Principled

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LRN’s Principled brings together the collective wisdom on ethics, business and compliance, transformative stories of leadership and inspiring workplace culture. Listen in to learn valuables strategies and receive actionable advice from our community of business leaders and workplace changemakers.

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Jun 24, 2022

S7E17 | Campaigns, not courses: Why communications matter to corporate training

What you'll learn in this podcast episode Good training is not quick to create. It takes time, effort, and years of instructional design experience. And too often, best-in-class training gets derailed by inadequate communications. An effective, attention-grabbing communications strategy is just as important as the quality of the learning itself. How can companies ensure that they’re designing training and communications that produce positive learning experiences and—ultimately—business outcomes? In this episode of LRN’s Principled Podcast Damien DeBarra, leader of Curriculum Design and Communications Strategy at LRN, and Tomaso Manca, learning director at LRN, discuss the importance of intentional curriculum design when developing corporate onboarding. Listen as the two talk about what best practices organizations should consider in their approach. Principled Podcast Show Notes * [1:28] - What is meant by the idea of campaigns, not courses? * [3:47] - Best practices for incentivizing learners. * [6:11] - The benefits for learners. * [7:31] - How does LRN approach this campaign-based strategy? * [9:46] - Examples of ways to retain the attention of your audience. * [11:54] - Tactics used by LRN to bring the idea of campaigns, not courses to life. * [15:00] - Tips to ensure people don’t feel overwhelmed by your campaign. * [17:30] - The LRN difference in this approach. * [20:40] - Advice for people looking to implement this approach for the first time. Featured Guest: Tomaso Manca has created exciting learning events for more than 20 years. As a Learning Director at LRN, he works with clients to create engaging learner experiences that support behavioral changes. Before joining LRN, Tomaso spent more than six years as a Learning Manager at Interactive Services. Prior to that, he worked as Best Practices Global Learning Manager at Thomson Reuters, supporting the learning of their Sales Organization. Tomaso holds an M.A. in Economics from Yale University. Featured Host: Damien DeBarra brings more than 20 years’ experience to the instructional design and strategic workforce planning spaces. As a Senior Advisory Learning Solutions Manager at LRN, he focuses on creating training solutions that ensure business buy-in and connect hiring practices to day-one learning roll-outs. In the last few years, Damien has helped organizations such as United Airlines, Sun Life Financial, SITEL, Astellas, MFS Investments, and SAP create 90-day action plans for their solutions and develop supporting communication strategies. He has worked with over 200 clients in areas ranging from retail to pharmaceuticals, call centers to nuclear plant manufacturing. Prior to LRN, Damien spent more than nine years as the Learning Solutions Director and Head of Instructional Design at Interactive Services. He has also worked as an instructional designer at NCALT, Electric Paper, and Epic. Damien received his BA from Maynooth University. Principled Podcast Transcription Intro: Welcome to the Principled Podcast. Brought to you by LRN. The Principled Podcast brings together the collective wisdom on ethics, business and compliance, transformative stories of leadership, and inspiring workplace culture. Listen in to discover valuable strategies from our community of business leaders and workplace change makers. Damien DeBarra: Good training is not quick to create. It takes time, effort, and years of instructional design experience. Best in class training is too often ruined by inadequate or authoritarian style communications. An effective attention grabbing communication strategy is just as important as the quality of the learning itself. So, how can you ensure that you're designing training and communications that produce positive learning experiences and ultimately positive business outcomes? Hello, and welcome to another episode of LRN's Principled Podcast. I'm Damien DeBarra, the leader of curriculum design and communication strategies at LRN. Tomaso Manca: And I'm Tomaso Manca, learning director at LRN. As co-host for this episode, we are going to be talking about the importance of intentional curriculum design when developing corporate onboarding, and what best practices to consider in your approach. All right, Damien, let's dive in. Something I've been hearing a lot at LRN is the idea of campaigns and not courses. What do we mean by that? Damien DeBarra: So campaigns, not courses, it's taken from the name of a talk we did recently at the Learning Technologies Conference in the UK just a month or two ago. And it's reflective of a conversation, which we have a lot here at LRN, which you hear in production, in our delivery teams and in the advisory team where I work. And that is the... We often semi-jokingly refer to it as, "the tragedy." "The tragedy" is that, we see world class learning materials being delivered to the business with a sort of, "or else" style communication. So if you think about it like, the client comes to us and says, "look, it's really important for us to roll out this training initiative around..." For example, B E and I, we make them a world class e-learning course. We develop a brilliant interactive classroom version of that for those who can't do online. We animate fully bespoke, beautiful videos. There's a whole plethora of support materials ready for the learners to help apply to the job. And the people who've partnered with us are really super psyched and can't wait for the business to get at this. But then the email goes out saying, "Hey, do this course by Friday, or else." It's devastating to your efforts, because as we sometimes like to joke a little bit, people who take online training, particularly online training, they're a little bit like people who ring call centers. And that is that they're already slightly irritated before they get to you. And if you do anything to give them an opportunity to opt out, to give them an opportunity to let that email slide down the inbox and just be ignored, they'll likely grasp it. And it's not because people don't want to learn on the job, it's simply that it's one email and another hundred inside of the day. They've probably got a job to do. They've already got training. They might be behind on... So any kind of blunt order to do a course really doesn't help. So instead, what we try and do is catch people's attentions and then incentivize them, or if you like, seduce them or draw them towards actually exploring those learning assets. Tomaso Manca: Very interesting, Damien. Can you share the best practice for incentivizing learners? Damien DeBarra: Sure. Well, we tend to do it slightly differently for... with each client, with each partner and differently for each communication strategy, depending on what's being taught or what needs to be learned. But there does seem to be an emerging best practice and it is nascent, it's really emerging, but that is the move away from what you might call the one and done training deployment towards a more campaign based approach. Campaigns, they're spread out over slightly longer periods of time. The amount of minutes a learner spends in their chair doing the training should be the same, or if even possible, less than whatever they did the previous year. But the campaign is spread out rather. And it's made up... The idea is use microburst trainings and snappy communications. Really engaging videos, try and keep them under one minute, two minutes, maximum. Job aids with exploratory questions to help you focus, and then whatever the medium, whatever the channel, we try and focus on using simple repeated messaging across a period of time in multiple channels. And if possible, we try and get that messaging going through the business, not just from an actor, as aware in a voiceover, but rather from real people within the organization. So real people within that business, diverse voices and if possible local leaders. So it brings a degree of a…