'Lead by example': How HR can support learning opportunities in an organisation

Upskilling can be a great way for employees looking to further their career. And for HR teams who want to support employees looking for new learning opportunities, it’s important to link those to the business strategy.

“The most important thing is genuinely understanding the business strategy; understanding what the business is trying to achieve and where they're trying to go,” said Humm Group’s people and communication director, Stephanie Carman.

“And then matching back your people strategy or your learning strategy – really aligning it to those outcomes. So it's understanding business strategy, understanding how that translates into other business units, and then building your learning strategy to support those outcomes.”

HR teams are often at the heart of rolling out initiatives that support employees through new changes and developments. At Humm Group, Carman said HR played a major role in guiding employee during the COVID pandemic.

“For probably a lot of organisations, and particularly for ours over the last couple of years with COVID, the organisation really looked to HR to be able to take it through that journey,” she said. “We've also been on a big organisational redesign and transformation journey so for us, HR has been at the centre of that. And so our teams are looking to us to support them with the changes that are required.”

To genuinely support employees, Carman said HR teams, “also have to lead by example in doing those practices and being able to lead them out effectively”.

“And by doing them, you also understand the experiences that your teams are going through in upskilling and challenging themselves in different ways,” she said.

The HR Tech Summit

Carman will be one of the speakers at this year’s HR Tech Summit in Sydney, where she will be hosting a session on optimising resources to enhance learning.

“The centre of my presentation is really around our learning ecosystem; how we're creating personalised learning experiences for individuals but also managing that learning in quite a globally dispersed workforce, which can be quite challenging,” she said.

She added that the session will also be about how internal learning has matched the evolution of the Humm Group.

“Our learning approach and strategy has really been to go where the organisation needs us to go,” she said. “Rather than having a fixed view of ‘This is what we think is needed’, it's the balance of ‘Here's what we know is needed based on all of our feedback, all of our different data points’ but also, ‘Here's where we're going from a business strategy perspective and here's what we need to be anticipating and preparing people for’.

“Some of those things have included, a few years ago, really shifting to be much more of an agile-based organisation, particularly in our tech and product teams. And that required significant uplift and upskill for our teams as part of that sort of restructure.”

Being an agile business

Carman went on to describe the benefits of being agile in a business.

“In organisations, you have strategic work and you have the BAU (business as usual) stuff that comes up,” she said. “And being able to switch and work in this agile way has allowed us to run at those two speeds concurrently; be able to manage the BAU but not get lost in that and lose sight of the strategic objectives and outcomes that we need to be delivering on.”

When the Humm Group began shifting to become a more agile-based business, Carman said learnings needed to happen across the whole business.

“To truly enable that to happen effectively in an organisation, you really need to upskill the entire organisation in agile practices and working in agile ways,” she said. “We not only had a targeted program and upskill program for our tech and product teams, but more broadly across the organisation, we had champions from each business unit who went back and really implemented those practices.

“And even from a people team perspective, all of our projects now are run in an agile way. We have regular visual management boards that we’re standing up for our whole department, but also for individual projects. We're using those principles of agile to really move faster as an organisation and not just in a traditional tech format.”