriers in people’s stories.

The following has become our model: We start by using the virtual platform to enable our online participants to tell their stories about the problem or issue to be addressed. They then break into groups to discuss their particular problem with two or three others and learn from them. Humans do love to mimic what others are doing, so the time together is important, whether in person or on a screen breakout room.

Next, we provide insights and present relevant information, ideas and techniques. Then we turn back to the participants and ask them to write about how they would use the new material in some sort of way. These writings are then read aloud as new stories. As the group listens, they begin to change the story in their own minds to learn something new.

Finally, we ask the participants to choose an action step which we call a “small win.” Once they commit to doing something new or different, and set a date by which they will have tried it and measured its impact, we have change happening, and learning then turns into improved skills.

An unexpected benefit of the Covid pandemic has been the increased productivity of some companies, particularly those which capitalized on technology so their employees could collaborate effectively and efficiently. One recent study by Raffaella Sadun, Jeffrey Polzer and others cited in this HBR article, “The Pandemic Is Widening a Corporate Productivity Gap,” found that the length of the average workday increased by 48.5 minutes during the early weeks of the pandemic. The article’s authors estimate that the best organizations, “those that were already collaborating effectively and working productively before the pandemic, have seen productive time increase by 5% or more.” 

What this reveals is that without commutes and despite home-work life in a new balance, people get more done if their organization enables them to do so. Perhaps we can make learning after Covid become more effective as well? Can this be something those in the education field can embrace as they strive to transform the learning environment within their organization?  

It’s been proven that people can learn a great deal through engagement in active learning. Virtual experiences can become that active learning. What is essential is for everyone involved ― administrators, educators and students ― to believe that the new is as valuable as the old, even more so. Then the new has to become acceptable to everyone’s minds and their own mental stories. Of course, each of us prefers the habits of yesterday to the unknowns of tomorrow. But now that we have had this crisis and have seen how people can soar in the midst of it, let’s not waste the crisis.