Episode 29 - Virtual Classroom Learning: Interview With Helene Bejjani

For the last 15 years, Helene Bejjani has been empowering people to learn and grow through her focus on 3 key areas: the corporate culture and work environment, leadership development, and employee development. With a brilliant career history to date, L&D BP for Newell brands and HO L&D for Antalis she is uniquely placed to influence significant change that supports business growth, in multiple locations in multiple ways. Including delivering a training program that touches 5000 people in 40 locations globally across a virtual platform. Today, the topic of discussion is virtual classroom learning.

You Can Read the Transcript of Our Interview Below:

Nathan Simmonds:

Welcome to Sticky Interviews. I'm Nathan Simmons, Senior Leadership Coach and Trainer for MBM, Making Business Matter, the home of Sticky Learning. We are the provider of leadership, development and soft skills training to the grocery and manufacturing industry. The idea of these interviews is to share great ideas, great concepts, and great ways these skills are being used to help you be the best version of you, in the work that you do. Welcome to the show.

Nathan Simmonds:

Welcome to this Sticky Interview with me, Nathan Simmons, Senior Leadership Coach and Trainer for MBM, Making Business Matter, the home of Sticky Learning. And today, I have the great pleasure of interviewing Helene Bejjani, I hope I'm pronouncing this right, I didn't check this last time, just to make sure. Digging into the depths of creativity and understanding around virtual classrooms, so yes, we've experienced some unprecedented times, I'm not sure how many times that works been used across the internet in the last three months. This has really challenged us as trainers, it has really challenged us as L&D professionals, it has really challenged us on a social level of how we connect with each other virtually and physically. And having seen some of the work that Helene's doing and the environment which in which she works in, what is it, 41 different locations. Was it 5,000 employees across 41 locations, I seem to remember something like this?

Helene Bejjani:

Yeah, something like that.

Nathan Simmonds:

That's a huge spread of people in a huge number of places, it's not just one or two offices, it's multiple locations. So I wanted to have a conversation with Helene. I wanted to find out what she does and how she's coped in these situations. But she's bringing with her 15 years of empowering people to learn and grow while focusing their work in three key areas, corporate culture, work environment, and leadership and employee development. And her experiences have been previously at Newell Brands as a HR Business Partner, and then more recently as the Head of L&D for Antalis as well. So in this conversation, we're going to dig into all that, that experience in all these areas and we're going to be digging into virtual classrooms, getting creative online, and how you use these tools to your advantage in a global arena, such as you do. Firstly, thank you for being here Helene, it's really appreciated.

Helene Bejjani:

Thank you Nathan for having me, it's a pleasure.

Helene focuses on empowering people to learn through the corporate culture and work environment, leadership development, and employee development

 

Nathan Simmonds:

First question for me always is, why do you do what you do?

Helene Bejjani:

So that's an important one. When you know your why, everything falls into place. For me it's something that I've been thinking about for a long time that, drove my career. I'm lucky that I found my why early in my career and I was able to work towards that. So I always think that, we spend so much time at work and wouldn't be great if people came to work passionate about what they do, feeling like they are adding value. And this is actually what drives everything that I do,