21 minute read
L&D’S ROLE IN ORGANIZATIONAL DESIGN
DRIVING SUCCESS IN ORGANIZATIONAL DESIGN
A SEAT AT THE TABLE FOR LEARNING AND DEVELOPMENT
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by Valerie Brophy and Michelle Crowe
The world in which we work is changing quickly. Business leaders are more frequently evaluating their organizations’ operating models and structures to keep pace with dynamic environments and emerging competition, as well as to meet evolving customer needs. This means that organizational design initiatives are happening with increasing frequency — and the stakes for getting them right are incredibly high.
Organizational design is the process of aligning and optimizing an organization’s capabilities, culture, structure, processes and technology, people and talent practices, and metrics to drive the achievement of its strategy and goals. Each of these areas is critical for the full system to operate in an organizational redesign. From a talent perspective, success occurs when employees are equipped with the new skills and mindsets that allow them to take on the new roles, work and culture that power the changes required to drive organizational success. This can only happen when the organization aligns its talent and expertise to drive the design of its future and accelerate the speed of adoption of the new behaviors, skills and mindsets needed to enable that future state and drive culture shifts.
At its core, organizational design is about creating a holistic, aligned system through which work is done and organizational strategy is attained. To build that complex system, organization design is typically broken into a series of interconnected focus areas (see Figure 1) that build on each other. This process should be driven by a multidisciplinary team of experts, including sponsors, leaders and subject matter experts (SMEs) from across the organization, HR leaders and business partners, organizational design/development, learning and development (L&D), change management, and talent management to maximize the success of the new design.
As a L&D practitioner, you play a pivotal role in organizational design by equipping employees with the knowledge and skills they need to be successful in the shift to new ways of working, expected behaviors and culture change.
L&D plays a role in each step of organizational design:
STRATEGY: Understanding the organization’s strategy and the anticipated outcomes of the initiative at a deep level provides L&D experts the information needed to create learning solutions that will propel the organization toward meeting its goals.
CULTURE: If culture shift is part of the change, L&D should also be involved
in creating solutions to enable the new culture and behaviors.
ORGANIZATIONAL CAPABILITIES: An organization’s L&D team is often comprised of experts on the organization’s current talent strengths and opportunities. Business leaders are the experts on what future capabilities are needed to advance the organization. Collaboration between the two groups enables a full view of current and future talent capabilities that will drive the future state vision and strategy.
ORGANIZATIONAL STRUCTURE: L&D will need line of sight into the future state structure of the organization to begin planning for future knowledge, skill and ability needs.
PROCESSES AND TECHNOLOGY: In this phase of organizational design, L&D needs to understand updated or new processes and technologies, conduct training needs analysis and plan for training to ensure compliance with the new ways of working.
PEOPLE AND TALENT PRACTICES: L&D should be involved in talent conversations because the team will be involved in new employee onboarding, as well as upskilling existing employees to prepare them to work in the new reality.
METRICS AND MEASUREMENT: Lastly, in this phase, training and learning metrics (completion, proficiency, etc.) can be good measures of adoption, change success (process compliance, etc.) and how the initiative is measured and reported.
This means that as a L&D leader, you should be involved from the beginning of an organizational design initiative through to the end. Being involved in the solution design early reduces project risks and ensures a more holistic organizational design solution, leading to a better outcome.
Ideally, the organizational design project lead is pulling all critical players to the table at the start of any engagement such as this. However, we all know that doesn’t always happen. As a L&D expert, it may be up to you to get yourself a seat at the organizational design table.
As a L&D practitioner, how can you make sure you are a part of the action? First, we recommend that you come prepared with a strong elevator pitch, or a persuasive speech that creates interest and conveys your ideas, on the importance of L&D in the organizational design process. This will help you convince the right people to let you pull up a chair.
Because organizational design impacts employees directly, change management should already be sitting at the table. If they’re not, they need to be involved to ensure successful adoption of the change. L&D is often included as a component of preparing employees for the change, so you should have some advocates for why you should also be involved in the organizational design process.
A 2020 article, “3 Ways Learning and Development Can Affect Change Management,” made the case for how L&D can have a strong impact on change management by arguing that ”[L&D] can engage from end to end in the design, development and delivery of the change management program, not simply the training portion of it.” A comprehensive change management approach should include L&D as a strategic partner, involved throughout the process, to ensure strong readiness to adopt the change. This is true not only for organizational design changes, but any transformation.
It is best not to wait until a change management practitioner comes to you, though. If you know about upcoming changes, get involved. Start by inserting yourself in the changes you know about by creating a business case to demonstrate why L&D should have a seat at the table. Is it because significant upskilling is needed? Are there significant process changes as a result of changing ways of working? Are roles changing because of the new organizational design? These are all areas where L&D specialists can provide incredible value to ensure the workforce is positioned for success when the change is implemented.
Strategically, it would be ideal to advocate for a change in the culture and practices of your organization. In close partnership with L&D and change management leaders, gain leadership buy-in with your business case and elevator pitch so that your organization’s leaders fully understand the value of an integrated approach. If your company has a strong learning culture, it will likely be easier to gain buy-in from leadership. However, if your company’s culture is less learningfocused, this may prove to be more challenging. If this is the case, we recommend partnering with change management or another influential team of experts (such as sponsors, leaders, and SMEs from across the organization related to the organizational change, HR leaders and business partners, and talent management) to assist with your business case and advocate for your involvement.
Organizations with more advanced capabilities may find it valuable to consider a structure similar to a program management office (PMO) where change management, program management and L&D are on the same team to ensure strong alignment across all disciplines. This integration can ensure fluid exchanges of information, which can be critical in a rapidly changing environment. It ensures everyone is working toward a shared objective and allows for work to occur in a more agile way by having more visibility to plans, upcoming changes and barrier points across the three
teams, who can be proactive and course correct when needed.
Research conducted by Prosci (2016) has shown that 58% of participants that integrated program management and change management met or exceeded their project objectives. Because L&D should be well connected to change management, it can be argued that a strong partnership across all three disciplines in an organizational design initiative will increase the ability to meet project objectives and ensure a best-in-class experience for affected employees.
There are many benefits of having L&D practitioners involved in organizational design decisions that can help form your business case:
• A holistic view of the organization’s organizational design strategy and its expected outcomes will enable the entire project team (including change management and L&D practitioners) to be better equipped to support, coach and grow employees through organizational changes.
• A clear understanding of the knowledge, skills and resources employees need will ensure they are successful in the change and enable future organization growth.
• Aligning desired behaviors and skills with organizational goals at the beginning, rather than retrofitting your strategy to the implementation plan later, minimizes impacts to the project timeline and ensures better end-state outcomes.
• An L&D view of stakeholders’ learning needs will inform change management tactics and ultimately inform the organizational design implementation.
All components are interconnected and should be documented in the implementation plan.
• Enable leaders to be leaders of change. Training professionals support leaders through the change by reskilling them to lead in the new organization. • Setting employees up for success will ultimately increase employee engagement and satisfaction throughout the change, which will mitigate resistance, increase the speed of adoption and decrease the likelihood of turnover.
GO BE THE LIFE OF THE PARTY
Hopefully, you now have all you need to get an invite to your organization’s next organizational design initiative. By inviting the right teams to priority initiatives, your organization will see increased speed of adoption, accelerated goal attainment and higher return on investment.
Valerie Brophy is a change enablement manager with over 10 years of consulting experience in organizational design, change management, L&D, leader development and coaching and employee engagement. Michelle Crowe is a change management and organization design consultant with over nine years of consulting experience in L&D, change management and organizational design. Email the authors.
Think about it — if training is not seen as relevant by the learner, or their manager, how likely is it to change behavior?
People don’t care about stuff they see as irrelevant, especially when they are busy. They certainly don’t care about training they see as irrelevant. If they are forced to sit in the training room, they will be thinking, “This doesn’t apply to me,” and then they will disengage. Who wouldn’t? Without relevance, learners won’t engage and won’t translate their training into new action — and without new action, there is no ROI. Therefore, without relevance, training is pointless and a waste of money.
To give your training any chance of being successful, you must prove genuine relevancy. And there is only one way to do that — through a performance diagnostics process.
GETTING STARTED
Someone asks for training. It’s what they want, but is it what they need? What someone wants and what they really need can be two quite different things.
If it is what they genuinely need to solve their problem then this need should be provable, and the relevance established for all to see. If it is what they want, but they have not really thought it through properly, there is work to be done to establish the real need and see if it aligns with what they say they want.
It’s critical that you establish the real training needs before investing training budget into programs that somebody says they want. Only by delivering what they truly need will you have any chance of success, so find out what they truly need. They probably don’t know, although they think they do, so you must help them discover what they need. Once they get visibility of what they need, they will align their wants to that newly exposed need.
Let’s assume the person asking for the training is a manager. Let’s call her Mary. Unless it is for compliance reasons, she is asking for training because she wants the people on her team to do things differently. Ask her what people are doing or not doing that needs to change — in other words, focus on behaviors.
BEHAVIORAL NEEDS ANALYSIS
Doing a training needs analysis (TNA) or a learning needs analysis (LNA) is a tacit admission that a training or learning intervention is the optimal solution. It probably isn’t, certainly not on its own, so start with a BNA. Start with the end in mind, start with the desired behaviors. Focus the requesting manager’s mind on what their people need to do rather than a knee-jerk idea of training as a solution.
Given a task, how does Mary want them to do the task instead of what they are doing now? How will she know they are doing it adequately well? Brilliantly well? Poorly? A BNA should result in a list of the required behaviors and against each one, some means to see or measure whether that behavior is taking place at the required level.
Thinking about the required behaviors will inevitably bring some focus to the current behaviors and the evidence Mary is using to prove their existence. In other words, what evidence did she use to arrive at the conclusion that she needed to ask for training? Thinking about current behaviors establishes the behavioral gap between the current and the required behaviors.
Here’s a useful question to ask Mary at this stage of your BNA: “If you don’t make any changes, and the existing behaviors continue for another 6 months, what will this cost the organization?”
Very few managers have thought about this, but with some prompting, most can come up with a very rough estimate of the negative impact on the organization for not crossing the exposed behavioral gap. You need to know what this estimate is so you can prioritize requests from different managers and understand where the often-limited L&D budget will have the most impact for the organization.
CROSSING THE BEHAVIORAL GAP
The next step is to figure out how to get employees to cross the behavioral gap. In other words, how can you deliver the required behaviors to the employees who need to do them?
An obvious question at this point is why the required behaviors are not already happening. What is inhibiting them? What is present or absent that is stopping people from doing the required behaviors and thus rendering them incapable on the job? To answer that question, it’s necessary to dig into what we mean by “capable on the job.”
Capability on the job, at the time and place an employee is asked to perform a task, is dependent on
two components: individual and environmental competence. If these two components are at or above a threshold level, the employee will perform the task well. Notice that this has shifted naturally into talking about performance and it is probably a lack of performance that brought the manager to you with their request for training.
Individual competence is made up of knowledge, skills, the insight and understanding of how to apply the knowledge and skills, mental and motivational state and sometimes physical abilities.
ENVIRONMENTAL COMPETENCE
Environmental competence is made up of all the things outside and surrounding the employee that affect how they do their job. It includes things like systems, processes, IT provision, tools, spare parts, organizational culture, management provision, support from colleagues and more.
It’s common to talk about the competence of an individual, but people seldom talk about the competence of the environment surrounding that individual to support them in what they are tasked with doing. A competent employee can be rendered incapable on the job if their environment conspires against them. Ask yourself: When an employee is unable to perform a task, is it their incompetence, or the incompetence of their environment that cause the lack of performance?
Consider your own experience; think back over the last month or two at your job. When you couldn’t do a task, was it you or your environment that was cause of the poor performance? Most people, when asked this question, say they knew what to do and wanted to do it, but couldn’t because of outside factors. In other words, it is more common for the environment to cause poor performance than lack of competence of the employee.
Of all the components of individual and environmental competence required for performance, the only ones directly affected by training are knowledge, skills and understanding. If, and only if, these are lacking will training be relevant, and then only as part of a holistic solution that addresses any other inhibitors to performance.
This is why a performance diagnostics process is essential to establish the relevancy of training and to give you an ‘audit trail’ to prove that relevancy to other stakeholders, especially the delegates and their managers. If you can’t prove that training is required with this process, don’t do training. You need to find another solution to the performance problem, and that solution is probably now much more obvious after the performance diagnostics process.
Mary, the manager who requested the training, should now see whether the initial desire for training was valid or whether this was wishful thinking that would not have solved the performance problem. Let’s assume that the diagnostics process did indeed confirm a need for better knowledge and skills and that training, amongst many other possible L&D interventions, looks like the best way to proceed. The next step is to establish the relevancy of the training to the target employees. You must ensure that the training is not only relevant – it must also be perceived as relevant to delegates so they see what is in it for them.
This means you now have a marketing exercise to convince the delegates, and any other important stakeholders, of the relevance of the proposed training. They all need to see that it is relevant to them personally, or they simply won’t invest much of their precious time and energy into engaging with your training, and even less into transferring what they see as irrelevant learning into action in their jobs.
This raises the concept of learning transfer. Relevance is one of many factors required to ensure learning transfer and thereby make training effective.
Returning to the first sentence of this article, “Think about it – if training is not seen as relevant by the learner, or their manager, how likely is it to change behavior?”
If you seek behavior change through training, your training must be relevant.
Think about it!
Paul Matthews is one of the leading learning and development experts, with three best-selling books. As well as being a sought-after speaker, Paul provides consultancy services, training workshops and webinars for blue-chip clients in the UK and beyond. Email Paul.
YOUR MENTOR IS WAITING
LEVERAGING TECHNOLOGY FOR KNOWLEDGE AND SKILLS SHARING
BY KAREN THARRINGTON, PH.D.
Mentoring in the workplace is a highly valued benefit. Mentoring not only provides employees with someone to go to for guidance or career planning, but it can also help them understand what goes on in other departments, can facilitate growth with decision-making or leadership skills, and can help improve a company’s overall feedback culture. Employees crave opportunities to learn and grow — but with shrinking learning and development (L&D) budgets, it’s becoming more challenging to offer expansive learning programs.
Many employees attribute some of their success to having a good mentor from the start. Knowing who to go to for help can be difficult, especially when employees are working remotely or in larger organizations with globally based employees. There may be external opportunities, but they can be expensive for someone who is just starting their career. While formal mentoring programs that are maintained by organizations are still popular, studies have also shown that informal mentoring can be more effective on career development (Underhill, 2005). Enter the idea of skillsharing as a complement to mentoring.
MENTORING VERSUS SKILL-SHARING
Mentoring is a professional relationship in which an experienced person (the mentor) supports another (the mentee) in developing specific skills and knowledge that will enhance the less experienced person’s professional and personal growth. While mentoring provides one-on-one opportunities to discuss various goals or skills, skill-sharing gets straight to what’s needed. Think of it as “mentoring on demand,” where employees can connect with someone who has the skill they are looking to develop. This hybrid approach gives employees a platform for knowledge and skill-sharing in hopes of connecting with experts who can assist with projects or professional goals.
LEVERAGING TECHNOLOGY
Mentoring may be critical to the success of junior employees, but there can be obstacles that make it more difficult to succeed, including time, follow-up meetings, clarity on the proper way to structure meetings or who is supposed to make contact first (Franko et.al, 2019). With the current number of remote workers, location is now an issue when considering mentoring relationships. Current technologies can bridge the gap of static relationships and take away the “guesswork” involved.
Employees engage with technology all day long, whether for work-related issues or in their personal lives. Everyone has their phone with them all the time and are used to dealing with software in the form of apps. By using a platform like those in which employees interact in their personal lives, we can leverage technology to drive engagement.
Using mobile applications with the mentoring process is not necessarily a new concept; there are several mentor apps available that work independently or alongside an in-house program. Many companies are finding that it is more cost-effective to use technology to complement in-house programs or even replace more traditional ones. In addition, connecting employees and mentors online opens opportunities for location-agnostic pairings. Whether through an app, an LMS or an organizational platform, technology can support the development of mentor/ mentee relationships at all levels.
- David Clutterbuck, Author, “Everyone Needs a Mentor”
WHAT TO LOOK FOR IN AN APP
The driving idea behind mentoring apps is that people can create profiles specifying their skills and talents and communicate with others informally through the app. There is no need to involve specific departments or talent specialists. Rather, allow employees to find each other based on their immediate needs, within, or outside of, the organization. Some of the apps are customized to work within a company’s established mentoring program. Many apps function similarly to a social connection app with landing dashboards, users’ names, photos, knowledge, skills, hourly fees and ratings. Users can often search for a specific skill to find a mentor or request to be matched based on similarities or goals. Some contain in-app systems for scheduling meetings or pushing info to mentors and mentees regularly.
Mentoring apps that envelop all communication, organization and data through the app are the most helpful. An additional feature might be rating systems like other share-economy apps, where both parties rate each other and provide optional reviews, which are only visible afterward.
When considering technology for mentoring programs, companies will want to ensure that the platform is easy, quick and relevant to employees. Apps that function easily and similarly to other apps they use regularly will engage them more than software that has a steep learning curve.
IMPACT
Retaining talent and knowledge/skill sharing is critical in today’s corporate workplace. Leveraging technology with mentor apps can help with creating a learning culture within a company and encourage cross-department collaboration, all of which can drive employee engagement. For L&D departments with shrinking budgets, out of the box apps might be one way to jumpstart a coaching or mentoring program. HR departments can also consider some of the more customizable products to launch a new mentorship program.
Whatever your L&D mentoring needs are, apps can revolutionize knowledge sharing and provide an easy launch to more formal mentoring. Opportunities for skill-sharing and mentoring are often noted as value-adds when employees are considering a job; mentor apps can promote collaboration and knowledge sharing solutions with “mentors on demand” who can quickly help employees solve a problem or learn a new skill quickly. Karen Tharrington, Ph.D., is a senior learning specialist at Kiwi.com, an online travel agency and tech company based in Brno, Czech Republic. With more than 20 years of experience in education and instructional design, Dr. Tharrington is responsible for leading curriculum development and train-thetrainer programs for the learning and development department. Email Karen.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
• Mentor apps: Leverage technology to reach employees.
• Skill-sharing: Use the expertise you have in the company for knowledge-sharing.
• Informal mentoring: Consider mentors on demand to help as needed.
• Usability: All-in-one app where everything is contained within the platform.
