Many individuals and organizations claim to be allies, but not all are genuinely committed to supporting marginalized groups. Performative allyship, a form of superficial activism, focuses on the appearance of allyship rather than meaningful action. It can be particularly harmful in the workplace—to organizations and the individuals that comprise them.

Performative allyship creates a false sense of progress and can perpetuate inequality. It isn’t just harmful to marginalized groups within your organization: it’s also hurting your bottom line. Let’s discuss ways performative allyship negatively affects your business and how to truly make a positive impact on your organization’s culture.

What Does Performative Allyship Look Like?

Performative allyship occurs when an organization wants to look like they’re supporting marginalized groups—by calling for or creating allies from their people without supporting their development or allowing them to take action that amounts to real change. It is easier to appear virtuous than to be virtuous.

These performative activities usually involve some form of tokenism, for example a company hires some people from marginalized groups to improve on their diversity metrics or makes sure the only people of color in the office are in company photographs—but it also goes beyond that. Not only might an organization take part in these practices, but they likely also position themselves as deeply interested participants in movements such as allyship, meant to uplift marginalized people—but without actually soliciting any true change within their organization. It could look like running a weeks-long Black History Month campaign on social media without any initiatives or programs to uplift Black people in their organization.

These not-so-helpful activities have been more common since the resurgence of the Black Lives Matter movement in 2020. As social media platforms like Instagram were flooded with black squares meant to indicate silence on the part of non-marginalized individuals to make room for Black voices, they, particularly businesses, ended up drowning out Black voices with their #activism. We see something similar happening every year during Pride Month. Organizations that follow it up with claims that they want to make allyship a part of their mission without doing the work it takes—they’re doing more harm than good.

In all, performative allyship is a way to look good without actually doing any good. And it hurts your organization in ways you probably don’t realize.

How Corporate Performative Allyship Affects Your Business

When organizations publicly jump on the back of a movement meant to bring attention to a historically marginalized group of people without doing the work to create real change within, two particularly important areas are affected: trust and public perception.

If an organization is an ally in name only, any outward campaigns to signal their allyship will be seen as glaringly hypocritical to employees who would be positively affected by true allyship. One day, someone is going to speak up publicly about this disconnect. Whether that person who speaks out is a current employee or a potential employee learning about you, this can be hugely damaging to both your sales and result in talent drains that are wildly expensive down the line.

Consumers want to patronize and work for companies that are aligned with their values and stand for something. In the age of social media, now, more than ever, people mobilize quickly to speak out against empty virtue signaling. And that information spreads loudly like wildfire.

Luckily, you can be an ally not just in name but also in action.

3 Ways to Combat Performative Allyship

1. Measurement

To truly develop an inclusive workplace, you must start with measurement and collecting data to assess the current state of diversity and inclusion. How many diverse groups of people already exist within your organization? How do you provide opportunities for those individuals already? Do you provide pathways to ensure their success? You can answer these questions through surveys, interviews, and focus groups to understand how underrepresented people at your organization feel about your efforts (or lack thereof) to uplift them.

Further, organizations serious about diversity, equity, and inclusion (DE&I) initiatives look toward the most privileged groups within, then study how they made it to the top and discover ways to ensure they extend those same experiences to marginalized groups. Was it the projects they worked on, the people they knew, their education, or their professional development opportunities?

It doesn’t end here, though. As critical as this step is for identifying areas of improvement, you must take that information and map out plans to ensure you enact the change.

2. Planning

After you’ve collected information and identified your weak points, it’s time to create a strategic plan, to act. You need more than an Employee Resource Group to hold your entire business accountable. You need to plan for real change, which will look different for every organization depending on their starting point but often includes outlining timelines, specific goals, and key performance indicators (KPIs) to track progress.

The issue many organizations run into with the planning phase is that they set goals that are too difficult to meet in a short period. “We’ll have a gender balanced organization in five years,” is a perfect example of an unachievable goal in many industries. It’s important to plan goals that are challenging yet possible. You need to be able to honestly hold your leaders accountable for change, and you can’t do that if your goals aren’t at all practical.

3. Accountability

The next phase in this process is the one that will ensure your success, and it is the most difficult. You must hold your leaders and managers accountable for the plans and goals you set forth. There are a few different levels of accountability you can enact.

The first level of accountability simply involves investigating how to hold your managers to account for driving conversations around diversity and inclusion and prioritizing actions that support true inclusion. This can entail simple yet regular touch-base conversations to keep the energy high in these areas.

The second level of accountability entails conducting and dissecting engagement surveys for your managers. If you deep dive into how employees feel about their manager’s dedication to inclusion, you’ll understand which individuals at your organization feels heard and by whom. It may mean leadership focuses more on developing certain managers in this area and provides an opportunity to positively reinforce others who are already showing promise. At this point, we expect managers to have a diversity plan, a detailed “to achieve” list that they can be expected to deliver.

The last level of accountability is the most serious: actions tied to remuneration. DE&I efforts are often tied to important KPIs to ensure progress when planning out and mapping goals. If certain managers do not show progress or alignment with organization-wide efforts over periods and after intervention, you must take more serious action to ensure momentum is maintained.

DE&I Work Drives Change

True DE&I work can create real change and improve ways people think about their workplace. Done right, initiatives such as allyship or inclusion training can excite people to want to be a part of the solution—not part of the problem. Check out GP Strategies’ DE&I programs and begin transforming your organization’s culture today.

About the Authors

Angela Peacock

Global Director of Diversity and Inclusion for PDT Global, a GP Strategies company.

She is a DE&I practitioner with nearly twenty-five years experience helping organizations and their people create the environments where anyone who’s capable can excel. At PDT Global, she leads the Strategic Inclusion team—a group who works directly with C-suite executives to build alignment and strategic understanding around DE&I. 

When Barbara Mistick and I surveyed people for our book Stretch, we asked people what they did to ensure they stayed current. The number one answer was: I hang around with smart people.

I got the chance to do exactly that last week as I facilitated a conversation on generative artificial intelligence with Sourabh Bajaj, CTO of CoRise and a group of heads of learning or talent who sit on the GSV Ventures Workforce Insights Board. Sourabh has spent his career in artificial intelligence in companies from Coursera to Google.

In this article, I hope to provide a quick primer and further the conversation more broadly on what generative AI will mean for us in the talent and learning space.

Part I: A Primer on Generative AI. Is ChatGPT All There Is?

Not by a long shot. But before we get there, here’s a tiny primer in lay terms by a non-technologist attempting to translate to our field of practice. Skip to Part II if you’re more the type who likes to understand the implications right off the bat.

We’re living in an incredible shift in capability of computing power that has led to this moment in time. A very popular quote cited by numerous tech bloggers in the last few months is from Lenin: “There are decades where nothing happens, and there are weeks where decades happen.”

Three big factors have been contributors to the weeks we live in now: computing power, transformers, and large-language models (LLMs). Hang with me just a moment, because understanding these three factors at a very high level will help you understand the enormity of changes that are about to happen.

Computing Power and The Three Waves of Machine Learning

You’ve probably heard of Moore’s Law, where the number of transistors that fit on a circuit doubles every two years. Think of this as the classic investing literacy question: Would you rather have $1 million or a penny that doubles every day for a month?  You might remember the doubling penny breaks $1 million on day 28. On day 29, it’s now closer to $3 million than $2 million. One more day and you’re over $5 million. Keep on going until the end of the year, the numbers are so big they are beyond conceptual understanding for most people – or at least me.

In computing power, we’re reaching beyond the penny-doubling-analogy month now, leading to what’s now a third wave of power. The first wave was good-old fashioned artificial intelligence – GOFAI – where humans hand-crafted and trained the machine. Many applications you might use rightfully claim they are AI-powered with this first wave of GOFAI. The second wave, deep learning, took off post 2012 and can extract attributes from raw data without the need for specific programming. In a sense, computers became able to learn like humans do – by example and through pattern recognition in an architecture of neural networks. See a chart below for the number of AI applications introduced in this first wave, in the second wave of deep learning, and in the current large-scale wave. The key takeaway: not only is computing power unprecedented and growing, we’ve reached a stage where previously inconceivable power is available to fuel sophisticated machinations.

Transformers. Not the Sci-Fi Action Movies

This newly available computing power and the advent of deep learning have allowed the creation of transformers. A transformer model is a neural network that tracks relationships and thus learns context and meaning. Computing doesn’t have to be done in a linear fashion, speeding up output. Transformers might take millions of hours to be properly trained, but when released openly, can be shared by others as foundational building blocks.

Before the onset of transformers, users had to label objects for the machine to learn. This breakthrough, introduced by Google and just available in the last few years, creates an ability for machines to pay attention to the most important data features and ignore the things that are not relevant, mimicking human cognition. ChatGPT is a specific use of a transformer model, with many others emerging. Because these transformers are parallel processing information and paying attention to relationships, they can go beyond an analysis of existing content to generate new content.

Transformer models that can take an input of text, images, audio, etc., and generate basically new output are what we now call the field of generative artificial intelligence. An older GOFAI model might have helped find and index content on your corporate intranet. If a newer transformer existed, it might look at everything on your intranet and generate content to “write a training policy for the employee handbook in conversational English” in 45 seconds or so. Below is a graphic that shows how many of these transformers have been developed in just the last year. We have to assume these are the equivalent of the first computers. In other words, you ain’t seen nothing yet. Key takeway: ChatGPT, amazing as it is, is just the beginning with many more transformers coming soon.

Large-Language Models

Large-language models are a sub-set of transformers. I asked ChatGPT to explain LLMs in lay terms. “Large language models are computer programs that can understand and generate human language at a scale never seen before. They are built using a special type of artificial intelligence called deep learning, which allows them to learn from vast amounts of text data and find patterns in the language.

These models can perform a wide range of language-related tasks, including translation, summarization, question-answering, and even creative writing. One of the most remarkable things about these models is their ability to generate new, coherent language that sounds like it was written by a human. They do this by using complex statistical algorithms to predict the most likely words to follow a given sequence of text, based on what they’ve learned from the vast amounts of language data they’ve been trained on.” Key takeaway: we are much closer to human-machine interaction that feels more like human to human than we have ever been.

These three components, not just ChatGPT, lay out the enormity of what changes lie before us, soon.

Part II: What Does it Mean for Talent & Learning?

Do you remember the famous big miss in predicting the future by IBM’s president, Thomas J Watson? In the 1940s, he reputedly said: “I think there is a world market for about five computers.” We should remember that and not underestimate what this tectonic shift will mean. Here are just a few of the ideas we talked about:

• Content development. Indeed CoRise is already experimenting with limiting ChatGPT to a known body of content and then generating a course outline in seconds. A few seconds later, a module of content is written. A few seconds later, Sourabh created a test. Can we anticipate enormous productivity and efficiency gains in content creation? Almost assuredly yes.
• AI augmented SMEs. How many times has your course development schedule been thrown off-track by a lack of SME access? What if 80% of what a course developer needs can be collected virtually, and the last 20% refined?
• Engagement @ scale. Could this be a new era of online learning, where the system is continuously monitoring and offering suggestions, tips, and advice, whether in a course or the flow of work? 
• Adaptive and learning on steroids. Adaptive learning at scale has been more of a hope than reality, with a few exceptions. Will we be able to realize that promise and insert learners in the right place with continuous monitoring to transport them through learning at the right pace for their unique needs?
• Personalized learning. If a new smart learning system can see what other systems you use during the day, can it suggest learning based on your unique usage? Or based on your job role, tenure, or other characteristics?
• Collaborative learning. Will smart systems be able to find other people doing the same tasks as you and connect you to learn together?

Perhaps the biggest implication for education and learning will be how we’ll have to help support our organizations in the ways in which nearly every job will eventually be affected. Computers did become ubiquitous, against Thomas Watson’s projections, and people and organizations adapted. As learning professionals, we should prepare to enable people with new skills to leverage the technology that is just about at our doorstep.

Part III: What Should We Be Worried About? Or Not Worried About?

With anything new and unknown, there are aspects of concern. Here are just a few.

1. Hallucinations. Just like humans, machines can learn the wrong thing but think it’s right. In AI, these are called hallucinations, where essentially the deep learning model is following the wrong patterns. For example, in self-driving mode my Tesla can read pavement changes or passing clouds as obstructions, triggering a known bug of phantom braking. (I love my Tesla and it’ll eventually get worked out, I trust.) When and how will these hallucinations in other systems get alerted and averted?
2. Two truths and a lie. You know that icebreaker – tell two truths and a lie about yourself. At this stage, I feel ChatGPT writes two truths and a lie. My name is unique enough that the internet domain for me should be limited. So I asked it to write my bio for me. (Try this, and if your name is shared by others, constrain it to your company, or city, or school.) It got it almost right, but not quite. All my education was completely wrong. But interestingly, the ChatGPT bio emphasized some things I hadn’t really ever focused on, and made me think I should. (What media outlets I’ve been interviewed by.) Really, this is more of the same problem as hallucinations, but a bit more deceptive since it’s almost right.
3. Mass job displacement. Many writers have already raised the alarm about the end of jobs for content creators of any type, from writers to artists to analysts to contact center representatives to software developers. This same alarm was raised for bank tellers when ATMs came out, but instead the number of bank tellers grew because demand grew and more branch banks were built. Will the demand for personalization and other services grow, allowing machines to do the more mundane work? Or will machines displace workers?
4. Isolation. In the event so much can be done with a human and many systems, will we lose touch with other humans? What will be the psychological effects of interacting with a system that seems human but isn’t?

As you can see, an hour discussion raised more questions than answers. Thus the GSV team is scheduling another call to continue the discussion further. If you aren’t already aware of it, GSV Ventures and Arizona State University hold a tremendous conference each year in San Diego, the ASU+GSV Summit. Sourabh and I will both be presenting there, along with many extraordinary speakers and our own LTG CEO, Jonathan Satchell.

We’ll also be at ATD ICE in San Diego in May. More info on the ASU+GSV Summit program can be found here, and if you’re a corporate learning leader, drop a comment requesting the special discount code and the GSV team will get you more than 60% off the registration ticket. Hope to see you there to continue the exploration on this topic together.

About the Authors

Dr. Karie Willyerd

Karie Willyerd is the only CLO to have taken two companies to number one in the world. Most recently she was the CLO for Visa. Prior to that she was head of SAP’s global customer education business. She came into SAP when Jambok – a video-based learning platform where she was the cofounder and CEO – was acquired by SAP SuccessFactors. Dr. Willyerd served as the CLO for Sun Microsystems and head of talent or learning for Solectron, Heinz, and Lockheed Martin Tactical Air. Dr. Willyerd is a prolific author on the future of work, learning, and human capital leadership, with two best selling books and articles/blogs published in Harvard Business Review, Forbes, and all the major learning trade journals.

Human Resources (HR) departments are frequently tasked with doing more with less because they often struggle with showing a direct return on investment for their initiatives and general efforts. Therefore, businesses often view these departments as an auxiliary function.

In fact, some organizations end up focusing significant resources on administrative activities rather than strategic initiatives that help align the organization to its goals and objectives, thus perpetuating the cycle or belief that HR is an administrative function instead of a strategic partner. Luckily, HR organizations are not tied to this reality forever.

HR can absolutely serve as a strategic partner in driving organizational goals and objectives. The challenge is in creating time and space to operate in this capacity amid the more administrative actions that naturally flow through the function.

An appropriate organizational design approach can help to break down barriers, streamline processes, and create structures that help employees and leaders navigate the HR landscape while helping HR teams themselves move more quickly. This will naturally shift the perception of HR to a more strategic, value-add business function.

Patchwork Organizational Design

As organizations expand and their needs grow, they commonly take a patchwork approach to organizational design, leading to a haphazard structure and workflow. Due to the high demands and need to continually “prove” themselves, HR teams are often among the least coordinated functions within an organization. The old adage, “the cobblers’ children have no shoes,” rings true in the case of HR in relation to many organizational principles.

To mitigate the complexity of working with corporate HR teams, many functions and departments hire their own dedicated HR professionals to support their department’s specific needs. These business line-focused HR teams or individuals may sit as a matrixed organization, or they may not report into the larger HR function at all. Even when both types of HR teams sit together, they may still serve specific business units. In these cases, they receive their priorities and direction from the business line rather than corporate HR—this creates a disconnect and inability to operate efficiently.

A Case Study: An Overwhelmed and Siloed HR Department

The above situation was the case for a large federal contractor and manufacturing organization we partnered with. The HR function of this organization was tasked with streamlining its structure while simultaneously ramping up output. In other words, HR was tasked with doing more with less.

As our team began digging into the contractor’s internal customer and employee feedback, several concerning (yet common) issues emerged:

1. COEs within HR were incredibly siloed.
   Serving as the face to the businesses they support, Centers of Expertise (COEs) were often tasked with answering questions about initiatives or processes that they knew nothing about. This significantly slowed down customer service and frustrated everyone involved.
2. HR business partners supporting specific lines of business felt they reported to and were loyal to the needs of their specific business leader, not the organization.
   Despite what initiatives were presented at the HR level, individuals’ work was essentially prioritized by the needs of the business line. This created a breakdown in HR-driven initiatives.
3. HR business partners reported spending 75% of their time on administrative activities and serving as a liaison between the business and HR.
   This severely limited their ability to focus on activities that drive business results within their business line or across the organization as a whole. This liaison approach created a severe bottleneck because information flow was primarily restricted at a specific point: the HR business partner.
4. Individual functions or business units would often seek external support to complete significant initiatives.
   These tasks should have come from various HR COEs, including but not limited to organizational restructuring, leadership programs, development of competency models, and high-impact recruiting. Even this organization’s learning function was moved from HR and placed within the business to meet its needs more effectively.
5. Within the HR department, various project teams were created to support critical initiatives.
   When HR employees were pulled from their roles to support initiatives, it left gaps on their teams. Many times, this resulted in interim leadership, significant efforts spent adjusting to new leadership, and building engagement within the new team—all very time-consuming responses.

In client- or service-based organizations, the organizational structure can undermine the workflow or processes in place to ensure work gets done efficiently, which this case study demonstrates. But organizational design is about more than creating an effective work structure. How a function is organized plays a role in how quickly information moves, how effectively teams communicate, and whether decisions are made at the right level.

The New Organizational Framework

As we learned more about this organization’s challenges, we identified that both the structure and the operating model were the primary challenges to moving quickly and best serving the customer.

To create the conditions for HR to serve as strategic business partners to the organization, major system changes were needed. Through working sessions with the full leadership team, we identified key areas where most of the questions and time-consuming activities originated, how to filter and service those requests expeditiously, and how to get the information employees and managers need in front of them before they even raise the question.

Redirecting most of this effort would significantly free up a large portion of the function to more proactively identify and address business needs, serving as a more strategic partner to the business instead of as an administrative one.

The New Operating Model

Armed with this new framework, we were able to design an operating model that physically realigned the more tactical side of the function with the more strategic COEs and business partners. We redesigned the organization’s operating model to allow for the administrative responsibilities to be addressed through a shared services team. This eliminated a significant amount of work from the Human Resources Business Partners (HRBPs), giving them time to be the strategic business partners they were designed to be.

A critical need was to address the random project teams that were created to solve specific problems (like a COVID task force, for instance). While emergency situations may result in the disruption of normal workflow, pulling key members of various teams to serve on projects with open timelines should not be normal practice for a well-functioning organization. The leadership team liked the project model for upskilling employees and having teams with diverse experiences but recognized that they needed a better process to move people around without creating so much disruption.

Part of the operational structure was a project team fed by the various COEs. While the COEs would own their own processes, the project teams would unite to support various initiatives by assisting the business or individual business units. These teams would be led by the HRBPs supporting that business unit. This allowed for benefits like rotating project teams for individual development and growth while maintaining stability inside HR.

Organizational Design Requires Full Commitment

Despite the effort and alignment around the need for change, this type of redesign will only be effective if everyone within the function follows the plan. Inquiries must be routed to the shared services function to be addressed and escalated. Initiatives must go through the project team. Business partners must align with the HR decisions and initiatives versus focusing solely on the business unit needs.

A heavy change management process is often needed when making a change to process or workflow. Leaders and employees must be fully aligned and assist with making the change stick. As with any change, resistance will come into play. It is easy to fall into old patterns of behavior, so the new behaviors must be constantly reinforced.

An effective change plan includes providing users with a clear understanding of why the change is important, what their specific roles are in the process, how they need to behave differently, a path to achieve the change through a clear set of resources, and a partner to support them along the way, which will help set the organization up for success.

Redesign Your Organization for Optimal Efficiency

A disorganized team can result in significant wasted time and resources by simply trying to find the right answers. That is what our clients faced and why they were spending significant time answering questions and completing administrative functions, many of which could have been addressed through self-service tools. By continuously “doing for” instead of teaching, this organization had created a system bogged down to the point of paralysis. Additionally, the lack of connection between the teams left them unable to adequately support each other.

Organizational design can be a powerful way to help organizations and functions move more quickly by streamlining the flow of information and providing critical workflows and processes for success.

This blog is part of our Moving Faster series in which we explore how certain business functions can transform into more strategic business partners. To learn about how using an agile framework can improve learning organizations, read Learning Fast: Lessons from an L&D Scrum Team.

About the Authors

Cheryl Jackson, PhD

Organization Design & Change Practice Lead

For over 15 years, Dr. Cheryl Jackson has been supporting transformational efforts in Fortune 500 organizations across a variety of industries including retail, manufacturing, healthcare, and food and beverage. With a doctorate in Industrial-organizational psychology, she combines her experience with scientific methodology and research techniques to create practical solutions that drive meaningful change in the workplace. Cheryl is driven to create effective solutions that help the organization as well as its employees thrive. Her focus is organizational effectiveness strategies supported by organization design, change management, assessment and development, employee engagement, leader development, and performance management. Cheryl is driving the development of the OD and Change Management practice within and across GP Strategies through the development of offerings and solutions, internal and external education, and supporting client initiatives. She remains actively engaged in the practice by contributing to whitepapers, blogs, articles, conferences, and podcasts on organizational design and change management and serving as a lecturer in the Master of I/O program at Texas A&M University.

As an emergency management professional, I have seen companies big and small face the same fundamental challenge over and over: how to keep operations running in the face of disruption. Disasters, cyberattacks, and pandemics—whatever the hazard and whatever the scenario—can have a significant impact on business operations, but the businesses that have survived have one thing in common, preparation. That’s why it’s crucial for organizations of all sizes to establish solid strategies for business continuity to ensure their critical business functions can continue, even in difficult circumstances. By thinking ahead, you can improve your company’s resiliency. 

Here are seven tips to help companies maintain business continuity and keep operations running smoothly: 

1. Conduct Risk Assessments 

Conducting a thorough risk assessment is key to business continuity planning. Risk assessment is an organized thought process that involves identifying potential risks and vulnerabilities in your operations and determining their likelihood and impact. By forming a cross-functional team to gather information about facilities, systems, processes, data, employees, customers, and suppliers, you will ensure that all aspects of your operations have been considered. You can then use the results of this assessment to develop an emergency-preparedness plan, then train your staff, and obtain the assets needed to sustain your critical business functions. 

Here is an example of risk evaluation in practice. While consulting with a global computer company in Europe, I found that its critical facility and key engineers were located near railway tracks carrying chemical trains. During the evaluation of the company’s emergency plan, I began looking into “what if” scenarios and discovered that the engineers were in the path of a potential chemical release from the nearby factory. This situation highlights the significance of conducting thorough risk evaluations for maintaining business continuity. 

2. Develop a Comprehensive Plan 

The Components of an Effective and Comprehensive Plan 

Once you have a clear understanding of your risks, it is time to develop a comprehensive plan to keep critical operations running in the event of a disaster. This plan should include a detailed incident response plan, communication procedures, access to critical systems and data, and alternative work arrangements for employees.  

Be sure to review and update the plan regularly, including conducting regular tabletop exercises and simulations. Additionally, gathering feedback from employees, customers, and stakeholders can greatly improve the plan’s overall effectiveness. 

How to Develop a Comprehensive Plan 

Business continuity planning is not just a privilege for large corporations but a necessity for businesses of all sizes. The objective is to have a strategy in place to maintain operations during times of income disruption. People often say, “We were lucky to survive those tough times.” But what seems like “luck” is usually just preparation meeting opportunity. 

Let’s take a closer look at how this process would breakdown for a small pizza shop owner who decides to create a business continuity plan.  

1. The owner performs a comprehensive risk assessment that considers the potential impact of incidents such as power failures, natural disasters, and supply chain interruptions. 

2. Based on the risk assessment results, the owner creates a plan that includes backup generators, alternate food suppliers, and other delivery options for customers during emergencies.  

3. Additionally, the owner trains all staff on the plan, conducting periodic exercises to ensure everyone understands their roles and responsibilities. If the owner can’t get to the pizza shop, someone else knows where the key is to unlock the door and knows how to turn on the oven without starting a fire. 

3. Prioritize Critical Functions

To help identify potential risks, tools such as vulnerability assessments, IT penetration testing, and disaster simulations are available. These tools can help guide the development of a robust business continuity plan. Regular training and drills for employees with nearby businesses, local emergency services, and suppliers are also crucial to help them understand their roles and responsibilities and become familiar with emergency-response procedures. 

Take, for instance, the security engineer at a large digital media provider who was worried about data privacy and the protection of sensitive customer information stored on their servers. One of the ways they ensure the security of the company’s systems is by conducting periodic penetration testing to simulate potential attacks by cyber hackers. The engineer uses specialized tools to scan the target systems for vulnerabilities, such as missing patches or misconfigured servers. If any vulnerabilities are found during the scanning phase, the engineer then attempts to exploit them to see how far they can penetrate the system and what kind of information they can access. 

The engineer then documents the results of their testing, including any vulnerabilities they discovered, and provides a report to the appropriate departments within the company, such as IT, compliance, legal, and management. 

4. Implement Mobile or Remote Work Arrangements

Implementing mobile or remote work arrangements is an important part of business continuity planning. In the event of a disaster, employees may not be able to access the company’s physical premises. Having remote work arrangements in place can keep many critical operations running. The COVID-19 pandemic has shown that remote work can be effective; many companies were able to continue operations with little interruption by increasing the capabilities of existing systems. 

For example, organizations that face frequent weather emergencies have implemented an emergency messaging and voicemail system that provides employees with updates on commute conditions and instructs them to work from home if the conditions are unsafe. Likewise, an employee can simply send a text message that day to let the organization know when they will be choosing to work from their home location. 

5. Invest in Technology

Backup and disaster-recovery systems, such as an off-premises, cloud-based data storage solution, are a crucial part of a comprehensive business continuity plan. These tactical backup processes can quickly restore critical systems and data in the event of a disaster, thus minimizing disruption to operations. 

The use of advanced technologies, such as artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning, can help organizations to automate key emergency-management processes, such as incident response and communication with employees and stakeholders. Additionally, the use of cloud-based technologies can help organizations to quickly restore critical systems and data in the event of a disaster, thereby reducing the impact of disrupted operations. 

6. Train Your Team

Having clear and well-defined roles and responsibilities for all employees is important to ensure response activities are coordinated and everyone knows what is expected of them in the event of a disaster. Regular training and drills are an effective way of clarifying these roles and responsibilities, while simultaneously teaching employees important emergency-response procedures.  

A “call tree” is a highly effective way of prioritizing employee safety. Start by creating a backup contact list of non-office phone numbers and alternate email addresses. In the event of an emergency, the call tree will be used to alert and mobilize employees. Assign someone, such a supervisor, to verify the status of every team member (a safety wellness check). Inform the supervisor that they may be asked to report information through the chain multiple times a day, particularly in longer, evolving emergencies like hurricanes or floods. Circumstances can change quickly in an emergency, so employees may be evacuating and/or in need of company assistance. A call tree will help you keep track of every one’s location and status.  

7. Communicate Your Plan Effectively

Finally, it is important to maintain a culture of preparedness. You can accomplish this by regularly communicating the importance of business continuity planning and involving employees in the planning process.  

Encourage employees to prepare for emergencies in their personal lives and provide them with the resources to do so. By fostering a culture of preparedness, you can ensure that everyone is prepared to respond effectively in the event of a disaster. Here are some key priorities to keep in mind when communicating your plan to employees:  

• Start by determining how employees will contact each other and where they will reassemble. 

• Provide employees with information regarding the company’s disaster recovery plan, including details regarding backup generators, redundant internet connections, and cloud-based data storage.  

• Regularly train staff on evacuation procedures and make sure employees are equipped with the necessary equipment and supplies to work remotely. 

Tailor Business Continuity Plans to Your Company

It is crucial to remember that no two organizations are the same and that each emergency-management plan should be tailored to meet your specific needs. By having well-structured business continuity processes in place, you can protect your employees, customers, and assets, and minimize the impact of an emergency. 

If you’re looking to create and implement an effective emergency-management plan, reach out to us today. Our team of emergency management experts will work with you to develop a customized solution that meets your specific needs.  

About the Authors

Joe LaFleur

Joe LaFleur, Director of the GP Strategies Corporate Crisis Management Program, has been with GP for 10 years. He holds the distinction of being the first person in history to be a gubernatorial-appointed state emergency management director for two states: Wisconsin and Pennsylvania. He was also a senior executive with the U.S. Federal Emergency Management Agency.

Navigating periods of transition is always difficult—especially large-scale change with serious business implications. In today’s rapidly changing business environment, effective change management is a critical competency for organizations that want to drive progress and achieve success.

Learn about the five change management trends on the horizon for this coming year to better prepare yourself for your next technology implementation or organizational change.

Trend 1: Resistance Management

One major trend I see approaching in the new year is resistance management: the act of ensuring that, in a timely fashion, you address and plan for all areas of potential pushback that might occur during your change implementation. This mitigates the impact resistance may have on the project or the adoption.

Why people resist change is simple: people resist change when they are heavily invested in the current state, regardless of how helpful a change might be; they likely have had to deal with negative outcomes from a change in the past and are therefore wary of all substantial change; or they fear the uncertainty that change inevitably brings.

We can mitigate resistance both proactively and reactively. While reactively responding to resistance is most common, proactively responding to resistance will garner the best results and is gaining more traction. Identifying possible areas of resistance before a change is implemented is critical. How do you plan to react to both passive and active behaviors that people might display, like disengagement, refusal to interact in or attend training sessions, breeding resistance, or the creation of ways to work around the new system? If you can plan for, assess, and determine why a certain form of resistance is popping up, you can preemptively intervene and hopefully mitigate that behavior.

Trend 2: More Simplified, Tactical Communications

The next trend—more simplified, tactical communications—is about creating the best end-user experience. Many change practitioners tend to pull together grand, large-scale communication plans that are very dynamic but are so heavy with content and several communication types that the client becomes overwhelmed or believes end users will be overwhelmed.

Recently, I put together one of these very detailed and robust change communication plans, but the client came back and offered a much leaner and more tactical, digestible approach they thought their organization would favor and respond best to. We must be mindful of how inundated people are with information nowadays; focusing on more targeted communications will more effectively get our message across to stakeholders and end users.

To create leaner, more agile change communication plans, go ahead and work up the large-scale plan you’re used to, but distance yourself emotionally from it and then revisit it. What can be pared down? What can be omitted or streamlined? Where can you turn communications into engagement opportunities instead? Be willing to adjust away from your standard way of doing things, especially if clients show a desire for a more simplified approach.

Trend 3: Change Adoption Accelerators

The next trend I’m seeing on the horizon is a dedication to change adoption accelerators with particular attention to the analysis phase of change management. Three specific areas of the analysis phase require special attention and can accelerate your change adoption process:

1. Change Complexity Assessments. These assessments shape the overall deployment of your change execution, and if you spend ample time analyzing the complexity of the change you’re championing, you can better choose your approach for it. It’s like getting dressed in the morning with a closet full of clothes that fit you perfectly—you don’t need to overthink or make too many decisions about what to wear in the morning. You have simplified the decision-making process through the virtue of having already created a system that sets you up to make great choices. Pay deep attention to your change complexity assessment, thoroughly meet the client where they are, and eliminate the need to deconstruct and overthink in the future.
2. Stakeholder Group Change Impact Analysis. One of the most important aspects of change management is getting buy-in from stakeholders. A complete analysis of who stakeholders are, how they are connected to the change, and what their impact, cultural perspectives, and resistance points are will allow you to determine how to create that buy-in and even how to quell any concerns that might pop up for them in the future. Change management is all about uncovering those pockets of resistance early.
3. Intent clarity. Like uncovering pockets of resistance, we want to identify alignment and misalignment at the leadership level as early as possible. Having a clear picture of the intent for a change is critical to leverage alignment that already exists and helps to drive change adoption and involvement in the process early to close any alignment gaps that might exist. Leadership needs to be in sync with the change effort. They are drivers of the change, and their employees sometimes mimic their perceptions or behaviors. As the leaders go, so go their employees.

Trend 4: Change Management Centers of Excellence

The fourth trend coming through for change management is the emergence of Change Management Offices (CMOs) or Centers of Excellence (COEs). These internal offices are dedicated to facilitating change management at a variety of levels for an organization. They are set up to provide a standardized approach to managing change among a wide portfolio of projects. The goal for these offices is to establish governance over change—to develop and maintain standard, repeatable processes for managing change, from the rules of engagement and the scope of projects to roles and responsibilities and success criteria. These organizations can be involved in change management from project conception to post-go-live activities.

Developing a CMO or COE is a display of commitment to change management and an understanding of how valuable it is. Having an internal resource like this is putting change management on the front burner, on high!

Trend 5: Change Management on the Back Burner

Despite the four positive trends that are emerging in the field, some organizations are certainly still reluctant to move forward with change management activities. This is particularly true when a project still has a lot of uncertainty. If a final solution isn’t fully defined, many choose to avoid change management efforts until they reach a level of comfort that may or may not ever materialize.

The problem with waiting and putting change management on the back burner until there’s something like a final solution design is that it often gets set aside until it’s just too late. There is so much messaging you can push out to your end users and stakeholders during even the ideation phase that can help facilitate a change much farther down the line.

You want to keep people engaged enough throughout the development process so that when you get to the final solution, they are where you need them to be. People readiness is a great asset for any change, and we can’t get people ready for a change if they don’t know it’s going to happen until right before it goes live.

Another challenge here is that the longer you go without change management, the longer you think you can go without change management. Don’t wait until the last minute and take advantage of your greatest resource: time!

The Outlook for Change Management in 2023

Despite the fifth and final, ever-present trend of putting change management on the back burner, 2023 will be a promising year for change management. If we can focus on resistance management, more simplified communications, change accelerators, and the emergence of CMOs or COEs, we’ll be well on our way to blunting the effects of trend five.

For more information on how to develop a successful change management plan that ensures positive talent transformation, check out our article, Mitigate the Three Common Pitfalls of Organizational Change Management.

About the Authors

Julyan Lee

Julyan is the Organizational Change Management Practice Lead at GP Strategies within Platform Adoption. His focus is on executing the OCM disciplines of Prosci, ADKAR, SAP Activate, Infor IDM Methodologies in both waterfall and Agile project environments. He is responsible for building GP standard OCM processes and methodologies, and ensuring uniformity in their application across OCM resources and their projects. He also supports business development teams in their sales pursuits, in formulating OCM solutions and proposal responses, and presenting to clients.

As we assess the changes in the learning and development landscape, we must also consider how we manage the delivery of our learning. What is being learned, how people are learning, and where learning takes place have evolved dramatically, and how we manage training delivery has likewise changed.

Ensuring alignment in this area can make learning more engaging and effective and help to align with organizational goals and priorities. Read on to learn how to capitalize on and enhance your training delivery management to bring the greatest results to your organization.

5 Tips for Better Training Delivery Management

1. Align with Your Customers and Stakeholders

A foundational step in successful delivery management is gaining a deeper understanding of your customer and stakeholder needs. Whether you are working with program stakeholders, executive champions of the initiative, content designers or developers, or even a workforce management team, aligning everyone to the same vision and strategy is imperative.

A strategy our delivery management team utilizes when aligning with our partners is to ask various questions, such as:

• What is the goal of the initiative?
• What business problems are you trying to solve?
• Who is the target audience of this program?
• What will be the duration of this initiative and program?
• What locations and languages do you need delivery support in?
• What expertise and skill sets may be required?
• What is the modality of the learning experience?

These details can help you build a resource profile to aid in selecting the right team members for the delivery. Once you have drafted a resource profile, remember to share it and calibrate it with your customers and stakeholders.

2. Plan for Demand and Leverage Downtime

Demand planning is one of the most crucial skills and tasks when managing a training delivery function. Aligning with your organization and stakeholders on priorities and needs can help you properly plan for demand. These details will help guide you and allow you to decide how best to utilize your team and identify any resourcing gaps.

Demand planning involves consistently looking into the future and anticipating needs. As the leader of the learning delivery function, you must stay connected to the organization and business. Utilizing a standard system for training delivery intake and requests can help you stay informed and assess the organization’s demands. This information can help build a roadmap and ensure the proper resources are aligned and available. When creating the roadmap, it is essential to consider the periodic or seasonal trends that indicate peaks and valleys in training needs.

When adequately planning for demand, you can optimize efficiency by leveraging your downtime. Leveraging your downtime involves measuring your utilization—tracking how many days and hours facilitators and other delivery resources spent delivering learning.

It is unrealistic to expect delivery resources to be 100% utilized since needs will always fluctuate. For instance, an onboarding course that spans several months will involve much higher time utilization than running a few virtual instructor-led training (VILT) leadership sessions. It is important, however, that you also set a utilization target. The industry standard for utilization is around 65-70% of all available hours. As a delivery resource manager, you want to carefully consider where to dedicate the other 30-35% of the time, be it to plan for upcoming sessions, update materials, refresh skills, practice self-development, or familiarize yourself with operational procedures.

3. Have Processes and Procedures for Various Modalities

Today, there is a wider variety of modalities to deliver training to learners. Because of this, it is crucial as a training delivery function to have processes and procedures in place to offer support.

As some organizations return to the office environment, their learning organization assesses which modality will be most effective for which program. We are seeing organizations return to in-person learning (42%) while leveraging virtual learning for specific programs (58%). Each modality has its unique nuances that require varying processes and procedures. To optimize and ensure successful training delivery, it is essential to continuously examine your processes and procedures for various modalities.

For example, for in-person learning, the training delivery may have processes around room setup, AV equipment, and roster management that are specific to that modality. Whereas, for VILT sessions, the processes and procedures will involve gathering and distributing platform links and materials, aligning with the virtual producer, and addressing any post-session activities such as managing recordings.
Taking the time to examine the processes and procedures will help to make things run more smoothly. This will enable your project and program managers or coordinators to successfully execute critical steps and tasks for delivery at the time of need. Our experienced program and project managers periodically review the processes and procedures aligned with training and training delivery. Staying up to date and incorporating best practices can be invaluable.

4. Commit to Ongoing Upskilling and Resource Development Efforts

In addition to putting processes and procedures in place to support the various training methods and modalities, it is important to have the proper talent and skills to deliver. With the constant evolution of learning modalities and strategies, it’s essential to keep current with platforms and tools for delivery management. Because of this, you must develop a plan for ongoing upskilling and development of delivery resources. One way to do this is to take advantage of the various resources through ATD or a partner like GP Strategies, which offers many blogs, articles, and webinars on industry changes and hot topics.

Over the past several years, we have been hearing about artificial intelligence (AI) and its impact on the workforce. It is essential to evaluate how these tools can impact both learning and the management of training delivery. For instance, organizations are starting to leverage AI to analyze data and help develop a deployment plan for training programs. Additionally, many organizations are training their teams on the skills needed to effectively utilize AI in their work life. Since AI is evolving and changing frequently, it is imperative to have a plan to keep pace with and upskill on these technologies and skills.

With this information on new industry trends, strategies, and modalities, you can build a strategy around how your team will stay up-to-date and continue its growth. If you have tracked your utilization, this is an ideal way to leverage downtime between training delivery projects. A side bonus of committing time to resource development is that it can dramatically increase engagement and the retention of your top talent.

5. Invest Time in Community and Engagement

A final way to improve your training delivery is to allow your training facilitators to communicate and share ideas in this era of decreased connection. Providing a space for your teams to share ideas on hot topics, themes, customer project wins, new programs, learner reactions, and design quality will enhance your team’s morale and promote knowledge sharing and celebration.

Outside of online communities, you can also consider hosting regular Q&A events on hot topics or trends or creating ongoing touchpoints for quarterly reviews or industry update talks that invite discussion. Find ways to build a community for your team and provide easy and constant access to it.

Optimize Your Training and Delivery Techniques

There are countless ways to ensure your training delivery management is operating efficiently. Learn more about our training delivery management services.

About the Authors

Megan Bridgett

Megan Bridgett, a leader in training and talent development for over a decade, helps organizations implement, optimize, and increase capabilities in their learning management initiatives.

Nick Williamson

Nick is senior leader in delivery management with 18 years of experience. Nick has built delivery and leadership functions in the Middle East, South Africa, India, Hong Kong, and the UK. His experience spans automotive, communications, banking, and utilities industries. His key skill is the creation of learning delivery teams and governance that supports the consistent approach to having the highest-quality, right-sized faculty in the right location at the right time, to deliver the right course. Nick aims to achieve the right balance between customer satisfaction and business commercial drivers through a relationship and partnership focus.

We observe new learning trends and developments every year, and lately there seems to be an ever-increasing demand for new ways of working and smarter ways of learning.

Read on to learn how the current L&D trends will help you prepare for potential disruption, become more efficient, and create new strategies for more alignment in your organization.

Learning Trends for 2023

Trend 1: Becoming a Skills-Based Organization

This trend is about organizations shifting from a rigid job or role description to a skills framework that enables a more fluid understanding of the work. Moving in this direction enables organizations to better respond to disruption by becoming more agile and resourceful.

Many organizations are turning to technology to help with this shift. While the technology is better than ever, it cannot “automagically” prepare us for new needs without a deep understanding of the work and work output. Understanding the work and work output that are crucial to you will help you create a learning infrastructure that you can use repeatedly to deal with oncoming needs. Becoming skills based involves a big learning culture shift and deep organization-wide collaboration.

Trend 2: Designing for Inclusion, Beginning with Onboarding

We have a huge opportunity to ensure we’re transforming our organizations to be more inclusive from onboarding and beyond. This can and should happen by building inclusion into our designs—up front and not as an afterthought. One example of how we can do this is by expanding the voices we use for our learning journeys.

We can also promote inclusion through increasing the number of support touchpoints through intentional micro-coaching and mentoring, shifting the way we provide access to learning opportunities, and paying attention to the different stages of the learning journey. Making sure we spend time building inclusion specifically into our onboarding and other learning opportunities sets the stage for that sense of belonging we want everyone to feel.

Trend 3: Refining Design Thinking, Agile, and MVPs

Another trend we’re experiencing is a resurgence and refocusing on agile and design thinking, as well as embracing the concept of minimal viable product (MVP).

When striving for elegance in our learning designs, we need to focus on creating the simplest product that will fit our needs before creating more complex learning systems. If your goal is to encourage community to enhance the learning experience, you don’t want to jump straight into developing an app—you should first consider the simplest way you can achieve that goal.

The beauty of embracing an MVP mindset is that it can meet a set of evolving needs yet is sustainable and data driven.

Trend 4: Optimizing Your Learning Ecosystem

Optimizing our learning ecosystem, especially in terms of technology, can help us focus on the human experience component and bring more productivity to our learners. When we optimize learning ecosystems—by redesigning a system to provide less resistance for users to get to relevant content, for instance—we can increase retention through engagement and improve upskilling.

Beyond that, optimizing your learning ecosystem increases communication, knowledge sharing, and meaningful coaching and mentoring. All of these positive increases result in reduced content costs—a win-win.

Trend 5: Expanding the Organizational Learning Boundaries

In order to deal with disruptions at industry levels and to stay competitive, we need to break down our traditional learning boundaries and think differently about how we can engage audiences both internally and externally.

Expanding your organizational learning boundaries means opening up your learning systems to focus on a broader audience to meet emerging skill gaps so your people can help the organization achieve its goals. Instead of something the organization builds and gives to just its internal employees, we want to approach our learning content more collaboratively and open-mindedly. An example of this would be to include open-sourced content in your learning journeys.

Trend 6: Exploring the Metaverse

Despite what many think, the metaverse is not actually owned by a single company. It is a virtual, immersive space that serves as a representation of the real world—it includes people, places, concept expression, events, and human connection.

L&D professionals should begin thinking about how to use this virtual space to create truly immersive learning experiences, like to provide a safe space for practice and failure in terms of digital labs and workshops, for instance. It can also be used to host events and conferences, dramatically increasing connection for hybrid workforces.

More on 2023 Learning Trends

For more information about these learning trends and to learn about Trend 7—how Web 3.0 will impact learning—check out my recent webinar, Learning Trends for 2023: Cultivating Connection, Alignment, and Efficiency, on trainingindustry.com.

About the Authors

Matt Donovan

Chief Learning & Innovation Officer

Early in life, I found that I had a natural curiosity that not only led to a passion for learning and sharing with others, but it also got me into trouble. Although not a bad kid, I often found overly structured classrooms a challenge. I could be a bit disruptive as I would explore the content and activities in a manner that made sense to me. I found that classes and teachers that nurtured a personalized approach really resonated with me, while those that did not were demotivating and affected my relationship with the content. Too often, the conversation would come to a head where the teacher would ask, “Why can’t you learn it this way?” I would push back with, “Why can’t you teach it in a variety of ways?” The only path for success was when I would deconstruct and reconstruct the lessons in a meaningful way for myself. I would say that this early experience has shaped my career. I have been blessed with a range of opportunities to work with innovative organizations that advocate for the learner, endeavor to deliver relevance, and look to bend technology to further these goals. For example, while working at Unext.com, I had the opportunity to experience over 3,000 hours of “learnability” testing on my blended learning designs. I could see for my own eyes how learners would react to my designs and how they made meaning of it. Learners asked two common questions: Is it relevant to me? Is it authentic? Through observations of and conversations with learners, I began to sharpen my skills and designed for inclusion and relevance rather than control. This lesson has served me well. In our industry, we have become overly focused on the volume and arrangement of content, instead of its value. Not surprising—content is static and easier to define. Value (relevance), on the other hand, is fluid and much harder to describe. The real insight is that you can’t really design relevance; you can only design the environment or systems that promote it. Relevance ultimately is in the eye of the learner—not the designer. So, this is why, when asked for an elevator pitch, I share my passion of being an advocate for the learner and a warrior for relevance.

Global Experience in Training Transformation 

Over the past 30 years, I have been fortunate to live and work in the Americas, EMEA, and Asia. The experiences have been enriching and have presented me with the opportunity to work with several global and regional clients as they transformed their learning approaches or developed the operational infrastructure for employee training and learning. 

I have witnessed how the rapid rise in global connection (thanks to technology) has forced organizations to adapt and modernize operations to meet learner needs. Even with these changes, we must continue to recognize the cultural and regional differences across the world, and organizations must be positioned to adapt and deploy learning consistently and efficiently. Despite the rapid evolution of learning over the past few years, the foundation for a global learning organization remains the same. Great learning needs require great execution. 

5 Steps for More Efficient Learning Organizations

When planning your learner experience, here are five of the most important steps to build a learning infrastructure that is efficient, cost-effective, and regionally specific. 

Step 1: Develop a Global Governance Framework 

When you first begin to build your global learning infrastructure, create a framework for how you should operate. Consider which operating models are best for your business today, and how best to meet your short-term needs while simultaneously looking at the future. Take time to benchmark and carefully consider an inclusive framework. 

You should also seek executive sponsorship. If your regional and global executive teams are not aligned and supportive of a change, you will struggle to implement it. Developing a reference document in collaboration with your business partners that outlines your global governance framework will provide structure and direction as your learning operations expand across regions. 

This global governance framework sets the foundation for all future plans and expansions, helps to build stakeholder support, and brings transparency to who is responsible for which process and how different aspects of your infrastructure will function. 

Step 2: Build in Compliance and Regulatory Requirements 

When it comes to compliance, companies now rely heavily on providing consistent, evidence-based learning to employees. This demand has led many organizations to centralize their learning functions and implement global learning operations. 

As you design your global learning infrastructure, recognize that there has been a rise in regulatory requirements. Learning organizations are in a great position to reduce risk for companies and customers, and you should take advantage of this as much as possible. When creating policies and procedures, consider how best to thread compliance into your learning operations. To be purposeful with information security and General Practice Data for Planning and Research (GPDPR) in your processes and communications, automate workflow to reduce risk when possible. 

While global learning operations can bring cost savings and operational efficiencies, individuals are the true agents of change—don’t miss the opportunity to be a strong supporter of the development of global solutions. 

Step 3: Avoid Groupthink and Consider Regional Preferences 

To prevent centralized groupthink, organizations should be careful when designing their governance models. When a learning team operates centrally, team members often assume they are the experts on delivering learning. While this may be the case, these team members may not have experience in deploying solutions regionally. They also likely do not understand regional resource complexity nor how to navigate purchasing at the regional or country level, both of which have their own set of obstacles. 

To ensure the right people are on the governance team, it is important to engage stakeholders in the team-forming process. This helps to build trust and engagement among stakeholders and can lead to cost savings through a deeper understanding of potential purchasing challenges. 

Step 4: Consult Your Local Experts and Interested Parties 

Although modern technology has made it easier for people to connect, there is still no substitute for firsthand experience living and working in other parts of the world. As an American, my personal experiences in Asia, LATAM, EMEA, and the United Kingdom have provided me with a deep understanding and appreciation for the culturally specific challenges global teams face. 

Although it may not always be financially feasible, it can be beneficial to assign team members from the central organization to work in a particular region or to have regional team members join the central team; this can ensure you are building a model that works across the enterprise. A successful global team recognizes and embraces the unique qualities and perspectives that each team member brings to the group. 

Allowing flexibility means adaptation—not the creation of a unique model. Build flexibility into your operating model, allowing for certain regions and business units to make their own regional adaptations. Of course, any regional adaptations should be considered through your governance teams. 

Step 5: Establish Global Partnerships 

A well-connected, effective global learning team can assist the organization in finding and partnering with the right organizations around the world. As different regions develop and grow, so do the local resources available in those areas. It is essential to be selective when choosing partners and to prioritize organizations that complement your areas of weakness or inexperience. 

It is also important to consider whether potential partners share your organizational values, have the desire and ability to collaborate and build capabilities that meet your needs, and are willing to work with and across learning providers in your best interests. When you select learning partners, consider their ability to deploy learning where your business operates and their willingness to collaborate and partner with your network of providers. 

Experience More Efficient Global Employee Training 

Modern learning strategies can present numerous benefits. Leveraging shared service centers, creating a cost-effective resource arbitrage, and outsourcing operations are not only about savings; they are also key to reinvesting in talent and learning initiatives. They are opportunities to adjust your global spend in a way that allows learning organizations to become better strategic business partners. 

GP Strategies can help you establish governance and relationships now that will have a significant impact on your ability to navigate and successfully respond to future changes. Reach out today to learn more about learning vendor management or building and maintaining a successful training delivery team. 

About the Authors

Dan Miller, Senior Vice President

Recognized as one of the top 20 Training Industry influencers by Training Industry Inc., Dan Miller is more than just a Senior Vice President at GP Strategies. He is an industry thought leader with more than 20 years of service at GP Strategies. He has led our expansion into the Asia-Pacific theater; overseen the development of GP Strategies' marketing and business development strategies for our learning outsourcing services; developed our Enterprise Assessment Methodology; and managed the design, delivery, and measurement of large-scale training interventions for our Company. He holds a B.S. in human resource management, an MBA from Anderson University, and an executive certificate in global management from Thunderbird University. Dan is also an accomplished speaker, having presented at key learning industry conferences such as ATD, Global Learning Summit, CLO Symposium, and the World Learning Summit.

Over the last several years, the work, the worker, and the workplace have transformed. But how we conduct business isn’t all that has changed. As people have become more comfortable leveraging technology to find solutions and consume information, providing easily accessible, ruthlessly relevant, and in-the-flow-of-work learning opportunities has never been more challenging. Providing those employee development opportunities, however, remains critically important.

Keeping up with these new learning expectations requires resources with different skill sets than your organization is used to allocating to employee development. To meet this new demand for modern learning, many organizations are now strategically sourcing their learning and development solutions and services through a managed learning services (MLS) supplier or partner.

Outsourcing to an MLS partner can streamline your learning organization, improve the effectiveness of your learning offerings, and enhance the overall learner experience. It can also save your organization time and money. Consider the following best practices as you prepare a request for proposal (RFP), identify the best partners, and finally, select and contract with a supplier.

Preparing the Request for Proposal

Solicit Input from Internal Stakeholders

The most successful outsourcing initiatives engage the right blend of team members from the start. The balance of procurement and operations resources is critical. In some scenarios, early involvement of less obvious representation from IT, data privacy, legal, human resources, and tax resources may help to ensure that your organization achieves its desired outcomes.

Failure to build and level-set the right team during the RFP process may significantly lengthen, complicate, and even derail the RFP process. Including all interested parties early on creates a smoother transition and implementation.

Align on Strategic Goals and Objectives for Outsourcing

Outsourcing can provide a variety of benefits to your learning organization, including:

• Expanding your capabilities to design and develop learning in new ways;
• Increasing your capacity to deliver learning to a diverse learner population;
• Improving the efficiency, quality, and consistency of your learning operation;
• Reducing cost and providing opportunities to reallocate budgets;
• Streamlining your supplier base to achieve maximum value;
• And freeing up internal resources for more strategic activities.

It is critical to identify and internally agree on your specific, overarching strategic objectives for partnering with an MLS supplier before beginning the RFP process. Making these objectives clear in an RFP helps your future partner define an operating model based on your specific objectives rather than solely relying on their own experience and assumptions.

Clarify and Define Scope and Scale

A common shortfall of many RFPs is a failure to define the scope of what is to be outsourced effectively and accurately. A Q&A between you and the potential MLS partners may uncover many of these details, but having a clear scope and providing sufficient detail in your RFP will help to minimize the number of supplier questions and reduce the impact to your team and RFP timeline. To make certain you receive supplier proposals that can be readily compared and that match your objectives, include all relevant operational details, data, and metrics you can obtain and share.

Consider Timing and Impact

Determining the impacts of change on the organization is critical to ensure the success of your outsourcing initiative. Do you have the backing and commitment from key stakeholders? Do you have available resources to support the RFP process and implementation? Are there activities underway that may be disrupted by an outsourcing transition?

The RFP process often requires many resources and subject matter experts during the transition of services to the new supplier. Having early stakeholder commitment and agreement on planning and timing is critical to ensure continued momentum for the project. Reviewing other training and technology initiatives occurring at the same time is also helpful when establishing an RFP timeline, transition plan, and implementation date.

Identifying the Best Suppliers

Tap into Industry Experts for Insights and Recommendations

The most capable suppliers with the best reputations and track records of success are well-known in the training industry. Look to unbiased sources to identify suppliers that should be considered for your outsourcing initiative. Some resources to leverage include Training Industry and Fosway Group.

Limit Bidders to No More Than Four Suppliers

When trying to select and source the best partner for an outsourcing initiative, too often, companies send solicitations to a long list of potential suppliers. The more suppliers you include in the process, the more questions you will receive and the more proposals you will have to read and evaluate.

This can put a significant burden on your resources and lengthen the RFP process. Limiting your solicitation to no more than four viable suppliers will allow you to keep to your timeline and ensure that your project stays on track. If time permits, consider soliciting a larger pool of suppliers through a Request for Information (RFI), which would allow you to quickly assess supplier capabilities and cull the list for the RFP.

Supplier Selection and Contracting

Assess Supplier Capabilities, Experience, and Reputation

Through a review of supplier proposals, presentations, and your follow-up inquiries, you should be able to assess whether a supplier has the necessary capabilities and experience to meet your needs. But you should also read between the lines to gain insight into the supplier’s reputation: Do they have long-term relationships with their customers? Multiple contract renewals? Expanding scope and services over time?

Take the time to fully understand the supplier’s governance approach and operating model so you can evaluate what it would be like to work with your partner every day.

Look for Value Beyond Scope

Suppliers can bring value beyond meeting your basic goals and objectives. You should also consider a supplier’s response time, management style, and capacity for agility and flexibility. Speaking to the supplier’s references can provide plenty of insight, so consider asking the following questions:

• Does the company you’re working with match your company’s culture?
• Does it add value and bring innovative ideas and solutions to the partnership?
• Has your support team been stable and easy to work with?
• Are issues addressed and resolved promptly and to your satisfaction?

These questions can expose key differentiators between suppliers that extend beyond the scope of the project and provide additional insights into whether a supplier is a good fit.

Negotiate and Strategize to Get the Best Supplier for the Best Price

It can be extremely difficult to get an apples-to-apples comparison when evaluating suppliers. Typically, differences in assumptions create variances in proposed solutions and pricing, and it isn’t until you have selected your supplier that the true scope and solution can be finalized.

Selecting an MLS partner is a strategic decision with long-term implications. It would be short-sighted to use price as your primary criterion for supplier selection. A best practice is to set costs aside, choose your preferred supplier based on cultural alignment and ability to deliver results, and then negotiate to get to a mutually beneficial price.

Write a Contract that Creates Value over Time

Like a marriage, a partnership needs a shared commitment to success and takes effort on both parts to sustain over time. While good intentions and alignment are important, a well-written contract is necessary to ensure partnership success.

Good contracts incorporate formal measurement of the supplier’s performance in meeting the strategic objectives of your partnership. This includes establishing agreed-upon metrics for key activities and deliverables and outlining penalties if performance falls below expectations. The best contracts are focused on creating and sustaining a strong partnership over time, often including incentives to encourage performance beyond expectations and to bring added value. This is often done by defining metrics around innovation, continuous improvement, and cost savings.

Deliver Impactful Employee Development

Following these steps when choosing an MLS supplier can help your outsourcing partnership reach its full potential and help you realize many benefits, including enhanced employee development by providing ruthlessly relevant and easily accessible in-the-flow of work learning opportunities.

By taking time to evaluate critical success factors and objectives and carefully selecting your MLS partner, you will significantly enhance your organization’s ability to develop a high-performing workplace culture and meet challenging business goals.

About the Authors

Heidi Milberg, Vice President

Leading an organization through a merger or acquisition can feel like spinning plates before a live studio audience. Trying to keep everything in motion, you’re never able to turn away from any one priority, even for a moment. It probably feels like there are always too many plates. And gosh, it’s hot under those lights. To be sure, learning and development (L&D) and human resources leaders have a lot on their plates when two organizations come together.

It’s no wonder, then, that diversity, equity, and inclusion (DE&I) don’t always make it to the top of the priorities list during mergers and acquisitions (M&As). What smart leaders realize, though, is that M&As are the ideal time to make sure the newly formed organization is built around a culture of inclusion—and that this inclusive culture lays the groundwork for real and measurable success.

Not only does proper DE&I work set you up for success, but it can also fend off the negative effects of turmoil, uncertainty, and unconscious bias that would otherwise lead to trouble in the future. As an L&D professional, you play a critical role in ensuring that the post-merger organization rises from an equitable foundation.

You can start by thoroughly assessing your current programs, including overlaps and gaps, with your counterparts in the new partner organization. Once you understand the distinctions, you can align on point of view and messaging, then begin planning for optimal integration.

Onboarding: Everyone’s a New Employee

That integration should launch with intentional onboarding. This introduction to the new (combined) organization is an essential setting for you to share, in detail, the values of your organization and clear expectations for employee behavior. When all employees, regardless of tenure or original organization, understand that those values and behaviors include the respect for and pursuit of equity and inclusion, you’re well on your way.

As you develop your onboarding program, don’t assume that implicit norms will be universally understood; take the time to ask whether historic unspoken rules might work against inclusion and act to formalize appropriate guidelines. Consider everything: leadership philosophies, communication and recruiting channels, and traditionally rewarded employee traits.

Retention: Turn Threats into Opportunities

During M&As—when the stakes are high—you’ll naturally be focused on retaining top talent. Replacement and reduction actions are to be expected, but you should seize the opportunity here to operate with an emphasis on equity and a preference for diversity. You can’t predetermine the demographics or corporate culture of your partner organization, but you can (and must) ensure that your leaders, recruiters, hiring managers, and organizational design practitioners are trained and equipped to actively mitigate bias in all staffing decisions.

Perhaps you’re thinking, “Is this really that important? I have a lot of other priorities to think about.” Consider this: Unintended missteps from a few well-placed employees with situational authority could negatively affect your organization’s racial wage gap or gender balance, at a time when everyone from employees to stakeholders (and maybe regulators, shareholders, industry watchers, the media, potential candidates, etc.) is paying close attention. The ability to publish a transparent and inclusive set of policies and demonstrate its real-world implementation builds trust in your organization, which is a significant boost for efforts to keep your most effective people and emerge with a culture of high performance.

Adaptation: More Than Just Logistics

Many organizations going through the M&A process are folding new regions, languages, or cultures into their ways of working. You may need a more global perspective than before when it comes to supporting employees, leaders, and workflows across multiple countries. Learning journeys for team members should include training on unconscious bias, microaggressions, and psychological safety. This investment avoids risk in the short term and pays off handsomely in the long term, as organizations that systematize inclusion achieve higher rates of engagement, productivity, and innovation.

Whenever two organizations become one, people will virtually always bring with them a prejudice—about both legacy organizations and the individuals within. For example, based on a few interactions or even branding materials, employees from Company A could assume that those from Company B have loads of technical expertise but lack business acumen. While this tendency is normal, it’s counterproductive and can prevent decision makers from spotting top performers and high-potential talent.

By all means, celebrate past successes and rich legacies—after all, everyone’s coming together to leverage the best aspects of both organizations. But don’t let preexisting affinities and bias skew important decisions at such a critical time. If you’re looking for red flags, take note when a sentence begins with “This is the way we’ve always done it” or “I’m from Company A so I think we should …”

Harmony: Don’t Forget the Customer

Most professionals at the forefront of M&As don’t need a reminder to look after existing clients. But beyond the rewritten contracts and new email addresses, customers will be anxious to learn exactly how the newly minted organization will deliver as a unified team.

Without an inclusive culture and shared sense of belonging, your customer-facing employees may not be presenting as wholehearted supporters of the merger—and that can set off alarm bells that jeopardize referrals and repeat business.

Culture: Handle with Care

Freshly integrated organizations often default to basing their culture on what feels popular with a plurality of senior leaders and roll it out to employees with a new mission statement or an internal communications campaign. This has always been a questionable approach, but it’s an utter strategic nightmare in the modern marketplace.

Today’s workforce and consumers want to know what your organization stands for. They expect a global mindset, transparency, flexibility, and a technocentric ability to deliver meaningful solutions. Employees, customers, and other stakeholders make investment decisions based on their level of connection with your brand, and that usually comes down to their perception of your organization’s culture.

So this isn’t something that can wait to be sorted after the dust settles; delay can be costly. Fortunately, in many cases all it takes are some learning opportunities and relatively simple messaging to shake off the lingering biases from previous mindsets. More in-depth learning programs can lock in a more equitable and transparent system for personnel decisions.

When you place a thoughtful, inclusive, well-supported culture at the heart of your post-M&A strategy, you’re doing more than feel-good box ticking. You’re positioning your organization for maximum strategic advantage built on tangible positive business outcomes. It just happens to feel good, too.

About the Authors

Angela Peacock

Global Director of Diversity and Inclusion for PDT Global, a GP Strategies company.

She is a DE&I practitioner with nearly twenty-five years experience helping organizations and their people create the environments where anyone who’s capable can excel. At PDT Global, she leads the Strategic Inclusion team—a group who works directly with C-suite executives to build alignment and strategic understanding around DE&I.