Royal Mail is reaping the benefits of a dedicated digital learning team after just six months
At a time when many L&D departments are facing ever-tighter budgets, it’s refreshing to find an organisation that is taking the plunge to invest in a new team. Royal Mail’s digital learning group was only established in June, but head of digital learning Emma Barrow is already shaking up the company’s attitudes to technology.
“The organisation made quite a bold decision to put this team in, but we need to learn more quickly, become more agile and be more aware of what’s going on digitally,” says Barrow. “Many of our 140,000 employees have been at Royal Mail for a long time, and aren’t really aware of the latest digital developments and how they might affect our customers over the next 10 years or so.”
Barrow’s team of six have already made significant progress in reviewing the organisation’s suite of e-learning content and introducing more opportunities for peer-to-peer learning through collaborative social platforms. “We’ve had to be really clever about leveraging our limited resources,” says Barrow, who joined Royal Mail in 2009 on its graduate scheme. “Unusually for a big organisation like ours, we sought out new, fresh-faced suppliers that would give us great-value content because they’re looking to experiment with their products.”
The L&D team is experimenting too, by running small-scale pilots before rolling out full-blown online learning courses. “We seek out opportunities for small experiments, and if they don’t go well – that’s fine. If they do, brilliant: we can then build a full business case with the weight of a successful trial behind us,” says Barrow.
One of the team’s first successes was the creation of a video learning module on dealing with difficult conversations, taken from concept to finished product in just 12 weeks with assistance from e-learning specialist Sponge. “A lot of people said they needed help with different types of difficult conversations: about absence, performance and conduct, for example,” Barrow explains. “In the past we would have been tempted to solve all of those separately, but we really needed to tackle the underlying problem.”
By taking ownership of the challenge, and creating the video learning “for themselves”, the L&D team developed a solution that was applicable across the organisation. And, says Barrow, “the reception was very good. We’ve had around 500 people complete it since it launched in late August. That’s about 5 per cent of our target audience of 10,000 managers, which is a huge achievement for us.”
Barrow’s goals for the next 12 months include getting a better understanding of employees’ digital skills – “most of our staff aren’t millenials, and there are a lot of myths about their digital abilities” – as well as making further progress with Royal Mail’s social learning platform.
“I want to leverage that hive mind and connect people with the colleagues who can answer their questions without the need for formal learning,” she says. “If someone asks me to spend money on teaching staff about Microsoft Office – something transactional and technical – why should I do that when at least 1 per cent of our people are experts in it?”