Should we save a fortune by using open and freely available learning and development materials for our employees?
I invite you to consider with me the factors in deciding whether, and to what extent, to use openly available Learning and Development material in meeting the needs of our organisation.
Some context
The University of Manchester comprises, at any one time, between 10–11,000 employees. They are the same in number and diversity as a small town. As a good employer, the University is constantly seeking to provide personal and professional learning and development support to each employee, to enable them to make the best contribution they can to the success of the University, whilst deriving a strong sense of job satisfaction and/or career progress for themselves. This is a complex and resource-hungry undertaking.
The objective of this short paper is to explore the potential for the University to reduce the direct and indirect costs of delivering on its new Staff Learning and Development (L&D) Strategy (and any other possible risks and benefits) by using L&D material that is openly and freely available online.
So how is staff L&D material and activity currently created and provided?
The University’s approach to L&D currently runs along traditional lines. Much of the required activity is both created and delivered by University employees. Much of this is done by a central Staff L&D team (formerly Staff Training and Development Unit), though with considerable work going on independently of the central team in other parts of the organisation.
In addition to home grown L&D we pay considerable sums to outside providers who create and/or deliver courses and other forms of activity to fulfil a range of development needs.
Finally, the University partly or fully funds many employees each year to undertake development activity outside the organisation with external providers, including competitor universities.
How might this change?
People who work in L&D tend by nature to be ‘sharers’. Even in market sectors known for their cut-throat competitiveness, L&D professionals are happily sharing their course content on “Maximising Sales and Margin”.
Added to this, the evolution of the Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) agenda has encouraged organisations to make the things they are doing to develop their colleagues openly available, in the hope that this may contribute to some greater societal good.
Here’s a real example of what is freely available — Managing Bias at Facebook.
Let us look at an example of something that is freely available online and then go on to use this example to consider the viability of the University using this type of resource in place of a more traditional solution.
Facebook has slightly more employees worldwide than the University of Manchester has in Manchester. For them it is their global nature that sets the L&D challenge rather than their total numbers of staff.
Facebook, in common with the University and most other large organisations, recognised the need to address the probable harm that (unconscious) bias was doing to the performance of their organisation.
(For anyone interested in the concept and implications of unconscious bias, for individuals and organisations, the film of the training session available at the link below is very accessible and enlightening. To get an informal insight into your own areas of unconscious bias try one of the online tests e.g. those provided by Harvard at: https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/takeatest.html)
Facebook ran a handful of 1 hour awareness-raising sessions for small groups of staff under the title of “Managing Bias”. These were delivered by senior members of the Facebook team. The intention was clearly always to record the sessions in order that they could be shared to all ‘Facebookers’ globally. The recording can be found at this link
On the front page that the link takes us to, Facebook are very clear about their decision to make their Managing Bias session available to all via the internet:
Why?
Research shows that individuals and organizations that believe they are meritocratic often have the poorest outcomes. That’s because when biases aren’t acknowledged, we can’t deal with them.
Our goal in publishing this portion of our managing bias training is to achieve broader recognition of the hidden biases we all hold, and to highlight ways to counteract bias in the workplace. We invite you to treat this as a framework for action. Please add to or amend this content based on challenges relevant to your organization.
Let’s commit to surfacing and counteracting unconscious bias to level the playing field for all of us.
Download More on What You Can Do
Download the Slides and References Used in these Videos
The quality of the content and the professionalism of the presentations is of a very high standard indeed. The information on bias is universally applicable (though may be found to be less readily embraced in some organisational and other cultures than in others).
It is worth being aware then that our University has recently invested many thousands of pounds in the commissioning and delivery (by more than one external training provider) of unconscious bias training to a large number of colleagues, though far from all. As different training providers were used there was some variation in content, though the broad themes were common.
So, if the University, on the strength of the very positive feedback received for our Unconscious Bias training, decided that many more colleagues should have the opportunity to have their awareness raised to these issues, should they continue to pay external providers to deliver yet more sessions, should they make the Facebook session available, or is there some other solution?
Considerations in deciding whether to use openly available learning and development material from the internet or other sources.
Here is a summary analysis of the possible pros and cons of the University making use of openly available L&D resources. You are invited to add to these and provide your own analysis of the range of considerations which will help me, the author of this paper, to make decisions on this question, within the scope of my role as Head of Staff L&D for the University.
Possible benefits
Consistency — a real challenge for us is to get consistent messages and information to large numbers of people over a short space of time. Online resources (some of which are in the form of elearning modules rather than recordings as with the example above) have rapid, total reach and are unavoidably consistent in content.
Cost — the freely available materials are also free to use. On unconscious bias training alone, the online option would have saved the University tens of thousands of pounds.
Possible downsides and risks
Updating — a training course can be tweaked in response to e.g. a change in legislation. This would be far harder with online material.
Responding positively to delegate feedback — we can act very rapidly on comments from delegates to ‘live’ training we provide or commission. This would be far harder to achieve with material generated beyond out sphere of influence.
Personalisation — though this is sometimes exaggerated, there are differences about universities, relative to other types of organisation. There can be a tendency as soon as something is said or done that appears at odds with our culture or expectations, to dismiss the whole content as irrelevant.
Trainee perceptions — will delegates feel they are being given a cheap alternative to ‘proper training’? And perhaps we need to build some ‘social learning’ around the online content e.g. for the online bias training we could offer small group follow up once people have watched the film
So, over to you. I’d really appreciate your views and comments on this, which have the potential to directly influence next steps, though I can’t promise to share any savings!
Thank you. Jonathan.
