In Training Too, One Act Is Worth More Than 1000 Speeches

The health crisis has created innumerable upheavals. But it has also been an accelerator of transformation. Corporate training has the opportunity to reposition itself — not only by adapting to a new context, but by using it as a lever to better serve the development of employees and the performance of companies. Communicating theoretical guidelines is no longer enough: to adapt to the new operational reality of employees, Training Must Be More Personalized and More Actionable.

Decentralized work has strengthened individual specificities

The year 2020 was marked by an intertwining of personal and professional lives. Even if this phenomenon did not wait for the global health crisis to appear in our society, it was constantly precipitated by teleworking imposed in many sectors. Preserving the balance between personal and professional life was already a widely identified problem, with the massification of smartphones and the permanent hyper-connection to numerous communication channels. With the health crisis and the closure of offices, work has invaded our personal lives, often with negative impacts on an already fragile balance. Commuting has been replaced by longer working hours, interruptions have become more intrusive, and disconnection has become more difficult.

But when the line between professional and personal spheres is blurred, it is in Two Senses That transfers from one to the other take place. So Our Personal Life Has Also Influenced the Way We Work. A year ago, our physical work environment was offices: an impersonal space, common to all company employees, and which was dedicated to a professional context. Today, this environment is personal because we are at home. This is our living space, so it is our own; we no longer work in an office owned by our employer, but in our own living room, kitchen, on a table and chair that belongs to us. To some extent, our schedules and our personal organization may have changed to adapt to us rather than to our company codes. By refocusing on each employee, and therefore by moving away from the epicenter of offices, work has become more deeply personal. For the same position, inter-individual differences have increased — especially with the decrease in exchanges between peers, which are in decline to the standardization of working methods.

This transfer of the center of gravity has impacted, among other things, training needs. Indeed, if it is up to the company to determine The Objective Of a training course, i.e. the skill or the posture to embody, it is up to each employee to determine the Starting point Of the training course, according to one's own maturity and experience. It is no longer possible to consider a standard training offer, or even an offer divided by large populations, for example according to the position or the level of seniority of employees. In order to be as adequate, and therefore effective, as possible, The training offered by companies must know how to position itself at the most micro level possible: that of individuals. The only way to do this is to let learners set their own level, and therefore their skills development needs, and then adapt the proposed training to it.

The strategic vision must be realigned with daily operational life

Who says lockdown, says isolation. Indeed, the refocusing of work on the individual has also meant a deterioration of the link with their company. Through this ongoing crisis, leading to the massive use of teleworking, the essential challenge for companies was, very quickly, to know how to detect and support employees suffering from this isolation and the loss of regular social ties. It should be noted that this isolation does not only refer to relationships between employees, it also concerns a fundamental psychological need: the need to belong. Indeed, being part of a team makes it possible to meet the need to feel integrated into the professional group. This goes hand in hand with the perceived impact of individual work.. And, generally, when one goes bad, the other follows...

More than ever in the wake of this pandemic, employees of large companies are looking for meaning — not the meaning that the company's activity has, but the meaning that their own daily tasks have on this activity. The strategic, and therefore theoretical, vision carried out by company management has gradually become uncorrelated from the daily life of employees, who are deeply operational since they are focused on their own tasks. The dynamic carried out collectively by all employees becomes difficult to materialize when the collective is fragmented. The risk, in the long term, would be to achieve a total disengagement of employees, which would have an impact both on their well-being, but also on the performance of the company.

Thus, companies can no longer content themselves with explaining a vision that is too abstract, whether it is about corporate values, raison d'être, or economic goals. As essential as the definition of each of these elements is, it remains theoretical — but, the theoretical was not enough, during the health crisis, to unite. Companies that have succeeded in making their values a rallying point, for example, are those that have been able to translate these values into concrete behaviors, integrated into the daily lives of each of their employees. In other words, they are those who have made the effort to move from theory to practice within their training offer, by offering Learning Paths Rooted in Practice, inviting and helping employees to Act.

Continuing Education Involves Continuous Support

In order to personalize training, the explosion of “micro” formats has stimulated a positive movement, consisting in transforming long and complex training into small bricks, which are both more digestible for the learner, and more conducive to the creation of tailor-made training. The same must be true for this new form of training built entirely on practice: the stages of the learning journey would thus not be videos or quizzes, but Concrete Actions to Carry Out in Your Daily Life. Learners would thus move from passive learning to an active posture — literally, since learning happens through action. They would also be in a position to manage their training, and make it perfectly fit into their existing habits, by carrying out the actions that they consider most relevant to their own context.

Moreover, training can no longer be considered as a series of one-off events, but as continuous support, throughout our professional career. Ideally, each employee would have their own coach to support them in developing their skills. For obvious reasons of cost and bandwidth, human support is not possible, even with the additional support of coach managers. Unfortunately, there is still no digital solution that completely replaces human support, at least not at the level of refinement that personalization at the individual level requires. However, progress in understanding our cognitive mechanisms has allowed the very recent appearance of solutions based on Effective and proven strategies to encourage action. Thus, the employee would not be left alone in the difficult implementation of his own personal development, but would benefit from assistance and nudges properly positioned, allowing him to make his transition to action a reality. And, in this way, to increase competence, in a direction that corresponds to him and that is in line with the challenges of his company.

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