There is nothing more intimidating than a blank page. Whether you are writing a story or painting a picture, the endless possibilities of starting from scratch can be so overwhelming that it is hard to get started.
This is certainly how it can feel when you are first getting started with a learning strategy. Do you start with leadership or compliance? Should you do an organization-wide skills assessment or a culture survey? Which key leaders do you need to get on board to make sure the strategy is a success?
These are all great questions to be asking. But many times, they are so daunting that you end up delaying the launch of your strategy or never really get started. At the end of the day, the most important part of any strategy is that it gets results. And, as General George S. Patton said, “a good plan executed now is better than a perfect plan executed next week.”
If you want to get started quickly, you should develop your learning strategy around three key questions in order to make an immediate impact:
1. What do people need in order to work?
Many companies struggle to help their people complete compliance training, sign up for benefits and even submit information technology (IT) help desk requests. These problems can represent dozens of hours per employee that are wasted.
The easiest way to get a learning strategy started quickly is to focus on learning solutions that can be applied to these problems. These solutions might involve documenting a standard onboarding plan or creating a simple explainer video on benefits. Depending on your industry, streamlining compliance training can lead to massive savings by decreasing the time it takes employees to complete their training.
That is the kind of impact that will make any stakeholder look up and take notice.
2. What do people need in order to work for your company?
Though things like payroll and compliance are needed anywhere, there are unique aspects of your company that create needs specific to your organization. This is part of your company culture, and you need to consider it when developing a learning strategy.
A learning strategy focusing on building culture needs to be about more than just the company values and mission statement. How does your culture meaningly manifest during day-to-day work? This could take the form of teaching people when to use a messaging program versus email, or it could be a workshop for how you want people making decisions.
Having a well-defined organizational culture has been shown to increase employee engagement, decrease turnover and elevate productivity, all of which are excellent ways to create an impact with your learning strategy.
3. What do people need to be successful in their role?
Though this question is usually asked first, it is important to put it last because it is the most difficult to answer and it can have the greatest impact on your organization.
Rather than trying to complete a skills or competencies assessment for the entire company, a process which can take years, it might be best to start with just one area of the business. If you can choose, select a part of the business that you are confident you can have an impact on. If you are struggling to get buy-in, find a stakeholder that already believes in the impact learning and development (L&D) can have on an organization. Even if this means you are working with a senior manager instead of an executive vice president, you will always have better results if you have a willing partner to work with.
The process of identifying gaps in an organization is fairly simple. Start by identifying the business metrics that need to be improved, such as retention rate, sales numbers, quality defects, etc. Once you identify the metrics to change, the next step is to figure out what the behavioral drivers are for those metrics. The process of identifying behaviors can take many forms. Interviewing leaders and employees, using data from surveys and looking deeper at existing business metrics can all be great sources of information.
Realistically, you will rarely be able to identify just one behavior, so pick only one or two you want to change. During the selection process, make sure to focus on behaviors you can quantifiably influence with learning.
Start Today
Strategy can feel like an intimidating concept, but with the right approach, it doesn’t have to be. Starting small with training basics can help you build momentum while you answer the harder questions.
A book doesn’t make it to the publisher without a great deal of planning, editing and sometimes returning to the drawing board. Chances are, your learning strategy will do the same. The faster you forget about trying to fill the entire page and instead focus on the first few lines, the sooner you can start having an impact on your organization.
