A transformation of the learning function: Why it should learn new ways

August 4, 2021

Here is an excerpt from an article written by Nicolai Chen Nielsen, Faridun Dotiwala, and Matthew Murray for the McKinsey Quarterly, published by McKinsey & Company. To read the complete article, check out others, learn more about the firm, and sign up for email alerts, please click here.

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Companies rely on their learning-and-development functions to help workforces learn fast. But often, the function itself needs a transformation.

Organizations are acutely aware of the importance of learning in today’s business environment. They understand that technology is changing the nature of work and the roles within it. They also understand that the ability of the workforce to learn new skills, model new behaviors, and adapt continuously is key to sustained success. Hence the elevated role of the learning-and-development (L&D) function, which must work together with business leaders to enable an organization to learn effectively, at speed, and at scale.
Learning needs to be deeply integrated with an organization’s strategy and core talent processes, such as performance management. Yet many companies feel their functions are ill equipped to play such a role. Rather than being regarded as one of the most forward-thinking functions in an organization, leading it through a learning transformation, many feel that their L&D functions struggle to keep up with the needs of their businesses.  Not so the L&D function of a US healthcare company that played a pivotal role in helping the organization respond to the COVID-19 crisis. When 90 percent of the 55,000-strong workforce suddenly began working remotely, within 24 hours, the function produced and posted online videos and learning modules to help workers set up equipment at home and log on securely (relieving a severely overstretched IT department that was already taking thousands of daily inquiries). And it curated new “playlists” of learning modules for employees on its digital platform, tailoring them to help workers find the information they needed quickly and navigate the crisis more effectively.
That burst of activity did not divert the function from continuing to support the company in achieving its strategic goals. The company’s hiring program went ahead, thanks in part to the L&D function helping onboard 200 new recruits virtually. The function also converted critical leadership-development programs into digitally enabled sessions, facilitated calls for 1,400 leaders to help them build the behaviors required to manage teams remotely and ensure that productivity did not drop, and helped business teams learn about the latest technologies required to serve their clients in new, digitized ways.“
It all came together,” said the global head of the organization’s corporate university. “The online learning platform, the L&D operating model, and the function’s capabilities—all of which we have been building since 2017—allowed us to meet the needs of the business in real time.” That key observation helps explain why few L&D functions excel in their new roles. It is because most focus on the learning programs and how to deliver them on a digital platform, overlooking how the function is organized and its capabilities.Good learning programs are, of course, critical. But the utility of even the best will be limited if not based upon an intimate understanding of an organization’s needs and an ability to forecast and respond to them rapidly—just as the US healthcare company did. And for that to happen, the L&D function must itself undergo a transformation and adopt an agile operating model.

The learning function of the future

Organizations and functions that have undergone agile transformations have been shown to outperform in fast-changing operating environments, delivering higher customer and employee satisfaction, lower costs, and quicker times to market. Such a transformation entails adopting an operating model whereby every element of an organization or function—its strategy, structure, people, processes, and technology—becomes more dynamic, with support from a stable backbone that ensures efficiency and consistency where needed.

In our experience, most L&D functions today are overly stable—to the point of rigidity. Staff in course-design, content-management, program-delivery, and digital-platform support often work in different departments that have their own key performance indicators, which are not necessarily linked to overall business goals. For example, the performance of those in design and development is typically judged by the velocity at which they can produce error-free content and the number of training hours undertaken by learners, not necessarily the quality of the training and its impact. In the delivery of a learning program, the key metrics are typically efficiency (the numbers in a classroom), faculty utilization, and feedback from participants rather than any measure of the degree of learning or behavioral change. And content management is evaluated by how quickly material is updated rather than its relevance to business needs.

Those factors mean that L&D staff struggle to collaborate well as they focus on what is meaningful to them rather than on broader organizational goals and associated key performance indicators, such as whether programs help people improve in their jobs and provide a positive business impact. L&D employees can also be reluctant to change systems that worked well in the past but that do not support next-generation learning. Protracted, linear project life cycles; extensive template catalogs with standard operating procedures; and cumbersome legacy platforms and systems slow down the response rate to changing business needs.

The antidote to those challenges is not complete laissez-faire. An L&D function would be directionless without a long-term strategy, learners confused if design principles were inconsistently applied, and a company’s finances at risk in the absence of disciplined guidelines for expenditure and vendor relationships. Rather, an L&D function needs to strike the right balance between stability and dynamism, assembling the components that will create a stable backbone as well as the dynamism needed for the function to keep pace with an organization’s learning needs.

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Here is a direct link to the complete article.

Nicolai Chen Nielsen is an expert associate partner in McKinsey’s New York office, Faridun Dotiwala is a partner in the Mumbai office, and Matthew Murray is a senior knowledge expert and learning architect in the Chicago office.

 

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