The Key to Effective L&D Strategies: Learning Campaigns

The quality improvement methodology group 6Sigma defines organizational effectiveness as the efficiency of a company in meeting its goals, outlining a six-step process achieving it.

1. Leadership sets the overall vision for the organization. 
2. Management communicates that vision to their teams.   
3. Management and leadership keep the vision on track and ensure project teams are accountable for their performance.  
4. The organization delivers products and services.  
5. Management supports performance by hiring, training, and retaining the right people.  
6. Organizational performance is measured and analyzed for effectiveness.
   

At first glance, the connection between organizational effectiveness and learning and development (L&D) strategies might not be obvious but stay with me!

Organizational effectiveness in action

Let’s look at the example of Acme, a fictional widget-selling company that I made up for this blog post. Acme is in the midst of a big change: A recent needs analysis revealed that Acme’s current sales force could be more efficient (i.e., sell more widgets) if the company adopted a new sales platform. A team identified the perfect platform and Acme is on the cusp of rolling out the new system. Leadership will measure its success a couple months down the road.  

Is the connection coming into focus?   

Acme’s adoption and rollout plans include making the new platform live and deploying a process-focused training as management hands out key dates and directives. Would you be surprised to learn that most sales reps aren’t excited about the change, nor are they motivated to change their work processes, flows, and habits? This will impact organizational effectiveness. But who could fault the sales reps for their lack of enthusiasm? It’s hard to get motivated without a “why.”

Organizational effectiveness starts with why

Supporting organizational effectiveness, whether in or outside of change, takes the right mix of leadership and communication as well as delivery of best-in-class learning and training programs to increase employee performance.  

But how can you achieve that? The solution lies in campaign-based learning. Let’s hop up a few paragraphs to revisit the 6Sigma list of organizational effectiveness, and — oh look! — communication tops the list in slot no. 2. Who better to communicate the why behind the change than the L&D function? And how better to communicate the why than within a campaign-based learning strategy?

Campaign-based learning helps your organization be more effective

Any company — including Acme — can maximize its learning strategy and improve overall organizational effectiveness through learning campaigns. These learner-centric solutions enable organizations to repeat and space content over time. On the back end, the people behind the campaign continuously collect data and adjust the campaign as needed.  

Sounds great — but where do you start? Learning campaigns begin with the creation of learner personas to ensure your campaign is focused on the target audience, not the content. Next, kick off pre-launch activities that generate excitement and manage learners’ expectations. Use a variety of delivery channels and modalities, push notifications and short messages to learners, reminding them of upcoming learning and sustainment opportunities.   

Encourage knowledge sharing with crowdsourced content and social learning and increase learner motivation by allowing them to pick and choose assets they want to interact with. Along the way, collect data to enable quick pivots that meet the learners’ needs. At each touchpoint within the campaign, ask yourself what the learner thinks and feels so you can continuously improve the experience.  

Learning campaigns can be used for almost all learning projects — and they don’t have to be complicated. Interested in learning more? Reach out to one of our Ardent experts today.