For learning leaders, the most stressful times are often also the most demanding. While learning is critical in times of stability, it is undoubtedly a need-to-have in times of crisis. The more drastic the change, the more people need to be upskilled, properly trained, and ready to find new ways to solve old challenges.
As a learning vendor, we realized that the unprecedented nature of this year meant that we had to do things differently, as well. As a result, in the spirit of learning, we felt compelled to share our top three best practices for keeping learning going in a time of crisis.
First, define new metrics
Learning solutions often have long-tailed metrics—like employee retention or increased sales—that make demonstrating immediate return-on-investment an often impossible task, despite the fact that high rates of learning and training are often one of the best indicators of a company’s success.
When the pandemic hit, we realized that these metrics would no longer be suitable, as the timetable for proving efficacy of learning programs shifted from months and years to days and weeks. As a result, we immediately helped our clients start tracking metrics like employee satisfaction and short-term behavior change, which we found to be suitable predictors of larger and more longer-term outcomes.
More specifically, we found that increasing the frequency of assessments, check-ins, and questions provided learning leaders with some much-needed certainty that employees felt knowledgeable and engaged on a daily basis.
Second, be stubborn about being flexible
Most learning organizations felt like they couldn’t develop COVID-19 trainings fast enough, and in the early days of the pandemic we heard many horror stories of COVID-19 courses that took weeks to develop, at which point best practices and guidelines would be completely different. As a result, the past nine months have put the flexibility of learning systems to the test unlike anything else.
COVID-19 highlighted the need to not just effectively deliver learning, but create content rapidly and deploy it seamlessly. For critical training needs like COVID-19, learning leaders need to be prepared for the unknown, and this starts with having systems that are highly adaptable and able to go the extra mile.
To make learning more flexible for our clients, we decided to do something unprecedented. Even though Arist is strictly a technology company (we provide a platform for delivering leadership, DEI, compliance, and other trainings via text), we immediately launched a content division with the goal of creating and converting custom text message courses for clients—on any topic—within two business days. As a result, we were able to help clients like the State of California deploy state-wide disaster preparedness training to thousands of residents in under a week, entirely via text.
We also realized that our platform could be used for good in a time of need, and instantly donated platform access to companies like DoorDash that used Arist for text-based anti-racism training.
Finally, frictionlessness is key
When employees are distributed and knowledge is critical, learning leaders need tools that create the lowest possible path of resistance for delivering new information. Asking employees to log into portals and track their own learnings often just adds more friction to an already overwhelming state of affairs.
During the pandemic, we became obsessed with ways we could reduce friction in learning. For learners, we focused on delivering training entirely via text message and WhatsApp, which meant that users could learn without leaving their messages app. For learning leaders, this meant making our pilot program completely full-service and fully refundable, with the goal of removing all barriers and risks to exploring new innovations. When the world is difficult, every step to make things easier has an enormous impact.
Some final thoughts
We wanted to share these takeaways because 2020 was a year of incredible uncertainty, and 2021 looks to be no different. In times of stress, our team realized that sometimes the greatest comfort we can bring to anyone is learning, since knowing how to be safe, who to go to, or what skills to arm ourselves with gives us certainty that we’ll be ready for the road ahead. And to arm thousands with these tools, often in times of comfort and especially in times of crisis, is the role of the learning leader.
At Arist, we couldn’t be happier playing a role in making learning happen, one text message at a time.
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