Lessons Learned in Moving Learning and Leadership Coaching Online

The arrival of the coronavirus required human resource leaders to be at their nimble best in rapidly moving a host of in-person processes and practices online. While recruiters faced arguably some of the biggest adjustments in transitioning the interviewing and onboarding of job candidates to virtual environments, their counterparts in the learning and development, employee coaching, and skills certifications spaces faced the equally challenging task of transporting their in-person operations online with little time to prepare.

As the dust begins to settle six months into the pandemic, leaders of those functions are conducting after-action reviews and finding lessons learned that they can apply to the future use of HR technology platforms. Many who had leveraged those systems only infrequently before the COVID-19 crisis have developed a new appreciation for the advantages—and the obstacles—of delivering learning content, coaching sessions, performance management and certification processes virtually. 

Those lessons are vital because some research shows that learning and development may become even more strategically important to organizations after the pandemic. A May survey by LinkedIn Learning found that 74 percent of global respondents believe building new skills is the most critical part of rebuilding organizations for the post-COVID-19 world. Some 66 percent of those respondents also said their learning function has emerged as a more strategic part of their organizations during the pandemic.

Moving Learning Online

Learning departments that had yet to transition much of their instructor-led classroom learning online faced a bigger challenge than most during the coronavirus outbreak. As these departments rapidly went virtual with essential education such as sales training or leadership development, many opted for the “quick fix” of a webconferencing format, says Charlie Chung, vice president of business development for NovoEd, an online learning platform provider in San Francisco. 

A May survey by LinkedIn Learning found that 74 percent of global respondents believe building new skills is the most critical part of rebuilding organizations for the post-COVID-19 world.

Webconferences are synchronous sessions that usually run for less than an hour and include training methods such as PowerPoint slides, shared whiteboards, audience chat tools and polls. Synchronous learning occurs in real time and typically features facilitator/participant interaction and feedback. Asynchronous methods allow employees to learn on their own time from any location and don’t require real-time interaction.

“I liken webconferences to an emergency response,” Chung says. “They can work well with certain topics that can be addressed in a short period with a smaller audience. But they’re more of a stopgap measure that typically can’t be used effectively for longer learning programs.”

In some cases, companies tried to convert programs that lasted four hours in person to 30-to-45-minute webconferences. 

“If you strip out all of the extraneous material, you might be able to get a half-day of in-person training down to two hours in a virtual setting, and a full-day in-person session down to maybe four hours online,” Chung says. “But if you try to deliver a webconference that’s more than 90 minutes, people begin to tune out and multitask.” Including more than 20 or 30 people in a webconference also makes personalizing the instruction more difficult, Chung says. 

Some also mistakenly viewed the conversion of in-person learning to online learning as a “one-for-one” proposition, says Summer Salomonsen, head of Cornerstone Studios, an arm of industry vendor Cornerstone OnDemand that develops original learning content. 

“There was a belief that an in-person training program that’s an hour long should be converted to an hourlong video, for example,” Salomonsen says. But that didn’t factor in shorter participant attention spans in virtual settings. 

Best Practices

Learning experts say there are two recommended practices that organizations can consider when converting in-person training to virtual environments. These concepts apply primarily to strategically important content that requires a mix of synchronous and asynchronous delivery approaches and where a greater level of interaction with facilitators and peers is key to learning retention: 

Break up learning content. Learning retention and application often improve when content such as leadership development; digital transformation; or diversity, equity and inclusion are broken up into their component parts and spread over time. The goal should be for participants to spend a few hours a week over multiple weeks on such online courses, Chung says.

“The idea is to pull together different resources, different activities and use different modalities to deliver content,” he continues. “Rather than asking people to sit through four or five 90-minute webconferences, it’s better to give them some short, facilitator-created videos or TED Talks to watch, relevant articles to read, podcasts to listen to, as well as things like PowerPoint presentations.” 

Creating self-paced asynchronous learning tools, such as bulletin boards or discussion groups, for use in the time between live webinars can enhance previously delivered content and allow for participant interaction anytime, anywhere. Such a curriculum might conclude with a wrap-up webconference to discuss what was learned. “The more media and peer-to-peer learning you use, the more senses you engage and the deeper and more effective the learning can be,” Chung says.

Hastily converted online learning that’s focused only on general concepts, memorization tasks or multiple-choice knowledge checks is likely to receive eye rolls from employees.

“The most powerful virtual learning experiences are those that springboard participants back into their real-world work,” Salomonsen says. “The learning can’t live and die on the computer or be seen as a separate event. There has to be a clearly visible connection back to the work and a pathway to practice new skills or apply knowledge, because that’s how we learn best.” 

Make wise use of facilitators. The more ways facilitators can stay engaged with participants during virtual learning, the better, Chung says. The knowledge that a facilitator is involved to monitor progress, review project work or answer questions—ensuring that online learners don’t feel they’re left to their own devices—is key to keeping employees on task and motivated to learn, he explains.

Peer-to-peer learning can also help boost learner engagement and produce broader and richer insights. Some of NovoEd’s courses require participants to review and comment on the project work of four or five of their classmates. That might involve such assignments as creating a project management template for a project they’ll be working on.

Organizations that deployed micro-learning during the pandemic—virtual training that’s often laser-focused on specific topics and delivered in small segments to accommodate employees’ busy work schedules—often experienced high usage of that content amid remote work, experts say.

James Cook, a London-based global partner in workforce development for IBM, says the average length of learning content for the thousands of courses and activities in IBM’s learning ecosystem has been reduced in recent years from an hour to about three minutes. 

“Rather than blocks of learning, we’re focused on atoms of learning and allowing employees to assemble those atoms according to their needs at the time,” Cook says.  

Dave Zielinski is a freelance business writer and editor in Minneapolis.

Illustration by Michael Korfhage for HR Magazine.