The advent of flexible working culture goes back to 1994, when 100,000 AT&T employees were part of a telecommuting experiment to explore how they could transform the workplace. This exercise resulted in tremendous savings on the operating cost and improved cash flows for the organisation.  In spite of the many positives, not many organisations fostered the culture of flexible workplace due to concerns around the efficiency and productivity of employees.

However, the world today is facing one of humanity’s biggest challenges that is forcing every organisation big or small to swiftly adapt to the situation and prepare their workforce to become remote-ready. While the lack of infrastructure and necessary processes requires organisations to invest in necessary tools and practices to continue business as usual, the productivity and efficiency concerns can be addressed by creating and fostering a culture of learning among employees working remotely.

Leaning Towards Learning To Drive Engagement And Productivity At The Time Of Crisis

While many organisations have a long-established learning framework in place, the current scenario urges everyone to go back to the drawing board and reinvent this framework factoring new variables that have emerged as a result of the crisis. Your framework should not just consider business objectives, but must weave in your employee’s state of mind and needs at its core.

Here are a set of learning nudges that will help you drive engagement and productivity amongst your workforce. 

#Align it with Business Continuity

Probably one of the most important steps while tackling situations like the Covid-19 outbreak is to ensure that your employees are well aware of the situation and what is expected out of them while working remotely. Infact, this is the right time for organisations to align their learning and training strategy with business continuity plans that they have set pace on. The core L&D committee, along with HRBPs, managers and leaders must start forecasting and mapping essential skillsets and favourable behaviours they want their employees to be empowered with to help them evolve as richer resources post the crisis.

#Make it Social

Employees are already getting accustomed to not having their peers around physically. It is important that your strategy does not isolate them all the more! Learning in silos makes the journey less interesting and engaging for people. It is important to invest in tools and strategies that allow employees to collaborate using the social learning features that give them an opportunity to collaborate with peers, post their queries, answer doubts and collectively work towards completing the assigned learning paths.

#Gamify the Experience

Some of the best providers of E-learning or LMS platforms have time and again demonstrated the unbeatable effect of gamification in motivating and engaging learners. Techniques such as leaderboards, points, badges and rewards have shown to produce tangible learning outcomes. Now, let’s roll back to today’s scenario; Employees are at home, juggling between job-related tasks and fear of future uncertainties.  In such a situation, it becomes very important to fuse gamification techniques to not just nudge them towards the desired learning objectives, but to foster healthy competition and excitement to keep their morale high.

#Add Recognition

With remote-working comes the fear of ‘not being noticed’. Employees are doing all that they can to ensure that this crisis and the sudden shift to a new way of working does not hamper business continuity. In such a scenario, recognition in every step of the way makes it a very exciting proposition for them. If you notice employees actively pursuing courses and consuming learning materials shared by the organisation, appreciate and encourage them without blinking an eyelid! Taking it a step further, don’t wait for ‘learning completions’ to recognise. Appreciate every little step that demonstrates a positive learning behavior. From logging in to the learning portal, spending time on it, attempting courses, to completing any course, every behavior must be recognised.

Let testing times not tamper your organisation’s employee value proposition. Leverage this situation to strengthen the learning ecosystem that will instill trust, promote productivity, foster collaboration and most importantly help you as an organisation standstill during these unprecedented times.