I have been running the Learning in the Workplace survey for 5 years now, and after over 5,000 responses from 63 countries worldwide the results are clear: Company training is the least valued way of learning in the workplace.
ways of learning NI QI VI Es VI+Es 1 Knowledge sharing within team 2 10 30 58 88 2 Web search 3 17 32 48 80 3 General conversations 2 19 40 39 79 4 Networks & communities 3 23 39 35 74 5 Blog & news feeds 12 31 35 22 57 6 Curated content 9 35 36 20 56 7 Self-directed study 13 35 35 17 52 8 Company docs 13 38 31 18 49 9 Job aids 18 37 30 15 45 10 Company training/e-learning 21 39 23 17 40
Right at the bottom of the ranking lies company training/e-learning with only 40% of respondent believing it to be very important or essential. When we compare the profile of the youngest and the oldest workers – i.e. how they ranked the 10 ways of learning relative to the overall profile (shown in brackets in the table below) – this is what we find.
Under 30s Over 60s
- Knowledge sharing 96 (1)
- Conversations 91 (3)
- Web search 77 (2)
- Blog feeds 69 (5)
- Prof networks 66 (4)
- Company docs 52 (8)
- Company training 51 (10)
- Self-directed 50 (7)
- Curated content 48 (6)
- Job aids 43 (9)
- Web search 86 (2)
- Knowledge sharing 83 (1)
- Prof networks 80 (4)
- Conversations 79 (3)
- Curated content 69 (6)
- Blog feeds 64 (5)
- Company docs 50 (8)
- Self-directed 47 (7)
- Job aids 39 (9)
- Company training 33 (10)
It is clear from the results that informal, social as well as self-organized approaches are now the preferred means of learning for many, so this would suggest the need for L&D to adopt a new set of workplace learning practices that:
- focus less on the creation of top-down content (courses and resources) using a “one-size fits all” approach, and instead offer flexible, on demand content and collaborative activities that allow individuals to have a personal(ized) learning experience
- focus more on supporting the informal, social learning practices that take place in teams, projects and across the enterprise, and also
- focus more on supporting self-organized workers and the development of their own personal learning strategies.
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This article is part of a new series exploring the skills leaders must learn to make the most of rapid change in an increasingly disruptive world.
In times of increasing change and complexity, it can be difficult to envision bold new futures with any certainty. Leaders need to embrace skills, practices and behaviors of futurists. Futurists don’t have secret powers to predict the future. Rather, futurists discipline themselves to question the status quo. They regularly scan external trends, adjacent industries and underlying forces. They consider diverse perspectives. And they boldly tell stories about the future before all of the data is available to back it up.
Our implicit views about the future are so ingrained in business plans, financial models, and strategy conversations that leaders often don’t take the time to articulate underlying assumptions. When they do, they may discover plans rely on variables that are far from given and perhaps not the only options. The future lives in a very broad set of possibilities, and these can unfold surprisingly quickly.
Methods commonly employed by futurists can help you strengthen your plans. Disciplined methods of strategic foresight systematically scan, analyze, probe and project the future beyond what we intuitively think might be possible.
The first step is identifying the most important and uncertain macro forces shaping your business. These can usually be divided into five broad categories: social, technological, economic, environmental and political. (Tip: Recall these with the acronym STEEP.)
Under each of these categories, there are a number of driving forces and external variables that might lead to very different futures. Once these high-impact variables are identified and prioritized, futurists gather diverse inputs to establish a range of how the variables are likely to play out over time. The further ahead they go, the wider the range of possibilities.
Futurists call this the cone of possibilities and carefully organize their forecasts into four buckets.
- What are possible futures? This is the full range of events that could unfold.
- What are plausible futures? This is what we believe is possible but unlikely.
- What are probable futures? This is what’s most likely to happen.
- What are preferred futures? This is what we want to happen.
Once you’ve identified your preferred future, you can start to identify key activities and milestones that would help create that future. Backcasting is the act of imagining a preferred future and then stepping backward toward the present, repeatedly probing what has to happen to enable each step.
To dream up bold, new possibilities, try imagining an outcome 10 times better, cheaper, or more impactful than what exists today.
One of the most challenging aspects of practicing the skills of a futurist is getting comfortable with the reality that we simply cannot predict the future. For many senior leaders, this is deeply unsettling. How can we possibly make big bets on the future without all the facts and data? We are all capable of becoming better futurists. In doing so, we not only architect hope of new possibilities, we also build more flexible, adaptive and resilient organizations in the process.
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Michelle: One of the things I often find is that there’s a bit of confusion about the difference between compassion and empathy. Can we start there?
Monica: We talk about compassion as a four-part human experience that unfolds in relation to suffering.
First, we have to notice that suffering is present in our lives and in the organizations around us. Second, we have to interpret that suffering in a way that makes us more likely to feel empathy and concern for what’s happening. The third part, empathic concern, is actually a form of empathy, and that feeling leads us to [the fourth part]: taking action, to do something about suffering. Overall, compassion is defined as a process that leads us to notice and alleviate the suffering of others around us.
Michelle: Why might companies invest in building compassionate practices into our workplaces?
Monica: Leaders feel like compassion is too soft to be relevant to their bottom line performance. But we have over 20 years of research on the topic of compassion in organizations, and we see that compassion impacts costly things.
There’s a very high correlation between whether people think they work in a compassionate organization and how much they are committed to stay in that organization. Compassion is helpful to performance in an organization through retention and commitment of employees.
Another way compassion matters to the bottom line of an organization is that compassionate environments increase employee engagement, and employee engagement heightens customer engagement.
A third way that compassion affects the bottom line is through resilience. Compassion helps people be adaptable to change, and performance research in the financial services industry shows that when organizations are more compassionate, they’re more likely to bounce back faster after a downturn.
Michelle: You have built into the book a personal blueprint that people can use in workplaces to improve their levels of compassion. Can you talk us through what the blueprint recommends?
Monica: The first thing that people can do is simply open their eyes more and make themselves more available to notice the suffering that’s going on around them.
The second part is making more generous interpretations. This one is hard and takes practice, because when people are suffering and upset, they can act that out in all kinds of ways.
Another way is to tap into the empathy aspect of compassion and to bolster your feeling of concern. We can do this easily by listening to our own self-talk. Empathy is really sensitive to costs. If you can activate your sense of, “I feel concerned for what’s going on. I wonder if I could just do something small,” then the fourth way that people can increase compassion around them is by finding ways to act.
It’s common that people tell us that they want to be compassionate, but they don’t know what to do. Even if there’s nothing heroic that you can do to fix what they’re going through, the acknowledgement of it and the expression of concern changes the work environment.
Michelle: We all share that same deep psychological need to feel respected, valued, and appreciated. The sense of safety that that brings for us, to feel that we have been seen, that we are connected and supported in some way—we underestimate how powerful those small gestures can be. If you’re going to awaken compassion across a whole organization, exactly how do you pull that off?
Monica: In our lab we have studied four or five parts of an organization that leaders and managers can work with to draw out compassion.
The first is networks—how people are connected together, and how you use the communication connections to share news about suffering and to update people about others’ wellbeing.
The next part is values, especially the values that are lived out in the organization. Especially [important] for compassion are the values that feed into our sense of shared humanity. If those values are woven into the way we live our work life together, then it’s a lot easier to be compassionate when suffering strikes.
The third part is role definition. That might sound a little boring, like how we define our roles, but job crafting and role-making can be powerful to change the meaning of our work. You don’t have to be in HR to expand your role to include compassion. Everybody can be important for noticing if something’s going wrong, or if someone is in pain.
Another thing that is really powerful are the routines of an organization. Once they’re well-established, they’re stored as procedural memory. People don’t have to think about them in order to do them. So if people think that taking care of each other is such an important part of getting work done that they incorporate it into their routines, you can change things that look like small behavior and get powerful system-wide effects.
The final thing is leadership. We try to help leaders think about role modeling, and the ways they hope other people in the organization will treat each other. Leaders as examples of compassion are really powerful.
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