“I am working more hours now than I did before. I am exhausted. Remote work is exhausting; I honestly can’t wait to get back to the office.” This was the sentiment of my colleague last week. She’s not alone. The pendulum has swung from excitement about the advantages of working remotely full time … to disdain. Here’s the catch—what you are experiencing right now is not remote work.

Prior to COVID-19, a smaller but growing percentage of the workforce had the opportunity to engage in remote working. Now, millions of workers globally have been transitioned overnight from office workers to home workers—more than 16 million, according to Slack. Not just regular home workers, but home workers during a global pandemic. With Facebook and Google announcing in May that they’ll allow employees to work from home until 2021 and Twitter announcing permanent work-from-home options, this isn’t changing anytime soon—in fact, Google declared a company-wide holiday in May to help employees address pandemic-related burnout.

What is remote work? As an advocate of the future of remote work, I would like to take a moment to acknowledge everyone who is now working from their home as a result of the pandemic and share a message about this new work experience. Nothing you are experiencing right now is normal. This is not remote work.

No Commute, New Pain Points

COVID-19 has accelerated an unprecedented transformational shift in our lives. Overnight, traditional offices shut down, and you, like millions of other people worldwide, were suddenly working from your home. Many of you had no home office; no comfortable headset for the hours of calls; no tastefully decorated wall to serve as your Zoom background; and probably not even a desk, an ergonomic chair, or a designated workspace. Your internet bandwidth and connectivity may not be optimized for the 24/7 connection of multiple devices as the world’s distributed teams compete for bandwidth across different time zones. You may not have been familiar with online collaboration tools or maybe didn’t even know what Zoom was before now. Even if you did have experience with online collaboration tools, chances are your colleagues didn’t. Now you must learn how to collaborate while working from home. Understandably, you weren’t prepared for this. No one was, and that includes your manager.

You might be feeling that you are not getting the support you need. Your manager might not have experience managing a remote team and may be asking more of you. They may be having difficulty learning to trust that you will remain a productive employee because they can’t see you physically at your desk. It might feel like they are trying to lift and shift your in-office work into your work-from-home experience. Those two experiences, however, are not the same environment and shouldn’t be treated as such.

Under the right circumstances, the benefits of a remote work environment are numerous. Remote work:

• Constitutes the freedom to do your work from anywhere
• Provides flexibility when you work
• Provides access to a diverse global pool of talent
• Creates opportunities for jobs unbounded by geography

In a 2018 Indeed survey, remote workers reported an increase in:

• Productivity
• Happiness
• Work morale
• Work-life balance

If working from home is new for you, here are a few simple best practices to help set you up for success:

• Establish a workspace that is comfortable for you. If you are in a smaller space shared with your family, establish boundaries for your area and protocols for interruptions. A reversible sign reading either “available” or “busy” can work wonders.
• Communication is mission critical when working remotely. Be transparent, direct, and honest with your manager. Establish a cadence and work etiquette that supports your needs—hours online and output goals should be part of that conversation. Above all, make sure you have an open dialogue with your manager to ensure you are aligned on expectations.
• Technology is your friend, but don’t be afraid to speak up if you are not comfortable or need help learning how to use it.
• You are not in this alone. Stay connected with your team, and use video meetings when possible. Keep yourself on mute when you are not speaking to minimize distractions. One trick is to move the active speaker panel of your video chat to the top of your screen under your webcam—this makes it appear that you are making eye contact with the group.

The Current Situation vs. the Future

The remote work environment gives you choices—right now, you have no choices. You are quarantined. There is no working from comfortable co-working spaces. No sipping lattes at the coffee shop. No catching up on emails on the plane or working from airport lounges. You are sharing spaces with new colleagues—your family—while dealing with new distractions and fears. You are playing teacher, cook, cleaner, spouse, and parent. You have not been given the opportunity to find the best working environment where you can be most productive.

Right now, the hours are longer, the distractions are stronger, and concentration is fleeting. You have unprecedented emotional strains as your world has shifted beneath you. Your lives and your work are now virtual.

We will, one day soon, reach a stable environment where we may have an opportunity to receive the many benefits that come with remote work. Until then, try not to confuse the current situation and all its challenges with real remote work. Try not to let the current situation overshadow the value a remote work lifestyle has to offer you. Try not to label this experience as remote work, but rather, recognize it for what it is—working from home during an unprecedented time for which no rule books are available. Remember, work is what you do, not where you go.

About the Authors

Keith Keating

With a career spanning over 20 years in learning & development, Keith Keating holds a Master’s Degree in Leadership and has experience in a myriad of areas ranging from Instructional Design, Leadership Coaching, Operations Management, and Process Transformation. More recently Keith has been leading clients on the development and execution of their global learning strategies. Regardless of the role, at the heart of everything Keith does centers around problem solving. He studied Design Thinking at MIT’s Sloan School of Management and found Design Thinking was a perfect tool to add to his problem solving "toolkit". Since then, Keith has been utilizing Design Thinking to help clients tap into understanding and resolving unmet customer needs.

This blog article was written prior to LEO Learning becoming part of GP Strategies.

For many organizations, moving towards digital training is a necessity in these difficult times. Gathering learners in the same physical location is—for obvious reasons—a greater challenge now than ever before. But we propose you think about this as an opportunity to try something new. It could be a chance to engage your learners in ways you’ve never tried before.

So, whether you’re a digital learning newbie or an experienced hand, we hope these tips will help you produce amazing training in these unprecedented times.

#1 Do Think About the Head, Heart and Hand

When we design virtually any kind of digital training, our aim is to change behavior. To put it simply, organizational change arises when people do things differently. That means not just imparting information, but also the desire and skills to use it. Our ‘Head, Heart, Hand’ approach pays homage to the work of BJ Fogg’s Three Pillar model and serves as a great reminder that learning has to be understood, felt, and acted upon.

Where distance digital learning can fail is if it neglects any of these areas. Think of it like the sides of a triangle—if any of them are removed then things fall down.

Trigger + Motivation = “I want to do something but I don’t know how!”

Trigger + Ability = “Yeah I can do this but I don’t want to.”

Motivation + Ability = “I want to and am able to, if only I knew when and how I need to apply the knowledge I have.”

Trigger + Motivation + Ability = “I know what to do, I want to do it, and I know how to do it.”

Distance learning is good at engaging the head when it delivers information in logical “chunks” that help learners understand what they should be doing. More on that later.

To engage the heart, there are lots of options available and the key is knowing what really matters to your learners and then showing it, instead of just telling it. For example, an opening message from the CEO communicates the importance of what they’re learning to the business and speaks to the learner’s sense of group identity. Or an emotive story from a customer’s perspective can be enough to motivate change through a desire to make life better for others.

Engaging the hand is all about practice, practice, practice. Does your distance learning provide the opportunity for learners to try new things and test out their new skills? Does it show them the consequences and outcomes of their actions in a safe space? Realistic scenario-based questioning is a powerful way to achieve this in eLearning. Other techniques include group and 1:1 roleplay, or offline workbooks that learners can go through in their own time.

#2 Don’t Be Afraid to Experiment With Different Formats and Approaches

One of the great advantages of distance digital learning is the sheer number of different formats to play with so you can choose the best way to teach depending on your content. If you’re looking for some inspiration, here are a few examples:

Each of these modes has its own sub-categories to explore. Let’s take video. Could you make a short teaser that gets people excited to learn about your content? What about a documentary-style video that dives deep into a topic and explores real stories to both entertain and get people thinking (consider Netflix’s Tiger King)? Or could it be interactive storytelling where the learner is participating in making decisions (looking again to Netflix and its film Black Mirror: Bandersnatch).

So there’s no need to feel like you’re limited to just one mode of delivery. Use different forms that resonate with your audience and do justice to your content.

#3 Do Be Goal-Focused and Consider the Whole Journey

People tend to roll their eyes when you talk about learning as a journey—but it really is! Learning something new is rarely a singular event. It’s a process that involves synthesizing information from multiple sources, then forming and reforming that into knowledge as it’s applied in relevant contexts.

When it comes to content for distance learning it’s important to set meaningful goals for this learning intervention. What I’m learning has to be leading me somewhere—towards a new ability, a skill, an achievement that’s relevant to my occupation or interests. Without the focus of the classroom, we need our content to be driving forward towards these goals, now more than ever.

This can be achieved in a number of ways:

• Be clear about the purpose and outcomes of the training at the start, and reinforce that message regularly throughout
• Ask the learner to consider their level of competence before the training, then replay that to them at the end so they can see how far they’ve come
• Break the training down into small chunks each with smaller objectives that contribute to the overall learning goal
• Give the learner regular opportunities to demonstrate their knowledge through quick quizzes and performance feedback
• Ensure that every bit of content you cover has a clear link to the overall goals. Learners should never be asking “Why is this important?”
• Conclude the training by restating the purpose, and a summary of the new skills and knowledge the learners should have

#4 Don’t Let Learners Be Passive

For any given moment in your distance learning, think about the activity you’re asking learners to actually do. Is it passive or active? Let me explain.

A passive task is “watch this”, “read that” or “answer these questions.” It’s an activity without a definitive purpose that begs the question “Why?”.

An active task is more like “research this, and then…” or “review the video, so that you can…”. These types of activities make it clear to me why I’m doing it and the purpose it has in the context of my learning journey.

To be clear, it’s not just a matter of re-wording a task description and saying that it’s active; the learner has to be able to see this as part of a chain of activities that leads them towards their ultimate learning goal.

#5 Do Think About Pacing, and Design for Disruption

We normally talk about pacing in the context of films, books, or video games. It’s the feeling the audience gets from the cadence or intensity of what’s unfolding in front of them. An action-packed video game can’t be action-laden all the time, otherwise the player gets burnt out too quickly and has to quit. But perhaps even more important is that varying the pace of an experience allows the audience to appreciate moments of intensity even more when they’re interspersed with some cognitive ‘downtime’. The same is true for learning.

In the home environment, it’s so easy for another task to catch your eye or demand your attention. Even a moment of hesitation in a distance learning program can allow the learner’s attention to be drawn elsewhere. Authoring any form of distance learning intervention requires designing for maximum attention retention. Having a good mix of media, activity types, and other interactive elements helps to modulate the level of intensity so that your learners experience a pleasant flow that keeps them engaged for longer.\

#6 Don’t Be Tempted to “Just Include Everything”

This is the most straightforward tip for distance learning, but it might just be the most important. It’s totally tempting to think of a digital course—especially eLearning—as free real estate when it comes to content. But this couldn’t be further from the truth.

For a classroom lesson, you probably wouldn’t give each learner the entire 87-page Policy and Procedures guide to read. Just imagine those printing costs! However, in a digital course, technically speaking, you can. It’s just bits and bytes after all. But I’m here to tell you that you shouldn’t. More information often leads to less retention and lower engagement because distance learners value training when it’s just enough.

For every ounce of content you include—be that text, video, audio, or anything else—ask whether learners really, really, really need it. If the answer is no, you should either remove or reduce it.

A Final Word on Designing Distance Learning Content

Digital distance learning doesn’t have to be difficult to make, but getting your own special formula right can take time. The trick is to be patient and try lots of different things. These unprecedented times can be the perfect ‘sandbox’ to test and refine your digital learning design ideas. Whether you’re starting small or overhauling an existing eLearning course, these tips can help you digitize your training content and embrace a fully virtual world of learning.

About the Authors

Rich Calcutt

Rich Calcutt is a Director of Consulting Learning Experience, and also chairs the Game Design team at GP Strategies. Rich's team brings together the science of learning design with the art of play, helping global brands create immersive and impactful experiences that change both mindsets and behaviors. Rich is a believer in the power of games to educate individuals, engage communities, and transform organizations.

No one could have predicted the ways in which 2020 would expose organizational vulnerabilities while simultaneously forcing those same organizations to quickly adapt and build resiliency into their business models.

We’ve seen companies that have already gone digital recover and in some cases, flourish during this time. And customers are no longer just driven by convenience, but also by health and safety concerns further exacerbating the situation, creating a call to action for the industry to wake up and take charge of the future.

Companies are falling into the trap of thinking that revolutionary technologies will solve their current woes. Sadly, that’s not the case. 70% of digital transformation efforts fail to ever reach their goals. To avoid this failure, the research shows the answer starts with preparing your people for the new way of selling and servicing and creating a culture to enable this important shift.

We see that companies like Cadillac and Hyundai have already moved to a selling model that includes a new role: the digital sales agent. By simply visiting their websites at certain times during the week, you can instantly enter a live video session with a sales agent who will give you a vehicle walk-around from a virtual studio and advise you on how you can have the vehicle delivered to your home.

In order for a model like this to work moving forward, it will require a transformation unlike any other. We’ve seen business development centers evolve from call centers to internet centers. The next evolution will include a live virtual component. Dealerships will need to be retrained to bring about the oxymoron of a contactless high-touch experience. Wrap your head around that concept! You may find that the product or delivery specialist accustomed to using the existing digital tools becomes the hero people rely on to help upskill the rest of the dealership.

Employees will need to be reskilled for a new normal that includes the proficient utilization of virtual and digital tools for a process that needs to account for the drivers and realities companies like Amazon, Tesla, CarMax, and Carvana are helping shape. The journey to this new mastery requires a performance-based outcome approach that starts with the learner. For instance, a traditional two-day face-to-face brand immersion course may now look like a four-week journey that includes a 30-minute high-octane opening and welcome. The experience would include challenges and activities to be completed between the live virtual sessions and learning that’s consumed in bite-sized pieces via different modalities. Each session would provide a chance to apply skills and role-play the desired behaviors that reflect the brand and dealership values, including personal real-world examples brought to each live learning session. Below is an example of what such a journey could look like.

The state of the world currently provides two advantages for successful change to happen: urgency and shared context in the knowledge that everyone is going through this together. There are a wealth of best practices and solutions being developed and improvised during this time. GP Strategies is working with our clients to ensure the success of their transformation and adaptation efforts despite the challenges. And the stakes have never been higher, with the safety and livelihoods of many intertwined and dependent on our actions. Right now, businesses are focused on surviving. But by developing the right skills and preparing for the new normal, they can soon be thriving.

About the Authors

Simon Huang

Simon Huang currently oversees the Global European Automotive Practice for GP Strategies. He possesses 16 years of automotive experience with two premium luxury OEM’s having led the national sales and product training organization and held various leadership roles in product planning, digital marketing and corporate strategy. He has worked globally in collaboration with global OEM headquarters and the dealer network to define and execute the strategic direction for various sales, marketing, leadership, customer experience, product and technology launches and initiatives. Prior to joining the OEM’s, Simon was a management consultant at PricewaterhouseCoopers and Ernst & Young creating business value developing cutting edge practices for Fortune 500 companies.

The H1 2020 release is here and full of new features and functionality! We have broken down the updates in a series of 10-15 minute On Demand webinars for you to quickly learn what to expect in your updated SuccessFactors environment.

You can also explore our full catalog of on-demand webinars here.

• Successfactors Platform Employee Profile
• Successfactors Recruiting
• Successfactors Employee Central
• Successfactors Compensation Variable Pay
• Successfactors Learning Management
• Successfactors Onboarding
• Successfactors Performance Goal Succession Development H1 Release Webinar

About the Authors

Erik Ebert

For the past 25 years, Erik Ebert has supported organizations across diverse industries and geographies to implement digital transformation strategies, improving business performance within human capital management (HCM). Erik has a track record of building lasting relationships through a consultative approach, resulting in happy clients, successful projects, and effective teams. Erik works as a Business Development Director with HCT at GP Strategies in Copenhagen, Denmark.

If the recent changes to our work environments have taught us anything, it is that when being faced with a challenge, we can rise to it. Thinking about learning in particular, before COVID-19, we often saw hour-long courses to help us learn how to work remotely, how to keep engaged, how to use a certain software or tool. But all of a sudden, we have to know how to do these things, and organizations adjusted on the fly and started to curate more content on the above topics instead of building new courses from scratch. Companies started to look at what communication tools they already have available and pushed out content accordingly. In all of this, it’s extremely important though to not just start pushing out content and start using tools to easily connect remotely, but to also think about the strategy behind all of this, and hopefully, keep up this new way of working once we’ve fought off this pandemic.

Learning in the flow of work

One strategy to consider in this new age is learning in the flow of work. Workflow learning differs from traditional L&D approaches. Traditionally, we often overwhelm employees with heavy content pieces focused on knowledge transfer either in eLearning modules or hour-long workshops. Learning in the flow of work however, puts the employee in touch with the right resources at the right time and right place. Workflow learning is designed to really drive business outcomes and performance, and focus on the learner. There are a multitude of ways to achieve learning in the flow of work. From using tools already available in an organization, such as Microsoft tools and apps, think MS Teams, Yammer and SharePoint, to integrating outside resources, such as LinkedIn or Twitter to help create community.

Collaboration as one key to workflow learning success

Another way to create community and allow employees to learn in the flow of work is collaboration. This refers to collaboration within a team, a project team, an organization, but can also mean collaboration outside of an organization. We see lots of collaboration happening right now. Within organizations, teams have virtual coffee breaks to connect and brainstorm ideas. Outside organizations, individuals cast a bigger net within their industries to come up with innovative ideas to help fight COVID-19.

Interestingly enough, when asking different people about collaboration, we see different definitions:

• Collaboration happens when two or more people work constructively to create a result that extends beyond the limited vision of each individual. (Steven Bleau, Instructional System Designer)
• Collaboration is the powerhouse of behavior change. Any collaboration in learning should give you the chance to gather new ideas/thoughts/concepts, test your ideas on others, and build something that is better than you could build on your own. (Vanitha Krishnamurthy, Sr. Learning Experience Designer)
• A group of two or more people working together by contributing a variety of inputs including ideas, discussions, and files to achieve something greater than if they’d done it individually. (Renee Brisson-Khan, Instructional and Learning Experience Designer)
• Collaboration goes beyond working together in silos to achieve an end result. It requires a team that is open to input and ideas of others for every element of the product to ensure it is not representative of just one individual, but of the team. (Katherine Hill, Instructional and Learning Experience Designer)

What does collaboration mean to you?

What’s common in each of these definitions though is that there seems to be a bigger purpose that collaborators work towards in order to achieve lasting change. This is very powerful and we would act amiss if we didn’t integrate collaborative aspects into everything we design! As people collaborate, they organically learn from one another through mindfulness, watching and listening to others, and reflection. Circling back to the main purpose of workflow learning, help drive performance, it is easy enough to see why collaboration should have its place in learning.

What is your definition of collaboration and how would you build it into your L&D programs?

About the Authors

Bianca Baumann

This blog article was written prior to LEO Learning becoming part of GP Strategies. 

Incorporating animation in education is revolutionizing the way we approach virtual learning. This blog delves into the myriad benefits of animation, showcasing how it can enrich and diversify the learning experience. Through animation, educators can capture and hold learners’ attention, breaking down complex subjects into easily digestible content. Join us as we explore the transformative power of animation in enhancing educational methodologies, making them more engaging and effective for learners from all walks of life.

1. Animation Adds Pace and Variety to a Virtual Learning Journey

Animation can play an important role within a sustained learner journey as it provides variety in the way that you deliver messages. It helps break up the journey, and because of this is a favored technique with our learning designers.

As it is a highly engaging, visual format that can really capture attention, animation is a great way to both introduce and summarize a course. The visual impact can capture a learner’s attention at the start, and animation’s ability to break down complex topics into simple messages helps with the summary. This approach neatly reflects the principles we use when designing blended learning journeys.

2. Animation in Education Helps Reinforce ‘Golden Thread’ Key Messages

As well as bookending a course in this manner, animation can be used throughout the learner journey, building a cohesive narrative throughout the journey. This repeated use presents opportunities to reinforce both brand identity and ‘golden threads’. These are the core messages that reinforce learning objectives throughout a journey.

This can be taken to a more granular level by using different styles of animation for each sub-set and theme within the learning content.

As animations are typically short, they’re ideal for interspersing throughout the learner journey.

3. Animation is Effective at Engaging Learners

Half the battle with a virtual learning journey is creating and maintaining a pace that keeps your learners engaged. This means adding a variety of learning modes, and animation is a perfect way to mix it up.

One of the great benefits of animation is that it’s naturally concise. Animation normally sits alongside a voiceover (in around 90% of the animation we produce at GP Strategies), and to make this work you have to have a simplified, concise script. It’s worth noting that the script and the visuals don’t have to perfectly mirror each other to complement each other. Each can tell a different part of the narrative, as long as they contextually fit together.

Boiling the script down to the core concepts helps to distill the message and reinforce the learning objectives. A clear message, told through a cohesive blend of strong audio and visual elements, makes for brief and engaging content. This makes animation a perfect tool for supporting microlearning principles. They’re designed to be engaging and fun to watch.

4. Animation Can Be Tailored to Your Learner’s Needs

At GP Strategies all of the animation we produce is customized, nothing is templated. This means it can be tailored to speak directly to your learners. This means a custom story and artwork based on a client’s branding, identity, and tone of voice.

Choosing the right style of animation for digital learning is an art in itself – the style you choose can have a big impact on the tone and message that gets delivered to your learner.

5. ‘Self-Build’ Animation Software Offers Flexible, Quick Wins

While most of the work we do at GP Strategies is fully bespoke, we do occasionally receive client requests to work using software which they already have a license for.

Across the industry we’ve seen a massive growth in user-generated content being uploaded, using Learning Experience Platforms such as Instilled by PeopleFluent. This increased use of user-generated content comes with a desire to easily add small-scale animation techniques – such as instructional text overlays. Tools such as Powtoon and Vyond allow you to do this, as well as using pre-animated characters to create some basic scenarios.

In a time when virtual learning is likely to increase, this is a viable option that is budget-friendly and does not require specialist skillsets.

If you’d like to discover how animation can bring your virtual learning journeys to life, our learning experts are here to help. Contact us today.

About the Authors

Brigitte Sutherland

It was already beginning to happen. Shoppers, though they didn’t realize there was a name for it at the time, have been socially distancing themselves from retail establishments for years. When is the last time you were in an absolutely packed shopping mall? Or one that didn’t have multiple empty storefronts?

As the global culture has become more integrated with technology, it has become less necessary for shoppers to visit brick and mortar establishments to find the products they’re looking for. One exception has been the car buying process, where most people genuinely love browsing the car lot in person and taking in the sights, sounds, and yes, the new car smell. Even this behavior, though, has begun to shift as technology has continued to evolve and present shoppers with the future of car buying, a virtual way to experience their vehicle.

Whether they were browsing Carvana or “test driving” the new Mazda 3 via their Oculus Rift headset, consumers have been getting more comfortable with different ways of evaluating their vehicle purchases beyond the standard lot browsing and test driving. Those who prefer a firm handshake and live conversation with a local sales rep that they can look in the eye, are now outnumbered by those who want to avoid the risks and some frustrations associated with the personal nature of the car buying experience.

And now, during uncertain times, dealership owners and operators need to think strategically about how to “retool” the retail car buying experience. What near-term investments will pay off in the long-term? What new skills and technology will help sales staff in the current social distancing climate? And what will carry over into the new normal with a growing trend towards digitalization?

So how will dealerships take their customers through such a personal and momentous financial decision without the handshake, the eye contact, or the reassuring smile? Many dealerships are implementing new technologies that allow sales teams to chat with customers digitally in real time. Customers can also take a 4K, real-time test ride (and with autonomous driving features increasingly available, we may all do more riding than driving soon, anyway).

Dealerships are searching for ways to provide more value and extend customer engagement digitally, including providing up-front pricing, negotiating friendly purchasing options, and providing links to product insights or reviews. Some sales professionals are even utilizing phone-based video apps to communicate with their customers. The limits to the virtual car dealership experience is hindered only by your (and your dealership’s) technological imagination.

That being said, any dealership owner or operator can tell you that customer-interfacing technologies such as live chat agents, virtual test drives, or robust CRM technology are more easily conceived than executed.

One way automotive organizations can expedite the learning curve of implementing and using these technologies is to build out their digital, technical fluency first, and to do it now. It’s time to take the next steps in the future of car buying and start implementing the processes that will turn your dealership into a modern, 3D billboard for your digital car sales operation.

As always, GP Strategies is here to help you adjust to this fluid situation and “retool” your strategy  to respond effectively to market changes.

About the Authors

Cathy Palochko

Cathy serves as GP Strategies’ Senior Vice President and global lead to the automotive industry. Leveraging her extensive knowledge of wholesale and retail operations (including traditional and next-generation dealership sales and aftersales processes), she is committed to helping clients modernize the retail experience. Prior to joining GP in 2007, Cathy served in various training and development roles focused on computing, workforce automation, and process improvement, including spending 10 years serving as director of development and training for a multi-line dealer group. A passionate advocate for the opportunities that automotive retail careers offer, Cathy has a strong personal commitment to improving the perception of the industry and the reputation of its leaders and workers.

Leadership research conducted by GP Strategies uncovered the need for four particular mindsets to lead effectively: growth, inclusive, agile, and enterprise. Inside a steady-state or business-as-usual environment, these different types of mindsets can ground leaders, helping them support their teams, each other, and their organization. But what about times of uncertainty or crisis? Do these mindsets go out the window in favor of something else? Quite the opposite. During times of uncertainty, these four types of mindsets can help refocus leaders on the attitudes they need to succeed. 

Growth Mindset  

A growth mindset reminds us to learn from our setbacks and challenges and use them to improve. When situations are challenging—customer demands are shifting, markets are in flux, employee roles are being changed or eliminated—it can be hard to remain positive. A growth mindset is an acknowledgment of current realities combined with a commitment to how you’ll address those challenges differently. How are your customers’ needs shifting and how can you be better prepared to meet them going forward? With organizational changes, how can you alter what you’re doing to support the organization? Is there something new you can learn or take on to contribute in new or different ways? 

Look around at the ways businesses and communities are flexing to change what they deliver to their customers and students. Adaptations like curbside pickup for food, distance learning for homebound children, or Zoom meetings to connect family members are real-time examples of the growth mindset—creative ways to accomplish goals through different means. When we move forward in spite of obstacles and look for new ways to accomplish tasks, we make room for growth and skill development. From there, it’s possible to move forward with confidence and instill that confidence in our teams. 

Inclusive Mindset 

Times of uncertainty and change are also times when you need your team to step up and bring their ideas and support to what you’re trying to accomplish. When a leader has an inclusive mindset, they recognize the need to make sure they are seeking the input of all members of their team and not simply falling back on the thoughts and opinions of a trusted few. They can do this by actively reaching out to get feedback and ideas from those with diverse perspectives.  

In addition, creating an environment of psychological safety is particularly important during times of uncertainty because you want your team to feel comfortable sharing all ideas. If a team member feels pressure to “get on board” even if they have doubts or other ideas, you run the risk of repressing information that might be useful. Diverse opinions can reveal new ways of adapting work-from-home scenarios to be more sensitive to working parents or help to better address the time zone differences of global team members. An inclusive leader helps all team members feel as though their unique differences and opinions are relevant at all times—including times of change. 

Agile Mindset 

Agility might be the most important mindset during times of change and uncertainty. When confronted with change, some people (including leaders) are so overwhelmed that they freeze, unable to act in a way that moves them, or their team, forward. You yourself might want to hold off on making decisions until the best decision comes into focus or you gather more information, but playing the waiting game and choosing inaction may not be the best choice. An agile leader is increasingly comfortable with ambiguous situations, is able to make decisions with incomplete information, and helps their team take actions that propel them forward.  

Agility can be seen in the adaptations leaders and their people have made to leverage technology in new ways to keep their teams connected and contributing. An agile leader cultivates personal resiliency and encourages their team to do the same. The result of agility can be new and innovative ideas, opportunities to get things done differently, or approaches that might not otherwise have surfaced if a leader didn’t to pivot from their current reality. 

Enterprise Mindset 

Change can cause leaders, and their teams, to lose focus. You may be distracted by world events, volatile market conditions, or upheavals in your personal life such as working from home while juggling family responsibilities. Under these circumstances, it’s easy to become disengaged and feel unsure where to spend your time and energy. One way to refocus is to tap into your enterprise mindset and think about the contributions you need to make to your team members, organization, and customers. Reminding yourself, and your team, of the shared purpose you to make contributions that benefit your clients and customers can keep you focused on the task at hand. Likewise, research shows that the best enterprise leaders link the work their team is doing to organizational goals. When you remind yourself of what or who you’re working for and re-center around the efforts you can make to contribute, you can increase your (and your team’s) engagement. 

Using Leadership Mindsets to Navigate Uncertainty 

During times of change and uncertainty, there’s a lot we can’t control. But with some conscious effort, you can align your thinking and bring forth an attitude of growth, inclusivity, agility, and enterprise thinking to help you move forward. And when you align your thoughts, your actions will follow, further enabling you to lead yourself, and others, through change. 

Learn how The Digital Leadership Suite can help you create more effective leadership at every level of your organization.  

About the Authors

Leah Clark

Leah Clark is the Leadership Practice Lead at GP Strategies, as well as an author and the founder of LeaderConnect. With over 28 years of experience in her field, Leah brings a unique perspective on the mindsets and skillset that are critical to leadership success to her coaching and consulting. Her clients benefit from her collaborative approach to crafting a well-connected and thoughtful leadership development strategy. Leah holds a Master of Arts; Organizational Psychology, Columbia University and a Bachelor of Arts; English and Sociology, Boston College.

This blog article was written prior to LEO Learning becoming part of GP Strategies.

We’ve taken the best insights from our team and assembled the 10 pro tips that everyone creating remote learning should pay attention to.

1) Learn the Do’s and Don’ts of Distance Learning

Start your journey towards higher-impact distance learning with these simple do’s and don’ts:

• Do experiment. There’s a silver lining in the current situation: we now have room to experiment in the digital learning space and there’s less resistance internally to our ideas. People are more open to trying things that sounded too risky before, and we are gaining traction on user-generated content, including videos, shared throughout the company. We’re realizing that some ideas which scared us aren’t actually that scary. So take advantage and experiment—design the use case and prove it works (or at least doesn’t cause damage)
• Do design for distraction and technology problems. Does your design make allowances for inevitable flow-breakers such as workload distractions, internet outages and children/pets/spouses gatecrashing calls? Include a technical facilitator whose role is to sort out technical issues as needed and make Plan B a part of your design. Identify where there are risks and plan for an alternative path through the learning. For example, allow for the possibility that people may not participate in a large group setting by having a breakout group backup plan.
• Do think about journeys, not events. Avoid thinking about single virtual classrooms or webinars, although they are important. Instead, think about the process, and how learner understanding will evolve over time.
• Don’t think it’s quick and easy. Having someone go online to deliver a message is only a starting point. As above, in relation to distraction and technology problems: you need to plan aggressively so that you can execute flexibly. You need a Plan B for shifts in group dynamics, technology, flow of activities, and so on. Think of the agenda more as a flow, with branching to account for areas where you may need to pivot.
• Don’t speak for longer than five minutes. Don’t let a speaker talk for too long without a break, whether they are a facilitator or participant. Take questions and input from learners, move to other activities or let another facilitator speak. This will help keep the energy of the session up.
• Don’t be afraid to check in with your learners regularly. In this moment of high distraction, regardless of your line of work, when you leave someone alone you will be forgotten.

2) Start With Your Objectives

Before even selecting a tool and channel, effective distance learning begins when you’re clear on your objectives and have defined the learning needs you’re trying to serve. One practical approach is to come up with a framework: first, list all the behavioral objectives, the learning experiences that support them, and the approaches for delivering those experiences. Approaches can then be matched to these needs. Perhaps there’s a certain toolkit that would help in a given area, or a need for knowledge to sit in a certain place. Or perhaps self-exploration would be the best tool for a particular behavioral objective?

There are also needs that would be best met by group learning and social activities. So, knowing where these best sit sets you on the path to finding the tools that will enable those methods.

3) Make the Most of Virtual Classroom Time

There’s no specific balance of online self-study time vs. virtual classroom time—you’ll have to experiment with what works best for your organization and material. However, both modes are very important.

A virtual classroom needs to have a point to it, and you shouldn’t treat practice and social connection as entirely distinct blocks of work within a session. For example, you could get learners to:

• Create a table based on data
• Scope an infographic
• Tell a story in a video and share it

The same is true for pre-work or self-study: give the learners something to do before the attend your virtual classroom, or else you’ll find yourself spending your time in the classroom lecturing, or otherwise covering what you hoped would have been digested during the pre-work or self-study.

4) Always Make the Purpose of the Learning Clear

Communicating the purpose of your learning is key to learner engagement. This should come naturally if you’re focussed on your objectives and the learning need from the beginning of the process.

If learners aren’t engaging with the learning, it’s entirely possible they’ve got other things that are getting in the way, they aren’t sure why the topic should matter to them, or what they need to do with it. In this situation, it’s important to go back to them and ask where you lost their engagement.

5) Find New Ways to Collaborate

When looking at the importance of giving learners something to do or create together, let’s look to the example of a large international client the LEO Learning team is working with. The typical prescriptive approach would be to just train learners on the specific things they wanted to achieve for customers. Instead of doing this, the client is now experimenting with providing this information and asking cohorts to reply with how they were achieving this, and developing a list of five best practices from that.

Furthermore, this method allows the client to build heatmaps and use them to determine what people are doing across the company and where the gaps are. This then allows for training that’s more responsive to the organization’s needs without a large research investment.

6) Whatever Engagement Techniques You Choose, Be Deliberate in Your Choice

There are many engagement techniques for a good virtual classroom that are available to us, including:

• Action and Action Learning Sets
• Chat
• Response (icons, emoticons etc.)
• Polling, surveys
• Whiteboards
• Document sharing
• Collaboration tools i.e. Google Docs, Sharepoint, Padlet, Slido
• Panel session
• Recorded video inserts
• Breakout rooms: reflection, creation, invention

Your choice of techniques is important, but most of all you should be deliberate and plan its use. For example, when using chat, you must think about and communicate rules for how you will use it during a session. Avoid simply getting everyone into a chatroom and telling them to talk about a subject.

Remember that tools can be used before and after sessions too. However, bear in mind that if you make material too substantial, you’ll see poor engagement. Rather than lots of pre-reading, it may be better to set a small task that exposes learners to a key piece of information.

7) Prepare Your Entire Facilitation Team

In a webinar, you can broadcast to hundreds and have to worry less about facilitating two-way talk. By contrast, your digital classroom has to emulate the face-to-face classroom as closely as possible. This may mean splitting larger groups into smaller break-out groups (around 12 people maximum) during a session. But this is only going to be effective if you have facilitators for each of those groups.

Identify people within the groups to act as your sub-facilitators and train them exactly as you would any facilitator. Hold a ‘train the trainer’ session and make sure they’re ready to help with technology issues, engage people who’re being spoken over and so on. Keeping the conversation going is harder when the immediacy of person-to-person contact is gone—so a person dedicated to this role is essential.

Bring cohorts back together to share ideas and set each group the challenge of facilitating the next when presenting. This can be a great way of keeping listeners engaged when it’s no longer their turn to talk.

8) Don’t Run on Too Long

One of the biggest differences trainers are discovering right now is that pacing and sustaining teaching is a completely different proposition in a lockdown.

A whole day of teaching is too fatiguing and potentially ineffective. Just as any one speaker shouldn’t go on for more than five minutes, a workshop needn’t run for more than 90 minutes. And you’d be surprised how much you can do in 45. Re-engage regularly. Return every second day and ensure learners are supported between each session.

Consider also how many people you have and how much of the topic has already been discussed. Allow time for ‘norming’—the amount of work that will need to be done to align everyone on the message or activity in the session. If everyone isn’t already aligned, the time-intensive discussion and discourse needed just to get started may push a session to the two-hour mark.

9) Always Remember to Align, Deliver and Sustain

LEO Learning has a specific model for planning learning journeys that will assist you in thinking about the core topics, learning moments and different tools: Align, Deliver, Sustain.

• Align: Bring the learners in and engage them—make sure they understand early why it’s relevant to them, and retain their attention by using existing memories, emotions, and cultural artifacts so they have something to relate that to.
• Deliver: This refers to your core learning and training practices, ensuring that you’re delivering the correct training in the best way possible.
• Sustain: Finally, continue to support learners as they apply their learning in the workplace.

10) Now’s the Perfect Time to Tell Stories

With more people now working from home, organizations are becoming interested in exploring user-generated content (UGC). We believe that this new theme of sharing stories is a real opportunity: people are less worried about production values and more open to the human element that UGC naturally allows.

One example, a Fortune 50 company that GP Strategies is working with, can help us illustrate this. The company is now creating guides on how to create a video to tell a story others can learn from, with a focus on what the brand means and how to bring it to life for the customer. These insights are then being shared around franchises and dealerships and prompting people to reconsider their approaches.

About the Authors

Stephanie Woor

I have seen the future, and I want to tell you about it.

For the last few years, I have been one of many researching, identifying, and sharing approaches to ready our workforce for the future. As a learning and development (L&D) professional, my passion drives me toward encouraging and empowering our workforce to take control over their future by preparing for it today. The L&D models created for this future are sound in design, and the requisite skills are practical, human-centered, and intuitive in their approach.

The date for when the future of work would arrive has been shrouded in ambiguity. It is simply referred to as “the future.” Estimates by many I have engaged with ranged from 10 to 15 years—and for some, as little as five—but no one could forecast the exact date our future predictions would come to fruition. No one predicted it would happen in a matter of days. No one predicted the entire world would evolve on the same timeline, but we have. We are experiencing a collective global disaster that has catapulted us years into the future, accelerating the state of remote work.

The future of learning and remote work is happening now, literally.

Future of Learning

Learning and development is a cornerstone strategy used to prepare our workforce for the future. The debate has been ongoing over the most effective modalities for learning: instructor-led, virtual-led, eLearning, hybrid, etc. Some have argued that we are using a 20th-century model (instructor-led, classroom-based learning) for 21st-century learners. The call-to-action has pushed the L&D industry toward expeditiously exploring opportunities to evolve. In learning (as in nature), evolution is gradual. The abrupt shift in our work lives compressed an evolution of years to a matter of days.

Over the last few months, my focus of research included predictions of the ways L&D would need to evolve in the next five years to meet the needs of our learners. The underlying needs of learners illustrated a move away from a fixed, top-down learning model toward a shared community of practice and other significant changes:

The pivot and transformation accelerant for L&D does not stop here. Speed, not perfection, is what our learners need, along with performance and workflow support, not training. Now, more than ever before, our learners will be relying on one another for support. It is our responsibility to help them develop and maintain connections with people and information, encouraging networked learning. Now is our time to execute all of the theories, methodologies, and approaches we’ve been studying on the future of learning.

Workplace learning is the new UI/UX testing. Now is the time to innovate and apply new technologies—and to mine existing content repositories across our organizations to facilitate workplace learning. Now is the time to dismantle the barriers to content access and ease of navigation and create environments that make learning easier and quicker by putting the content within the flow of work for the learner. We need to remove as many “number of clicks” it takes for our learners as possible, enabling them to access the information required quickly.

Now is our time to practice empathy, put ourselves in the shoes of our learners, and ask, “what do they need to know and how can we get them access as quickly and easily as possible?” For example, frontline medical teams are too overwhelmed to access the Learning Management Systems (LMS) where, historically, training information may be stored. They can, however, plug earbuds into their smartphone and listen to audio for their need-to-know information—so we pivot to podcasts.

We are learning that simply lifting and shifting instructor-led classroom sessions into virtual-based online sessions is not enough. We have gone from “Zoom excitement” to “Zoom exhaustion” in a matter of weeks. Virtual learning needs to be creative, collaborative, and supportive—and let’s not forget the importance of pedagogy with behavioral, emotional, and cognitive components in learning initiatives. The more inspired and engaged learners are, the stronger the learning experience.

These caveats are not new. We did not know we would need to take years of theory and apply it overnight. Admittedly, some of our current attempts are clunky, but we are learning and evolving quickly, and we will get there. We’ve sustained, after all, a shock to our learning ecosystem.

Our new reality marks an experiential shift for our learners. Their learning must focus on their needs—not our nice-to-haves. The result will be a model of lean learning. The future of learning is now.

Remote Work Is Here to Stay

Until now, only a percentage of organizations recognized the power and value of remote workers. Besides the cost savings associated with less space required for the organizations, there are benefits to the worker. For me, I struggle with productivity in a typical open-office environment, and my quality of work suffers. I find myself easily distracted by noise and office politics. The anxiety associated with the fear of interruption adds significant time to any project completion. Working remotely allows me to inhabit an environment of my choice, resulting in increased productivity, personal well-being, and a more distributed work-life balance. We, the advocates for remote work, have believed for some time in breaking the chains that bound us to a physical workspace, asserting that work is what you do, not where you go.

My reality is now a shared reality with the world. Overnight, millions of workers were thrust into remote work. The transformation has been neither perfect nor easy—many without the luxury of preparation, proper physical space, or necessary technology—but the world is adjusting. What had previously been a glacial process of corporate transformation toward the future of remote work—both in recognizing the value of remote work and creating the infrastructure to support it—has been achieved in a matter of days. Managers are developing trust and establishing the necessary communication cadence with their employees to increase their level of comfortability (both of which are requirements for successful remote work relationships). Organizations that previously questioned the possibility of remote work are experiencing firsthand the value as productivity continues.

The outcome is clear: Remote work does work—and not just for the future, but for today.

We Are Witnessing True Agility in Action

Business models have changed overnight and continue to evolve rapidly not only to meet the needs of customers but—where possible—of a population under siege by a pandemic. Auto manufacturers are producing ventilators and safety gear, fast-food franchises are leveraging their supply chain to deliver school lunches, and beer manufacturers are producing hand sanitizer.

The agility of these organizations in pivoting from their business models of just two months ago so quickly and successfully is unprecedented. If I had predicted these billion-dollar organizations would transition to 100% remote work and change their business models in an accelerated manner in a matter of days, you would not have believed me. We are seeing the future of work manifest before us.

For many years, futurists have shared the goal of having agile, adaptable employees who are ready to meet any future organizational need—our workforce can do it, and they are. We have long advocated against defining talent by jobs or job titles but rather by skills. Overnight, the shift has occurred. “Not my job” (three of the most dangerous words in any organization for employees to utter) has fallen by the wayside as everyone works together. From training classroom faculty to teach online, reskilling airline staff to volunteer at hospitals, or leveraging internal skill sets and expertise to shift production from one product line to another, the examples of our nimble, innovative capacity are bountiful. The adaptability our workforce is demonstrating at this moment is breathtaking and beautiful.

The future of work is now. No, it is not the full future we predicted, where robots and technology augment our tasks—that vision will take more time to develop. The state of the workforce we see now is all about the human side, where higher-order cognitive skills like empathy are imperative, enabling us to connect with and understand one another. Our problem-solving capabilities, our creativity, and a growth mindset reinforce our resiliency and ability to face adversity and critical change successfully.

Future of Us

Our world turned virtual overnight when we became the hosts to an invisible contagion. Separation became the key to safety yet, amid our isolation, we share a connection. We are networked, even hyper-networked, and we are experiencing this unprecedented disaster collectively as a global community. Physical barriers are omnipresent, but virtual walls are crumbling as we extend compassion beyond our small circles and into the world.

Our efforts are not perfect. We could do better, but given our lack of preparation time, we are experimenting daily. Some of these experiments will fail. There is no single solution for our current situation, no prior model to leverage. After all, the novelty of “novel virus” reminds us this is a new, never-before-experienced situation we are navigating.

In our drastically changed landscape, we see the future: remote work, organizational agility, networked learning, and hyper-connectivity among people. It may not have arrived as we predicted, with years of the gradual transformation of robots taking control of the world. Instead, we face a stealthy and silent accelerator that divided our world physically but united us virtually. With it came fear, volatility, and uncertainty, but in the end, it is our humanity that enables us to prevail. Empathy, creativity, and problem-solving are the skills of the future, the capabilities of today, and the powers that make us resilient and irreplaceable.

About the Authors

Keith Keating

With a career spanning over 20 years in learning & development, Keith Keating holds a Master’s Degree in Leadership and has experience in a myriad of areas ranging from Instructional Design, Leadership Coaching, Operations Management, and Process Transformation. More recently Keith has been leading clients on the development and execution of their global learning strategies. Regardless of the role, at the heart of everything Keith does centers around problem solving. He studied Design Thinking at MIT’s Sloan School of Management and found Design Thinking was a perfect tool to add to his problem solving "toolkit". Since then, Keith has been utilizing Design Thinking to help clients tap into understanding and resolving unmet customer needs.