'Empower your team to try new things'

Learning can be a grind. And there are two components that contribute to e-learning fatigue, according to Connie Hansen, group director of people and culture at Urbis.

First, being expected to sit through the same lengthy modules each year, about something that’s already known; second, spending so much time looking at screens that we’re longing for human contact.

“Most organisations I’ve worked with have a combination of some really new fun things and some arcane older things,” she said.

“COVID made us quite fatigued in general, about looking at a screen and engaging with technology – people want to be in real-life as well.”

Speaking at the HRD Learning & Development Summit on 30 October, Hansen participated in a panel with other experts to share a few tips from watching how L&D has evolved over the past 15 years.

 A typical fault is to decide on a content strategy and then shoehorn in extra bits.

“Before you know it, it’s 50 minutes and it doesn’t actually achieve what you set out to achieve,” she said. “Be really specific about what you are trying to achieve.”

Context is also important, Hansen said.

“People want to hear from their leaders; they want to hear from experts they respect, and they want to hear relevant case studies. Whenever I’m designing anything or working with my teams, it is absolutely about making sure I have those combinations.”

Varied learning material at DFAT

Also on the panel was Mehri Doyle, director of learning and development at the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT), who cited the importance of being nimble since the organization operates across all time zones.

“Some of our posts work in the Pacific and they may have really terrible bandwidth, so their ability to consume longer videos or even download them is quite minimal,” she said.

The department covers such a broad mandate that its learning material is wildly varied, Doyle said: “What is it you’re trying to impart? What do you want someone to know, do or be as a result of having undertaken this learning?”

At the summit panel, Doyle called an end to dull learning.

“If someone comes to you and says, ‘I want to record that day-long lecture in the hope that someone will watch it.’ Well, feel free to say no,” she said. “We’re not going to invest our time and effort and resources in creating that.”

DFAT runs off the pulse of geopolitics and Doyle said introductions to weekly video content is shot on a short deadline so it can be relevant to current events. Last year, a cut from the Barbie movie was incorporated because it included the “nine-dash line” in the South China Sea, for example.

“I encourage people to have a look at the different tools that are out there … and empower your team to try new things,” she said. “That might mean suggesting to someone they buy a tripod, stand in front of the UN and film themselves on their mobile phone, please. And just send me whatever you get. And then you can try it again the next day, and the next day – until we get something that’s really usable and amazing.”

Westpac: ‘Tech change is hard’

As head of enterprise capability and transformation at Westpac Bank, Deepti Sachdeva works within well-defined corporate constraints.

“With a bank our size, any tech change is hard,” she said at the HRD Learning & Development Summit.

Regardless of that, the bank is on the front foot. To provide targeted learning, for example, Westpac is using Teams and creating nudges to remind people about doing their learning while offering additional content to the formal program.

“We have also started to use that tool to remind leaders of the progress update on where their learners may be and how they can support them,” Sachdeva said.

Podcasts are reasonably new territory for Westpac, she said, where it is distributing content featuring in-house experts that can be accessed via QR codes to be added to Microsoft Stream playlists.

“It’s about making that accessible to people on the go,” she said.