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, it's helping build better workplaces, helping empowering people like you said, helping them learn and grow. And I found that through learning and development, we can do a lot of that. Of course, it's not the only area that touches upon that, but it's one of the ways that we can help build better workplaces for people to come, to be happy where they work, about what they do and feel that they add value. So I think that from the learning perspective, so I love really identifying needs, whether it's people's needs or just the business needs and come up with solutions.

Helene Bejjani:

And when I say solutions, sometimes it's learning, sometimes it's something else. So this is where our added value comes into place and yeah, helping people, helping design experiences as well for people, it's something that we're hearing more about but I truly believe in that. And virtual learning is part of that so I, like you said, work in global environments, I enjoy that very much. And when you work in global environments, you are working with people from different cultures and most of the time the structure is very matrix-like, it's cross-functional, and it's also very diverse. So this difference is something that for me is incredible because it drives so much value, I use the same word value a lot, but it drives so much, the difference is so enriching. So yeah, I love tapping into that and helping people see how it can be impactful, and this is where virtual learning can be very powerful as well.

Nathan Simmonds:

Yeah huge. That prime thing that kind of jumps out to me, when you know your why I can't remember if it was Nietzsche said, "If you can understand why, you can survive any how." Or at least...

Helene Bejjani:

Exactly. You can. Any road will take you where you want to go. If you don't know your why, any road will take you.

Nathan Simmonds:

And this is the thing, a gentleman I kind of interacted with a little while ago said, "Your purpose is never unknown, it's either unclear, unfocused, or unstructured," So it always exists underneath whatever you're doing, it's just whether or not we have the focus to understand what it looks like and the structure in order to make it happen on a daily basis, and luckily for you and the people that you work with, you find that in L&D in connecting with people and helping to increase that level of understanding. The other part that kind of jumps out for me is, there was a post from Darren, the founder at MBM, we go to school, we learn all this stuff, and then we go to work we have no idea how to manage our time we have no idea how to sell a product we have no idea how to negotiate a better deal on something. Now all these things are really, really important to life and we spend the first you know 20 years of our education or whatever it is not learning these things.

Helene Bejjani:

Exactly.

Nathan Simmonds:

Then when you come into L&D, it's just like, "Ah, now I've got an opportunity to share this stuff that's really important with people. How do I make it work and how do I get to more people." So it's phenomenally powerful.

Helene Bejjani:

Yeah and I mean today, to be honest, we have so many new jobs, new roles, that are going to emerge, that are emerging, so traditional schools cannot keep up with that. There are so many things that people really will need to learn on the job, through experience that you can't have degrees for everything and yesterday, I was actually having a conversation with a friend who wanted to go into something specific to e-commerce, and this is not something that you can find a degree in so there's this company that trains people on the job and helps them learn the skills, and I found it really interesting.

Nathan Simmonds:

[inaudible 00:06:58] the sound on the computer for two seconds. And that is the interesting thing, because it's a new world that's coming, that is here and, as you know, it's starting to materialize. We home school, we opted to home school sometime before this situation. And I know of people that are using virtual classrooms, so they're already using virtual classrooms to help homeschool their children in certain specific subjects that they want them to learn or their children want to learn more about. And actually now, more teachers are having to do that. These guys that were doing this virtual classrooms, literally for school-aged children, they're already ahead of the curve because they were doing it three, four, five years ago, whereas all of a sudden these teachers over here, are suddenly pushed into this camera, oh we don't know how to use Zoom, we have no idea how to deal with this, and we have no idea how that's going to affect our thinking or the brains of our children, whereas these guys are ahead of the curve already.

Nathan Simmonds:

So there's going to be new job titles coming out, as you say, whether it's for teachers, online teaching assistants or whatever it is, actually there's this new world that's coming out of it and no, there won't be degrees for all of it, but there's definitely going to be some very specific skill sets that are going to make a difference for that.

Helene Bejjani:

Yeah and the pandemic forced people learn new skills that no one could just teach them. It was a new setting, it wasn't a normal setting, so even old courses that you could find on how you can do that we're not totally relevant to the situation, we're all learning together.

Nathan Simmonds:

Yeah and correct. And this phrase that I view several times, it's the intensity of proximity. So it's the intensity of being with your family 24/7 is like, "Holy cow, I need some space." And then it's the intensity of your work it's just like, okay actually, there might have been these courses to help you teach online but they weren't there to help you understand what they would feel like if you're doing it eight hours a day, every day, for the last four months.

Helene Bejjani:

Exactly yeah,