Involvement in Standardization – The missing piece of your talent management jigsaw?

Learning and Development (L&D) teams are often intensely self-critical.

As a result, L&D orientated conferences can feel like group therapy sessions with never ending quests such as “proving impact” and considering if all the industry talk is just “emperor’s new clothes” (just two example sessions taken from this year’s Autumn Forum sessions which, unfortunately, clashed with other things for me).

Meanwhile, headlines on recent LinkedIn posts in my timeline have included “Are the scope of AI discussions in L&D too limited?” and RedThread have discussed “The Existential Crisis of L&D”. All of this while old arguments continue, sometimes seemingly over mere semantics – such as skills vs competencies, training vs learning, etc.

One issue many L&D teams have struggled with is how to deal with technical or senior experts and how to keep/develop these people in routes other than moves into leadership/management. Back in my L&D for consultants days, this was a particular issue as it was recognized there needed to be a route for people to develop in the firm whilst remaining a technical expert in, for example, Cyber security. This differed from the traditional broad>specialism>broad career path (or “I shaped career”) of the firm – and L&D often focused on the broad (via new hire/graduate/introduction materials and management development at the ‘top’). The Mind Tools podcast picking up on this theme recently, with some discussion of the classic issue that whilst someone may be good at a job they might not be good at managing others. This is another thing L&D then get criticised for – trying to develop “leadership and management” training that is only likely to have an impact if the individuals involved actually want to change their behaviour(s).

So what can/do we (L&D teams) have as options to support those who are best kept away from management (either due to their own desire, financial reasons to keep them as specialists, past failures as a manager, etc)? Well, one option many might have already taken is interest in professional organizations and associations. These organizations are often a great way to keep your current awareness up and may give opportunities for your technical staff to influence future generations, for example how CILIP had a role of working with universities on librarianship programmes when I came through for chartership and early career.

However, there is another option that I do not think I have ever really heard talked about in L&D discourse – standardization.

International Standards reflect the global consensus and distilled wisdom of many thousand technical experts – https://www.iec.ch/understanding-standards

The opportunity to contribute to national, regional or international standards will be of real interest to many of your experts as well as a benefit to your organization (not least keeping your experts aware of trends and changes).

Don’t give up

It is election day in the UK (July 4th 2024).

While I won’t get political here, there is one thing of interest to me in this election (that has not had a huge amount of coverage):

The boundary changes.

I really like my current MP but she will no longer be my MP after this election, not due to the vote but due to boundary changes. These changes resulting in my address being grouped in a different political geographic entity.

The changes in the boundaries for this election had been assessed as hugely benefitting the incumbent Conservative party. Instead we are seeing predictions of an opposition Labour landslide, perhaps even bigger than 1997.

So a lesson from this campaign can be seen as for us all not to give up on what we believe in.

The UK Centre-Left appears resurgent, when just a few years ago it risked terminal decline. With elections in France, the USA and elsewhere ongoing there is a lesson for the eventual losers – don’t give up.

Just some of the previous evaluations of the boundary changes that were expected to reinforce Conservative dominance:

Phygital workplaces

I have recently been thinking again about the nature of workplaces – this has been triggered, in part, by some staff survey results and related activity in the day job.

Discussing the topic with colleagues has brought me back to various previous activities over the last ~15 years whilst at the same time trying to be conscious that there are new(er) ways of tackling some of the issues too.

One of the more interesting reads I have found at the same time is a recent article (from Journal of Workplace Learning 36:9):

Digital environments as sites for informal workplace learning in knowledge work
the article is, at least for now, freely available via the above link.

This considers the workplace under study, in the research, as “phygital”. I probably have heard of phygital before without really acknowledging it, however, it seems to be primarily a marketing term so is perhaps not universally known? It also probably does not help that it’s not very easy to write/say until someone explains it is a portmanteau of physical and digital (as kindly demonstrated by this cricket team):

What I quite like in thinking about p/Phygital is that it represents that many knowledge/office workplaces are now hybrid daily. Gone are the days where my work from home days would be to plough through certain tasks – now its more the norm and you are expected to be available on Teams, email, etc. as needed. Therefore, as many orgs are now allowing people to spend more time at home how do we increase the digital workplace to create a more “joined up” experience with the physical office/workplace?

I would imagine the findings of the article will sound fairly familiar to many people:

Digital technology extended learning opportunities by providing flexible possibilities for interaction, collaboration and access to a wealth of information. On the contrary, digitally mediated presence could restrict learning if the attendance and learning remained superficial. The complexity and constant change in digital workplace environments presented challenges that could potentially restrict learning. Information overload, constant interruptions and changes were burdens that required employees’ skills to manage these challenges.

The “superficial” point is particularly interesting to me. I recently passed four years with my current organization and this time has flied by in many ways – covid, working from home a lot, a relatively pain-free commute when I do go to the office, relatively little travel for work (compared to some past roles) and other elements have perhaps all contributed to this. However, this has triggered me to consider if, even with all 4 years, this has led to a more superficial experience than previous roles. My conclusion on this is that whilst the work has not necessarily been as superficial the relationships perhaps are – however, I am also very conscious there is a risk of “rose tinted glasses” in reflecting on past experiences. For example, I can certainly say I was superficially involved in work in the past when, for example, I was forced into a regular commute by an office change that made me want to leave that job at the time.

Another key element, for me, from the article relates to the social:

social environments, where people interact, collaborate and relate to each other, are formed not only in physical but also in digital work environments

and I would say that this is an area that we hear a lot about. Enterprise Social Networks (ESNs) did not live up to the hype a while back, even the Wikipedia page focuses on lack of adoption. However, there remains the question of how to maintain social relationships virtually – the article identifies some important elements such as “informal meetings”. If we consider the success of, say, Twitch which has been compared to having people in your living room – does the Phygital workplace need a variety of social channels for different work, and non-work, related topics? Or, as the article puts it, “constantly open lines”. This trade-off between social engagement and not interrupting deep work seems to be the remained challenge for the Phygital environment.

It finally got me? Covid in the “new normal”

I’ve recently done one of the more elaborate work trips of my career (Geneva>Rome>Amman>Dubai>Doha>Geneva) for workshops and meetings in both Amman and Dubai. Whilst it was great to see Amman and Dubai and meet the people there, perhaps inevitably, I returned to a week of being sick. This at times has felt different to anything I have experienced before which leads to the question of “was it Covid?” From descriptions of the symptoms it would seem to likely have been hit with the latest variants (FLiRT). I must admit that I had probably been ignoring Covid news but whilst I have been ill there seems to have been quite a lot of coverage of FLiRT. The Financial Times, for example, expecting a surge this European Summer.

This leads to the question of if (work) travel is really worth the hassle. Airports remain busy and Ryanair and other airlines are bouncing back. However, considering that (as far as I know) I have not had any covid symptoms before this is reminder of the roulette being played by asking people to travel.

I seem to be on the mend but given my track record we will see.

Gender

Gender is one topic I have learned a lot about in the last year, but remain far from an expert in. This is obviously a controversial topic for some, due to politicisation and other issues, indeed the New Statesman podcast did a good job recently of covering the gender care report and what the implications may be for UK politics. However, given I recently spoke publicly about some of my work related to gender, I thought I would reflect here too.

Work in the last year or so

So what have I been doing:

  1. I was invited to help a group of experts on gender develop an elearning module on gender-related issues in my employer’s particular context. This included working with a number of very inspiring/informative subject matter experts.
  2. I have been involved in various gender related sessions such as webinars.
  3. Recently I was asked to replace a colleague at a UN event that covered gender topics.
  4. Updating the online learning from point 1 to be future ready.

A big issue for me?

Well, I would say, in part, that I have been fairly oblivious to some issues in this space. Perhaps due to my background, including working for/with lots of great female leaders and team mates, I have not experienced some of the issues. Therefore, I can appreciate I have been “gender blind” to some of the experiences of others. This is, of course, at the same time as knowing that there would be other industries than my own where traditional gender balance has led to reduced opportunities, sexism (in both directions), etc.

One route to consider gender is part of wider DEI, indeed perhaps gender has fallen down the order of importance for some groups given wider DEI issues (I would say this is the case in the world of L&D where talent/learning teams have often had DEI responsibilities added to their roles), climate change, supply chain crisis and other issues.

Another recent find that got me thinking was this video from Mattel (albeit it is 5 years old):

Now this is very powerful and it’s clever from a marketing perspective considering Barbie toys would have been seen as the ultimate “girly” toy when I was a kid.

Role models

The message of needing to see role models is an interesting one. As with most topics, we comprehend via the lens of our existing knowledge. My personal take on this, therefore, is that identifying role models undoubtedly does play a part in childhood. In my case, just as I was being bullied as a teenager (for me the “othering” was being ginger) Chris Evans burst into stardom and through the Big Breakfast, TFI Friday, “Ginger Media Group”, etc. will have (unconsciously – as I wasn’t that self-aware) undoubtedly had an impact on me in thinking that there was no barrier to red-heads being successful. Indeed, reflecting on this now, you could argue the likes of Karen Gillan have really pushed it to another level and I would hope ginger kids today have a much easier time. Should only a ginger call another ginger ginger?

Data over personal experience

A lot of the above is really limited to personal experience and perhaps it is an issue/topic so rife for anecdote that gender becomes difficult to treat as seriously as it should be. Therefore it is interesting to consider that the World Economic Forum estimated it would take 99.5 years to close the gender gap in 2019. By 2023, the time to achieve gender equality had risen to 131 years. How robust these numbers are is surely debatable but the UN’s view that there is “backsliding” on gender is something for everyone to consider.

Conclusion

Anyway, lots to think about, lots to keep improving in my own practice, lots to keep learning and, dear readers, do feel free to help me with that.

The conclusion of some of the work I have assisted with is below which, you would hope, not many people would disagree with:

What is to be avoided is gender blindness, which is the failure to consider the implications of the physical and/or social differences between gender.