The learning-and-development (L&D) function has taken on a larger responsibility, requiring collaboration with business leaders to enable an organization to learn effectively, quickly, and at scale
FREMONT, CA: In today's corporate world, organizations are acutely aware of the value of learning. They recognize that technology is altering the nature of work and the roles that people play in it. They also recognize that the workforce's ability to learn new skills, model new habits, and adopt continuously is critical to long-term success. As a result, the learning-and-development (L&D) function has taken on a larger responsibility, requiring collaboration with business leaders to enable an organization to learn effectively, quickly, and at scale.
Learning must be tightly linked to a company's strategy and fundamental personnel management processes, such as performance management. Many companies, however, believe that their functions are unprepared to play such a role. People believe that their L&D operations are struggling to keep up with their businesses' needs, rather than being considered as one of the most forward-thinking functions in a company, leading it through a learning transformation. Anyhow it's different in the case of a US healthcare company's learning and development department, which was instrumental in the organization's response to the COVID-19 problem.
Within 24 hours, when 90 percent of the 55,000-strong workforce was going remote, the function created and distributed online videos and learning modules to assist workers in setting up equipment at home and logging on securely - relieving a severely overstretched IT department that was already taking thousands of daily inquiries. On its digital platform, it also created new playlists of learning courses for staff, personalizing them to assist workers to discover the information they needed quickly and handle the crisis more successfully.
The function did not deviate from its mission of assisting the organization in attaining its strategic objectives as a result of the burst of activity. The company's hiring program went through, due in part to the L&D department's virtual onboarding of 200 new hires. The function also helped business teams learn about the latest technologies required to serve their clients in new, digitized ways by converting critical leadership-development programmes into digitally enabled sessions, facilitating calls for 1,400 leaders to help them build the behaviors required to manage teams remotely and ensure that productivity did not suffer.
