Henry Ford is reputed to have said, “Any customer can have a car painted any color that he wants so long as it is black..” Ford was speaking to the advent of standardized mass production, which enabled massive efficiencies but, as he implied, also massively limited personalization.
No doubt about it, standardization does enable great efficiencies. And there are other benefits of brand consistency and transportable skill sets to be realized when, for example, global companies centrally design and distribute leadership training. But at the same time, local sites and divisions have location-specific workplace cultures, customs, organizational characteristics (e.g., unions), performance priorities and other talent development needs that the one-size central design solution does not respond to very well. For good reasons, these local sites and divisions often recoil from what looks to them to be corporate force-feeding. The result: A program that yields significant business impact in one global arena may yield very little in another.
There is a concomitant reality, as well, that budget and expenditure constraints prohibit each local venue of a broadly dispersed global organization from having their own learning and development function. Thus, the dilemma: how to harvest the standardization and efficiency benefits of centrally designed talent development programming while at the same time nourishing local personalization that ensures equally significant business value and impact everywhere.
Our answer to this is a new hybrid definition. To most, the term “hybrid learning” means programming that is live and in-person for some learners and attended virtually, from a distance by others. This is a serviceable concept for these times of COVID-avoidance confinement. But in our view it is a necessary but pallid compromise, not a new horizon for achieving business results from training investments.
We propose that the proliferation of digital learning transfer platforms (also known as learning experience platforms or LXPs) offers the opportunity for a new and impact-enhancing hybrid: Learning programs that are at the same time standardized and personalized.
Consider this example of a global company that operates manufacturing facilities in several dozen different countries. Each shift is supervised by a shop floor manager. The shop floor manager is an entry-level manager position, the lowest in the company’s vast hierarchy of management talent.
Training for these shop floor managers is necessary for two principal reasons: to build the capability to supervise effectively, ensuring shift operating efficiency and quality and to prepare a pool of managerial talent for succession into other local sites, countries, divisions and global positions. Note that this first purpose requires as much local personalization as possible; the second purpose calls for as much standardization as possible.
Now consider some of the complicating factors about differences between sites that call for as much personalization as possible: different time zones, languages, traditions and customs regarding manager-employee interactions; different shift configurations and schedules; different levels of L&D staffing from several staff to only a single part-time responsibility; some are union, others not.
Finally, consider that a program to get entry-level first-time managers up to sufficient performance ability levels would need to be relatively robust, including new knowledge development, skill practice, feedback and coaching.
Before the advent of LXPs, there were really only four basic strategies available, all of them flawed:
- Bring the new managers into corporate headquarters for several weeks of comprehensive training. This is highly expensive, involves intrusive on-site operations and is hard to manage timing-wise, and adequate transfer is unlikely due to the event-based, “drinking-from-the-fire-hydrant” program design.
- Send a global team of trainers all around the world to deliver this same program. This is equally if not more expensive than option 1 and equally unlikely to achieve adequate transfer; the one-size-fits-all approach neglects local site needs and constraints.
- Design the program centrally, ship it out globally and hire enough local L&D people to deliver it. This strategy is certainly more cost effective than approaches 1 and 2, but it is difficult to monitor quality and consistency of messaging and it places a heavy budget burden on small local sites with limited staffing constraints.
- Rely on each site to come up with their own solution. This is probably the best of the four choices, but it is sorely lacking on the standardization dimension for creating a consistent talent pool, and program quality assurances are unknown.
A full-fledged LXP, on the other hand, is capable of taking the best elements of the four bad choices above and assembling them into an elegant solution, an approach that takes the advantages of a standardized program and blends them together — site by site — into a locally personalized hybrid.
Imagine the program design as the creation of a set of building blocks (think LEGO) that can be assembled in a variety of configurations, with each configuration personalized to the interests, needs and constraints of that local site.
Such a program in the context of our example of the global manufacturing company training its shop floor managers might have the following elements, all created with the expertise of a centralized corporate L&D function:
- Classroom-style presentations on video with breakout room discussion options embedded for local facilitation.
- Facilitator’s guides (translated into local languages) for leading the classroom breakouts.
- Coaching tools and resources for managers to conduct one-on-ones.
- A library of brief videos of good (and bad) examples of managers interacting with direct reports with second-language subtitles.
- Guidelines for facilitating periodic virtual check-in meetings (schedules weekly, bi-weekly, etc. to be decided locally).
- Assignments, with associated resources, for learners to complete by requesting coaching sessions with their manager.
The specific timing and sequence of each of these elements can then be customized at the local site, where they will be uploaded into the digital learning transfer platform. One site, for example, may choose to assign participants to attend the live synchronous session; another site, where time zone differences are more awkward, can choose to schedule the recorded version of the synchronous sessions and facilitate its own live breakout sessions in its native language. Each site can schedule its own check-in peer-to-peer sessions using a local facilitator and employing the facilitator guides provided in the overall package.
The expertly designed elements address standardization needs. These standardization needs are further addressed when each site is provided with a set of guiding principles that will assure quality and optimal impact. For example, the configuration chosen by each site must:
- Include skill practice opportunities in a setting where errors can be safely tolerated.
- Include ample feedback in practice sessions.
- Provide participants sufficient off-duty time for participation.
- Provide facilitated peer-to-peer sessions.
- Require participants to provide reflection reports at check-in sessions.
- Provide manager coaching opportunities at least every two weeks, ideally weekly.
Sites can be empowered to configure the elements to meet their own local needs, staffing constraints, time zone issues and so forth, as long as they adequately address and stay within the confines of the mandated guiding principles. Once these elements and manager and learner assignments are uploaded into the learning transfer platform, facilitation and delivery become largely automated, vastly simplifying the program execution workload.
Robust and thorough evaluation and monitoring need to be employed, both at each site and centrally. Distal sites should be required to monitor and evaluate their local implementations, providing feedback to a local oversight group that can make immediate decisions and recommendations to enhance engagement and impact. Local site data can be readily aggregated and reported at the central level, as well, to make changes that would benefit any and all local sites. And these central reports enable a level of accountability and oversight to satisfy program owners and other stakeholders. Digital LXPs provide bountiful and real-time data and reports on all key success dimensions, including assignment completion, individual and group progress, manager engagement, and other program execution and outcomes. These reports are readily available at the click of a mouse, so problems and opportunities for enhancement can be quickly spotted and acted on.
L&D leaders thinking about employing this standardization/personalization hybrid model are advised as well to consider the core principles of mass customization, as we wrote about in our September 2020 article, “Personalizing performance, not learning: lessons from mass customization.” Mass customization concepts provide ready guidance for thinking about how “one-size-fits-all” standardized centrally produced program elements can be personalized by users. The primary mass customization principle that our new hybrid concept employs is this prescription: Provide personalization options at the latest possible point in the supply chain (i.e., at the local user point versus region, division or country level).
In closing, we advise L&D leaders to not fret unnecessarily over the risk that standardization needs will be undermined by adopting the standardization/personalization hybrid approach. The reality is that all learning is to some extent “hybrid.” Consider that even in the most standardized mode of a professor’s lecture to a mass audience, each individual tunes in and tunes out, digs in to some bits of content and bypasses others, creating as many hybrid learning bits as there are participants. The digital learning platform optimizes this reality, allowing standardized program elements to be configured into a learning journey that accommodates as many of the site-specific and participant-specific variations as possible.
