Why? Unfortunately, the number of situations where people attend a program without knowing why is still high. At the same time, having a why is one of the indicators of participant engagement in a learning initiative.

How?

1. Before the start of a program/ workshop/ training session send over a nudge with a simple question: “What’s one thing you expect to improve after attending the x/y/z program”? and explain to them how reflection can help the learning & performance improvement process in a short paragraph.

2. Set up a survey, so you can see the results as well, but be careful to craft the copy so that you make it clear that reflecting is something that will help them!

‍Click on read more to see what a nudge from Humu looks like.

Why? Being order-takers is becoming more and more of a problem for L&D professionals. At the same time, to move toward a more consultative approach we need time to change our own behaviors. It doesn’t mean that in the meantime we should accept all the requests we get.

How?

Every time a stakeholder comes to you requesting something for you, just spend 10-15 minutes with them asking about all the possible ways that solution might fail and what you can do to prevent them from happening. It might raise their awareness that the solution they came up with might be a small initiative they should add to a bigger change process.

Why? People face uncertainties regarding their careers at all times, but sometimes their people managers can’t help guide them, having a coach might not be an option, and the resources they find on the internet aren’t as specific as they would need.

How?

1. Set the topics you can discuss in the specific timeframe of the Open Hour so you can guide people in choosing the challenges they bring to you;

2. Prepare frameworks or questions you can ask for the most common use cases to make the time you spend together as efficient and worthy as possible;3. Set a recurrent date & hour in your calendar and invite people to schedule time for a counseling session. You can use Calendly to make it easier for them to book a call.

Why? People Managers face diverse, delicate challenges, they rarely talk about outside their inner circle. But the lessons they learn are priceless and can help in reducing anxiety, impostor syndrome, and help others in approaching similar circumstances in a wiser way.

How?

1. Source challenges from all your people managers;

2. Invite 1-2 senior leaders to be in the spotlight and share the ways they have faced similar challenges;

3. Rotate the spotlight on various people managers each quarter or even monthly, depending on how you feel the audience.

Why? Measurement is one of the most talked about while also one of the most challenging parts of L&D. When building business cases to get funding for our ideas or proving the impact of our work, we need to go past vanity metrics and measure behavior change & performance improvement.

How?

A way you can measure leadership development initiatives is by making sure that your engagement & 360 feedback processes have questions that are related to people management. Additionally, as long as confidentiality is not an issue, you can have reports for each manager so you can talk to them about their progress and steps forward.

Why? Training is one of the most sought-after solutions by most of our stakeholders. At the same time, we’re growing more and more aware that training in isolation it’s not the most efficient solution for behavior, mindset change, or even skill acquisition. But we’re the learning experts, so we can’t blame them for not knowing.

How?

1. Introduce snippets of theory about behavior, habit, or mindset change wherever you can (onboarding, events you’re having, newsletters, intranet resources, etc.);
2. Have people reflect upon their own change journeys to raise awareness about the complexity of behavior change either proactively or whenever they come to you asking for training.

Why? One of the traits of a learning culture is psychological safety. One of the ways you can support building psychological safety is by offering people the opportunity of being authentic & share their failures. Fuckup Nights is a type of event that can help with that.

How?

1. Start by bringing in people that feel comfortable with sharing their fuckups;

2. Brand the initiative in a nice, attractive way and talk about it as much as you can;

3. Run the session in a fun tool that attracts people (Mibo, welo) if you can’t run it live;

4. Measure the results through an additional eNPS question that asks about how comfortable people feel with failing.

Why? If your company is in growth mode or/ and working remotely or in a hybrid way, people get to know each other less and less. Offering them the space to meet informally can raise awareness about common issues, lessons learned that can be shared, and impromptu collaboration.

How?

1. Set a recurrent day of the month;

2. Brand the initiative in a fun & smart way & launch it wherever your audience is;

4. Use a fun tool that attracts people (Mibo, welo, Glimpse), and match people based on what you know about them and how they could help each other;

5. Follow-up in an interesting way with stories from the event itself or from what the event has sparked (knowledge sharing, collaboration opportunities, etc.).

6. Measure the impact with additional eNPS questions about collaboration after a while.

You can test the initiative with a smaller group before launching it to the whole company.

Why? Becoming a people manager for the first time is a draining experience and knowing there’s someone who has your back and can support you in the transition can reduce anxiety.

How?

1. Send a congrats message to first-time managers and invite them for a 101 conversation where you can get to know them, their challenges, anxieties, and thoughts better.
2. As a follow-up you can schedule multiple 101 sessions or just recommend them resources they could explore and people they could talk to.

Why? Information overload is everywhere. We want to learn about something and it’s hard to determine what sources can be trusted, and which ones are high-quality and deserve our attention. You can save your colleagues’ time by curating free resources for them. This idea works especially if you have no budget to outsource content curation to a paid tool.

How?

1. Make a list of colleagues that are passionate about learning & research and reach out to them;
2. Work with them to create learning paths for different specific learning goals using free internal or external resources;
3. Choose a space where you will share the learning paths (tools like Notion, SharePoint, etc.) that could work;
4. Spread the word!

Why? As humans, we’ve evolved to learn socially and by listening to stories. Intervision is a peer-coaching activity with a small group of professionals who have roles or challenges in common and they can help each other grow.

How?

1. Gather people in a session of ±1.5 hours;

2. Have them list & vote on the challenges they have in their day-to-day jobs;

3. The challenge that gets the most votes becomes the focus of the session. Ask the one who wrote it to give as much context about the challenge as possible;

4. Give space to everyone else to first reflect on every solution they would propose to the one in the spotlight and then share them verbally;

5. Repeat over and over again in multiple sessions to cover the challenges of other people.

Why? Your colleagues are constantly bombarded with information. Requiring them to know about the programs they have available only because you’ve built them or you’ve talked about them a few times it’s not realistic. A newsletter is another opportunity for you to share internal programs or external resources that might be interesting for them.

How?

1. Decide on a structure for your newsletter. Keep it simple and try adding sections where you can invite your colleagues to share resources or lessons learned;

2. Ask for some help from your design team so they can build a beautiful HTML template;

3. Decide on a tool you’ll use for email marketing purposes;

4. Share the subscription link everywhere!

Why? A user guide is basically a written manual of how you function. Its goal is to set blindingly clear expectations on how to collaborate without extra second-guessing. They can be used in the hiring process, to speed up onboarding of new colleagues, reduce anxiety when it comes to collaboration, and create space for vulnerability.

How?

1. Decide on the questions you want to add in the user manual;

2. Prompt people to ask for feedback after creating their user manuals to avoid biases and blind spots;

3. Once user manuals are created, nudge individuals to share them with everyone they work with.