Design Thinking Tool: LEARNING LAUNCH

Challenge

One of the challenges of a company that is steadily growing is to be able to retain its employees  and contribute to their growth. Particularly for one where the program is at its early stages, and  especially in a remote work setting, engaging employees to take advantage of learning and  development (L&D) opportunities offered by the company can be rather futile. Employees tend  to be occupied by other priorities that L&D take a back seat in their careers. The L&D department  of Company BLD is now trying to find ways on how they can effectively address this challenge  and have decided to apply Learning Launches as their approach to design thinking.

Selection

For this challenge, the members of the L&D team have done brainstorming sessions and came  up with a list of possible ways to encourage learning in the company. The learning launch will  allow the team to conduct experiments quickly and inexpensively to gather data to determine  which of these possible solutions, if any, will most effectively promote L&D. If none of those  solutions will hold, this design thinking tool will allow them to pivot their approach through the  data gathered in the experiments.

Application

The first experiment is to gamify the learning process in the company. An efficient gamification  strategy has been found to have positive effects on motivation and engagement when  implemented in real-world situations. Learners tend to achieve learning outcomes more  effectively via an engaging journey rather than a traditional training approach. Adding that most  of the company’s employees are between the ages 23 and 40, this experiment is expected to  appeal to them.

The second learning launch is embedding the L&D aspect in each department’s OKRs. For  example, the technology solutions department came up with the objective to elevate their  delivery of quality solutions that will impact the whole company. One key result of this objective  is that the members take courses about the technology relevant to their skills, paid for by the  company, and obtain a certification. This could then translate into their acquired competence  and applied to the products they deliver. Another key result that another team came up is that  members are given immediate feedback regularly coached on their performance.

A third hypothesis that is tested is that employees are encouraged to take control of their  learning and development if they get recognized for it. As such, every month, during the monthly  “town hall”, active learners are recognized and rewarded for their efforts.

Insight

Through a set of metrics initially identified, the results of these experiments were gathered.  Compliance, efficiency, and quality were measured. By applying the learning launch tool, the  L&D team garnered insights on which programs were effective and which ones did not improve  traction. Results showed that having L&D as a team goal made it easier to incorporate the  practice in departments because they were concrete and done as a group. As such, this practice  has been rolled out to every department in the organization with a regular check up on their  achievements every quarter. Since the other hypotheses provided good numbers, but not as  much as the abovementioned, it was decided to incorporate them as well in smaller doses.

Approach

Since indirectly, the challenge is to create impact in an individual employee’s learning,  development, and career growth, learning about their personal and career goals before  conducting the experiments would have been beneficial beforehand. The L&D team could have  gained more understanding through listening to their stories.

Mohamad/February 2021

