Changing the face of workplace learning

A year into the pan­dem­ic, busi­ness­es find them­selves with dec­i­mat­ed bud­gets, reduced man­pow­er and fac­ing some of their biggest chal­lenges yet. Many rely on the input of every employ­ee to recov­er and remain com­pet­i­tive in an increas­ing­ly unpre­dictable mar­ket. Invest­ment in human cap­i­tal, there­fore, has nev­er been more impor­tant.

New tech­nolo­gies have made inno­va­tion in this area not only pos­si­ble, but desir­able. Lock­down and remote work­ing have accel­er­at­ed busi­ness dig­i­tal­i­sa­tion by sev­er­al years. Busi­ness­es now look at solu­tions that will work well with a dis­trib­uted work­force, while keep­ing inter­ac­tiv­i­ty, col­lab­o­ra­tion and engage­ment high.

Still, this comes with its own risks. Tech­nol­o­gy adop­tion should always be a means to an end and not the end-goal in itself. Too much automa­tion and busi­ness­es risk intro­duc­ing con­formism at the expense of inno­v­a­tive think­ing. A bal­ance between human inter­ac­tion and tech­nol­o­gy-assist­ed train­ing can be the per­fect blend busi­ness­es need to see their work­force flour­ish.

Bringing interactivity to the virtual classroom

The World Eco­nom­ic Forum esti­mates that 44 per cent of employ­ees’ cur­rent skills will need to be replaced by 2025. That’s a lot of retrain­ing that needs to be done in a short amount of time. 

When L’Oréal found them­selves with a dis­trib­uted team at the begin­ning of the pan­dem­ic, they knew they couldn’t just pause their train­ing efforts. They need­ed to act fast to keep their work­force engaged and pre­pared to face the new real­i­ty. That’s when they real­ly start­ed to look at vir­tu­al class­room train­ing.

“COVID-19 has forced us into the future and in the UK and Ire­land we have gone from 5,000 hours of vir­tu­al learn­ing in 2019 to over 30,000 hours in 2020, of which 19,000 are from vir­tu­al class­room hours,” says Vanes­sa Palmer, learn­ing, cul­ture and engage­ment direc­tor at L’Oréal UK and Ire­land.

How­ev­er, vir­tu­al train­ing in itself wasn’t going to be enough to keep engage­ment high, so the busi­ness looked at ways to keep employ­ees inter­act­ing and com­mu­ni­cat­ing with each oth­er.

“We were very aware from the start of our move to vir­tu­al learn­ing that full-day cours­es were not engag­ing; some­one is not going to learn effec­tive­ly through spend­ing a whole day in front of their lap­top at home. Effec­tive learn­ing needs inter­ac­tiv­i­ty and a change in the for­mat of the cours­es, whether that is break-out rooms, white­boards, or polling or quiz ele­ments,” says Palmer. 

While vir­tu­al class­es have made their cor­po­rate train­ing far more acces­si­ble, it’s the human ele­ment of inter­ac­tion and exchange of ideas that real­ly made the dif­fer­ence in how employ­ees respond­ed.

“The total num­ber of hours our UK and Ire­land employ­ees spent learn­ing in 2020 increased by more than 20 per cent in com­par­i­son to 2019 and the aver­age hours of learn­ing per employ­ee has also increased by over 20 per cent,” she says. 

New landscape of soft-skills development

Inter­ac­tiv­i­ty and col­lab­o­ra­tion are par­tic­u­lar­ly impor­tant in the world of soft-skills train­ing where employ­ees often have to rely on sub­tle cues and sig­nals to inter­pret behav­iours. Thou­sands of peo­ple, who are just enter­ing the work­force, are tran­si­tion­ing from a world of social media into a world of remote work and miss­ing out on key in-per­son inter­ac­tions that can help them hone their soft skills. 

Now employ­ers are asked to come up with inno­v­a­tive ways in which their work­force can con­tin­ue to devel­op these intan­gi­ble, yet cru­cial, skills for busi­ness suc­cess.

“Peo­ple used to think they had to be engag­ing and cre­ative when talk­ing to their con­sumers, but dull, dry and grey when com­mu­ni­cat­ing with their work­force. Busi­ness­es are final­ly real­is­ing their first audi­ence, and the one that can have the biggest impact on their ambi­tions, is their own employ­ees,” says Tom Hall, chief exec­u­tive at Con­tent­ed Broth­ers, a con­tent inno­va­tion com­pa­ny based in Lon­don.

One unsus­pect­ing tech­nol­o­gy that has made soft-skills train­ing not only engag­ing, but also pos­si­ble in the world of remote work is vir­tu­al real­i­ty (VR).

“VR is able to deliv­er the kind of learn­ing that makes your brain feel like it’s been through the expe­ri­ence you’re learn­ing about rather than some­thing you’ve observed or watched,” says Hall. “Peo­ple think of VR as some­thing to be done on your own, some­thing that can be very iso­lat­ing, which is absolute­ly not true.”

Con­tent­ed Broth­ers recent­ly worked on imple­ment­ing VR-assist­ed soft-skills train­ing where one employ­ee wore a VR head­set and anoth­er held clues to a puz­zle that could be resolved only through col­lab­o­ra­tion. While VR train­ing does require addi­tion­al equip­ment, solu­tions like Google Card­board have made it acces­si­ble and a viable option for remote train­ing.

World of AI: risks and opportunities

Look­ing beyond inter­ac­tiv­i­ty, busi­ness­es often turn to arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence (AI) as a panacea for all their cor­po­rate inef­fi­cien­cies. We’re already see­ing some progress in this realm with adap­tive tech­nolo­gies that take spe­cif­ic job-role com­pe­ten­cies and match them up against indi­vid­ual skill lev­els of the employ­ee. 

The tech­nol­o­gy works very well in sce­nar­ios where large groups of peo­ple need to acquire a very spe­cif­ic skillset. Sta­tis­ti­cal data analy­sis can look at pat­terns and anom­alies which then tell the stu­dent where their knowl­edge is lack­ing. Yet, the tech­nol­o­gy doesn’t come with­out its own flaws and AI experts warn busi­ness­es to use this tech­nol­o­gy with cau­tion.

“The notion of intel­li­gence is quite wrong in this con­text, because what we talk about here is repet­i­tive data extrap­o­la­tion. Intel­li­gence is about inno­va­tion of think­ing, the abil­i­ty to dis­cov­er hid­den things in what is vis­i­ble, which you don’t get in machine learn­ing. It is in a way cre­at­ing sub­or­di­na­tion to exist­ing knowl­edge,” says Dr Cyrille Math­is, neu­rol­o­gy and psy­chi­a­try spe­cial­ist, and chief sci­en­tif­ic offi­cer at Think­TankMaths, a math­e­mat­ics research com­pa­ny based in Edin­burgh.

Angela Math­is, chief exec­u­tive at Think­TankMaths, adds: “Cur­rent AI is good when you’re look­ing for sta­tis­ti­cal pat­terns, things that match, but not look­ing for out­liers. How­ev­er, in these out­liers there’s a uni­verse of infor­ma­tion; that’s where you’d go if you’d like to invent and cre­ate.”

Since AI relies on pre-exist­ing sets of data, there’s a height­ened risk of intro­duc­ing uncon­scious bias­es in the algo­rithm, caus­ing more dam­age than good. Amazon’s AI-dri­ven recruit­ment tool is a per­fect exam­ple of this. The tech­nol­o­gy used data sets based on suc­cess­ful male appli­cants, mak­ing the sys­tem dis­crim­i­nate against female can­di­dates. The tech­nol­o­gy was instant­ly shut down once its bias was dis­cov­ered, but the risk always remains that more sub­tle bias­es can go unno­ticed for a long time.

Regard­less of the approach they take, busi­ness­es are aware things will nev­er go back to how they were, nor should they. Some changes were long over­due and are mak­ing a big pos­i­tive impact, while oth­ers need to be intro­duced with more cau­tion. 

“Our approach to learn­ing and devel­op­ment in the UK & Ire­land will not be going back to what it was. There will be two main changes. First­ly, the future will be a greater blend between vir­tu­al and in-per­son than before and sec­ond­ly, our longer cours­es will be spread out over weeks not com­pressed into days. Sev­en­ty per cent of infor­ma­tion tak­en in is lost with­in 24 hours; this is a stat that the learn­ing and devel­op­ment com­mu­ni­ty pre­vi­ous­ly accept­ed, but COVID has giv­en us a chance to change this,” says Palmer at L’Oréal.

And maybe that’s exact­ly what the work­force of tomor­row needs. Rather than deliv­er­ing train­ing faster, bet­ter, smarter, all we need is a bit of a break. A bit of time to engage in a qual­i­ty peer-to-peer or teacher-to-stu­dent inter­ac­tion that encour­ages us to think crit­i­cal­ly, chal­lenge the sta­tus quo and use our imag­i­na­tion. It’s these skills that will even­tu­al­ly help busi­ness­es weath­er the storm and come out stronger at the oth­er end.