So this is what we’re going to be talking about today. And as we get started, I’d love for you to drop a number in the chat that describes how you are showing up today.

What’s it like for you today? What number describes how you feel? Drop it in the chat.

What’s our scale? Kati? One to five, but we’re feeling low at a one.

Oh, the image.

Yep.

Each image has a number.

So pick the number associated with the picture that describes how you’re showing up today.

Me personally, I think I’m a six today.

And yesterday was maybe more of a seven.

All right, looks like we’ve got five.

Okay, but then doubt love to see it. We’ve got some jumping. It’s okay if yours is a little less desirable today. All right, we got a three.

Thanks for being honest. Couple sevens in here.

I hear you feeling strong. Maybe a little overwhelmed, a little headache.

Okay, let’s collectively all just take a moment and arrive in this space.

Take a deep breath in.

Deep breath out. All right, we are here and however you show up is okay.

And my hope is that maybe throughout the course of our conversation, you can move to a box that feels a little bit more useful for you today, especially around learning and development.

Okay, so this is me. I’m Kati. Thank you, Kayla, for the intro. I’ve worked in learning and development for a very long time and I love working with startups.

Over 13 years with startups.

I like organizing the chaos with L& D. I worked mostly internally before about six years ago, actually seven now that I started APA. So thanks for being here with me.

And what I’d like for you to do right now is go to menti. com and type in this code. I’m also going to drop a link if that’s easier. And I want you to share what is one word that you would use to describe learning and development at your organization today. One word. See what we got. You can click on the link or you can drop in menti. com. Well, we got weak.

Okay.

Ineffective.

I hear you.

Meh. Okay.

Obligatory. Yep.

Non- existent.

Sufficient.

Okay.

This is a nice word cloud. In learning and development, we want to engage our audience. This is a tool you can use at your org, mentimeter. com.

It creates word clouds and words that are used more than once get bigger. Looks like a couple people have put weak in here.

And you can see in the bottom right, 10 people have submitted. So we’ve got 19 on.

So if we were in an L& D, like actual workshop, I’d say, Okay, guys, let’s keep going.

I want to get up to 19. So this is a tool that you can use. And you’ll see kind of throughout, we’ve designed this in a way to illustrate some best practices in L& D that you can take and borrow for your orgs.

Cool.

All right.

So I’m sensing a bit of underwhelm, in general, in terms of L& D and your orgs. And that’s okay.

That’s what we’re here to talk about today.

Okay.

Let me just get out of this and go back to this.

All right.

So let’s talk about why building an L& D program is important. And you probably already know it’s important.

It’s why you’re on the webinar. But the first thing is, it’s going to fuel your organization’s growth. It creates this culture of continuous learning, it protects the culture that you’re working so hard to create and build. And it retains the high performers. And this is a statistic from the 2024 LinkedIn Workplace Learning Report, which says 94% of workers say that they would stay at their company longer, if they felt they were being invested in, in their learning, in their career development.

And so today, we want to talk about how to do that.

And I saw some questions come in from you all, but I would like you to just start answering these in the chat.

We’ll review them together throughout the training. But any one of these questions you feel called to answer, like, what are you doing today?

Are you facilitating them internally?

Do you have a vendor?

Do you have a budget per employee?

Who’s eligible for benefits?

Is it nothing?

Just what’s the current state? Like, what are you guys doing at your organization? Just drops and things in the chat here.

All right, facilitating internally, sounds good.

Keep those coming, just anything about this.

Who uses L& D budgets if there are any? Do you reimburse folks, do you build internally?

Employee stipends, okay, yep, see that a lot. Reimburse, okay, so probably some type of approval process through managers and getting approved to go to workshops or certifications. LinkedIn Learning Membership, okay. Keep these coming in here, and if you see one in the chat that aligns with what you do, like it. I want you to like it with an emoji, okay? Great, let’s keep going here. So one of the questions that I saw in the questions that you submitted, and this was the most common question, was where do we even begin?

How do we even start on a learning and development program? And here’s a checklist for you. This checklist will work, and you can decide how much you wanna do on your own and how much you wanna involve someone to help. But the first thing you wanna always do in L& D is align with business goals. So what’s the company trying to do? What does the board care about? What do your investors care about? And then what you wanna do is conduct a needs analysis.

So asking questions of your leaders, of the employees, understanding through surveys as well as one- on- one interviews, what is the lay of the land? What is needed? And sometimes you might have an inclination as to what is needed, like I think we need leadership development. Okay, you can tailor your needs analysis to ask specifically about leadership development, for example. Really important that once you have this information that you put together, then a recommendation of sorts, okay? I like to call this a blueprint.

It’s a blueprint for a dream home. We haven’t built the dream home yet. Let’s get approval on the blueprint from our internal stakeholders to make sure this is going to accomplish what we need so we attain buy- in on that blueprint, okay? Now it’s time to build the dream home. We can hire an L& D person internally full- time to do that. We can do it ourselves, or we can outsource to a vendor or somebody else to do it for us.

Once we do that, that’s when we build and execute, then you measure success, which we’re gonna talk a lot about today, and then share results, gather feedback, modify, do it again, okay? So this is where you start. When you say where you start, take a screenshot of this if you want to. And then at startups, the common core offerings we see the most are these four with diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging kind of threading through all of them always. No surprise there. New hires, right? We are hiring a lot.

We just got funding and now we’re doubling in size. We need to put together a program for new hires to make sure that we are who we said we were through the whole recruiting process. The second core offering we see is around managers or leaders investing in our management staff. The third one is sales. Usually we wanna see a revenue uptick in an organization. And so sales training is often one that we’ll see early on at a startup. And the fourth one is general rollouts. So that means in our startups, change is the only constant.

We’re flying the plane as we’re, or what is it, building the plane as we’re flying it. And so as things change in our organization, we need to communicate about those changes. The product is changing. Who needs to know about that in the company? What does that look like? And so these are the four offerings we sometimes see. So I’m curious from you all, drop in the chat, which one of these, or you could come off mute even if that’s your thing, are you doing or aren’t you doing?

Any that seems surprising in here.

You can drop in the chat or come off mute.

Which ones are you or aren’t you doing?

Sarah, just started new hire training. Okay, amazing.

Literally this week.

It was the, oh, beautiful.

It’s our first ever training. Yeah, onboarding.

That’s incredible. I love that. And what was the impetus for you deciding to invest in developing a new hire program? Is your head count gone up this year or what was the focus for you on that?

Yeah, well, I just joined like six months ago and it was like, and our hiring plan is really aggressive. We doubled in 12 months and we have another, we’re about 173 right now. We have another 60 people to hire. And if you’re gonna manage your culture really well, you gotta get people at the beginning and set those expectations. So we’ve done a lot of work on defining our culture.

Beautiful. That makes a ton of sense. I hear that a lot. Thanks for sharing with everybody in the room. Then I see a couple other folks who chatted here, Jessica, Donna, and then, is it Bilal? Is that the correct way to pronounce your name?

That’s right.

Okay. Beautiful. Tell me about what you’ve got going on here. Looks like a lot.

Yeah.

I joined the company about two years ago. We were in a similar phase as Sarah, where we were tripling in size, a much smaller team at the time, so new hire training was a big one to ramp on the industry and also the products because it’s a couple of different offerings. That was a big one, setting them up with checklists and onboarding a history, a work grant, basically, instead of modules. Sales definitely needed some extra horsepower, so P- Club, for those who haven’t heard of it, is led by Chris Orloff, who was the guy behind Gong, Gong Success.

Epic platform took a lot of the burden off the team internally, and really set some good frameworks in the house behind sales. Then we have a lot of new leaders that as we’ve grown, we’ve had to hire internally or grow internally, and so exec. com was one that we were referred into, who has a lot of very seasoned leaders coming in, who are purely there for management training, not necessarily domain knowledge, but they’re going to be able to say, hey, how do you have this difficult conversation? How do you drive that?

So it’s just based on as we see the growth pains of the company or we’re proactively seeing them, we build training or we invest in vendors that can help us, who know how to do it better, right? So know what we’re good at, and know what we’re not to take the external help.

Yes. Thank you for sharing that. And I think that’s something that we’re often thinking about. I was internally, when I was working at a startup, when do we build and when do we buy? And do we reimburse? Do we hire a vendor? Do we have the resources to do it ourselves? And so we’ll talk a little bit more about that today as well. So I appreciate you bringing that up. Thank you. Okay. Let’s keep going. I love the chat. Keep dropping things in chat. If you’ve got ideas or things that you know that have been working for you or even questions.

So when we think about executing company owned training, which is a lot of times what we’re doing at a lean in our lean systems, right? These are kind of four things to consider. The first one is alignment. So making sure that whatever we’re rolling out within the business is in alignment and the managers and our company and leaders and executive team, all the way up, are on board with what we’re training. Because what we don’t want to do is invest a lot of time, money, resources into training.

And then for our people to be untrained and trained the right way. It is worth it to take time on the front end and align with everybody on that recommendation. And then you want to be thinking about a learning funnel. Learning funnel, start broad and get into what do you do now, okay? And so we can talk more about that if you’d like. But the third one is making sure that we’re tailoring that message. And this is part of the learning funnel, right?

So we might have general company updates, general things we’re telling people, but then what do you do in your role now? We need to make sure that in training, we are narrow casting to the audience, not broadcasting. So that’s extremely important. And then always gathering feedback. We’re looking for themes for feedback. So I usually like to say three or more of the same thing. We’ve got a theme, once as an accident, twice as a coincidence, three times. We’ve got ourselves a theme and we should probably do something about it.

So these are great ways to kind of think about your company owned trainings. And I’ll spend time on aligning with leaders and managers here because this is a common pitfall that I see. And so when you do align with your managers, it gets them on board. You give them a safe space to ask questions prior to a rollout of any kind. And so we wanna roll out to them first, provide them something that they can do to drive whatever it is we’re training on. This is new hire training too. This is sales training. This is even management training.

I know that sounds a little meta, but if we are training all of our managers, let’s make sure the leaders and executives and everybody else are also on board with what they’re learning and then conduct live follow- ups with them. And so here’s an example of a talking guide that we’ve created. This is an example of something that works really well. We made this for one of our clients and we did a workshop on having brave conversations. And so after the workshop, we gave them this and said, this is what you can take and do in your team meetings.

These are discussion topics you can have. And this is what you can do in your one- on- ones with your people. These are questions you can say, things you can ask to really drive it home. So be thinking about your learning initiatives as just that, an initiative, a program. What we do after training is more important than what we do during training. I’m gonna say that again. What we do after training is more important than what we do during training.

So we wanna think about learning and development as an initiative within our organization, not just a box to check. And so things like this, talking guides, resources, especially driving it through the management staff is the sweet spot to make that happen. I’m gonna pause because I’ve been talking for too long and see what questions do you have so far, thoughts, anything you disagree with I’ve shared so far before we keep going.

Katie, we did have a pre- submitted question. Where do you start with developing an L& D program, and how can you build a robust program without spending a lot of money? How can you do this when you don’t have a dedicated L& D person and bandwidth is limited on the people team?

Yes. I think I’ll drive us back to that first slide I shared, which was like where to start. And it needs to start with prioritizing based on business goal, business need. Where are you going this year? What’s the company trying to accomplish? And then thinking about how you can fill that business need with learning and development value. And in doing that, what you can also consider is doing that needs analysis, asking people what they want, how they will receive it, what would be useful for them, putting together a recommendation based on that.

And if you are on a shoestring budget, it’s always aligning with the overall goals. And I’m going to get to how to measure and different ways to do that on a shoestring budget in a couple of slides. So I’ll dog ear that part of the question if that’s OK. All right. I’m going to keep going for the sake of time because next up, we’re going to talk about budget, which is in line with this question. So let’s talk a little bit about budgets for L& D. It’s valuable to spend on learning and development as soon as possible.

We want to be as proactive as possible. We saw that statistic earlier from LinkedIn in the 2024 report. We want to increase employee retention. We want to invest in our high potential employees, make them stay. There’s a few different ways that companies allocate L& D budgets. You’ll see the one here on the slide that is oftentimes organizations will allocate a certain percentage of payroll costs. So let’s say that the startup’s average annual payroll per employee is $ 70, 000. They might allocate $ 700 to $ 2, 100 per person. This is just a range.

This depends on your company, your industry, your stage of growth, all of those things. But this is a way that a lot of organizations think about it. Some organizations also allocate a fixed dollar amount. I saw some of you mentioned in the chat earlier about a learning stipend. That exact same thing from a few hundred to a couple thousand dollars per employee. And that often is based on role, based on tenure, responsibilities, all of those things.

So sometimes somebody who’s in a technical or executive level leadership role might have a larger budget than somebody who’s in an entry level role. And sometimes you can unlock funds as you stay at the company longer. So these are all kind of a range of how we see companies allocate L& D budgets. And then another thing we hear a lot about is when to do it in- house and when to reimburse employees. And this is kind of a good rule of thumb for that. So if in- house and building it yourself is extremely valuable when it’s company critical knowledge, right?

Like you have to be a subject matter expert at your company in order to develop something. That makes sense that you would do it in- house. Onboarding orientation, actually facilitating that should mostly be someone internal, someone’s internal, I should say. Team building as well as any sensitive proprietary information, okay? As far as reimbursing goes, it’s when it’s specialized, right? We are sending somebody through agile scrum training for engineering. Like that’s something that we can send them to, there are tried and true ways to do that.

And you’ll see some other things here. I’m curious for those of you who mentioned stipend in the chat earlier, how are your employees using their stipends mostly? Is it for conferences? Is it for certifications? I saw LinkedIn learning, but what else? How are those being used today? Kyle, I saw you say stipends. Do you know how your folks are using those? Udemy, okay. Beautiful. Certifications, okay. And what about as far as building in- house programs? What type of programs are you building in- house? New hire training I saw.

Okay, Peggy, conferences for reimburse. That makes sense. Anything else?

I saw earlier that there was somebody who was using a couple of vendors, also another option for sure, build or buy kind of thing. Speaking of vendors, this is a checklist if you ever want to work with an L& D vendor. You’ll get access to this after, but this is something that’s extremely important, especially at the startup stage. We want to ensure that vendors are going to tailor the content for the culture that we are working so hard to build.

I remember when I was internal at a startup and I didn’t have budget to hire another L& D headcount for my team, but I had budget to hit the books with an expense, so I hired a vendor. I felt like I vetted them so strong and I learned the hard way that I was underwhelmed at the end of the day because they didn’t tailor it to the level that we needed it. It’s really important that you are working with vendors that will tailor the content for you that will include screenshots of your tools.

If you’re doing a giving great feedback training with your leaders, make sure the vendor is going to include screenshots of lattice or whatever tool you use to include the feedback, so it actually drives it at the end of that learning funnel.

I always say, if it’s not a heck yes, it’s a no. If you’re thinking about working with a vendor and you got a little like, I don’t know about this, it’s probably a no, keep looking because they should feel like an extension of your team and make your life easier. Make sure they’re tailoring and adding specific examples for your organization. When you get to the stage, when you’re ready to hire an L& D person, these are some of the responsibilities of that person.

They should be doing needs analyses, curriculum development, training facilitation, onboarding.

You can read the rest of these here, but it’s extremely important that when we’re bringing in our first L& D hire that they’re able to do, maybe not all of these things, but most of these things. When you’re thinking about that, you can maybe save this for later, now is not the time for your work.

I’m going to pause right here and see what questions do we have so far?

What questions, responses, disagreements with what’s been shared? I’m just curious how we’re doing so far.

Anything that is still weighing that you want to make sure I answer in the next 30 minutes because I’ve got a few more slides I want to cover on measurement. If measurements one, you want to hear it’s coming, but anything else you want to make sure we cover.

Katie, I can’t see the slides anymore. I don’t know if that’s just me though. I stopped sharing. Okay, got it. I thought you were referencing two of them. I just stopped sharing just now to see everybody’s faces if people were on video and see if there were any questions so far. Thanks, Peggy.

Going once, going twice?

Okay. How do we get folks to actually use the L& D programs we’ve provided? Great question. The key to doing this is, first you have to decide, are the programs mandatory or optional?

That’s based on your culture and based on the level of investment you’re making.

If you’re putting together a program and actually, let me ask a follow- up question.

When you say use, do you mean actually attending the program or actually doing what the program is trying to behavior- wise change in them after the program?

Literally both. Let’s start with actually logging into the platform. That’d be great.

It’s the classic training question. The big thing is we want to make sure that they understand what’s in it for me. The what’s in it for me component is what we need to be able to answer always in learning and development.

Why is this a good use of our time?

I think it’s every seven seconds we’re asking ourselves, is this a good use of our time?

We move fast.

Making sure that we share with our organization the why. Why are we investing in this? It’s because we listened to you.

In our surveys that we sent out, you said you wanted access to learning platforms.

Ninety- three percent of you said you wanted access to learning and development funds. We heard you. Here you go. Then driving it through the leadership function.

For example, leaders should be having career conversations with their employees.

at some stage, right? Sometimes in one- on- one, sometimes during performance reviews.

And so make sure that they know how they can pitch using the learning and development tools as well as the trainings, et cetera, to help align with career goals. So let’s say that I’m managing Peggy. Peggy reports into me at an organization and Peggy and I are talking about development over the course of the next year. And we identify an area that Peggy can really flex to grow. And Peggy wants to get to that next level.

And so what I’m able to do is then knowing from the people function or whoever’s in your organization, these are all the accesses that we have to different tools and different things. I could say, Peggy, I’d love for you to go look. I’m also gonna look at these things and let’s come up with a plan together on using these things to help you meet the goal you need on whatever it was we just discussed. So that’s a really good way to drive it.

I like the idea of using managers there. It’s like, we had the same thing. Everyone in engagement service said, we want you to invest more in growth and development. We have stipends, we get programs, no one’s touched. Well, not no one, but majority has not touched them, especially based on the responses we got. So reminding the managers in one- on- ones to constantly bring them up. I love that idea. Thank you.

Yeah, and then give some examples. Sometimes people don’t know what is even an option to use. So we work with an organization and we help them develop their new hire program. And part of the new hire program is talking about the stipend.

There’s a couple of slides about that. You have access now to this.

Here’s how you can use it. How do you think you might wanna use it? And they start to think about it as early as new hire, the new hire experience and how they might use it. And give them some examples, right?

You can go to certifications, conferences. You can hire a coach to work with you one- on- one. Like what are all the things they could do?

And then just make sure they have access to how to use it.

Make it easy for them. Sometimes people get a little stuck on, we don’t even know where to begin.

That’s awesome, thank you.

Let’s see, Jessica. Employees wanting more career progression internally, but while we’re in a phase of not growing much, we don’t have things like opportunities. Ooh, I love this question. Such a good question and so common. And so I think the key here is thinking about skills that an employee can develop at your organization, even before there is a role available for them, okay? It’s that whole assimilating into the skills and roles of where they wanna be before there’s even a role available.

Sometimes they might outgrow our organization through that process.

That’s not the goal necessarily, but the goal is people development, right? We wanna make sure that they feel developed in their career.

And so when we think about, for example, if there’s not a leadership role for somebody, but they eventually wanna be a people manager, they can start to flex skills as a leader now. You can be a leader without the title, right?

So what does that look like?

Maybe they wanna lead a team meeting once a month and you have them come and help lead the team meeting with you.

Just be thinking about what those skills are that they can begin to flex. And I’ve even talked to companies and employees before about let’s add bullet points to your career development.

What do we need to add to eventually get there?

Let’s look at a job description of where you eventually wanna go.

At our company, here are the things you’d need to be able to do. Let’s start practicing those now.

That can be a really great way to flex that. How to make sure you have the right tools and learning for more technical folks.

Definitely ask them, ask the department heads, ask the CTO, ask the head of, I’m gonna use engineering as an example, ask the head of engineering, ask the head of solutions engineering. Find out from them what they’ve done at other organizations. I used to work internally at a tech cybersecurity company. And when I started working there as an L& D professional, I didn’t understand cybersecurity, but I didn’t need to.

I needed to understand how to interview folks internally to uncover what their learning needs were and then map a recommendation based on that.

I never had to be a subject matter expert for the tech of cybersecurity and how to block bots on a website.

It’s not something I ever had to learn, but having access to the engineers and the heads of the organization, understanding where they wanted to go.

They were trying to work better as a team. They were trying to learn this new type of code.

They wanted to learn Ruby on Rails. Okay, let’s figure out ways to make that happen.

And so you can internally ask, and then you can start to vet based on what those needs are and competencies are. Hopefully that answers that.

Hopefully that answers that.

Okay, keep them coming. I’m gonna share my slides again because we’ve got a few more things. I wanna make sure we get to measurements. Are you able to see my screen? Yes?

Okay, beautiful.

I covered this just a touch, but this is about making sure that the content is relevant, okay? And when you have a lean team, and this is a question that’s come up a few times now, what does that look like?

80% foundational and 20% department specific is a great rule of thumb. You can’t make 100% tailored content for everyone. So let’s take a product rollout for an example.

We’ve got something that we’re fundamentally changing in how we go to market and the way the product works.

80% of the content on the product rollout training or information is probably gonna be the same.

Here’s what we’re doing.

Here’s why we’re doing it. Here’s the impact it’ll have on our customers. Here’s the impact it’ll have on you.

20% is now what do you do with that?

Sales, here’s what you say. Customer service, here’s how you explain to our current clients. Engineering, here’s the buttons you press behind the scenes. So 80% can be the same, but then that 20% tailorization is great because you can work with departments to do that and then measure how it works for each of them. So hopefully that’s helpful.

And we wanna make training fun and engaging.

Yes?

We did have a pre- submitted question. Someone asked when to provide more specialized training for departments. So you just mentioned the model for that. Is that something that people should be rolling out in the beginning or maybe at a certain milestone they start to follow that model?

Specialized training for specific departments.

Okay. Yeah, I think the example I used earlier was like around engineering and agile scrum training.

That’s when I see a lot in startups that they’re trying to facilitate some type of pods or product design, engineering, working better together, something like that.

So I think it’s all based once again on the need.

And if you’re a lean team, how do you prioritize what all the learning and development needs are in your company? And the good news is, is that for department specific stuff, like very technical types of training, you can usually find an organization that will train them. And so your role will be to vet with the head of the department, the right vendor, okay?

To help come in and do that. So I think it’s based on the need and how fast you’re growing.

As far as new hire training goes, going back to new hire training and department specific training, it’s still kind of 80, 20. So we are of the philosophy and what we’ve seen work really well with startups is have everyone at cross departmentally go through the same kind of 101 level, who we are, what we do, why we’re in the market, how we help our customers type training.

And then once again, what to do with that.

So engineering, you’ll go off and kind of your 201 department level specific training.

Sales, you’ll go in, what does it sound like? What are you gonna say? How to overcome objections, et cetera. So I think you can start at the new hire stage and working with department heads on designing that.

And then as the technical proficiencies in your company increase, you can align with those goals with the department heads.

Let me, I just wanna make sure I share about measuring success. And then we can, this is usually where folks have a lot of questions. So I wanna make sure the million dollar training question is how do we measure this, Katie? It sounds fluffy.

And I love that because it’s not.

So in learning and development, if you’re working with a vendor, make sure they’re gonna measure with you what the success looks like.

If you’re doing it internally, ask yourself these questions.

And there are some ways we can do this.

We can do pre and post training assessments.

So understanding the baseline of where the knowledge is today and then measuring a post training uptick in knowledge.

And you can ask leaders of the people, you can ask the actual learners as well.

We can be doing qualitative and quantitative measurements.

So in those surveys, we can ask them, what does this sound like?

What do you need? We can also get them to do a Likert scale. We can send a quiz before to understand that baseline of where they are. And then the other thing that we wanna do is be focused on learning outcomes. So this is something that I see a lot that organizations forget. They say, we need a training on this. And it’s like, okay, but what do we want that to accomplish? By the end of this training, what are the three things we want learners to be able to do? And make sure you spend time on that.

So learning outcomes should be extremely actionable.

Think resume words, right? Like by the end of this, you should be able to identify the three steps in doing blank.

By the end of this, we want employees to be able to recite the product update.

by the end of it, like what is it you want to make them do? And then you can design the training to do that and then measure that they’re able to do that during the training and after the training, okay? And then there’s some baseline KPIs that we see often in learning and development that are really healthy to measure and consider when you’re rolling out a program. I’ll give you a second to read some of these here. Mobility, culture surveys, 360s, ramp time.

And there’s a couple examples in here that I’ve given that you’ll have after about what that can look like per role. So here’s an example for engineering. How do we measure that a training has worked in engineering?

Well, let’s talk about the technical proficiency.

Are they able to do the things that they learned tech wise after the training program? Problem solving, are they able to assess and apply the knowledge and solve problems in new ways? What does that look like? Error reduction, are we able to decrease errors and defects and things like that? So these are ways that you can measure specific for engineering. And then here’s an example for sales.

So I think when we’re thinking about general company wide, they might be a bit more general, but then you get down to the departmental level, they should be really specific for what you wanna see from that function. And usually measuring has questions. So I’m gonna pause and see what questions do you have specifically around measurements?

Anything?

What are you doing today to measure?

I’m also curious about that. Is there something that you do? Does it make sense? Okay. Well, I’ll keep going then.

Oh, I saw a question here. Donna said, how do you help leaders understand that behavior change takes time? Ooh, that’s a great question. Let me think about that for a second.

I think anytime that we are working with leaders and we’re talking about behavior, depending on the behavior, if we can tell a story, that’s really helpful about changing behavior. I sometimes like to use kind of a silly example, which is everybody shake your hands, cross your hands, which thumb’s on top.

My left one goes on top naturally, okay?

Shake your hands. All right, now make your right one go on top.

Okay, that feels kind of weird, but I’m able to do it because you told me to.

Now shake your hands again. Now put your hands together.

Which one’s on top? Probably the one that you did the first time, right?

And so it’s because we are creatures of habit and we naturally resist change. And so it’s really important when we are thinking about human behavior that we acknowledge that. We are creatures of habit. That is a thing people say for a reason. And so in order to shift behavior and change behavior, the best way to go about that is to think about it as an initiative or a program and not just checking a box, right? So not just doing a training and saying, we’re done. We’re done here. We’ve done it. We trained them.

We’re good to go. It’s kind of a drip campaign.

Some founders and leaders will hear you if you apply it to kind of like a marketing funnel. Like if we’re trying to change our potential customer’s behavior, how many times do we have to hit them marketing wise? It’s the same kind of thing with learning and development. If we’re trying to sell internally to people to change behavior, it’s kind of a drip campaign. We’ve got to hit them a couple of different ways and from managers and give them tools and give them resources and help shift behavior like that.

So if you can tie it to general human behavior, sometimes that will resonate a bit more. Thank you for that, Donna.

That’s a great question.

And I just answered the question about ROI. What else? What other questions do we have right now?

Okay, I’m gonna just go through two more slides then.

So these are the three common pitfalls we see. So try to prevent these the best you can. One is lack of alignment.

We talked about that a lot today, right? Failing to align with the leadership function all the way down and aligning with the various roles.

Two is one size fits all. So we need to tailor to folks.

We do not wanna broadcast information. We wanna make sure we narrow cast it within reason, right? That 80- 20 role we’re focusing on. 80% can be the same, 20% must be tailored. And then the last one is inadequate evaluation. We wanna make sure we’re measuring the success of the program so that we know if it was a good use of time as well as money, resources, and what we can do differently in the future. Okay, so I’d like for you right now I’m gonna drop the mentee back in, and I’m curious what is something that you are gonna try?

What is one thing that you wanna do in your organization based on what we’ve talked today or maybe things people have shared in the chat? What do you wanna try?

Go ahead and link to the mentee.

One thing you wanna try in your organization for launching an L& D program.

I’ll give you a second to type it out.

And then if there are any remaining questions, you can go ahead and drop those in the chat. We’ve got about 10 minutes left.

So I wanna make sure we get to any of those.

Understand the learner’s needs better.

We love to see that.

Keep reminding managers on the L& D initiatives we have for them and how to drive usage.

Come up with KPIs, woo, love to see that. Get the managers more involved.

Ooh, whoever said get the managers more involved, how?

How do you plan to get the managers more involved?

I’m curious, you can either chat or, okay.

What else? We got four people who’ve submitted and there’s like 16 people on here. What are you gonna try? Beautiful, emphasize that 80- 20 rule to clarify roles and what’s needed. Align with the company goals, love that.

If you have OKRs or what are your leadership functions?

What are they presenting to the board? And how can you help? Turn the needle just a little bit with learning and development. All right, keep them coming here, love to see it.

And we are going to use storytelling to drive adoption. I love it.

I’ll download this and we can send this, maybe Mary and Catherine, can we send what people are recommending we do?

Okay, great, as a follow- up, love it. All right, so we have some great resources for you. We’ve got a guide from OneGuide and setting up an L& D program that is kind of a summation of this conversation. We’ve got one on designing your company’s new hire experience. If you are at the stage where you’re looking at an LMS, we’ve got an LMS selection guide.

And then there is a link down here to set up 30 minutes with me.

There is no pressure.

You do not have to wanna work with my company or me to set up 30 minutes, but you can just pick my brain.

What is going on at your startup? And how might we get something started that might help you?

Even if you’re on a shoestring budget and you’re building it internally.

So we’ll share all these things with you and you’re welcome to grab time.

And then we will open it up for any questions that you have.

And feel free to add me on LinkedIn or email or anything like that.

But what do we have?

What questions do we have?

Anything you were hoping to see in here that you didn’t?