As we round off our three-part series on skills for workforce resilience, this final article focuses on tips and techniques that have been shown to generate results and influence behaviour change.

If you missed the previous article on skills for workforce resilience, find it here.

Learn more about workforce skilling in our interview with Ali Sharif, Learning Consultant, Sponge Group.

How can learning leaders support workforce resilience?

Learning has a clear role to play in the development of skills, and formal and informal methods in concert generate better results.

Deploying skills content.

When it comes to implementing skills, we’ve found that a range of techniques work, built around the principles of speed, access, and practice. These include:

Providing bitesize content at-the-moment-of-need, via desktop or mobile apps.
Deploying content playlists that tie into the circadian rhythm of an organisation (coaching season, performance reviews, pay reviews).
Creating moments for collaborative virtual learning in a social environment, via team ‘cinema viewing’ area within courses.
Making sure content is easily integrated into any platform and mobile optimised for ease of access.
Launching skills initiatives with marketing assets like posters, playing cards, or learning journey maps to promote course uptake.

Behaviour change with impact.

Ultimately, organisations are looking to generate behavioural or cultural change, whether that’s embedding digital transformation, reducing compliance-related risks, or generating connection through an onboarding process.

The aim of these nudges is to enact real behavioural change and we’ve seen these techniques work.

By using a combination of formal and informal learning and point-of-need resources, we’ve seen levels of content retention double, and desired behaviours improve by 10-20%.

Tough champions of the softer stuff.

Soft skills are critical for employees to contribute meaningfully to business goals. Upskilling people to take personal responsibility and make time in their day for appropriate decision-making is a leading quality, especially in times of upheaval.

The COVID-19 pandemic has created unprecedented shifts in the workplace, and things aren’t going back to how they used to be. Embrace that and invest in implementing soft skills like communicating a vision, growing emotional awareness, building trust remotely, being influential without authority, and communicating with empathy to amplify workforce resilience.