The Digital Adoption Show | Upskilling the Future Digital Workforce

As we come to the end of this season, here are our top five picks from The Digital Adoption Show Season 2. 

• Marco Dondi Future of Work Expert, and Associate Partner, at McKinsey & Company and Saurabh Guru, Global Head, Customer Success, Whatfix on Discover the skills future employees will need from a McKinsey expert.
• Bart Schutte is a Director of Digital Learning at Saint Gobain and Arijeet Das Diengdoh, Associate Director of Sales – EMEA at Whatfix, on Transform not train your way to a better business strategy.
• Tomissa Smittendorf Director, North America Sales Learning & Development at Kellogg Company and Paul Dixon, Director, Strategic Accounts, Sales at Whatfix on how Change Management can transform your perspective on hybrid work culture.
• Claire Doody Founder and Principal Consultant, at Work in Motion and Ex-Global Director, at Twitter and Akshay Moza, Manager, Customer Success, Whatfix on The 5 Must-Follow Hacks to Build a Future-Proof Workplace.
• Stella Collins Co-founder and Chief Learning Officer at Stellar Labs and Ajay Kumar, VP- Pre Sales at Whatfix, discussing “Learn the power of doing with Neuroscience”.

If you enjoyed our podcast, please write a review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or Google Podcasts. For Season 3, we will surely take your feedback into account. Season 3 dates will be released soon, so stay tuned! Happy podcasting!!! Until next time, see you soon.

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This episode of Digital Adoption Show features Maria David, Enterprise Sales Manager at Whatfix, and Rafaela Endert discussing Why Organizations Should Encourage Employees to Acknowledge Mistakes and Learn from them.

7:47 - How would you advise young professionals just starting out? Do they need to prioritize learning over roles?

• If you don't have the next three years' career plan in mind, because things are changing, you're changing, and you're learning, dont stress about it in the earlier phase of your career
• You learn best when you're out of your comfort zone. You have to find opportunities, take up new responsibilities and you need to push yourself to be brave

14:58 -As a leader, how would you encourage other leaders to accept it and include it in the organizational culture?

• We as leaders have the responsibility to support innovation. It only happens to learn from mistakes and we learn from mistakes. As a leader, you should promote people to take responsibility and focus on improving themselves rather than the mistakes
• A growth mindset links back to making mistakes. Looking at the bigger picture, if we really encourage our employees to develop, we just need to support them and make that environment for them to try out something different. Otherwise, we as leaders cannot expect our team to perform differently

19:18 - How can L&D harness employee productivity with social learning? 

• Social learning has already become a priority in some organisations. Social behaviours are learned by observing and imitating the behaviours of others
• Each and every one's individual knowledge is really an absolute treasure. The more we support from a central learning perspective, to encourage and support employees to learn on one hand each other, as much as it’s individually benefiting, but also ultimately a benefit for the company.

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Claire Doody is Founder and Principal Consultant, at Work in Motion and Ex-Global Director(How We Work), at Twitter. She led the redesign of work at Twitter to support its decentralization strategy. 

The latest episode of the Digital Adoption Show features Akshay Moza, Manager, Customer Success, Whatfix and Claire Doody on The 5 Must-Follow Hacks to Build a Future-Proof Workplace.

4:54 - Technology has become the backbone of the L&D function. How can leaders use technology more effectively while keeping the human element in mind?

• Experiences can be made more human by using technology. 20 years ago, there was a huge gap between being alone, and working through content on an LMS but today we could have a transformational learning experience
• You've got multiple touch points like Slack and Zoom throughout the employee journey and it's very powerful. Well-designed tech-enabled learning can facilitate the human-centric approach and it can create continuity outside the classroom to build a sustainable relationship across peers which is much more inclusive
• To achieve high standards in L&D, you need to focus on good learning design and facilitation to create those learning experiences. This also creates tension between scalability and the number of touchpoints a learner might have. Meanwhile, there's plenty of content, rotting away on learning management systems that would make you feel very isolated, using e-learning

14:45- How do you create a change when building an L&D strategy? What are the three things you keep in mind?

• The first one is about understanding the business and its purpose. Understand the standard L&D offerings of employee onboarding, training and whatever is vital to your business over the coming years. If your business is going to double in size over the next 18 months, you will benefit from putting in place some diverse hiring and interviewing skills if your organization wants to break into new markets
• Be ruthless about what you focus on. You can quickly become an order taker when you come under pressure from various parts of the business. If you don't have a framework for taking things on and rejecting things, you will fall short of the resources or the capacity to take it all on and you can’t go anywhere
• Expand your thinking and appreciate that very few things can be addressed by learning alone, looking at the mindset, the behaviours with culture and the systems. Ask yourself what's incentivizing people to behave in the way that we're trying to address and what's stopping them. We need to reframe L&D as a performance consultant, so that doesn't always mean that there's going to be training in the solution

Claire Doody LinkedIn

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Marco Dondi is the Future of Work Expert, Associate Partner, McKinsey & Company. He is the Author of ‘Outgrowing Capitalism’- Strategy consultant in economics, banking, labour and education.

The latest episode of the Digital Adoption Show features Saurabh Guru, Global Head, Customer Success, Whatfix and Marco Dondi on Discover the skills future employees will need from a McKinsey expert.

5:17 -In what ways are traditional skills no longer relevant in our organisations and why is there a need for change?

• If we think of the introduction of technology, and the pace at which technology is changing, many of these technical skills become obsolete in 12 to 18 months.
• Artificial intelligence has already been deployed and adapted. But if you take a step further and think about the speed of diffusion of these technologies and also as these technologies become better, what all types of activities that they could substitute, that will cause, a lot of change.
• The rapidity of change will likely force people to not have one job for all their life or even two or three jobs, many people are coming into the workforce today, and they'll have to go through possibly 10 different transitions, some minor, some a bit more significant. 
• Skills that weren't really the focus in the past, it was just focused on either capability, technical skills, the ability to do something, but once you learn it, you're good, you're good for maybe it happens once that you need to learn something else. 
• Whatever you learn, by the time you're 10 years in the labour force, is almost irrelevant, but it's a minor component of what you need, it means that all of these skills have continuously adapted, and continuously learn become much more important than they were the past.

12:04 -What is DELTAs approach? Why is it called DELTA?  How can people learn by using it?

• For Instance, if you go into chemistry, you need to know exactly what elements you're mixing, if you want to get the right compound
• One of the key use of this framework is really to structure much more systematically and consciously
• If you're a learning and development professional, or if you have an education system, or if you're a teacher, you can start using this to think of how you develop these different elements in my students, in my colleagues or in my organisation

21:29 -How DELTAs could help shape education and organisation training?

• Our education system has been developed, especially the higher education system and the high school system, they are really being designed, mainly focusing on the content and the knowledge, all the assessments are assessing people based on what they know, and what they can conjure up on a test, which means that most of the focus is really going into the subjects and into what you might be asked in a test
• But how do I also develop all of these arguably more important traits that will be the ones that future-proof citizens enable them to learn whatever they want in the future? How am I actually doing this? I think many education organisations have been very open to saying, many of these things, I simply haven't prioritised, and that's a chance that even if I say that they are important, we might not be developing in schools because, we're not ration training teachers on them, we are not suggesting specific approaches and modalities develop these different skills
• If you believe that these skills are such an important part of the future and of your life and success, then saying soft skills just seems not to end yes

Marco Dondi LinkedIn

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Michelle Parry-Slater is the Learning & Development Director at Kairos Modern Learning and the Author of the L&D practitioner's toolkit, The Learning and Development Handbook. Her mission is to support L&D professionals to improve the impact of their profession by taking a strategic, holistic approach to people and workplace development. 

The latest episode of the Digital Adoption Show features Kriti Arya, Team Lead Business Development, Whatfix and Michelle Parry-Slater on the secret to the success of The L&D Handbook.

6:45 -Do you think learning techniques should be changed for different people/ groups/regions? Does the one shoe fits all approach work?

• Learning and development are actually wearing very comfortable shoes. If you got your comfortable shoes on to move to a new set of shoes, they're new, they're not worn in yet, they can feel different and uncomfortable but we need to perhaps go through that uncomfortableness, ourselves as a profession
• Learners don't necessarily embrace uncomfortableness, but the people who are learning or need to learn for their jobs deserve the best opportunity to learn
• We need to look forward to solving learning challenges with modern ways of working and that's what our learners will be expecting. Therefore we need to figure out a way by which we can provide learning in a way that suits the individuals concerned

12:36 -Should the learning approach reflect real life? What advantages does this learning approach offer L&D professionals, and how can they implement it?

• To buy a car or choose our life partner, we don't do courses for these, we ask our network, friends, and family, we look at magazines, online and YouTube videos and do our own research. So we've got these skills innately, so learning and development professionals really do need to harness the skills of our learners and should focus on giving them what they need when it comes to content or paving the learning pathways
• It's actually lazy not to help our learners with the right content and learning pathway or force people to go on a course, to force people to wait six weeks to learn something that they need for their jobs right now
• Create communities of practice networks for people to talk to each other about their work and learning to create social interaction, people are loving face to face learning activities but what are they loving? Are they actually loving sitting in a room getting the knowledge dump? or are they loving chatting with their colleagues?

17:57 -What would you like to suggest to the young L&D professionals to build the right future?

• It's always been networking. Some people just hate even the word networking, because it just fills them with dread speaking to strangers and so on. Pushing yourself to meet other people, and engage in community is really what will open your eyes to new ideas, and new opportunities
• Focus on empowerment, if you give young people a voice, they will really come up with some fantastic ideas. So it's not a cliche to say, young people are the future, but sometimes they're not met where they are. They're met with criticism and judgement
• If we can reframe, and invite the people who are the future of our profession, into the community of a fully networked invited open space, then I highly recommend that young people push their way in, but I also recommend that everyone else put their hand once probably had and pay it forward

Reach out to Michelle Parry-Slater

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Katie DaCosta is an International Learning Leader & Founder of Purple Nyx consulting. She is a collaborative and forward-thinking Business Leader and Strategist across Learning, Organisational development and Diversity, Equity & Inclusion (DE&I) Having worked across Global technology and service organisations.

The latest episode of the Digital Adoption Show features Shreya Srivastava, Customer Success Manager at Whatfix, and Katie DaCosta on 3 ways to create performance-driven cultures through transformational learning strategies.

12:03 What did you do differently when managing teams and what was your primary focus?

• Leaders and managers have a lot of responsibility. Managing remote teams across multiple time zones is even harder. Therefore, it is important to be culturally aware and sensitive to time zones
• Language and interpretation are also considerations that the whole team should be aware of, sometimes someone says a phrase or says a word, and it is misinterpreted. The confusion over it will be laughed at, explained, and learned from
• Data should be the key focus area for L&D personnel. This tells us what we need to develop for, and what, who, and why we need to develop for. We can also understand how well we are supporting and improving the skills of the organization and ultimately, its performance

20:48 -Being in the L&D department and also familiar with DAP/Digital Adoption Platform, what would be your top 3 objectives you would like to share with the audience? 

• Performance is absolutely crucial for learning and development teams so that the business can deliver quicker, and they have employees who can take on projects quicker and they can make a positive impact 
• In order to develop effective competence and performance, learning and development teams need to think about what is important, which can't be achieved through delivering long, boring training courses. Therefore, they have to think differently
• L&D teams should be constantly looking out to see how we can embed learning into the flow of work to help performance on the job. It could be things like embedded tips, user guides, podcasts, videos and coaching. A key consideration is to make sure our employees have access to this content in an easy way
• Partnering with IT teams and product teams is really important so that the learning teams can actually start to embed learning in the portals and tools and performance tools like Whatfix can really help in this as well
• L&D teams should focus to solve and close the learning and performance needs. Employees and businesses can do this by understanding the ongoing challenges and issues that impact business performance and planning and implementing training accordingly

25:42 What do you think about blended learning and how it can benefit organizations in the long run?

• Digital learning is generally viewed as linear or path-based, and it can even be viewed as less flexible. The whole concept of digital learning is delivered by technology. It can be a course, an interactive PDF, a video business simulation, a podcast, or an Online Social Forum
• On the other hand, classroom learning can also make use of technology, but it's typically delivered live and it takes the learner out of their working day, which is not ideal for any business. But considering blended learning uses various delivery formats. Blended learning pretty much covers the focus on how we learn effectively. It brings other learning mediums into the mix, like social collaboration, Q&A, forums, virtual classrooms, mentoring, coaching, and on-the-job learning stretch projects

Katie DaCosta LinkedIn

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“Learning by doing, learning through discovery – that’s my preferred way.” - Stella Collins

Stella Collins is Co-founder and Cheif Learning Officer at Stellar Labs. She is a Learning specialist and author. She is an acknowledged expert on the practical application of science-based learning to business performance solutions and is the author of Kogan Page’s sell-out book Neuroscience for Learning and Development. 

This week's Digital Adoption Show features Ajay Kumar, VP- Pre Sales at Whatfix, and Stella Collins discussing “Learn the power of doing with Neuroscience”.

04:36  -What are your thoughts on corporate L&D?

• Learning and Development leaders are developing and improving their own skills as they realise that the world is changing, and training at work is nowhere near like it used to be
• Also, L&D leaders do not necessarily need more qualifications. They need to be more professional about it. And that's where understanding the science of learning can add to that credibility and professionalism
• We need to be much more connected to the business because gone are the days when learning and development kind of sitting in an ivory tower and could create content and just hope that people wanted it or just hope that people would choose them

08:51 -Tell us a bit about your critically acclaimed book 'Neuroscience for L&D'?

• The book is a kind lot the reason that I have had this new role for two and a half years is that my co-founder discovered me by reading my book, and my book is about the science of learning. So it's heavily scientific
• So the book is very practical. If neuroplasticity is the way we learn, then what does that mean for us in our jobs as L&D whether we're trainers or designers, whether we're delivering or you know, we're kind of supporting learning? What does that mean for us? So it's site very science base
• But the science is explained in the simplest reasonably simple way. It's not too in-depth, but I can lead people on a journey. So they get a bit at the beginning, and then they build on it. And then it's all about so what does this mean we need to do in our real jobs of trading, whether that's trading digitally, whether it's face to face whether you're designing e-learning it's practical

10:10 -How do you see the L&D role emerging in the new corporate world?

• It traditionally sits in HR because both HR and L&D have evolved to be different. But what we need to do is to have L&D emerge as very much a business partner with the business
• And we should be talking to the business saying, what do you need? What do you need your people to be able to do? And how can we support you in enabling that to happen? 
• And that doesn't mean we necessarily need to teach your people because if they're learning Java, or they're learning some kind of cybersecurity coding, we in L&D, can't do that. But we can perhaps support the process so that those experts within the business who have the skills and the knowledge can teach the next people coming along, how can we support them to do that
• For instance, technical people tend to think that their technical employees need to have all those technical skills, and they kind of forget that actually, they still need to communicate well, influence or persuade or negotiate. And here l&d plays a crucial role by supporting both sets of skills, soft skills and hard skills because they actually go together, and they fit together very well

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Nick Shackleton is the CEO at Shackleton Consulting and Former CLO at Deloitte UK. He is awarded for people development, strategy, innovation, and learning content including the Learning & Performance Institute’s Award for Services to the Learning Industry, 2017.

This week's Digital Adoption Show features Shagun Vaish, Principal Customer Success Director at Whatfix, and Nick Shackleton discussing An L&D Innovator's Journey who believes in the power of learning.

09:32 What are some suggestions for creating a learner-friendly environment? Can you share any examples of how this concept has worked for you?

“People are just doing a weird educational ritual that doesn't achieve what they would like to achieve.” - Nick Shackleton

• Nick mentioned that challenges drive our learning, and sometimes those challenges come in the form of a story. But more frequently, they come from our work. Anyone familiar with the Centre for Creative Leadership’s work knows that their challenges are really what drive our learning
• On the other hand, In order to support people’s learning, we can do two things. We can challenge them and look at the challenges they already have in their jobs and create the resources that support them
• Likewise, Practical advice is to focus on either creating useful stuff that helps people or challenging experiences that change people. And all of the tools you need to do that systematically, in a data-driven way, are freely available

17:30  We know the future of the world and L&D is digital. So, why are social networks and human-centred design so important for the future?

“Some organisations increasingly realise that they cannot control their reputation and their external brand independently, they are dependent on their employees to be ambassadors of their organisation.” - Nick Shackleton

• Nick stated that human-centred design is essential across lots of fields. So the reason design thinking is critical is if as a business you want to sell your product, it's not a bad idea to talk to your customers
• And you should take time to understand the needs of your learners if you want your learning services or products to be effective. This will help you not only improve your learning culture but also make your learning services or products more effective and efficient
• In fact, when most people join the business, their initial impression of learning is negative, they're just being forced to comply, and complete this. Imagine if you could turn that around, and actually help people to do their jobs more seamlessly. That would influence a lot of things, it would reduce the number of people leaving, improve employee satisfaction, and increase productivity. So it would improve the overall experience

20:31 Why is it so difficult for a leader to modify his or her leadership style? What effect does this have on organizational change?

“Leaders have a huge influence on the culture of an organisation and if you've had to work for a bad leader, it makes every day miserable.” - Nick Shackleton

• Nick also mentioned that we tend to promote people who are good at their jobs. And quite often, that means that they're bad at leadership
• For instance, in some engineering organisations where if somebody is performing very well as an engineer. So they are going to promote him as a leader. And then his natural inclination is to tell everybody else how to do things like him, and that sort of quite infantilizing people and often it means that they lack people skills
• People often sort of pick up a lot of their leadership styles from their parents. And so their idea of what it means to be in authority, and how you should behave is quite deeply ingrained and embedded. So we have to take the time to actually step into experiences, which develop them in different ways and show them a different way of working with people that aren't merely telling people what to do, and turning people off when they don't do it

Nick Shackleton LinkedIn

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Avery Banta is a Vice President and Head of HRBP, Change Management & Org Development COE Team at Globe Telecom. Experienced in learning and development and HR for more than 15 years. 

The latest episode of the Digital Adoption Show features Nabras Mohammed, Manager, Whatfix and Avery Banta on how Change Management Transform your Perspective on Hybrid Work Cultures.

2:15 - How have Learning and Development been game changers for Globe Telecom?

• Post Pandemic companies needed to shift learning away from the classroom and upskill an entire workforce to keep pace with digital transformation inside and outside the company. Globe group stood ahead of the learning curve
• Globe group stood ahead of the learning curve, by focusing on up-skilling employees for the present and future. We assign numbers to the outcome and we measure it actively
• L&D strategies should be an enabler to help organizations get to that vision. It should focus on bringing the aspiration among the employees to go towards the collective goal

3:12 - Importance of resilience in today's work culture?

• Significant changes encountered in work culture post-pandemic, especially hybrid work, technology upgradation, increased software usage, expanded employer’s role, and most important humanization of employees. It's a new set of adjustments altogether
• People in general, are resilient because we form our habits. But before we even get over the hump, we had to go through the journey of adjusting, finding our groove again and being at ease with that new way of work

6:01 - How do you bring change to your organisation?

• For people who are managing change, changing their mindset should be the priority since even if you give all the skills, train people, and provide them with the tools, they still need to change their mindset
• There's no secret sauce to change. It's never going to be the templated approach. You don't have templates or playbooks in terms of how to manage people's hearts and emotions. So what do we do?
• Whether it's classroom or online, most people are not happy with their learning. We should focus on bringing the motivation to learn and delivering in the way they consume best
   

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Robert Szabo Vice President, Learning Sciences at Learnshipis enabling global digital transformation in corporate language and communication training.

This episode of Digital Adoption Show features Shreya Srivastava, Customer Success Manager at Whatfix, and Robert Szabo discussing the Top 3 hacks to transform your organisation’s learning experience.

During his conversation with Shreya Srivastava, Robert had some brilliant insights on how leaders can learn to :

• Overcome language barriers in the workplace
• How to embed new ways of learning in the traditional organizations
• How Gamification can change the way learning happens in any organization

2:31 - Recommendations for the new entrants in L&D

• The most important one is to keep up with technological development, which is moving at a more rapid pace than it ever has. Communication skills are critical to be effective in this new way of work
• With a lot of people now working in remote teams and who have never met each other physically, people need to be aware that the skills that are required by employers these days are constantly evolving
• With organizations re-skilling and up-skilling their employees, employees should take proactive steps to equip themselves with the skills they will need in the future

5:55 - Impact of COVID on the changing mindset of the people learning?

• We can compare it to as big a historical event as the second world war or women joining the workforce. These things happen to humanity, creating changes that don't disappear quickly and I think the impact of COVID-19 is visible because remote work is not going anywhere
• Companies are now reducing office spaces and they enforce remote work policies for the well-being of employees and in other instances, they're controlling costs
• Digital pedagogy got a big shot in the arm and more jobs have been created in the space of digital curriculum creation and the digital transformation of university offerings

9:27 - How do you cope with learning and bridge the linguistic barrier?

• English has become something of a lingua franca. For instance, if a Japanese guy talks to a Swedish person, they will speak English. English has become an integrative tool where people want to become part of that community
• To address the communication goals, focus on different channels and create a culture where everybody has a voice. Try to set a  benchmark level for each language, which could be neutral in value and try bringing everybody up to that baseline
   

Listen to Robert’s incredible journey on the latest episode of The Digital Adoption Show. Do check it out now.

This is one of the special episodes you should not miss.

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