From random acts to results - a way to think about workplace education

The world has changed. The way we communicate and connect with each other, the way we run our lives.  

It's all changed.  

Consumers and buyers today have higher expectations and more power. And this has an impact on your job and the business you work for.  

To survive, your company must change.  

That means the way we work together must also change.  

Companies today are focused on delighting customers by making the buying experience enjoyable. It’s the only way to sustain growth. HR, training, and talent leaders need new ways to enable this vision for sustainable growth and to help people succeed in this changing world.  

The tectonic shifts in business over the last decade required leaders in every function to ask ‘Why do we have a job? How can we be instrumental in helping our people succeed?’. 

To start thinking about a new model, first look at what the world of work is like for your people. Employees are more confused and overwhelmed today than ever. 

The antidote to the chaos is a modernized, architected approach to workplace learning. 

To bridge the gap between businesses and their customers, people must be empowered and enabled to fully play their role. But the enablement of people doesn’t happen by creating a training program which somehow magically changes their behavior.  

Learning how to be successful in anew or changing environment is a journey. Even if people are hired for their skills and experience, it remains a journey of change over time, and does not deliver an immediate change in behavior or ability.  

Many leaders make the assumption that people can be hired specifically to fit into a changing environment, then point to the dearth of good talent as the reason why change isn’t happening. When the problem is viewed as a foregone conclusion, it can become self-fulfilling. 

But what if it were possible to meet people where they are, enabling them to become productive, satisfied, and successful in the goal of delighting customers?  

What if organizations could tap into people’s innate desire for success, and instead of inundating them with too much information and noise, help them focus on the things needed to make an impact in this new world of work? 

While it is true that people may need specific sets of skills and experiences to perform in their role (for example, one wouldn’t expect to transform a social worker into a seller for investment banking products) organizations are overlooking the opportunity to leverage what is often referred to publicly as their most important asset: people.  

Standing in the way of that opportunity are the random acts, information overload, and organizational noise. If there were a way to corral those random acts, organize them into a repeatable, scalable method, and create traceability to business results, the workplace would be very different indeed, and customers would show their support with their wallets. 

At Oxygen, we push back against these random acts by using a role-based learning approach with three core pillars.

The learning experience is… 

1. Architected based on a business outcome, the customer’s experience, and the future-state profile of a role. 

2. Experiential and sequenced based on how people learn. 

3. Consistently and traceably measured to an agreed-upon standard. 

Like you (we’re guessing),we constantly encounter organizational resistance to changing how learning is created: with conventional wisdom, blind faith in established practices, and a fear that looking at work from afresh perspective will put one’s job at risk. From the perspective of learning, these are old ways of working.  

Imagine… 

What if you could change how people within your company work and engage with customers?  

What if you could adapt and become more agile?  

What if you could let go of the things that are weighing you down?  

Letting go of old ways of thinking to give way to new ways of working.  

Letting go of “best practices” to give way to new ideas. 

We believe in embracing the new way. And we want to continue investigating what that means for you and your organization.  

How will you help people and companies grow in this new world of work?  

What will you do to take your organization from random acts to results? 

Learn more about our approach in the video below.