In praise of intangible benefits
The place of frivolity, fun and fear in building connection.
Loyal listeners to The Mind Tools L&D Podcast or readers of The L&D Dispatch will know that I have long been a fan of remote working. I began my transition towards blissful isolation within a few months of joining Mind Tools, back in 2013.
Two days a week at home became three, became four, became five, and by 2016 my isolationist policies and ‘Make Ross Great Again’ slogans had led to the dramatic decision to move 150 miles north of the closest Mind Tools office: settling in the beautiful city of Inverness in the Highlands of Scotland.
North of the wall though I may have been, I never felt disconnected from the wider teams in Edinburgh and London. I wasn’t the only remote worker, but these geographic centres exerted a gravitational pool on our business: drawing talent from and to the surrounding areas.
The connections within and between teams were strong, and I made a deliberate point of ensuring my presence was known both digitally and physically throughout the business.
In practice, that meant copious use of Slack channels (I discovered once that I was the most prolific Slacker in the business, a discovery that will not have surprised my manager) and by visiting the Edinburgh office once a month.
Then Covid happened, and remote work went mainstream.
According to a 2022 briefing from the UK Parliament, just 12% of the UK workforce worked from home one day a week prior to 2020. By June of that year, 49% of UK workers worked one day a week from home. As restrictions lifted, that figure decreased again, but did not return to pre-pandemic lows.
At this point, Mind Tools had three offices across the UK and a team in Denver. But the pandemic had triggered a change in recruitment strategies. With everyone working from home most of the time, there seemed little point in recruiting near our offices anymore.
As folks left our regional bases, and were replaced by new hires from across the UK and US, the need to have three offices disappeared.
My individual remote working strategy up to 2019 (spam Slack to make sure that people remembered I existed) had to be expanded to encompass the entire company.
If you want people to connect with one another and build the kind of relationships that bond and grow a business, you have to be deliberate about it.
We’ve written before in this newsletter about how we maintain connections at Mind Tools. In fact, looking back, it was based on our team day in Leeds in 2023.
And so here I am, one year later, fresh from another Mind Tools team day in Leeds: living proof that two or three ideas and a dream is all you need to succeed as a learning designer.
But, more seriously, I want this year to celebrate the intangible benefits of mucking about together.
This year’s event, facilitated by our friends and partners at People Unboxed, had some discussion on our business plans and strategy. All of which were developed remotely, and will be implemented remotely. More on that in a later edition.
Instead, what I really wanted to acknowledge this week was the first day that the People Unboxed team ran: essentially a day-long ‘escape room’, complete with riddles, clues, padlocks, games and opportunities to perform.
It was exactly the kind of foolish fun that draws the ire of many in the L&D commentariat.
What was the business outcome of me discovering that our Account Director, Colin Howell, can craft a phenomenal paper airplane but can’t throw it under pressure?
What ROI did we observe in learning that Head of Marketing Robert Bell can find a loophole in any instruction?
How do we measure the value of my getting to know UX Designer Alex Miller, and then inviting myself along to her team meetings to find out how our product team organize themselves?
The truth is that, since the pandemic, my colleagues here at Mind Tools have become experts at organizing ourselves and communicating online. We really don’t need to get together in person to ‘work’.
But we do need to get together, at least a few days each year, to build the kind of connections that offer intangible benefits for the other 360+ days we spend apart.
Want to find out how we work together to solve workplace challenges? The best way is to work with us! Email custom@mindtools.com or reply to this newsletter from your inbox to schedule a chat.
🎧 On the podcast
Ever tried to build an organizational learning community? Spoiler: It’s really hard.
But guess what: Your organization already has one! Probably, it has many.
This was the key takeaway for me from last week’s Mind Tools L&D Podcast discussion with Andy Lancaster, author of the book Organizational Learning Communities.
In his book, Andy describes the many types of learning community that exist, and describes a model for nurturing, supporting and enhancing these.
Listen to the full episode for more! 👇🏽
You can subscribe to the podcast on iTunes, Spotify or the podcast page of our website. Want to share your thoughts? Get in touch @RossDickieMT, @RossGarnerMT or #MindToolsPodcast
📖 Deep dive
I’ve long been a fan of ‘customer education’ as a concept. The world’s leading tech companies, including Google and Meta, all offer courses on how to maximize the benefits of their products.
And, because development of these courses typically sits within - or adjacent to - the marketing department, they tend to have a real focus on impact and measurement.
That’s not just great for helping the companies assess the ROI of the training they provide: it’s also great for learning outcomes. Courses are designed specifically to target user needs, and users will abandon them if those needs aren’t being met.
Now a new report from Forrester, commissioned by our friends at Intellum, outlines how the customer education space has evolved and matured in the past five years.
Per the report, in-person workshops have been replaced with in-app guides and videos. Use of certification has become less common, but on-demand training modules have become more popular.
And the report outlines some of the benefits of a formalized customer education strategy: improving customer retention, increasing spend, and reducing costs.
But a word of warning: ad-hoc interventions are far less successful than a longer-term strategic approach.
It’s not covered by the report but, for longer-term skills development, that’s probably true of learning in general.
Full disclosure: Mind Tools are a content partner for Intellum. Check out their customer education platform online or speak to us if you need help developing content for your customer education strategy.
Intellum’s Lizzi Shaw joined us on The Mind Tools L&D Podcast in episode 365: ‘L&D lessons from customer education’.
Forrester Consulting, 2024. 'Drive Business Success Through Customer Education'
👹 Missing links
🧑🔬 Great Scott! The impact of meeting yourself
If you want to know how this drama called life is going to play out in the future, now you can. Researchers at MIT have created a chatbot that mimics an older version of yourself, complete with grey hair and whiskers. In the best case scenario, having a conversation with your older self is intended to help you make wiser choices in the present. As fans of Back to the Future know, the worst case scenario is that it ‘could create a time paradox, the results of which could cause a chain reaction that would unravel the very fabric of the space-time continuum and destroy the entire universe’.
🤖 The big winner of the robot wars: Anguilla
Remember when we all found out that the main benefactor of the .tv web suffix was the country of Tuvalu? By 2019, 8.4% of that government’s revenue came from royalities. Well, now it’s happened again. As companies across the world splash out on trendy new .ai domains, the big winner is the government of Anguilla. I’m still hoping the term ‘Unbelievable Killerbots’ will catch on and we here in the UK can finally cash in on our domain too.
🎮 Microsoft enters the Metaverse… Microsoftverse?
This week, my Mind Tools colleague-and-friend Tracey McDonald and I tried out the new ‘Immersive Spaces’ feature in Microsoft Teams. It looks unbelievably like the Horizon Workrooms experience we dabbled in previously, except that you have the option to control your avatar through your existing device if you don’t have an Oculus headset. It worked OK, and we returned to the video call after two minutes.
👋 And finally…
This video was sent to me by my colleague Gent Ahmetaj, with the caption ‘If LinkedIn was a person’. I confess, I couldn’t make it through the whole thing.
👍 Thanks!
Thanks for reading The L&D Dispatch from Mind Tools! Want help building better managers in your organization? Get in touch by emailing custom@mindtools.com.
Or just hit reply to this email!
Hey here’s a thing! If you’ve reached all the way to the end of this newsletter, then you must really love it!
Why not share that love by hitting the button below, or just forward it to a friend?