How to Use a Digital Tool to Support Upskilling

Transcript

Lachy Gray  00:00

In season four of market work, we're focusing on upskilling. We've looked at upskilling broadly through global trends, and what skills will be needed in the coming years, and specifically at various points in an organization's lifecycle such as hiring and leadership remote teams. And in today's episode, we're looking at how to use a digital tool to support upskilling. Before I introduce our guest, I reminder that we have a free bonus for our podcast listeners, just head over and check it out at our link tree link ter dot e forward slash make it work podcast. So today's guest is Mark Eggers, co founder and head of sales at Yano, a team based gamified learning platform that embeds information to improve your team's performance in a fun and engaging way. Welcome, Mark.

Mark Eggers Thanks for having me on.

Lachy Gray  00:52

And full disclosure, I'm the other co founder. We're all clear. So, Mark, could you start by giving us a quick elevator pitch for ya know, just to give our listeners an understanding of what Yano is, and the customers that you serve?

01:09

Mark Eggers Sure, I thought you did a pretty good job. As you said, Yarno, we're a team based gamified learning platform. So we have a team versus Team format, which encourages high completion rates and therefore changes behaviour.

Karen Kirton  01:24

Mark, I find that when organisations think about digital learning, you know, they look at online learning courses, or they look at an in house LMS. And you know, what you're talking about is obviously quite different. But you know, where do you think is the value in that kind of learning that traditional, I guess, online learning course, or LMS? And what are the limitations of that?

01:47

Mark Eggers Yeah, it's a great question. I think the volume of content out there is the biggest challenge. And in modern learning, we've got, I think, 24 minutes a week on average for learning. So don't expect someone to sift through a huge catalogue of material and choose what's right for them is a big ask. And the way we ingest media these days is changed as well. We're indoor scroll culture, where you've got five to 10 seconds to capture someone's attention and to expect them to sit through a click Next module with 30 slides and then do a usually poorly written quiz at the end is, is getting less and less appealing for the learners. So I think the the biggest limitation is is the size and length of those types of types of courses. And the relevance to the learners job.

Karen Kirton  02:37

Where does the 24 minutes come from out of interest?

02:39

that's a Bersin Deloitte, I thought it was a Bersin stat. I'm not sure if it was when he was still at Deloitte or whether it was post but that was one of the studies they did.

Karen Kirton  02:50

I feel like I would like 24 minutes.

Lachy Gray  02:57

And how can a digital tool such as Yano be used to support upskilling?

03:03

I mean, for us, it's all about looking at ways to embed and reinforce information. You know, when we first started, the tool was you know, we, we looked at these large libraries of courses and said, Well, how many key takeaways would you be actually happy with if you were to say, as a learner or as one of your team members? What would you like them to take away from this course? And usually, it's around four or five key bits of information. So I thought, why don't we just distil that down into, you know, short and sharp, bite sized learning chunks and deliver it that way and sort of cut through the noise? I think Tim Ferriss said in one of his podcasts or books around, you know, most business books are four or five key points wrapped up with a lot of pages. But yeah, essentially, I always felt that that quote from Tim Ferriss was was relevant to the learning world as well, because it seems like you're the longer the course. And especially in those marketplace models where you've got other people writing the content and putting it onto a marketplace for purchase, which, you know, a lot of those big LMS platforms have been, you know, length is often seen as value.

Karen Kirton  04:13

I guess if you look at things like blinkers where they take, you know, an entire book and just give you small points, and that seems to be more and more popular. These days. It still feels like cheating to me, but but I guess it makes sense if you don't have time to read an entire book, but you just want to get the gist of it, really, isn't it?

04:34

And funnily enough, they've just been bought by one of the largest LMS platforms, so value in that.

Karen Kirton  04:43

And, you know, you would have spoken to a lot of different business leaders and l&d people in your career about the value of upskilling. So what do you think is the biggest barrier for organisations to start an upskilling programme?

Mark Eggers 04:58

Oh, gosh, okay. How long is this podcast?

Karen Kirton  05:03

Try and keep it to five minutes.

Mark Eggers 05:06

I think for me, the top one there is, I think senior leader and board buying. I think from a strategy perspective, the ones that do it the best the companies that really excel in this have drive from either the board or the senior leadership team to make learning fundamentally part of, of their business model. And then everything rolls down quite quickly from there. Usually it's not the case and we're fighting the other way, we're going from the l&d Manager up, and a lot of layers in between. We're just talking before we started about some of the challenges we have in getting Yano into an organisation you know, we've got a customer at the moment where we're going through all the relevant checkpoints, they've got the budget, they love the solution, it's very relevant to their learners, and we're stuck at head office, because they're part of a global organisation, and they've got to go through through London through I think they're an IT role or a systems role to get approval to use us. And you know, it's not even a large, it's on a very large contract. And it's nothing to do with money, it's about someone blocking it for whatever reason they've got, and that's a, you know, that's a huge challenge for us to, to get, you know, ya know, embedded into an organisation is the level of, of layers you've got to get through.

Karen Kirton  06:24

Because I think that's the thing when you're looking at training and development as a whole, it's often seen as a cost to the business, and particularly in this kind of economic environment, it can be the first thing to to get cut. So I can see how it would be up to the poor l&d manager to try and do their best to sell it through. But at the same time, it may go, there might be a position that feels self serving to them, because it is their job as well. So people might go oh, well, you need to say that because, you know, you don't want your role to be made redundant versus actually there's value in upskilling our people, no matter the economic environment.

Mark Eggers 07:05

Yeah, 100%. We, we found very early on when looking I did a big we did about 100 interviews early on in the sort of prior to building Yarno, we wanted to make sure we understood the problem we were trying to solve. And, you know, we had managers telling us, you know, in the first meeting, that they sweep bad results under the carpet because they don't want to feed them up to the senior leadership team, because they get blamed for you know, that they're doing a poor job if the learners don't know something is, you know, which I think is rotting from the inside out. Really, because you don't if the the team above don't understand where the problems lie, how do they ever start to try and fix them and learning should be a safe place? What if you don't know something? That's okay.

Karen Kirton  07:50

Yeah. I hadn't thought of that, that people would actually be looking at those schools. But I guess that's true, particularly going to larger organisations, they want to see the value for the investment.

Mark Eggers 08:04

Yeah, and one of the questions we used to ask Lachy, if you remember was, how do you define success in your role, and it usually stumped people. So they would really take a lot of time. And then often the, the way they would answer is to say, Well, how do I define success? Or how does the business define success? We say, Well, what's, what's the difference? And often they say, Well, I would, for me, it's about whether the team are enjoying the learning that they're doing. So that's been from a personal perspective, but then they say, Oh, well, the business has different metrics that they would measure a spa. So it was always interesting to see that there was a clear cut line between the two.

Karen Kirton  08:46

How do people cut through that, like, if they're the challenge is to try and develop an l&d person or a business leader? And I've got those challenges that's resonating with me. How do I cut through that?

Mark Eggers 08:59

As in how do you get through the challenges of all the layers? Well, it's very difficult. And then this is where I mean, I spend the majority of my job supporting the person who's our advocate through the channels and trying to get them through the barriers often go back into multiple presentations, multiple demos, multiple proposals, the proposals will change, they'll start with a certain amount of learners and it will change someone else will get some buy in and they might want their department in and it's an average sales cycle for us is for an enterprise customer, probably between 12 and 36 months. And that sounds crazy. But you know, if you do a trial, and then you know, go through that, and then you're going through large contract procurement. IT security. Yeah.

Karen Kirton  09:48

Yeah. You're trying to sell the value of actually upskilling full stop as well.

Mark Eggers 09:53

That's right. Yeah. I mean, the first thing Yeah, and these are all things we discovered along the way. We didn't think it was going to be likely

Lachy Gray  10:02

I think a big difference from when we started is that I think the staff are driving the need to upskill now, or they say I want to upskill I want to grow personally and professionally. I think that's quite different to when we started, what over seven years ago, when it was very top, top down driven? This is what you do. There's nothing outside that. That programme. And now, it's I think it's gone a lot the other way? Well, certainly probably for customers that we get the best results with. So Mark, what would you say the companies who do get great results with the owner? What are they doing differently?

Mark Eggers 10:53

Well, customers with that work with us? Yeah. Well, I think there's full company buy in on the strategy. And learning being a big part of that, I mean, to get ya know, when we're a tool that sits on top of the LMS, or an adjunct to the LMS. So we are already fighting for our place in the budget. So we have to prove ROI. So we have to show that we are going to make some kind of change in behaviour. And when we go into the engagement, we are always focused on what metric are we looking at? So how are we going to move the needle for you. And that might be something like an increase in sales, or an increase in net promoter score, or voc scores or a reduction in incidents or accidents. So there has to be something that we want to be measured against. Because when it comes round to renewal time, the CFO is gonna look at us and say, well, you're that's a cost additional to our other platform. And, and, yes, the LMS probably has poor engagement, and all the rest of it, and no one really likes doing those modules, but it's there, and they've already got it, because it does a lot more than us, you know, we only do a very small thing. And Jana was always a very, I guess, niche product in a lot of ways. You know, the simplicity of piano is part of the appeal. It's, it's a quiz, that's it and it's fun and engaging, great, but it doesn't do all the things in the LMS does it can't book event spaces and, you know, do your pathway learning and career progression stuff and all that kind of jazz. So there's always a big challenge for us in that way, compared to an LMS. And we're not we never want it to be. So I think the companies are doing well. Yeah, they look at other programmes on top of of the current system they've gotten, of course, there needs to be budget against that, and, and whatnot. So there's a few factors, I think, at play.

Lachy Gray  12:52

And there's there's real advocacy, as well as in there, as you say, there's usually a strategic driver, at a company level, the learning is a way to achieve that. The managers have bought in often their KPIs against it. And we've learned that if there isn't manager support, then it's pretty much dead in the water. And that manager's report is very difficult to get like, as a third party coming in, like that needs, that expectation needs to be driven by leadership. I think that's one of the challenges we have, isn't it as a third party on the outside? We can, we can't really change that. We can work towards it. But we need that by and yeah, yeah.

Mark Eggers 13:45

And we and we get measured against the uptake of the team's enrolling in, ya know, and if the Depo manager or the the DCA manager or someone who's away from head office, they've got their own sort of level of control within that environment, then head office telling them that they've got to do this thing, unless there's this, I guess, push behind that, that they see the value. And they say that this is actually important, then yeah, it's really hard for us because we can only push so hard from our side without having that that line manager support.

Karen Kirton  14:26

Yeah, I think a lot of the times, training is just seen as a ticket box exercise, right? So, you know, we've talked over this podcast series about you know, how to create a learning culture and what does that look like, for my business with amplify HR and one of our company values is continual learning. So I'm just interested Mark, if you were speaking to my team about one thing that they could do as individuals to live that value of continual learning in their 24 minutes a week, what would be your recommendation?

Mark Eggers 14:59

Because it's different because we're by small businesses, you know, we give a lot of leeway in terms of the learning a week, give a budget at the beginning of the year, and we say, right, you've got X amount of dollars per year to spend on training. You can choose your own adventure what what is going to upskill you in your role right now that you want, that you think is going to benefit you. And we let people have that sort of choose your own adventure model. So I think that's probably one thing I'd say is it's been effective for us is that in a small business, you've got a lot of you wear a lot of hats in your role, as we all do as business owners and so your needs change a lot, depending on the things that are confronting you that week. So I think that flexibility would be one thing I think is key is allowing people to, to choose what they what they are interested in. Because if you have that 24 minutes, you at least want them to be enjoying it.

Karen Kirton  15:53

Yes, you're not enjoying it, you're just not gonna do it, right? Because procrastination.

Mark Eggers 15:58

Yeah, and I say all the time as well, like I, some weeks, I look at what I've actually learned this week, I've actually gone outside, done anything on top to improve and, you know, we're talking before, you know, I love audiobooks. So that's one thing I try and do is, if I'm in a car on the way to a meeting, or if I'm on the train, going into the office, so often put an audio book in, that's my time to learn. So I'm trying to get a subject that I'm interested in, it's usually a self improvement tip, I think, usually,

Karen Kirton  16:27

you get your five or six things out of it.

Mark Eggers 16:32

Yeah, we've talked about this, you know, I've always thought, you know, has a wider application for that kind of thing. Because there's so many books, think of all the books you've read, you know, the classic sort of business books, like, you know, how to influence people, the Charisma Myth, all that kind of stuff. Like, they're great books, and they've got a few little snippets that you take away at the time, but, you know, I've totally forgotten those books. You know,

Karen Kirton  16:56

if you could, there are some that can stay with you, like, for me, like a lot of Brene browns, work actually stays with me, and who quite stay with me and I, and I probably reinforce that own learning with myself, because then I use them when I'm doing workshops with people. So you know, depending on the workshop and the group, but I'll often say to people, we're going to start off with, you know, the idea that we're choosing courage over comfort today. And because I just think that's such a powerful, you know, concept, and you know, that, that means we're all gonna speak up, and you're gonna have psychological safety, etc. But yeah, like, I'm looking at the books on my desk at the moment, most of them, I wouldn't be able to tell you, like a takeaway that I got out of it at the time, because it's been so long that you just forget.

Lachy Gray  17:41

You know, I think that embedding is the critical piece is taking something and putting it into practice. And I don't think that's done enough, especially with Workplace Learning. For whatever reason, there is this sort of mindset that you do the training, and then you're done, and you know it now. And we know it doesn't work like that. So the value of reinforcing what we learn, is still a relatively new concept, I would say, we, that really stood out to us, when we started IANA. That's one reason why we went down the route that we have, where we're all about embedding learning, whether that's your traditional learning, whether it's a workshop, and it's a leadership workshop, there's a couple of key concepts that you'd like everyone to take away. And you want to reinforce that over the next couple of months. And then check back in again, and there's going to be questions, there's going to be areas that people don't know as well as they thought they did, especially once they've had a chance to practice. And then you have a chat about that. And then you reinforce that. And that, from my point of view, that's, that's learned, like, we call it continual learning, but it just learning like that. We're, it's it's practising, it's getting new information in checking it against what we already believe. We need to discard some, update it and on we go. So nothing often, learning is something that's done separately, it has to be done, especially mandatory training. I guess that's different. And that's the exposure that a lot of people get in the workplace to learning is compliance safety.

Karen Kirton  19:39

Yeah, that's true. But I think the point you're making today about the application, I think, if you can't apply the learning, that I would question like, why you were doing that in the first place. And it just reminded me of an organisation a couple of years ago, and they had a new senior manager coming in like C suite level and the managers said to me, you know, we need leadership training in this organisation, you know, they've obviously never had any say, No, there's actually been a lot of leadership training over time, the issue in the organisation was the accountability to apply at training. So, you know, the managers would go off to this training to learn how to performance managers, for example, but then given the situation where they needed to enact that performance management, they would choose to ignore it, and their managers up the chain wouldn't hold them accountable to have to do that. And so to me that that's really what what I see happen, which is a bit frustrating is that people will automatically say, well, they obviously need to be trained, we need training for this person. It's like, well, sometimes it's actually not the training. It is that embedding and it's the application and the accountability to do that over time.

Lachy Gray  20:53

Yeah, and that's what I think. Back to your question, Karen, I think being really clear about, you know, what, what's the organisation trying to achieve? What's the team trying to achieve? What's the individual trying to achieve? And then how does learning support that, rather than seeing it as a separate thing? That either is or isn't done, as long as the mandatory stuffs done, then we're happy. But you're doing? And unfortunately, that is, that is often the mindset and when we're trying to change that.

Karen Kirton  21:22

Yeah. Yeah. Although you can help with the mandatory training.

Lachy Gray  21:26

Yeah, yeah. But people don't get as excited about that.

Karen Kirton  21:32

To report to the board.

Lachy Gray  21:36

So Mark, is, is there an example of a customer, you don't have to name the customer that but that you can share, just so we get a sense of how how customers are using Yano in a sort of a practical sense.

Mark Eggers 21:49

I think fuel-based sales teams are probably the best example that I can give, because they're a classic learner in the fact that they aren't behind a desk, they're out on the road in their car, visiting customers. So they haven't got the time to sit there and do those modules. And it's very difficult to get them all into a classroom for for classroom based training, because it's really expensive, especially if they're dotted around the country. So for customers who have that type of learner, we, we see a lot of success in, in that type of model where we're giving them product information, you know, objection handling, you know, tips and tricks around, you know, sort of selling techniques and whatnot. And you've heard a couple of customers recently who have that rep base model on Yes, in a lot of success with, with them getting out there and being able to do short and sharp chunks of learning in their own time might be when they're having a coffee or, you know, in between, in between meetings when they're sitting in their car, or whatever it is. So I always like that example, because I think practically, they're the type of learner that has, I guess, been ignored over the years or have had a poor experience for learning because it was so hard to get them into a training room.

Karen Kirton  23:09

Yeah, and I think with those roles as well, they so KPI focused, that the actual individual employees aren't always keen on being off the road either. Because it's like, well, the more time that I'm not out here, that's going to ruin my KPIs.

Mark Eggers 23:22

So new salespeople, so they generally want to do their own thing, they've got a bit of a wolf mentality, they like being at doing their own thing. Look to the retail is very similar in that it's, you know, we often say the retail workers, sort of forgotten learner in a lot of ways or the deskless worker, because traditionally, it's been very hard to train and they're on shift work that need to be on the floor, to get them in a training room, you've got to pay a minimum of two hours to make sure you're covering under the award, I believe is the way it's is done. So we see a lot of success in our retail customers as well. In fact, some of the stats we see, one of the customers, we've got got a 40% increase in sales for a particular line of goods that we helped upskill, their team on, one of our customers had a nine point NPS increase in six weeks. You know, NPS is very, very hard to do. And the insights we found with that customer is that the team members would actually avoid people in the aisle if they didn't have the confidence and the capability to feel that they could serve the customer in the best way. So it wasn't like they didn't want to they want to do they didn't have the training to be able to adequately guide the customer to make the right decision. So that's something that we take a lot of pride in when we do a rollout as we see the difference in the way people behave. Because you know, when you give people that confidence, then they're actually more likely to seek out the customer in that aisle because they want to apply what they've learned. So there's a real correlation In between, you know, that sort of focus on on particular product lines and, and upskilling, the staff in in those underlying selling techniques than actually seeing a result from a, you know, from a business perspective.

Karen Kirton  25:13

Not all Skill versus Will you know, you've got to have both. Thanks. You're welcome. All right. You mentioned it before you listening to audiobooks, and early in this series, Lachy, and I had a question for our guests, and I thought it was worth bringing it back today. So what's one thing that you've learned or a book that you've read? In the last month,

Mark Eggers 25:44

I have been on the Oliver Berkman train since I read 4000 weeks. And that kind of got me on to his more recent work. So the 4000 weeks is sort of an equals, like a productivity hack. Show, if you've read it, I think Lachy has. But essentially, that's what the average amount of weeks you'd have, if you live to 80. That's one of those sort of reminders that, you know, our time is limited. And each week that goes is one less after 4000. So, to sort of Yeah, I guess helps you sort of realising, you know, to enjoy the ride as you as you go along. That was that was one thing I learned out of that book. And then recently, he's put out a couple of really good BBC produced audio or podcasts, I guess you call them? Yeah, they're podcasts, I think, and one's addicted to busy, which is, which is very good. Talking about the difference between as a society we value busyness now as a form of success. So you are in the way that sort of the media portrays successful people as they've got like a 4am start, and then they meditate for an hour, and then they elevate to work and then they, you know, have a bowl and they have a protein shake at lunch, because they haven't got time to eat properly. And it's being successful. Whereas I think that he talks about the Greeks being you know, to be have leisure time in Greek times was a form of of success, because everyone else was doing the work for you. And you can lay around and go fit olives and, you know, cord with a palm frond, you know?

Karen Kirton  27:22

Which one I prefer.

27:25

Mark Eggers Right, right. I mean, but that's not the way that that he's Yeah, and that particular and so that was very interesting as well. And he goes and talks to different professionals and experts in the area, which was, was a great, great, listen.

Karen Kirton  27:39

Awesome. I do remember Lachy telling me about 4000 weeks. I don't know it just sounds so depressing to me. Like, because adu sounds long, which is weird that 4000 weeks. So I was like, Oh, am I actually prepared for that?

Lachy Gray  27:57

Not depressing.

Mark Eggers 27:59

It's not Yeah, that's the sounds depressing, but it's actually not it's actually quite inspiring.

Karen Kirton  28:04

I'll check it out on blinkers day, as well.

Mark Eggers 28:08

That one he's on the imperfect podcasts if you've come. So he's on that kind of boat Yeah, talks through the key points. And I think they talked about Warren Buffett does a similar things that he says, you know, if you've got, pick the top 25 Things you want to achieve in your life, and then you write them all down. And he says, Alright, now remove the bottom 20. Basically, if you want to actually focus on these things, and you've got to cut down and that's, that's pretty much the takeaway from from the Berkman book is that you can't do everything. So saying no to things and focusing on those, those key sort of achievements is the way to, I guess go deeper into the areas you want to excel in.

Karen Kirton  28:51

Yeah, I like that. I think I've I've mentioned this before that I heard someone speak a couple of years ago, and she said every time you say yes to something you're saying no to something else, and that this has really stuck with me since then, because I am a helper and I try and help people's every time someone says hey, can you I always go Yeah, so I've really tried to actually pull that back a little bit. And and remember that?

Lachy Gray  29:16

Yeah, we actually we talked about this, it's, it's either a hell year, or a no. Because often it's a ya know, you don't really want to want to do it, but you feel like you should, and then you're not really present when you're there. And I think, yeah, the 4000 weeks book is is great. It's more for like philosophical. Like he does take a bit of a hatchet to the productivity kind of genre, doesn't he? Mark is like, any Yeah, it's he's trying to encourage us to think differently about time. And even the language about spending time, you know, like it's money. It's not renewable. It's quite different. So Oh, yeah, I think it's how you doing anything differently after reading his work Mark?

Mark Eggers 30:07

Yeah, I think so. I mean, there's things like, you know, if I get stuck in traffic, I'm changing my, the way that I think about that. So rather than being like, Oh, I've been stuck in traffic, it's like, alright, I get to have half an hour to listen to a audiobook or listen to a, an album that I wanted to revisit or whatever. That's, I guess it's a small mindset shift, I guess, in terms of the way you see those things, because I'm not getting that half an hour back. So in being annoyed about it, and sitting there grumpy and probably driving more aggressively and being annoyed to other drivers, because I'm late or whatever, I've been held up. But the reality is that that time is, is gone. Regardless, I may as well spend it with a positive mindset. Like it was in addition to apply this is that I'm trying

Lachy Gray  30:54

good growth mindset is don't worry.

Mark Eggers 30:58

Right. Right. You know, you as long as you've got the intention to get it right.

Lachy Gray  31:01

Yeah, that's right. I did want to ask you about generative AI, because Karen and I have discussed it in a couple of episodes. And I know that, you know, for Yano, we're very focused on creating relevant and tailored content. And more recently, especially with tools like Chaco Beatty, being used to generate a lot of learning content. What's your kind of take on that? And like the value of using a tool like that, then where do you think it could go?

Mark Eggers 31:43

I don't think it's the silver bullet everyone thinks it's going to be. I think that it's a great way to give structure to get I mean, we talked about sort of the difference between a blank page and having some kind of, you know, skeleton on the page, if you've got something to help, promote thought and give you some structure in how to write a Indiana's case, it's an explanation where we feel that that's called the most relevance because it gives you something to work on. But you know, the risk you've got, excuse me? Yeah, the risk of God is that people can just plug in, you know, the prompts, and suddenly you get this what? on the outs on the outside looks quite, quite good. And it reads well, and it looks like it could be correct. But, you know, if you get someone to look closely at it, there's probably a lot of holes and there usually is some some mistakes. I mean, obviously that Bronte Campbell podcast on the imperfect seal a day and she did her bio on church Abt. See wrong. Probably more than 50% of it was incorrect. They said she'd retired and said all these things. And yeah, all these it read perfectly, but it was all wrong. She's like, No, wrong, wrong, wrong. So yeah, I think that and that's coming from somewhere that's got a lot of information about her. So she's got a lot of articles written about, she's got a Wikipedia page, and it's still getting it wrong. So if you've got a niche topic that has even less written about it, then I think there's a there's a big risk that it's, um, promote, potentially promoting misinformation. And if you aren't checking it, and being careful about what you're pressing ENTER on, then yeah, there's a risk there.

Lachy Gray  33:32

I, I tried to use it to, to the today to work out the interest that I was saved with my offset account. And I did it two different ways. And the second one was completely wrong. told me I was going to save a huge amount of money. And then I went back and looked at the accounts, and there was it was wrong. But it's good, though, because it lays it does list the calculations out so I could do it myself. But yeah, it is interesting, isn't it, that we're seeing in a lot and creating a lot of kind of generic vanilla type content. And when you think about it from a learning perspective, you just, you just wonder at the the benefits of that, then what are the impacts going to be? We're going to find out.

Mark Eggers 34:17

One of the examples we looked at was for our transport customers, they do a process called coupling and uncoupling whether the semi trailer and the trailer connect. So when I dropped the trailer off at the DCM sabe and we did one where it was, Can you give me a summary of coupling and uncoupling? And what it did really well was it gave you a paragraph four points, a paragraph four points and a conclusion. So I really liked the fact that it gave you that structure to work with so when you're actually going through and using your brain to actually do the process that is correct, then you can fill them out and it just gives you that structure where obviously the information I gave was was quite generic and it wasn't necessarily incorrect, but you know, It different companies have different processes, but the actual layout was actually quite good. Kind of as a timesaver, right? Because they fill out.

Lachy Gray  35:11

All right. Well, that's, that's time for us today. So let's talk about takeaways. Karen, what are your takeaways from today's,

Karen Kirton  35:19

I think just being clear on your outcomes for the for upskilling. So particularly, if you're an l&d person, then I think that's something that, you know, is a challenge, but is needed to be able to sell it through the organisation is actually one of the outcomes. And I think, you know, some of the stats, you're giving up to the, you know, that retail space and the field workers, I think that would really resonate with people in a business. And yeah, and I think I, I will read that book. Even though I thought it sounded depressing. Because I liked that idea of just reframing. So to Yeah, I'm not stuck in traffic, or I'm not bored at the hairdresser, or whatever it might be, actually, how can I use this time? Because when it's gone, it's gone. So I'm not gonna get it back.

Lachy Gray  36:10

Yeah, it's so true. I would agree with you on that being clear on your outcomes. I think that's so important, especially for learning. And then I think I would add to that, the asking yourself if you've got the right buy in, and advocacy. And I think this is true of any programme that we implement in the workplace. We need to know what we're trying to achieve with it. We need to know how we're going to measure success. And then we've got to have that buy in and advocacy to drive it to give it the best chance of success. Mark, how about you what are your takeaways from today's episode?

36:48

I think the skill skill and will was a favourite.

Karen Kirton  36:54

Glad you enjoyed it.

Lachy Gray  37:01

Links to Articles and anything else we've discussed will be over on our websites yano.com Today, you and I amplify hr.com Today you just follow the links to the podcast section. And if you receive value from this episode, we would love it if you could leave a rating or review over at Apple podcasts. And you can get in touch with Mark on LinkedIn. We also have our link tree li n k TR dot E for slash make it work podcast. We do have that bonus offer there for our listeners.

Karen Kirton  37:37

Yeah, next episode is coming up in two weeks from now. So click the subscribe button and you'll be notified of when that's available. Any final thoughts Lachy.

Lachy Gray  37:46

I'm going to go back to my 4000 weeks notes. Think about how I'm spending my time.

Karen Kirton  37:52

I'd be interested in hearing your notes.

Lachy Gray  37:56

But thanks so much for joining us. I will see you next time on the Make It Work podcast.