In today’s disruptive marketplace, change is inevitable. Successful businesses must become more agile and prepared than ever before. Your organization’s leaders are a vital piece of this process. Leaders promote collaboration, innovation, and communication not just with your customers but while working with your internal teams. This is why many organizations are focusing on leadership development this year.
Infopro Learning has more than 25 years of experience designing corporate training solutions that get results. We recently assisted a global construction and engineering organization by developing an eLearning program to help their leaders learn new practical change management skills. This blog post shares the three critical components in this program that led to success.
Solution Highlights
Infopro Learning designed a two-day virtual workshop to help this leading construction company train and update management. The leadership teams were working from several different locations around the globe. A blended online program was the most suitable form of training delivery.
The leadership training program consisted of three major components. A flipped classroom strategy was utilized to optimize the time employees spent in training. An interactive workbook was designed to function as pre-work for learners and guide them through the entire learning process. A series of virtual instructor-led learning activities were also created to promote social learning and increase knowledge retention.
A Flipped Classroom Strategy
The creation of this leadership program started with strategic planning. The leadership development program was designed, to begin with, assigned pre-work before the formal instruction sessions began. This helped each participant gain a basic understanding of the topics and information that would be discussed beforehand.
The pre-work was designed to build context around each leadership skill and topic. Starting the learning and development process with pre-assigned work gives learners an opportunity to think about the learning materials ahead of time. This way, the instructor-led leadership courses could include a deeper dive of content and be used for discussions.
Designing the eLearning program this way optimized the time that was used for training and promoted deeper learning and understanding.
The Interactive Workbook
The interactive workbook was designed to serve as a resource for learners that they could access and use throughout their entire learning journey. The online workbook could be downloaded in a PDF format so that learners could print out materials and have a hard copy on hand. The online version was used as pre-work for the program. It also provided a section on the next steps and could be used as a planning tool after the leadership program was completed.
The entire program was about change management and was created to help leaders understand the recent changes the organization had made. The program consisted of several courses that helped leaders develop new skills. It also was designed to help learners better understand their leadership roles and how they relate to change.
The workbook incorporated a blend of different activities to build context around each topic and to increase learner engagement. Modern visuals and designs were used to create appealing imagery such as infographics. Short videos were integrated into the program.
Scenario-based activities helped learners practice new skills and learn how they could be applied in the real world. The workbook also had many sections that included reflection activities where learners could take notes and share their thoughts.
Virtual Instructor-Led Sessions
The two-day virtual program included several instructor-led sessions that went over each topic in more detail. The virtual sessions are built upon the materials in the interactive workbook. This portion of the program included social learning activities and discussions to further aid the learning process. Each session was designed to focus on helping the learners to develop effective leadership skills that would help them as facilitators of change.
The most successful VILT sessions are interactive and often use pre-work as a way to create a common starting point for learners. Using this strategy allows instructors to focus their time on social learning activities and hold discussions that will build a deeper understanding of each topic.
Solution Results
The professional development programs for leaders substantially reduced resistance to change. The two-day workshop successfully equipped the leaders with the skills and knowledge they needed to successfully facilitate the recent changes the organization had made.
No incidents of resistance were reported. 60% of employees were early adopters of the new programs and software that were put into place. 40% of employees actively practiced the change management skills from the program.
Learn more about how we used eLearning to deliver this successful leadership development program. Read the case study Leadership Training for Change Management.
