Recorded Webinar

Transcript

[00:00:00] Laura Mastrorocco: Hello and welcome for those of you just connecting. We're so happy for you to be with us here today. I'd like to formally welcome everyone to our Learning Lab Part 1. This is expert advice for creating structured development programs. Today we'll talk about what to consider when creating a development program to set employees and your organization up for success.

[00:00:27] Laura Mastrorocco: My name is Laura Mastorocco, and I'm serving as your producer today.

[00:00:31] Laura Mastrorocco: We have Pinar O'Flaherty, who is a learning strategist and instructional designer with a few decades of experience designing programs, both digital and in person, remote, live, and hybrid. She works with PILOT to design programs with the learning and design principles that we'll be sharing today to ensure great learning experiences.

[00:00:57] Laura Mastrorocco: So thank you, Pinar, for being here with [00:01:00] us.

[00:01:00] Laura Mastrorocco: I'd also like to introduce Rachel Crice, who is the engine for Product and Delivery for PILOT, where she drives the creation of impactful coaching products. She works closely with our participants to energize and challenge them while finding inventive ways to meet our HR customers needs for scalable employee development with proven results.

[00:01:26] Laura Mastrorocco: Delighted to have you here with us, Rachel.

[00:01:29] Rachel Crice: Awesome. Thank you, Laura.

[00:01:30] Rachel Crice: So Laura mentioned, I am Head of Product here at PILOT and we create impactful coaching products that are scalable. But what is PILOT really? So PILOT was founded to help everyone feel powerful at work.

[00:01:42] Rachel Crice: That's our mission. We show employees how to effectively self reflect, solicit and accept feedback, advocate for themselves, and take effective action in their organizations. And this is done through four methods of learning. Tech enabled group coaching that allows us to scale to many. individual online [00:02:00] reflection activities where they get really powerful insights about themselves executive fireside chats with leaders at our customers or organizations, and one to one future focused manager feedback sessions where both managers and employees focus on development objectives and talking about the future rather than performance, which focuses on the past.

[00:02:19] Rachel Crice: So that's a little bit about PILOT and where I'm coming from.

[00:02:26] Rachel Crice: All right, Fennar you and I had a previous webinar, so if all of you who are on the webinar today missed that, we will have a link for you to watch that previous webinar's recording. But just a little kind of rewind to what we've talked about in our past webinar we talked about the kind of Really core principles on optimizing L& D programs for hybrid and remote.

[00:02:48] Rachel Crice: So how do you get learning programs to folks, regardless of where they are, if they're in office, if they're in office sometimes, or if they're fully remote in a way that's impactful for them. And the four things we talked about on [00:03:00] that webinar was cohesion and structure, prompting and enabling real world action, building community connection with learners, and allowing for different learning styles. Those are four really important pieces that you want to consider when creating those programs for hybrid and remote. And everyone loved that webinar so much that we are here today to talk solely about number one, cohesion and structure.

[00:03:23] Rachel Crice: So we're going to dive deep on that today. And we have two other learning lab parts that are coming up in October and December, which you can join us as well for a deeper dive on some more learning and structure.

[00:03:38] Rachel Crice: All right. Pinar.

[00:03:39] Pinar O'Flaherty: Yeah. Just a little picking up from where we left off in the last webinar, we did talk about how, because it was focused on hybrid learning environments, we talked about how a lot of times the first go to when we're talking about learning design. is making things virtual or making things into e learning.

[00:03:56] Pinar O'Flaherty: And while that doesn't always work for every [00:04:00] need the thing that does always work is great design, which is why these webinars were born. So we want to have the opportunity to talk a little bit about what goes into great design. And and the fact that it's often more about the process and the questions you ask yourself along the way.

[00:04:13] Pinar O'Flaherty: Rather than picking from a set of formulas or a set of structures and in terms of how to create a learning experience. So we'll start with structure, we go to the next slide. Great design does start with with great structure. And Rachel, do you want to talk a little bit about the history of how instructional design came to be?

[00:04:35] Rachel Crice: I found this to be very interesting, but a obvious point. Instructional design has been around for quite some time, and it comes from the need for structure and scalability, right? And, It really became a prominent need during World War II. So what better organization or structure to look at than the military for structured programs and they needed to quickly train millions of people in different locations to use new technology and it needs, they needed to just be confident that [00:05:00] those.

[00:05:00] Rachel Crice: those soldiers were going to be learning something at Fort Davis and Fort Benning that were going to be the same, that they were getting the same learning outcomes, and they were all doing the same thing. Several psychologists, education specialists, were asked to create training materials in mass for those thousands of soldiers, and All of that to say, again, structure is crucial for learning programs, especially when you're delivering to many learners.

[00:05:24] Rachel Crice: It's going to help ensure engagement and usage, right? We want people using the programs we create. And if learners aren't paying attention, then they aren't learning. So you have to set them up for success to engage. And efficacy is really about information retention and skill development.

[00:05:39] Rachel Crice: Structured programs are more easily consumed and retained by learners, and of course you want your learners to use what they got out of your program in the real world, so we want to enable that application and have measurable outcomes so you can figure out what good looks like for you, for your organization, for your, learning audience.

[00:05:56] Rachel Crice: You've got to set your sights on that end goal and work your way backwards from there. [00:06:00] So that's what we're going to talk about today is how to help learners understand what's expected of them and then enable them to achieve those desired outcomes.

[00:06:09] Pinar O'Flaherty: Absolutely. There's just this, the next slide is a slide that we actually used during our last webinar to talk a little bit about structure.

[00:06:14] Pinar O'Flaherty: And I like this because it helps us to think about a program that is happening over many weeks or many months and what it could look like from a bird's eye view. So this is an anonymized actual program. program that was part, it was a hybrid program. Some of it was e learning, some of it was live.

[00:06:30] Pinar O'Flaherty: And you'll see that what was, what the needs were for this program was to have the learning content slowly diminish as the learners were starting to apply things more and more to their day to day. But they did have something to go back to over the course of the program to give them support in moving from learning foundational content and then starting to apply it.

[00:06:49] Pinar O'Flaherty: This is a good snapshot of what a structuring needs can look like. But, how do you get to this point? Because needs are always different depending upon a few different things. What we thought we would do is talk about four really good [00:07:00] places to start in terms of, In terms of thinking about that journey that needs to happen.

[00:07:04] Pinar O'Flaherty: So we thought we'd start with learning time. And that refers to both the length of time that the learner might need, they might need a learning experience that happens over a month or two months, or, I've even designed programs that are nine months long. But it also refers to the amount of time that person or the learner spent it's often referred to as seat time when we're talking about e learning, but time that they may also spend within a live workshop or to point to collaborating with others.

[00:07:31] Pinar O'Flaherty: So maybe you have a learning program that has a community forum where learners can go in and exchange ideas or follow up on certain things outside of formalized learning time. Here's the thing with collaboration. Even if it does not end up being a component of your learning plan because of the way we work there will always be an element of collaborating with others.

[00:07:52] Pinar O'Flaherty: There's very few learning programs for organizations where that's not a consideration. Even if they're not necessarily [00:08:00] collaborating with others during the learning experience, it's something to consider because they will be collaborating with others when they're applying the skills that they've learned.

[00:08:06] Pinar O'Flaherty: So that, that's always a point to think about. And then individual work. Similarly we apply what we learn both as individual and individual work and collaborative work. But I feel like every learning program really benefits from giving the learner opportunities to work through work through the information they're receiving or the skills that they're working on.

[00:08:25] Pinar O'Flaherty: They might have individual work where they're doing something that's self paced like e learning or even a more sort of analog reflection time to think about the things that they're learning or practice time. And it does tend to be that most most designs do end up with some sort of individual work during the learning as well as how they're applying that learning after the program.

[00:08:45] Pinar O'Flaherty: And then Rachel touched on measurement of outcomes, and measurement and feedback on a program should not be an afterthought. It should be part of the design program. And I'm going to talk a little bit more about that as we go through, but really measurement and. [00:09:00] And what success looks like and how you're going to identify the metrics to know that your program is successful is something that should be part of the initial design process.

[00:09:08] Pinar O'Flaherty: So before we, we dive into that a little bit more we have a quick poll. Laura, I'll let you take it away.

[00:09:15] Laura Mastrorocco: Thank you. Question for you all. What is the biggest challenge you are up against right now with your program? You should be seeing that polling box on your screen. If you will, click whichever response applies, and then the submit button is to the lower right corner.

[00:09:32] Laura Mastrorocco: We'd love to hear from all of you, and we'll go just about 10 more seconds.

[00:09:41] Laura Mastrorocco: So either they are not engaged, they are not applying their learning, there's a lack of thoughtful structure, which results in a poor learning experience, the results are not being measured for the learner or for the organization, or perhaps [00:10:00] all of the above. If you've chosen other, please do list in the chat what other challenges you might have.

[00:10:08] Laura Mastrorocco: So it looks like, oh, the majority say all of the above. And we do have A couple of people saying other, unrealized benefit of learning and development, rolling out a new apprenticeship and continuing education program, getting a good program rolled out, and a lack of follow through, such as a sustainment activity and measurement.

[00:10:36] Laura Mastrorocco: Thank you for those of you who shared in the chat.

[00:10:40] Pinar O'Flaherty: Yeah, these are all very, you're not alone. These are all very, common frustrations or challenges that organizations face. And we're going to talk about some things, we'll have some Q& A at the end too, so stick around for that, but we're going to talk about these things.

[00:10:54] Pinar O'Flaherty: Often unrealized benefit of learning or development is because there is no measurement program or measurement design included. So [00:11:00] how do you know it was successful, right? We're going to talk a little bit about that. Rolling out a new apprenticeship and continuing education program that can be very hard when you're doing something like apprenticeship because it's so individualized to think about the metrics and how to see like what the successes are there.

[00:11:15] Pinar O'Flaherty: Getting a good program rolled out. Yes we all face that and that's one of the reasons we're chatting a little bit today. And then lack of follow through and measurement. I think I actually saw somewhere else in there something about application, and those things are really tied in together, and that's why design and thinking about the structure of your program up front is so important, because all of these issues can be addressed by asking really good questions to begin with.

[00:11:35] Pinar O'Flaherty: If we go to the next slide I, I have them bucketed into two different things, and that's starting with program outcomes and starting with logistics. And we're going to address it in this sort of structure during this webinar today, but do bear in mind that there's a lot of different schools of thought and theories around instructional design.

[00:11:53] Pinar O'Flaherty: And there's always more than one way to do things, which is actually good news, in my opinion. So when we talk about [00:12:00] program outcomes, We're really thinking about all of our stakeholders. What are the organizational goals? So an organization might say, look, our sales numbers are down. We need to give our salespeople more information so that they can speak, speak to our products better or help our customers or clients come to better solutions, make, better packages for sales.

[00:12:19] Pinar O'Flaherty: There might be challenges around something like that. There might be management goals, perhaps management saying we need to increase retention or we need to look at succession. We need to have people ready to be promoted into new roles as we grow. But don't forget the desired learner outcomes. So this is really interesting.

[00:12:35] Pinar O'Flaherty: Something often happens when we're looking at program outcomes and we look at those three levels of organizational management and learner levels. Sometimes they align very well. But sometimes there's some insights to be had when they do not align. Why are learner goals slightly different?

[00:12:51] Pinar O'Flaherty: And it can be very insightful for management stakeholders to see, who among their body of learners or who among the people that are working at their organization are [00:13:00] having challenges and why and some of those challenges, may not end up being a learner. A training issue for somebody saying I'm working overtime all the time.

[00:13:07] Pinar O'Flaherty: That's not really a training problem, but we might want to dig into it and say, why do you end up working overtime? Is that a skill issue or, do we need to hire more people or do we need to look at how we're spending? So there's some really beautiful insights that can come from looking at multiple levels of program outcomes.

[00:13:23] Pinar O'Flaherty: And then of course, Those program outcomes get tied to measurement, which will, again, I'm going to dig a little bit deeper into that shortly. But the other category is logistics and logistics can be can be, they're basically around like the site, the time that you have to produce, the time that you have to train people, the size of the program that you need how often the program is going to run, maybe something you run twice a year.

[00:13:44] Pinar O'Flaherty: Or maybe something you're running quarterly, or maybe it's a client facing program that's running all the time and then the budgets and resources. And how is the time that people are away from their desks being funded? How how much of budget do you have to put into producing materials?

[00:13:59] Pinar O'Flaherty: Do you have people on [00:14:00] your team that can develop e learning if that's something that ends up being part of the design? So let's dig a little bit deeper into this and talk more specifically about program outcomes. And here's some really Good bird's eye questions to start with. So who are my stakeholders?

[00:14:13] Pinar O'Flaherty: Because you wanna start there and there's multiple reasons why you need to start there. You're going to need to get buy-in and make sure that everybody's on board and they understand what the benefits are. For them it's a lot easier to get budget when that person is, has. full buy in and knows that this is going to have a wonderful impact on their organization and meet their goals.

[00:14:33] Pinar O'Flaherty: And then what does success mean to each of them? So as we look at those various levels of stakeholders, at the organizational level, it might be like our sales increase at the management level. It might say, I have a savvier sales team that's keeping my clients happier and I'm getting more repeat business.

[00:14:48] Pinar O'Flaherty: And then at an individual level, that salesperson who's going through the training program might be like, you know what? I really feel much more confident. I understand our product better. I may be able to be more creative with the solutions [00:15:00] that I offer my prospects and that for them is it's reducing their stress.

[00:15:04] Pinar O'Flaherty: It's increasing their sales and potentially commission. And then in that example, they're also, getting some, a little bit more meaning and productivity out of their work, which, there is that component of the learner getting some value from the program as well. And we talk about learning objectives and learning objectives are so important to instructional design.

[00:15:21] Pinar O'Flaherty: They're often your North Star. A learning objective, and some of you may already know this, is what the learner needs to be able to do or do differently. something new or different after the program. And I really stress that it has to be verb based saying they'll understand our policy.

[00:15:36] Pinar O'Flaherty: How do you measure understanding policy? You'd want to make it verb based and say they're able to explain policy and explain the impact of policy violation on their role or their team, right? And the reason why that verb is so important is measurement. It's very hard to measure something where there's not a change occurring.

[00:15:57] Pinar O'Flaherty: You have to be able to measure, before and after which [00:16:00] brings me to benchmarks. So the re, so setting a benchmark saying what does good look like for our organization or what does good look like for this type of learning or what does good look like for this group of learners is important because you really, it's not realistic to go into any learning program and we're going to get 100 percent engagement and 100 percent the learners are going to say this report back that they had a wonderful learning experience and 100 percent performance improvement.

[00:16:26] Pinar O'Flaherty: You want to look and see what the benchmarks are within this group and see that needle is shifting and actually we have A little actually we have a poll and then I think also Rachel, you're gonna talk a little bit about benchmarks in a few minutes. But do we wanna do the the, I guess it's not a poll, it's a question to add into chat, Laura, if you wanna read that one out.

[00:16:45] Laura Mastrorocco: Yes, so please share in the chat. What are some of your potential stakeholder outcomes? So a few examples are increased revenue, people show up, positive 360 feedback, an [00:17:00] increased customer NPS score, or employee retention.

[00:17:05] Laura Mastrorocco: And thank you, Annette, for kicking us off. Reduction in error rates. Employee retention revenue is always a good one, employee retention, customer retention, positive 360 feedback, skill improvement, retention, succession readiness, retention, a culture of trust that results in people using our stop work authority and feeling accepted, empowerment, employee retention, skill improvement.

[00:17:36] Laura Mastrorocco: Operational efficiency, succession planning, customer and employee retention, higher employee engagement and productivity, improved performance that enhances department goal attainment, marketplace image, employee confidence, increased revenue and employee and customer retention improved employee experience, [00:18:00] income and digital enhancement and succession pipeline.

[00:18:04] Laura Mastrorocco: Thank you all for sharing in the chat.

[00:18:08] Rachel Crice: Awesome. Yeah. I like to see the mix here. There's a bit of, feeling based things that we want as outcomes and some more kind of tangible outcomes as well, it sounds and the challenge really for more of the feeling based things like feeling more empowered or, PILOT's mission is feeling powerful at work.

[00:18:24] Rachel Crice: The challenge there is. really figuring out what is the behavior that comes from that feeling and how do we measure that? What happens when people feel more powerful at work? What happens when they're empowered? What happens when there's a culture of trust? How do we measure those things? It's going to be in more of a tangible behavior and 360 feedback might be a great way to do that, get the learner's perception on their own behavior change, but also check in with others.

[00:18:50] Rachel Crice: Is that validated throughout the organization that thing is actually happening?

[00:18:56] Pinar O'Flaherty: Yeah. I think those are some really good points. And these are things that [00:19:00] the really interesting thing that I'm noticing is these are all goals that are very clear and specific, which is a, which is really helpful to know what those outcomes need to be, because that will help to set up sort of your measurement plan, thinking about thinking about what the experience needs to be so that you can see that shift and preparing for a succession pipeline, for example, and retention.

[00:19:19] Pinar O'Flaherty: Those are things you'd need to drill down a little bit deeper into and say what will result in retention for our company or what even, what does retention look like if we, what, where's our threshold for that for our organization? Again, all of these things relate to looking at what are the outcomes that we need where the, and I see actually all levels that we talked about represented here too.

[00:19:38] Pinar O'Flaherty: As Rachel pointed out, how people feel at work is just as important as their efficacy and it often motivation and engagement is a really big part of overall performance and success of any organization. So how do you like rein in all of this and it's with logistics. So if we go to the next slide logistics is often something that you can be used to set some [00:20:00] parameters.

[00:20:00] Pinar O'Flaherty: And it's, it can be a little bit like, oh, we want to do this and we can't do that, but actually it's really good to have some parameters and some guidelines. So time capacity is one thing we talked a little bit about. Seat time, but also the time that it takes to build the program scalability, and this is again, about how many people do you have to train is this something that you're going to be growing year after year, is this something that's going to be ongoing, and how will that be expanded or applied to maybe your, starting training with one area of the company and you want to expand it across other areas, and then, budget and resources and those two things are very much tied together obviously because our resources that our people power is has to have budget behind it.

[00:20:41] Pinar O'Flaherty: Before we dive a little bit more specifically into all these program logistics we have another poll, where, because I do want to cover all these things we only have a certain amount of time. So if we can see where your your biggest challenges lie, we can spend a little bit more time if we find that everybody wants to talk about time capacity or budget on sort of some [00:21:00] things to consider with those things.

[00:21:01] Pinar O'Flaherty: So Laura has the poll up.

[00:21:04] Laura Mastrorocco: So you'll see I've launched the poll. Please do click on your response and then click submit. Once again, we'd love to hear from everyone. So far, I'm seeing a lot of I don't want to skew the, I don't want to skew your answers, but we'll go just a few more seconds. If you haven't already clicked submit, please do

[00:21:22] Rachel Crice: I love the mystery, Laura.

[00:21:24] Laura Mastrorocco: Yeah, is it toolability? Is it budget? Or resources? Or all of the above? If it's other, please share in the chat. And so here we are, the for joining. All of the above is what I was going to say. We have most everyone chiming in with all of the above, only second to time capacity.

[00:21:45] Pinar O'Flaherty: Okay, we have two winners. So what we will talk, we will touch on everything, but but let's start with time capacity. That happens to be our next slide. Thanks very much for for setting that up so nicely to us pollsters. So time capacity deadlines, there's always deadlines. Deadlines are the great [00:22:00] motivator.

[00:22:00] Pinar O'Flaherty: So what can I do about this time challenge? So deadlines can be It can be when you have to have people trained up by, it can be when you have to have your project plan in. There's often multiple deadlines whenever you're planning any kind of project. And there's some things to consider. So when you have some time based challenges, and you're thinking about design, we're going to start still talking about questions, but what are some things that you can actually do?

[00:22:24] Pinar O'Flaherty: You can think about a modality shift or a delivery method shift. So when I use the term delivery method, I'm referring to. How is the learning going to be delivered? Is it going to be a self-paced, e-learning? Where learners will go in and they'll have maybe two weeks to finish a certain number of e-learning courses.

[00:22:42] Pinar O'Flaherty: Is it going to be a live webinar where you'll expect learners to log in once a week for an hour or once a month for a couple hours and participate in a webinar or a live workshop? Maybe it's going to be an offsite where once a quarter you'll have a group of learners come together in person.

[00:22:58] Pinar O'Flaherty: So if you have a [00:23:00] deadline, you can think about a delivery method shift where you say, okay, you know what, actually, we've got to get this done. We can't have everybody away from their desks more than one day this month. So let's give them a little bit of pre work to do, and we'll have a half day. Or we'll do two.

[00:23:16] Pinar O'Flaherty: One hour webinars the last two weeks of the month. So you can shift your modalities around to help support those deadlines and help you make some decisions about that. And then you might say, we don't have, six weeks to produce a video. So what you could do instead is you could decide, you know what, let's shift our modality.

[00:23:34] Pinar O'Flaherty: And when I say modality you might have an e learning module that is the delivery method, and within it you might have a quiz, which is one way of learning. You might have a video, or if you have a tight time crunch, you might say, let's not do the video, let's use screenshots with some text next to it, or some voiceover that explains those screenshots.

[00:23:51] Pinar O'Flaherty: That's a way of reducing the overhead for producing that modality within the e learning. You might say, you know what, let's let's get some additional resources in let's have [00:24:00] a contractor or a consultant come in, or. Maybe we'll borrow some people's hours from another team. You can engage your SMEs your subject matter experts.

[00:24:08] Pinar O'Flaherty: Some subject matter experts also make great facilitators. That's not always the case, but you might have some folks on your team that could participate in the webinar or production of self paced materials to help like very quickly get that up to speed, or you might choose to have shadowing, or I think somebody mentioned an apprentice program.

[00:24:28] Pinar O'Flaherty: or mentoring as part of your design as well, because that can reduce the reduce the need to have learning all done by certain deadline. It can be that they, they have the introduction to the information and then they have, after that deadline, they have mentorship time or shadowing time where they're getting a little more support a little more structure and scaffolding as they start applying what they've learned.

[00:24:49] Pinar O'Flaherty: To the real world and then, consider what you can or will do after the deadline. Again, something like a mentorship program or something like a follow up. Maybe you [00:25:00] have a six month refresher that you wanna plan for and that gives you a little more breathing room to have that. That, those kind of some of those principles also apply to when the learning needs to completed by and not just the production.

[00:25:11] Pinar O'Flaherty: The other thing to think about is how much time does the learner need, like how much learning time versus practice or application time do they need. Rushing learning is never ideal, but sometimes it's unavoidable so consider. What does the learner need to know now versus over time? If somebody is new in a role, for example, they're probably not going to take on all of the responsibilities for that role right away.

[00:25:35] Pinar O'Flaherty: And there's actually a instructional approach to design called just in time learning where the learner receives just what they need. just when they're about to apply that. So for example, if you have somebody who's new in a role the first week they might only be meeting with other roles that they're going to be collaborating with.

[00:25:54] Pinar O'Flaherty: So maybe that first week what they're really learning about is organizational structure, their own role [00:26:00] responsibilities, and getting to know other people in the organization. And then, week two, they might delve a little bit deeper into what they need to know based on the responsibilities they'll have during week two.

[00:26:10] Pinar O'Flaherty: You can meet out the the learning based on what they need to know. There's different approaches that you can do based on that. And then I always like to think about what does the learner need in terms of. The actual seat time or time they'll spend during live training versus what they can do on their own.

[00:26:25] Pinar O'Flaherty: So that's pre work, follow up work getting a peer buddy or a mentor where they have these touch bases that happen outside of the learning structure, the learning program itself. That's still part of the design, but it's not necessarily seat time. A couple of things to consider in terms of time is facilitation.

[00:26:44] Pinar O'Flaherty: Do you need a facilitator? Is that subject matter expertise or manager the right person to deliver that training? If you do need a subject matter or facilitator, how much time you're going to get from them. Never underestimate how much time you might need from a [00:27:00] subject matter expert. You might need them to help support like outlining the content reviewing the content once it's been developed, if it's going to be learning or even reviewing delivery materials, if it's going to be a live session.

[00:27:12] Pinar O'Flaherty: I always like to to work with my subject matter experts early and often and that way you can course correct and align. Before you get into producing expensive videos for something and make sure that the the subject matter expert is saying, yes, this is on point. This is going in the right direction, or, oh, I've noticed a content gap, something that the the learners might need to know.

[00:27:32] Pinar O'Flaherty: So that's a little bit about time capacity. And certainly we can revisit later.

[00:27:36] Rachel Crice: One thing that I was just thinking is. All of this is really in alignment with some product development principles just around working around customer needs and thinking about your learners as customers and what are their needs in this learning program that you're designing.

[00:27:54] Rachel Crice: And time capacity is one of those things and it greatly depends on that type of learner [00:28:00] and what their needs are and what their day to day is. So as a. product developer, you want to know who that customer is and what their day to day looks like so that you can really design something that they're more likely to start using.

[00:28:11] Rachel Crice: So back to engagement and usage, setting them up for something that they're actually able to engage in. People want to do the work and earn something, but they don't want to put the effort in the wrong place. And the wrong place should not be like, I just don't have time for this. or how do I find the learning?

[00:28:29] Rachel Crice: So there's like some smaller logistics things like that come up when it, when you're thinking about time capacity, even just a small thing of can this learning actually be done in 30 minutes?

[00:28:40] Pinar O'Flaherty: Yeah, absolutely. And also to your point, if you are doing something, if you're talking about product do you need for example, like a knowledge toolkit or do you need to think about is there a help desk or help help tool component to the training or what resources do they have?

[00:28:53] Pinar O'Flaherty: And that refers back a little bit to just in time learning too. Like you may want to lay a foundation, give them some tools so that they have [00:29:00] opportunities for discovery while they're doing, applying their learning to their day to day. And then, you have a month later, you have a follow up where you bring them to the next level knowing that they've had certain tasks or work modes that they've had where they're applying their learning, they're using those tools, and then they're ready to come in for the next round.

[00:29:18] Pinar O'Flaherty: Yeah, the capacity of a learner is is really important in terms of how quickly they can apply. And I, yeah, there's always that risk of giving somebody. a lot of information in a couple of hours, maybe too much to absorb, and they may not be using some of that information immediately either.

[00:29:35] Pinar O'Flaherty: So additional tools, things like knowledge bases or other toolkits that they can refer back to as something to consider. And when you're designing, those supplemental materials are part of that consideration as well, supporting them once they've completed the learning itself.

[00:29:50] Pinar O'Flaherty: Absolutely. So all so scalability is very much about how many people do you need to train and that's often a logistic that [00:30:00] impacts the decisions you make for the structure and the design of the program. The scalability also relates to those deadlines that we were talking about just a second ago. You often need to start with, and this is a question that sometimes sometimes I'm talking with a team that needs training and I'll say how many people are you going to train?

[00:30:17] Pinar O'Flaherty: And they might say like 500. And I'm like, so how many times you're going to offer this training? This live session and they're like, oh, we are gonna offer it this one day on the screen phone. Okay, all 500 people are going to be attend that one day. And how effective is that one live virtual session going to be?

[00:30:33] Pinar O'Flaherty: Oh, we're gonna do some role playing. Really? You're gonna do role playing with 500 people during a so scalability really? You really have to. There's a lot of good questions that come out of that. If you are training let's say you're training 300 people. You can train 300 people if you wanted to do a live workshop in an afternoon.

[00:30:50] Pinar O'Flaherty: If you think about the structure of, and if you have the culture for this, Is there pre work you can give them? Are there, is there a peer community that they can engage in prior [00:31:00] to and after that live experience? It really goes beyond just how many people practically, and I, a general rule, if there is something that you're doing virtually, you probably want to keep it to 20 or 25 people if you want a high level of engagement.

[00:31:14] Pinar O'Flaherty: If you're going to do anything like breakout rooms or practice conversations or case examples that you might want to be able then, the group to discuss either as a whole group or even break them out into small groups and have them share their thoughts. So when you think about scalability, you're thinking about the number of people you want to train, what that experience is going to be like, but then also scalability of the program itself.

[00:31:36] Pinar O'Flaherty: Is this something that's being delivered every quarter? Is it something, is it an apprenticeship program that, that starts again every six months or development program that you want to run twice a year, for six months or for three months at a time? So scalability can apply to the number of learners, but it can apply to the program.

[00:31:54] Pinar O'Flaherty: and the program over time. How do you want to grow it over time? The other things [00:32:00] and, it's like location of learners, obviously, if you're going to have people coming together, do you have all the logistics together to have people fly in from different locations? If you're going to be presenting virtually, how many different time zones are you looking at?

[00:32:11] Pinar O'Flaherty: Same thing for the facilitators. And then down in this right hand corner, we have content maintenance. And And just like metrics and measurement you do want to think about content maintenance. If it's a one and done, if you're getting everybody up to speed on a new policy and you're going to do it once and it's not going to change again for a couple of years and the training would be so different in a couple of years, then content maintenance isn't an issue.

[00:32:35] Pinar O'Flaherty: However, if it is something that you need to run on an ongoing basis, you do want to think about how hard is it going to be to make changes and edit this Here's a good example. If you're producing something let's say it is a product training, and you're looking at software, user interface maybe you don't want to go with complicated screen recordings that have voiceover, and that [00:33:00] are, like, pretty heavy lift to produce screenshots and text, which can be more, more quickly updated if you do change a screen in the, you And the user interface for the product. So content maintenance can be based on the content itself, and it can also be based on the scale of the program. How often are you going to repeat this program?

[00:33:20] Pinar O'Flaherty: Will the content change over time? Or it, something like, for example, like this is our. This is our training and how we like to the communication model that we use at our, that might have a longer shelf life because you might be committed to a certain approach to feedback and communication skills for managers.

[00:33:39] Pinar O'Flaherty: And that program is probably not going to change month to month. That would be very confusing for your managers. So you do want to think about scalability when it comes to content maintenance. The type of content, how often you'll need to refresh it how often you're going to run that program and if changes will be, need to be made to it over time.

[00:33:58] Pinar O'Flaherty: So all these things are very [00:34:00] intertwined because of course content maintenance impacts what, delivery method or modality you're going to have. And all of these things, of course impact. The next thing we're gonna talk about, which is budget. Budget can be a little bit of a dream crusher, it could also be, like other logistics, a really great way to put some pressure on and make some decisions. And just making good decisions is really important in great design. It's actually really great. So you do want to think about, what's my budget to build, deliver, and maintain this content and these programs over time?

[00:34:31] Pinar O'Flaherty: Do I need to hire facilitators? Do, do I need to have a program manager? What are all the roles involved? And then, so that's around supporting and building the program. The other side of. of a budget is how much time can I afford to have these learners either not up to speed or away from their daily work?

[00:34:51] Pinar O'Flaherty: So can I afford to take my entire sales team away from their desks for a week for some intense really beneficial sales training, [00:35:00] maybe maybe if it's, maybe if you time it so that it's during your slow season where you don't have a lot of sales going on. How training is funded is really important and it's not just the learners.

[00:35:09] Pinar O'Flaherty: Particularly, somebody mentioned apprentice programs earlier Mentoring, shadowing, apprentice programs are an incredible way to learn and they, that can often pay for itself in many ways because there's so much value in that. But do consider that if you're asking somebody who's more seasoned or senior or experienced to be a mentor, you are taking some hours from them.

[00:35:32] Pinar O'Flaherty: You are increasing their workload and you may be taking some hours from them. I think I still think the benefits of a mentorship program or shadowing program often outweigh that because there's a lot of benefits to being a mentor. There's a lot of. Knowing that somebody has the potential to become a mentor when they see that in their career pipeline can be very motivating and that can solve your retention problem or help to solve your retention problem.

[00:35:55] Pinar O'Flaherty: For example having a mentor can also solve your retention problem [00:36:00] because that person may find that they're less frustrated. They feel more connected. They feel more tied into culture. I remember there was a comment earlier about making feel people feeling connected and part of culture. Budget can impact, obviously, across the board, but some details that we may not think about, like how does our budget impact mentors?

[00:36:17] Pinar O'Flaherty: How does it impact the hours that we need? And this kind of thinking of, thinking about budget spend, of course, relates to your decision makers. Again, Making the decisions, getting the budget built to, to fund the building or development of a program and to fund the seat time for your learners at or time away from mentors or other facilitators, subject matter experts.

[00:36:41] Pinar O'Flaherty: There may be some negotiation there, which brings us a little bit back full circle to, to To outcomes and resources and making sure that, early on you find out what those stakeholder needs are and what their concerns are so that when you come to budget. they're invested [00:37:00] and you have their buy in and they're keen to see this program come to fruition.

[00:37:05] Pinar O'Flaherty: So our next slide before we go into some Q& A is on resources, but before we do that, I just wanted to do a quick poll. What are the biggest challenges that you have in regard to resourcing?

[00:37:21] Pinar O'Flaherty: Laura, do you want to read our options out?

[00:37:24] Laura Mastrorocco: Sure, so what is your biggest challenge with resourcing? Is it finding subject matter expertise? identifying and closing content gaps, finding the right people to do the learning design work, finding the resources to create e learning or live learning delivery materials, all of the above.

[00:37:45] Laura Mastrorocco: And last but not least, if there's something else that you're finding to be a challenge, please drop it in the chat. We'd love to hear from you. We'll go just a few more seconds. If you haven't already clicked submit, please [00:38:00] do so at this time.

[00:38:07] Laura Mastrorocco: And it looks like we have quite a few people who are saying all of the above and an equal number voting for finding the resources to create an e learning. Or live learning delivery materials.

[00:38:24] Pinar O'Flaherty: So I'm glad to see that all the above is the winning answer every time. And actually I'm seeing a little connection between a question that was asked in the chat and.

[00:38:33] Pinar O'Flaherty: Finding the resources to create e learning or live learning materials. And I think, I don't know, Rachel, if you'd like to speak to that, but I feel like there's an overlap between sort of, we're talking about a lot of principles in this just one hour time period. And sometimes there's something out there's somebody or something out there that can help you.

[00:38:54] Pinar O'Flaherty: So sometimes there it is like bringing in a consultant or bringing in a contract team or hiring an organization that specializes [00:39:00] in e learning, and sometimes it's finding a program. That meets your needs. And Rachel, I know that I mentioned before that PILOT's actually like a really interesting case study in terms of benchmarks, but it's also really interesting case study in terms of a resource that, that works well for a specific kind of need.

[00:39:19] Pinar O'Flaherty: And sometimes people think they have to create a bespoke program in their company, and then they find out that there's PILOT, for example, or another company that has a program that does meet this need that can adapt to that. Their organization. Do you wanna talk a little bit about pilot as a case study in that regard?

[00:39:36] Rachel Crice: Yeah, I do find that particularly with PILOT customers the benchmarks are a little more flexible. So it depends on what again, your learning outcomes are. If they're more around, compliance and things like that your kind of subject matter experts may be a little bit different and much more of a need, right?

[00:39:52] Rachel Crice: For you to go external and find someone who really. And certified coaching and the coaching community [00:40:00] is a little more loose, right? You have different subject matter experts in different areas. We've got, Pinar, who's a instructional designer and learning strategist, but we also have folks who are life coaches.

[00:40:08] Rachel Crice: We also bring in folks who do career coaching exclusively. We have HR consultants who are on our team. Again, it goes back to thinking about who are your stakeholders? What do they need? My stakeholders here at PILOT are, HR customers, their employees at organizations, there's people managers at those organizations, and that leadership team to Corey's question here in the chat around how do you position all of this with energy and clarity versus a firehose of information for those folks in the C suite?

[00:40:34] Rachel Crice: It really is thinking about you What does this person need to say yes to what I want them to do? And that goes from subject matter experts to your stakeholders. So what do I need to get a yes? And that's how, Corey, I would position that to the folks in the C suite as your stakeholder is try not to do the fire hose of the information.

[00:40:54] Rachel Crice: Lots of, lots, most people in the C suite, at least I would say, are like, just give me the information I need and not the [00:41:00] extras, right? I don't got time for this. So one thing, a framework that we have here at PILOT, I'll give you a little secret here is a model called the Head, Heart, and Guts model of leadership, which really helps with how do you get to that yes with folks.

[00:41:14] Rachel Crice: What type of leader are you talking to? Are you talking to someone who's more of a head leader who really resonates with data? Are you talking to someone who's more of a heart leader? Do you need to like tug at the heartstrings to get that yes? Or are they more of a gut leader who, really resonates with more of the, let's take a risk, let's go on an adventure, let's take the leap type of leader who wants to be at the front of the charge, the kind of Braveheart moment, right? So that's what I would say in terms of the C suite with Subject Matter Experts OpenAR. Again, I think it just really goes back to figuring out what your learning outcomes are and who's the best person for that job.

[00:41:46] Rachel Crice: And it could be internal, it could be external.

[00:41:48] Pinar O'Flaherty: Yep. And that's actually like a really good point to start off this resources slide. There's so many challenges and so many considerations. Now, of course I love learning design. So I'm like, Oh, great. Bring it out. I'm like, let's design a program.

[00:41:59] Pinar O'Flaherty: But you [00:42:00] may need to find subject matter experts internally, or, I worked with organizations that actually are like, wow, we really need to bring in some external subject matter experts to help us build this product. Or some outsource some aspect of it, like maybe you need to outsource somebody who can build great videos for you, if that's part of what you want to have as part of your learning or your need for to meet your needs of your learning design.

[00:42:22] Pinar O'Flaherty: And you know that all those things impact the delivery method too, and the roles and responsibilities. You may just as Rachel was saying, you may find that, yes, you do need to design this program. Yes, compliance training that is specific to your organization is the program, but there may be a part of it that could be delivered differently.

[00:42:40] Pinar O'Flaherty: I know that a lot of organizations, there's so much great content that's already been designed and built out there. For example, some people will when they're bringing up a new person in a financial position, they'll have them take Excel courses through another organization, or they'll have them, work on another a lot of these different software, obviously software has their own training, but there's [00:43:00] awful lot of, a lot of organizations, for example, that have courses on the essentials of digital marketing, or principles of Behavioral psychology within a human resources organizations.

[00:43:10] Pinar O'Flaherty: So as you're thinking about the structure and the subject matters that you experts you have on team or whether you need to find somebody else in those rows and responsibilities and whether it's internal or you're going to outsource in those delivery methods, you can also think about what we refer to as off the shelf training, or organizations that provide certain types of training programs as like their product, like PILOT does that you can bring in to either meet your entire learning need or supplement what you're doing.

[00:43:38] Pinar O'Flaherty: And, I've worked with a lot of organizations that do And this relates to budget, they will, send somebody who's in that succession line to night classes and finance if they, if they need to do that, or they will find budget to send, some key leaders to like a management training program on communication feedback models and then they can bring [00:44:00] that back and there can be a bit of a trickle down.

[00:44:02] Pinar O'Flaherty: Effect when you have leaders that have specific training they can bring back to their teams and integrate into their culture and way of working. It's not always about working from scratch and building the whole thing yourselves. You do need to consider what's the capacity?

[00:44:16] Pinar O'Flaherty: What are the resources that you need? What's the the budget that you have? And there's all those different things to weigh a little bit. I know we only have a few minutes left and I think we wanted to leave a little bit of time for questions. So Laura, do you want to give us, give the summary?

[00:44:29] Pinar O'Flaherty: I think there are some or sorry, I'll give the summary. I think there's some, another slide later that has some of the other information that you'll need. For attending. But so we go back to the outcomes. Who are my key stakeholders? What does success mean for each of them? And what does success mean for our learners?

[00:44:45] Pinar O'Flaherty: What are those learning objectives? And how does that impact both sort of management and organizational goals as well as the learner goals? And then what are the benchmarks? What is, what are the, What does that really, what does good look like for your organization? And then what we just covered in time capacity, scalability, [00:45:00] budget and resources.

[00:45:01] Pinar O'Flaherty: And remember, there's always more than one way to do things. So that does those logistics help you to work within that framework of, the choices that you're going to have to make. Which I find really helpful in terms of just giving some guide rails to putting together a good learning experience.

[00:45:18] Rachel Crice: This was such a great discussion. And on that, I think just when we were creating this webinar in partnership with Pinar I had come to Pinar and I was like, what if we did this webinar on like a formula for creating structure for a program? And she's it's not really a formula though. We can't really do that.

[00:45:34] Rachel Crice: We can't do here's step one, step two, and Here's your program, right? It's really a reflective moment for you all. So I hope that gives you a framework for how to think about these things and like the methods for structuring a program and all the opportunities that you have to really make it your own.

[00:45:51] Rachel Crice: All right, we've got some questions coming in the chat. We're going to spend a couple minutes here on Q& A. So drop any questions that you do have in the chat as you do that. Laura is [00:46:00] going to be dropping some links to additional resources for you here as well. That first link is to the previous webinar that Pinar and I did on optimizing L& D programs for hybrid and remote.

[00:46:10] Rachel Crice: That one will give you more of a kind of big picture, zoomed out view of what we talked about today. An ebook, Missing Ingredients for Employee Development, and some upcoming webinars as well. Our next one in partnership with BMRE, right Laura? Yes, that's correct. All right, August 23rd at 1 p. m. eastern, Easy Steps to Transform Your Team's Work Experience.

[00:46:29] Laura Mastrorocco: And so feel free to drop any questions in the chat. We'd love to hear from you. If we haven't already answered your questions.

[00:46:44] Rachel Crice: Quick question, Pinar. When I was, we were talking about content maintenance and it goes back to the measurement conversation as well. One thing that we do here at PILOT is we're measuring consistently through our program, right? We want to get user feedback all the time. And it I find that the program needs [00:47:00] to still be flexible enough for us to learn from that feedback and make a change. But we don't want to overhaul everything, right? So how do we create the balance there? How do we create flexible enough programs so that they can be updated with user feedback, but not like a total redo with a ton of content maintenance?

[00:47:16] Pinar O'Flaherty: That's a really good point. Even if you do have content that's relatively evergreen, this is our company culture for feedback or something that you know is going to be, that's going to be the way it is for a few years.

[00:47:27] Pinar O'Flaherty: You do want to have in that upfront structure, how often do we want to make changes based on what the learners or what the learners report back about their experience? Or if you have performance learner performance measurement, like quizzes and things like that to assess, are they understanding this information?

[00:47:44] Pinar O'Flaherty: Or maybe even you have a survey that you send to the learner and the manager afterward. Maybe, 30 day, 60 day out. Are you able to apply what you've learned? Where do you feel that you need more information? You do want to have regular opportunities to integrate feedback for any new learning [00:48:00] program.

[00:48:00] Pinar O'Flaherty: And I feel like it's probably like A good sort of I don't want to say rule, but a good practice is to assume that the first time you run a program, that it is a prototype. So you want to have in your project plan that once you've had a complete every the, a complete cohort or complete group of learners have completed the program, and you want to give them 30 or 60 days to give you feedback and say, yes, I'm able to apply this to my work, or here's where my gaps still are.

[00:48:29] Pinar O'Flaherty: So you want to look at topping up or rebuy, making revisions separate between 60 and 90 days after the initial completion of all learning components. Yeah. And then if you're running it multiple times a year, I would think about what your budget and resources are quarterly or maybe biannually for making those, collecting learner feedback and making that.

[00:48:48] Pinar O'Flaherty: And it is really important to let your learners know that they are part of the process and you are invested in hearing from them and knowing that the experience was positive. I think And Rachel, you mentioned this earlier. [00:49:00] There is a, an emotional and psychological component to learning. There's many books out there many master's degrees that you could get on this.

[00:49:06] Pinar O'Flaherty: But engagement is really -the learner has to see the value in what they're doing. They have to feel empowered by it, and they have to feel that they are part of the learning experience and that you will hear them and their feedback. So yes Definitely. I'm really glad you mentioned that. I would have that as part of your regular maintenance cycle is integrating learner feedback and also learner performance assessment.

[00:49:26] Rachel Crice: All right, we are right at the minute here. Wrapping up I do want to give just a quick reminder that this is only part one. We've got two more parts of this learning lab. One coming up in October, one coming up on December, so save the date. Registration is not open for these just yet, but you will get an email about when registration is open for these webinars.

[00:49:44] Rachel Crice: You can follow us on LinkedIn at pilot_inc is how you can find us. Or go to our resources page on our website and you'll find more information on these webinars there, but thank you all so much for joining us. If you need your SHRM HRCI codes, they are in the chat. Over to you, Laura, to close [00:50:00] us out.

[00:50:00] Laura Mastrorocco: Yes, thank you all so much for joining and learning with us today. I hope you found this to be so informative. I know I learned a lot. If you'd like to learn more about PILOT for your organization, please scan the QR code that you see here on the screen, or I've also dropped a link in the chat. We'd love to, to talk further with you.

[00:50:18] Laura Mastrorocco: I very much appreciate your time today, and Pinar and Rachel, I very much appreciate your expertise. With that, I thank you all, and have a terrific rest of your day.