Learning Design Best Practices for a Global Workforce
With an increasingly distributed and global workforce, organizations need to become more sophisticated about how to support their employees' growth and development. There are many variables to consider from time zone, to language barriers, cultural differences, remote vs in-person vs hybrid, folks who are co-located but virtual, etc. Meanwhile, L&D teams are still being asked to deliver high-quality training and great experiences that engage employees and inspire them to do the hard work required to develop new skills. Here are a few tips and tricks we’ve picked up along the way as we develop and deliver impactful learning experiences to a variety of global teams and organizations.
Deliver in a Variety of Time Zones
The name of the game here is inclusion. Whenever possible, offer your learning experiences at times that cater to folks in a variety of time zones. Sometimes that means scaling the experience for smaller groups and offering multiple time options. It’s quite common for folks who live or work outside of the headquarters region to feel like they’re always getting a sub-par experience. Every time you’re able to offer learning at a time that is locally convenient for an employee, you reinforce that the organization values that employee and their development.
Gather, Review and Integrate Diverse Feedback
The most common things that drive the development of learning experiences and training programs are noteworthy gaps in competencies, strategic priorities, and leadership edicts. That makes complete sense in large, global organizations, but can lead to the development of training programs designed for the lowest common denominator, or the largest employee group or culture. During the prototype and testing phases of development, be sure to capture feedback from a variety of audiences and integrate that feedback into the program. The aim should be to easily customize the experience for different audiences, geographies or cultures.
Showcase Local/Representative Voices
Representation is incredibly important for helping people feel like they are seen, heard, and belong. As much as possible, choose to include in your program leaders, facilitators, and guests that represent and will resonate with the employees. Not only does this help engage your employees, it also helps elevate and bring visibility to a diverse group of leaders, facilitators, and guests.
Leverage Additional Resources When Hybrid
Hybrid experiences of all kinds are necessary and relevant to the future of work. Unfortunately, hybrid experiences are also harder to design, facilitate and support than those that are fully in-person or fully virtual. Yet, given that hybrid is here to stay, it’s time to start figuring out how to deliver them well. To begin, know that hybrid experiences require additional resources to be truly engaging and inclusive to all participants—no matter the modality with which they choose to engage. Train and allocate additional facilitators to make sure you’re creating a great experience for everyone.
Curate Offerings
A side effect of developing the workforce of a large global organization is a large suite of learning offerings. You will likely have a variety of learning opportunities that are delivered in a variety of ways—some self-guided, some directed, some internal, some external. This wealth of learning is a luxury, but it can also be a bit overwhelming to an employee. Questions like Where should I start? What’s most important right now? and What learning will make the biggest difference for me? will cause employees to hesitate, or perhaps even dismiss learning altogether. Just like Trader Joe’s offers only a few choices to their customers to minimize decision fatigue, consider how L&D leaders, HRBPs, and/or Managers can help to tailor, prioritize, sequence, and curate the learning opportunities for each individual employee for where they are in their learning journey.
What additional learning and development best practices have you identified for global organizations?