As an L&D leader, you may be familiar with this common challenge: balancing stakeholder expectations, organizational goals, and learner needs in one cost-effective solution. If you over-prioritize stakeholder or organizational needs, you risk alienating learners or not giving them the best opportunities to build their skills and confidence. On the other hand, if you focus mostly on learner needs, then other goals can fall to the side.
So a strategic balance is best … but how do you strike that balance? After all, trying to please everyone is easier said than done. The best way is to push your learner experience design (LXD) to the next level with these three proven strategies for success.
- Align Learning with Your Business Strategy
Before you begin any initiative, speak with stakeholders, leaders and other key decision makers in your organization to better understand the results they want to see — not just this quarter, but throughout the year and into the next.
They may say, “I want …”
- Employees to perform better and faster, so we can gain a competitive advantage in the industry
- To see a measurable impact and ROI, not just words or promises
- Customers to have a positive experience so they’ll come back for more
- Training to be simple and low cost
- To make better use of our technology or make it less frustrating to use
Which of these goals sound familiar to you? What others have you heard in the past?
As you prepare to create a learner experience that targets the goals most important to your business, remember that employees’ capabilities directly impact your business strategy. Every piece of the LXD supports these broader objectives, from improving performance and customer service to facilitating digital transformation through the use of new tools and technologies. A well-designed experience with business strategy at its heart can greatly strengthen employees’ capabilities and drive lasting results.
For example, AllenComm worked with Delta Air Lines to create a new onboarding solution — on a rapid timeline — that would build learners’ skills in providing world-class customer service and meeting high standards of excellence. This blended learning solution resulted in a 15 percent increase in productivity within five weeks of launch, and customer satisfaction increased by multiple points while service capacity increased exponentially. Not only were learners feeling more confident, but their new capabilities directly led to better outcomes that aligned with the enterprise’s business strategy.
- Connect Learning to Outcomes People Actually Care About
An initiative will be more successful the more people care about what they’ll get out of it. Stakeholders, leaders, key decision makers and learners should be able to find a reason and a purpose behind their investment, whether that investment is their money or their time.
To create training that’s worthwhile, think about who’s involved. What will they benefit from the most? How can the LXD result in greater productivity, innovation, agility, retention and growth — five of the most common outcomes people care about?
Moreover, how will it reflect the audience taking the training, so they can see themselves in these outcomes and envision their future if they can master the content in front of them?
The truth is: modern learners expect learning to be personalized and interesting. They need an intuitive experience that’s easy to navigate, on demand when they want it and visually appealing to keep them engaged. They want to connect with the learning on a deeper level, with personas and relatable storytelling that draws them in and shows them what’s possible — and what can go wrong — as they navigate new situations.
But not every learner is the same, especially when you’re training on a global scale with learners from diverse backgrounds, cultures, and languages. Each learner has their own unique learning style and preferences, yet it would be impossible to design for every single one. One solution is to find common threads among your audience and target those commonalities, harnessing empathy as a powerful tool to resonate with learners in each interaction.
Then, use technology — perhaps even AI or adaptive learning options — to enhance the learner experience, add scale, and enable personalization that goes beyond simply selecting a role or branching path. This technology is quickly becoming more affordable every day, and you may be surprised to find tools that work well with systems you already have.
If you’re not sure where to start, there are a lot of great resources about AI and upskilling in L&D available for free online. You can also consider partnering with a technical expert or vendor to navigate your options (they may even negotiate better investment opportunities on your behalf, which can help make the case for change with stakeholders).
All of these strategies can connect learning to outcomes people care about — but the design shouldn’t stop there, especially if you want to see higher ROI on your L&D initiatives. It’s important to keep learning continuous and bring it directly into the flow of work for maximum impact.
- Encourage Continuous Learning and Learning in the Flow of Work
There’s an old adage that “learning is a continuous journey, not a one-time event.” This will always hold true! And it’s no secret that one of the best ways to encourage continuous learning is with a strategic learning plan that supports learners beyond the initial experience, with regular reinforcement and growth opportunities throughout their career. This is where scalable, adaptive learning solutions really shine.
A great LXD considers scalability and adaptability early, using a modular approach that’s enabled by technology and responsive feedback to evolve with both business and learner needs over time. After all, what your organization needs this year will be different from what you need next year, and the year after that … so how can you plan for these changes in a way that’s sustainable and doesn’t require significant rework?
Here are a few ways:
- Keep stakeholders and learners involved and informed throughout the initiative, not only when designing for the business strategy or learner-centered outcomes, but also when rolling out your learning solution and refining it over time.
- Consolidate your tech stack and keep it updated to reduce redundancies, improve the user experience, and enable high-quality tracking and measurement capabilities to gather data that will inform the future of learning.
- Stay up to date with trends from reliable sources to better uncover the trends that are worth the investment (vs. the ones that are just hype).
- Incorporate effective change management strategies, tailored to your organization’s unique needs, to help facilitate transitions in technology or learning, build momentum and excitement, win buy in from others in the organization, and create sustainability even in an unpredictable market
One organization, Stellar, took an exceptional approach to continuous learning and sustainability by creating a comprehensive learning ecosystem of over 10,000 courses. Complete with custom eLearning and instructor-led training (ILT) for Stellar employees, as well as a full catalog of broader learning topics to help employees upskill based on their own interests and career goals, the initiative has created a ripple effect in learning and stands as an inspirational example of what L&D can become with the right support and team at the helm.
To use a similar strategy for your own organization, consider what learning options will best encourage learners to be curious, explore, have a desire to grow and take ownership of their development. This fosters a culture of continuous learning. When paired with learning in the flow of work — making the learning accessible in the moment when learners need it, how they need it, and in a way that’s directly applicable to the work they do — it can lead to those outcomes that improve learner capabilities. Ultimately, this achieves your business goals that prove the ROI for the learning solution.
Set Yourself Apart as an L&D Leader That Expertly Balances Business and Learner Needs for Success
While these three strategies can help the next time you’re designing a new learner experience, your own personal expertise is the most invaluable tool you have. Embrace your strengths throughout the process, and partner with an expert who perfectly covers the areas in which you’re also still learning and growing, to create an LXD that makes a lasting, meaningful impact on your business and the learners who make that success possible.
The more you can continue to build your own expertise in balancing everything at once, within the resources that you have, the more you set yourself apart as an L&D leader capable of turning even the biggest challenges into great opportunities.
