3 ways to get your people excited about a new learning platform

James Mcilvena, LHH’s managing director for Australia and New Zealand, was interviewed by HR Leader’s editor, Shandel McAuliffe, for Career and talent mobility simplified, a recent webcast in partnership with LHH.. The podcast discussion which followed (in partnership with LHH) examined measuring the success of talent mobility work.

Ms McAuliffe posed to Mr Mcilvena: “We’ve talked a little bit about engagement and how to get people on side. So, how do we get people to properly engage with things like learning platforms and change management? How do we get people on board when they’re tired and they’re busy and everyone’s talking about feeling burnt out after the last couple of years?”

Mr Mcilvena provided listeners with three key things to keep in mind: repetition, explanation, and insights.

He said: “How do you get support internally? I’ll start with saying repetition is king on this stuff, and whether you subscribe to the: ‘You need to tell people three times for it to sink in, or seven times for it to sink in’, or anywhere along that scale, the one thing that is absolutely critical with any of this is you need to actually repeat the message.”

“It is not enough to purchase or invest in something, run a launch party, send an intro email and kick back and just hope this thing takes off. It requires not just follow up messages to remind people that this is a benefit, an investment that’s made for their betterment, for their career management, their career mobility. So the message is a really easy one to send. It’s not a risky or divisive message in any way, shape or form. It’s like this is an investment we’re making in you because we care about you, and we want you to stay and grow with our business.”

To create the right comms plan around this, Mr Mcilvena put forward: “If you’ve got successful employee referral programs, what made that successful? Think about how you messaged those programs that really take-off and have traction with employees and make your career management/career mobility strategy borrow from some of those themes.”

Mr Mcilvena also suggested that businesses need to be crystal clear about their “why”. He stated: “The why. Why did we make this investment in the first place? Why have we gone to the effort to set this up? Why do we want you to do it? And we talked about in the webinar this concept of being very, very clear with the signposting of what skills the organisation expects to need more of, what skills the organisation is going to value when it comes to longevity of employment, and potential promotion. So being clear about a few of those things when it comes to the why, and then the consistency of messages.”

The last idea Mr Mcilvena shared to get people engaged with learning platforms etc was around insight. He said: “Track if you’re investing in anything and asking people to get involved. Who’s using it? How many times are they logging in? Are there patches of absolute evangelists versus patches of people where no one’s logged in? And if so, can you get some amazing stories about how it’s been beneficial for the evangelists? And then for the areas where no one’s logging in, is there a blockage there?”

The transcript of this podcast episode was slightly edited for publishing purposes. To listen to the full podcast conversation with James Mcilvena, click below: