Your learning and development programming and Brandy Melville’s clothing have at least one thing in common: A one-size-fits-all approach does not work for everyone.
L&D has been around for quite a while, but it underwent a significant transformation over the last few years as many companies adopted virtual training programs amid the Covid-19 pandemic. But organizations may now have an overreliance on these training courses, which often lack a hands-on element crucial to retaining information, academics speaking at a recent Academy of Management panel warned.
“I’m seeing that organizations are emphasizing micro-credentialing, they’re encouraging self-directed learning, and that worries me a little bit because I feel like it puts so much responsibility for training and development on the employees’ shoulders,” Carol Kulik, professor of human resource management at the University of South Australia, said.
Lucky for HR pros panicking that their multimillion-dollar L&D investment is a complete waste, panelists shared some tips for mixing formal training and informal social learning. Read their advice below.
Allow for mistakes. Most workers don’t use the information they learn in training programs to do their jobs—a surefire way to forget that expensive curriculum—and may refrain from practicing their new skills if they can’t experiment.
“I bet that everybody has had the same experience, where you go off to this training program, and you’re really excited about it, and you come back to work, and it turns out there’s this whole backlog of stuff that piled up while you were off at the training program,” Kulik said. “Suddenly, you’re under all this pressure. You’ve got deadlines, you’re not in the right headspace to practice the new skill, you automatically fall back on the old habits, and then the training doesn’t stick at all.”
Managers, Kulik said, play a crucial role in ensuring their direct reports have the time and space to practice newly learned skills. She shared that one executive at a boutique marketing firm did that by assigning employees returning from an AI training course to use the skills they learned to develop a campaign for a hypothetical client.
“It was basically a sandbox, so they were able to play, they could make as many mistakes as they wanted, but it was such a beautiful transfer moment from training to being on the job,” she said. “It created this in-between kind of third space that allowed the skills to set in.”
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Make in-person matter. Love it or hate it, being in the office can provide more opportunities for feedback.
“Some of the return to office arguments, I think, do carry water for the need to be able to get together and bump into people and ask questions and figure out what the more of the inside-baseball tacit knowledge stuff that’s happening within the organization,” Christopher Myers, associate professor of management and organization at the Johns Hopkins Carey Business School, told HR Brew.
However, those informal learning moments may not happen if employees are spending their in-office time on Zoom calls or working on solo projects.
“We’re working face-to-face, but the work itself is moving virtually,” Kulik said. “We’re missing a lot of that visual, vicarious learning.”
Some companies have started structuring in-office time to focus more on collaborative teamwork. Microsoft, for example, found that one of the most beneficial uses of in-office time was for onboarding its new employees. In research the company published in 2023, it noted these employees were more likely to ask their manager or assigned onboarding buddy for feedback, be asked by their team for input, and get effective coaching and feedback.
HR teams can also leverage in-person gatherings, like corporate offsites, to foster a blend of formal and informal training. Software company Atlassian has an “Intentional Togetherness Gathering” program, through which teams meet in one of the company’s offices a few times a year. These meetings can be particularly helpful during critical points in a project, Catherine Collins, an associate professor at UNSW Sydney’s Business School, said. “When things are going screwy, when they are making those mistakes, and realize that they need more of these social processes for learning that is unstructured and spending time together.”
Not in the office? There are workarounds. While in-person interactions offer the most organic opportunities for peer learning, virtual calls have options, too, Myers said. Teams can schedule quick debriefing meetings after client calls, or avoid hopping into other meetings immediately after meetings, to reflect and offer feedback.
“Those are all ways to try to build in or replicate some of the things that might happen more naturally or organically when we’re in person, but are still very beneficial when we’re remote,” Myers told HR Brew.