Social Distancing Isn’t the Answer: How Learning Leaders and Technology Leaders can Create a Great Culture
By: Sarah Moffat
Tags: Covid 19, Technology, Leadership, Learning And Development

Social Distancing Isn’t the Answer: How Learning Leaders and Technology Leaders can Create a Great Culture Sarah Moffat Apr 23, 2020·8 min read

Last week I reached out to some amazing folks and asked them to join a #communityofleaders. Each week I’m posing questions and asking for their insights, advice, and thoughts about how we’ll come out of this crisis stronger and more resilient than ever.

Last week, we talked about the powerful and positive things that are coming out of this pandemic and international crisis. This week, I wanted to hear their thoughts on:

How can L&D professionals and technology leaders work together better to support a positive culture and higher levels of engagement for an economically and geographically dispersed workforce?

I heard from one leader who talked about how the government agency he supports is working hard to engage employees and even using some untraditional-for-government-tools including Slack. I’ve heard of other organizations holding yoga/mediation courses, speaker series, book clubs, and other really cool ways for people to connect.

What I’m hearing from all these leaders is that we don’t actually want social distancing. We want physical distancing. Socially, technically, and developmentally, however, we need to be banding together. While being together physically isn’t advised, recommended, or prudent — being socially isolated or distant will only harm our culture, mental health, and motivation.

We need socialization. We need to be socially together, maybe more than ever. As a learning and development leader, who happens to work in cybersecurity, I see so an abundance of opportunities for technology leaders to really lean on their L&D counterparts to join forces between the two seemingly different areas.

Which brings me to Community of Leaders and what they thought about this question. And, as last time, I’m bringing you their unabridged wisdom:

Question 2: How can L&D professionals and technology leaders work together better to support a positive culture and higher levels of engagement for an economically and geographically dispersed workforce?

LaJuan Bryan-Beverige, Chief Learning Officer, Department of Commerce

In these times where people are experiencing elevated…emotions, frustrations and uncertainty…. each area (learning and technology) needs to play their role as it relates to building relations (connections) and supporting employees. One critical requirement is transparency in organizational practice and process. Clearer identification of available technologies each agencies/organization has approved, made available for their users, and the socialization of both guidance and expectations of how proper use of these tools empowers the organization.

We need to become more proactive instead of reactive. Ensuring L&D within each organization is properly resourced to conduct annual surveys of the internal workforce, when possible, would allow timely measurement and/or identification of skill gaps. This type of workforce analysis would enable the L&D community to provide the right types of virtual training, collaborate with technical teams to develop online job-aids, and/or create peer-to-peer groups to assist employees with self-development. Sharing this organizational information across the board between technology leaders and L&D professionals would help everyone stay as current in their skills sets as possible.

Beth Killoran, Deputy Chief Information Officer, General Services Administration

There are a number of ways that they can work together. In our agency, we have built an integrated message from leadership. We have integrated video training, webinars, virtual town halls, along with traditional email messages, new letters etc. Adult learners need to have things provided in small segments. With so much phishing, many employees only click links or read things coming from their direct management chain. By providing a multifaceted and integrated approach, you can be effective and secure at the same time.

Jason Briefel, Partner, Director of Government & Public Affairs, Shaw Bransford & Roth, P.C.

How can they not? Why are they not? Technology and design leaders are already helping our organizations improve customer and user experience. Why is it such a far leap to use the same approaches to building and sustaining positive cultures through learning and talent development? Why have our organizations not already prioritized these teams working together, and what does that mean about culture?

Perhaps we are thinking about technology too narrowly. I looked up the etymology and found this definition interesting: “The word technology comes from two Greek words, transliterated techne and logos. Techne means art, skill, craft, or the way, manner, or means by which a thing is gained. Logos means word, the utterance by which inward thought is expressed, a saying, or an expression. So, literally, technology means words or discourse about the way things are gained.”

Learning shows up when information gained is applied and alters behaviors. We must be asking how can technology contribute to building community and facilitate scaling behavior changes across organizations.

Kathleen Cowles, Partner, Deep Water Point

Had to really think on this. Good exercise! Brought in things in my past (Connecting the Dots) and adding more for ‘COVID-19’ today. Tried to keep it as concise as possible. Will be interesting to see the variety of answers!

1. Are you ‘Connecting the Dots’? Have you created a Common purpose (the ‘we’ part) so teams can direct energies toward shared goals?

2. Within the ‘Team roles and responsibilities’ are you asking your team questions about what ‘tools’ the teams need to reach their goals — do your technology teams share in the common purpose and do all teams feed the technology teams their tools requirements? This is critical for aggregating everyone’s needs for success (including the technology teams), and helping to prioritize investments.

3. Initially, did you focus on quick team wins in order to scale? (i.e., Kudos on small, lets tackle the next one!)

4. As a leader, are you available to your team on a regular basis? What nurturing, empathy, flexibility and appreciation are you giving your team (and all the teams)? What about other feedback loops?

5. And for COVID-19 times — — What ‘fun’ can you add for a virtual workforce? Do you ensure teams believe you support a ‘Family First’ mantra — do you offer to hold after ‘family time’ meetings (i.e., early or after 8pm) to accommodate family responsibilities. Do you truly have a ‘no judgement’ environment as dogs bark or children come into the rooms in this ‘stay at home time’? I’ve heard that some teams use a daily photo challenge. This connects their team each day, helps them to share a bit of themselves and promotes interaction as people comment on each other’s photos. Some do weekly online happy hour with fun games and exchanges. Some have sports hours. I’ve heard of teams using hangouts like a ‘water cooler’ and a virtual ‘lunch rooms’ where people can just drop in. How about sharing expertise like cooking, painting, gardening, music etc. How about questions for your team: If you could live in another time, who is your favorite musician, best place to live etc. Let everyone contribute. And a great technique is asking a question of your team — i.e., tell me what you are thinking on ‘x project’ and turning the submitted answers into a word cloud. This is a great visual for teams to get a pulse on where the team is coming from on a project or in a situation. (Wordle is a great tool).

Darryl E. Peek II, Global Government Solutions, Salesforce

A positive culture is the result of the collective workforces head (thinking), heart (feeling), and hands (doing) which need to be closely aligned with organizational mission, values and goals whether around agility, trust, customer success, innovation, and equality. The collaboration between Learning & Development and Technology leaders is more critical than ever based on the increase in the competition for qualified employees to perform specialized functions for administrative, technology or mission-oriented roles. It is recommended that all parties focus on the employee experience through joint strategic outcomes that creates transparency, velocity, and vision for the future workforce. It is also important to develop an active and passive feedback loop to ensure the needs fo the employees in the organization are being met in a timely manner to include mission-oriented and/or back-office functions. A best practice is to use a cloud-based SaaS platform with automated workflows, relationship management, easy interoperability, transparency, data analytics, and omnichannel usage which enable the creation of employee apps that handle all phases of the employee journey. This approach along with an engaged management team will enable the greatest opportunity to achieve a positive culture for higher levels of engagement for a dispersed workforce.

Sue Bohle, Executive Director, Serious Play Conference

Whether or not executive teams are collaborative has always been one of the big differentiators in the success of medium sized and large companies. Fiefdom, insecurity and even “I’m too busy with my own activities” can stymie progress. Game-based training programs can help promote collaboration. It’s usually soon clear that participants in a good have to work together to solve the issues worked on and the team that “wins” is celebrated. A hold out executive who is not working with other participants might not be singled out during the training, but will be identified for the leader in the assessment/evaluation afterward.

Learning and Development professionals can implement game-based training programs with the help of CTOs and other technical support professionals over distance platforms. Zoom and other platforms offer video participation, where smiling faces and active learners stand out, and bored looks are obvious. Participants soon get used to being engaged and it ultimately feels like people are all in the same room. Some sophisticated software platforms will send participants off to breakout room or organize participants at tables before uniting a bigger group again for team presentations.

Greg Zlevor, President, Westwood International

I think that L&D and Tech leaders need to discover more and better ways to make Zoom and video tech more social. This will be a combination of facitlitated activities and video technology. What are the best practices?

We need to find ways to simulate and replace human face to face and touch. Shaking hands and hugs are an important ingredient to bonding.

Mika Cross, Vice President of Employer Engagement and Strategic Initiatives, FlexJobs

During these challenging times, I’d really encourage creative approaches to team learning and development that offer and include interactive exercises and team building across small groups to keep learning social and engaging. You can invite groups or teams of employees to join fun contests to complete online learning and earn small tokens or prizes while attending webinars or training together in an online group setting with the expectation to share knowledge learned and exchange ideas about areas they find interesting and applicable either to their work and home lives. Finding ways to stay social and connected will help build and support positive culture and higher engagement and could benefit larger teams if done correctly.