For many teams, feeling engaged and connected while working remotely has been a challenge. Regular Zoom calls and the occasional Friday drinks are great, but they can lack a certain something. That’s why at Go1, we’ve decided to go back to the future with a good, old fashioned book club. 

Spearheaded by our wonderful UK team, the Go1 Book Club  — powered by premium content partner Blinkist — has been a hit. So, we thought we’d share the love and help you get started with your very own, Blinkist-powered book club. Here’s everything you need to know. 

As mentioned, the big question on many people’s lips this year has been: ‘how can you keep employees engaged in their development and connected with colleagues while working remotely?’

In our humble opinion, the answer is simple: a book club. 

Times are changing (more rapidly than many of us can keep up with!) and organisations need to think differently about how to foster collaboration, increase team connectivity, and encourage personal development.                    

A book club is a great way for team members to connect outside of traditional, formal work contexts such as meetings and 1:1s. Book clubs allow participants to share ideas and engage in thought-provoking discussions in a more creative, informal setting. 

The best part? It works! The UK Go1 Team now meets every fortnight to discuss the week's 15-minute ‘Blink’...and any other tangents that arise along the way! 

It may sound silly, but the biggest barrier to engaging with a book club can often be the actual reading part. Unfortunately, with packed schedules and a rapidly changing world, not everyone has time to consume a 400-page novel every fortnight. That’s where Blinkist comes in. 

Blinkist offers 15-20 minute summaries of non-fiction books. Blinks can be read or listened to (the audio starts automatically), and with 145 titles currently available on the Go1 Content Hub, there’s something thought-provoking available for everyone. 

Standout titles include:            

The Introvert’s Complete Career Guide 

4 tips for running a successful book club

You’ve got the books (or Blinks, in this case). Now, for the club. Here are 4 tips for running a successful book club. 

A book club is only as good as its participants. With that mind, the first step to running a successful book club is spreading the word to generate interest. Be sure to highlight the benefits of a book club, whatever that means to your team — be it creativity, engagement, or just a chance to drink wine and talk about a book, with minimal actual reading involved! Whether you spread the word through Slack channels, a team-wide email, or simple word of mouth, make sure everyone knows they’ll want to be there or be square. 

You’ve got everyone on board. Great. Now, the hard part — finding a meeting time that suits everyone. The important parts here are finding a day, length, and frequency that suits your team. Based on our UK team’s experiences, we recommend fortnightly meetings. Be warned, this step may involve a little trial and error to figure out whether 30 minutes is long enough, or Fridays work better than Wednesdays. Start by getting something in the calendar that everyone can attend. If necessary, you can tweak things from there. 

When running a book club, it’s important to find a balance between structure and natural conversational flow. Still, it can be a good idea to come prepared with a few questions in your back pocket, to prompt discussion in case of any awkward silences. A few starter questions might include: 

What did you find most interesting about this book? 

Was there anything about this book that you didn’t enjoy/agree with? 

What new things did you learn? How can you apply these learnings to your life? 

What questions do you still have after reading this book?

Did any quotes or passages stand out to you? 

Have you read other books by this author? If so, how did this one compare?

Did this make you want to read the whole book, or did the 15-minute Blink suffice? 

Again, you don’t want the book club to feel too restrictive, but a few ground rules can help ensure everyone feels heard and engaged. A common ground rule may be setting aside time for each team member to share their thoughts about the Blink, to ensure everyone can participate in the discussion. Ground rules can also be a little more fun, such as whether alcohol/snacks are appropriate (or encouraged) during the book club. Whatever rules your team decides on, the most important thing is ensuring everyone is on board! 

Running a book club through Go1 is simple. Just follow the steps below, and you’ll be up and Blinking in no time!

Log into Go1 Content Hub, and create a new group, e.g. ‘Fortnightly Book Club’.


Select ‘Enable discussion’ on the group.                


Add your book club members to the group.    


Add the asset ‘How to facilitate a Book Club discussion’ to the group.


Browse Blinkist to find your desired Blink for the next book club meeting.


Add that Blink to the group and assign the relevant due date for the next book club meeting.


And remember, the first rule of Go1 Book Club is...tell everyone!

For more insights, be sure to subscribe to the Go1 newsletter to stay on top of all the latest L&D trends. Or, you can book a demo today to find out how Go1 can help with your team’s learning needs.

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For many teams, feeling engaged and connected while working remotely has been a challenge.  That’s why at Go1, we’ve decided to go back to the future with a good, old fashioned book club.

Say hello to Go1’s book club with a twist, powered by Blinkist

For many teams, feeling engaged and connected while working remotely has been a challenge.  That’s why at Go1, we’ve decided to go back to the future with a good, old fashioned book club. 

A turbulent year has shown the current L&D mindset isn’t connecting in the ways we want it to. Here’s how to rethink your L&D team’s mindset to embrace courage, confidence, and collaboration. 

Have you ever woken up on the wrong side of the bed? Grumpy, tired, or just not in the right headspace? If so, then look no further for proof that mindset is everything. There’s a huge difference between waking up in a cheery, positive mood and waking up feeling like something is slightly amiss. It all comes down to mindset. You can have all the best intentions, infused with a healthy dose of skills, but without the right mindset, you probably won’t get very far. L&D is no different. 

We discussed the ‘L&D mindset’ in our most recent blog post Understanding business value vs learning value. If you haven’t already read that, it’s a great introduction to L&D values and mindsets, as well as some of the broader challenges facing L&D. Have a look now! We’ll wait. 

If you need a quick refresher, we focussed on why L&D teams need to pivot from a learning values mindset to a business values mindset. Of course, doing so requires broad, team-wide mindset shifts, which is the exciting cliffhanger we finished on. 

To continue that theme, today, we’ll be looking at why mindset matters, the state of L&D mindsets, the role of technology, tips for embracing collaboration, and how to rethink your L&D mindset moving forward. 

First things first, let’s put mind over matter. 

When you examine it closely, mindset is at the heart of nearly everything L&D does. So much so, that 85% of learning team leaders said mindset was the biggest barrier to achieving their team’s goals in 2020, according to a survey by Michelle Ockers. 

On a broader level, research into business mindsets by Stanford psychologist Dr Carol Dweck found that companies that adopt a growth mindset are “are 47% likelier to see their colleagues as trustworthy, 34% likelier to feel a strong sense of ownership and commitment to the company, 65% likelier to say that the company supports risk-taking, and 49% likelier to say that the company fosters innovation.”

Bringing it back to L&D, research by Gallup finds that the number 1 reason people change jobs today is a lack of career growth opportunities. From this, they conclude that “if leaders don't change the way they approach development, they cannot expect sustained performance excellence.” That ‘change to the way they approach development’? Mindset. 

Basically, in L&D, all roads lead to mindset. It permeates through culture, skills, and performance, and is at the heart of everything we do. Unfortunately, it’s becoming clear that the current L&D mindset hasn’t evolved to keep up with wider organisational demands. Accordingly, it just isn’t connecting with learners, executives, and team members in the way we intend it to. 

Before we can work on changing this, let’s look at the state of L&D mindsets. 

According to Michelle Ockers, mindset is fundamental to everything L&D does — both good and bad. She explains this in her article for Go1 Crafting a digital learning strategy that creates value, saying, “L&D mindset gets in the way...In addition to adopting a business value mindset, those L&D teams who create the most value let go of tight control and share responsibility for learning with others. They see others as connected contributors to learning rather than passive recipients of content and training. This shift engenders curiosity to use technology to do things differently, rather than just doing things more efficiently.” 

The idea that ‘L&D mindset gets in the way’ should be cause for concern. Rather than facilitating growth and moving towards confidence, courage, and collaboration, the current L&D mindset seems to be holding teams back, focussing instead on control, status quo thinking, and fear of failure. 

This sentiment is echoed by Liberate Learning, who think that “L&D in organisations with predictable learning offerings fulfils ‘organisational hygiene’ purposes of compliance or employee engagement rather than being a critical business function with a measurable performance impact.”

Corporate Learning Disrupted takes a similar view, stating, “we need to transform the way we think as L&D professionals. The old beliefs need to make space for the new if we want to have a chance to align business and corporate learning.” Clearly, it’s time for a change, as L&D values are misaligned with practical, day-to-day realities. 

The 2020 Emerald Works Learner Intelligence Report shows the disconnect between L&D mindset and practical outcomes. They mention “an L&D industry that is declining in impact while consuming more investment”, adding “there is a gap between learning and development strategy and on-the-ground practice.”

To demonstrate this disconnect, only 16% of learning practitioners think their teams engage in online learning without being prompted. However, in reality, 74% of online learners say they’re happy to learn without any prompting. That’s not just a disconnect, it’s a chasm. And it all starts with mindset. Addressing these disconnects should be at the top of every L&D leader’s list. After all, it’s difficult to change your mindset if no one is on the same page.

Additionally, the 2020 Learner Intelligence Report found that, due to a disconnect between L&D strategy and actual impact, “60% of learning and development departments find themselves on the lower end of the EW Index”. This means these L&D teams are having a “transactional impact” rather than a real, behavioural impact, wherein the focus is predominantly placed on “competence, rather than capability.” Only 6% of learning organisations are deemed to have a “high-impact learning culture.”

In large part, this is down to a “lack of evidence-based practice”, as only 10% of learning teams use performance data to measure the impact of their programs, while just 12% use analytics to improve their service. 

The standard L&D mindset simply isn’t connecting. While ‘mindset’ will mean different things to different companies, what is clear is that it’s time for a refresh, moving from tight control to collaboration, from status quo to embracing new ideas, from fear of failure to courage and confidence, and from learning value to business value. 

As ever, technology has a part to play. According to Michelle Ockers, L&D teams are too preoccupied with “fear that technology will make L&D redundant rather than augmenting what they do and allowing them to create more value.” Given this, she recommends that L&D teams get technology into perspective, labelling it as “an enabler of learning and performance, not the saviour.” 

Thrive Learning puts it a little more bluntly, saying, “We choose to tether ourselves to these “band-aid” technologies. Our salvation. The ‘ooooh shinies’ of the world. The things that make us go “aahhh” and “wow”. Yeah, those super shiny technologies are sexy, sure. But unless we start resolving root cause issues, we’re never going to ever be able to really adopt them.” 

While this might sound harsh at first glance (or hilarious, depending on your perspective), the statistics back it up. Emerald Works’ Back to the Future Report found that investment in learning technologies increased by 3% in 2020. Despite this, “only 15% of learning leaders report successes in driving innovation for business growth – 3% lower than in 2019.” More investment, less output. 

On average, they found that organisations use 25 different learning technologies, spending over 21% of their budgets on digital. Even so, they conclude that “technology alone does not correlate to business or learning impact.” 

This is further evident among the top 10 extreme concerns for L&D, from a survey of 1,123 learning leaders. 29% are concerned by the pace of technological change and their team’s inability to keep up (up 10% from 2019), while 39% say L&D are overwhelmed and under-equipped (up 10% from 2019). 

Perhaps most importantly, 39% say that leaders have traditional expectations of L&D that are difficult to challenge (up 12% from 2019). This is worth emphasising, as it seems that these ‘traditional’ expectations are holding L&D back, keeping teams stuck with an outdated mindset. 

Still, it’s not all doom and gloom. Technology can be used to facilitate a brighter future for L&D, it just requires (you guessed it) a mindset shift. According to Emerald Works’ Back to the Future Report, high-impact learning cultures (HILCs) spend even more on digital (28%) than other companies. But it’s not the increased spend that correlates with performance, it’s their ability to “look through a different lens in order to change capability”.

The numbers are telling. 66% of HILCs use analytics to improve the learning experience, compared to 12% of average companies, while 91% of HILCs use technology to organise and make learning easier to find, compared to 28% of average companies. Finally, 71% of HILCs use technology to involve learning consumers in design, compared to just 21% of average companies. 

Shifting towards these practices would be an excellent first step for rethinking the L&D mindset.     

When analysing your team’s values and mindset, collaboration should be a primary consideration. As Michelle Ockers said, “L&D teams who create the most value let go of tight control and share responsibility for learning with others.” In other words: collaboration, collaboration, collaboration. 

McKinsey summarises the role collaboration will play in the future of L&D, saying, “L&D leaders must embrace a broader role within the organisation and formulate an ambitious vision for the function. An essential component of this effort is a comprehensive, coordinated strategy that engages the organisation and encourages collaboration.” 

Why is collaboration so important? Aside from the obvious, in top-performing L&D departments, team members are 50% more likely to understand how their work is linked to their organisation’s overall performance, while a massive 97% say that business leaders recognise that learning is aligned with the business plan. In essence, these organisations recognise that L&D is one piece in a far larger puzzle.

Additionally, 91% of L&D team members say collaboration is either essential or very useful to their job, while 80% say they are willing to share what they know with others (although 23% say they need a little help getting started). 

Nevertheless, this is another area where there is a major disconnect between mindset and output. In fact, collaboration in L&D is trending in the wrong direction. According to Emerald Works’ 2020 Back to the Future report, L&D teams’ in-house ability to facilitate social and collaborative learning decreased from 25% in 2018 to just 15% in 2020. 

Exacerbating this issue, only 31% of L&D managers work upfront with business leaders to identify the KPIs that they want to improve. Disconnect alert. This shows a worrying lack of collaboration between L&D and the wider business. To evolve the L&D mindset, this must change, with L&D becoming more plugged into wider organisational factors. 

Once again, the difference between HILCs and other organisations is stark. 91% of HILCs say they “actively encourage people to collaborate in building knowledge resources”, compared to just 37% of other companies.             

Moving forward: 3 tips to rethink your L&D mindset

The current L&D mindset needs a rethink. Collaboration is down, disconnects between expectation and output are rising, and technology isn’t closing the gap. While overhauling your mindset may seem intimidating, looking at things from a fresh perspective can have huge benefits for both your team and your business as a whole. 

The best part? Mindset is something you can work on every day, from waking up on the right side of the bed, to encouraging collaboration among your team. Here are 3 concrete tips to help you move forward with a shiny new mindset! 

Before things can truly change, it’s important to take stock of your current mindset. Do some of the problems outlined in this blog sound a little too familiar? Are things not quite connecting in the ways you had hoped? It may come down to a simple mindset shift. 

Take the time to identify and analyse your current mindset, before openly challenging any engrained status quos that have crept into your thinking. Remember, ‘this is just the way we do things’ may not cut it, so it’s time to say out with the old, and in with a new mindset. 

To us, rethinking the L&D mindset is all about evolving from fear and central ownership to embrace the three Cs: confidence, courage, and collaboration. It all starts with the confidence to embrace change. This quote from Laura Overton rings particularly true: 

“I've seen evidence that learning and development can really deliver strong bottom line value, incredible value, back into the organisation. I think one of the challenges is that we feel that rather than being that diamond, that precious gem, often we see ourselves as more of a piece of coal." 

It’s time to move away from that thinking. Throw away the fear of failure, and embrace a confident mindset going forward, recognising L&D as the precious, value-laden gem that it is. 

We outlined why collaboration is so important earlier, but this one bears repeating. L&D does not exist in a vacuum. Rather, our decisions impact others, just as other people’s decisions impact us. Going forward, L&D must collaborate with business leaders, other teams, and each other, to play our role in the wider organisational context and fully embrace a business value mindset.

Rethinking the 'L&D mindset' 

Value. It’s the word on everyone’s lips. Okay, maybe not everyone’s lips, but if you’ve spent any time around L&D recently, there’s a good chance you’ve heard the word often enough that it has started to lose meaning (don’t worry, that’s what this article’s for). 

It all comes down to one simple philosophy: the more things change, the more they stay the same. No matter how far learning technology evolves, how sophisticated learning systems become, or how far along the path to digital transformation we are, ‘value’ will always remain a central pillar of L&D strategy. In other words, love of learning is wonderful, but without a clear, actionable plan to demonstrate the broader business value of that learning, it probably won’t get you very far. 

Laura Overton summed it up perfectly in her recent article for Go1 Business value: L&D’s bedrock of digital success, stating, “...new technologies and learning models came (and some went), and the economic climate ebbed and flowed, but the one critical factor that surfaced remained the same: business value is L&D’s bedrock of digital success.” 

So, to help you understand the value of value once and for all, we’ve decided to dig further into these ideas, examining how we think about value, business value vs learning value, the benefits of business value, and 3 concrete tips for showing business value. 

In L&D, there are as many unique ways to think about value as there are ways to actually learn. There are too many value variables to list, but some may include your organisational maturity, business goals, the size and skill set of your team, your learning needs, and many more. 

However, no matter how your team currently thinks about value, it can pay to take a step back and look at the bigger picture. Often, we can get so caught up in standard value mindsets, that we forget to see the forest for the trees. 

We will explore this idea further in an upcoming blog post on L&D mindsets (stay tuned!), but for now, think of it this way: you derive a different value from purchasing an expensive new car (something tangible) as you do from hearing a baby’s laughter (something emotional). Basically, not all values are the same!

Even more simply, you derive a different value from a savoury bite of dinner than a sweet bite of dessert. Business value vs learning value is similar — both valuable, but in completely different ways. 

As such, keeping an open mind and challenging L&D status quos can be the first step to understanding business value vs learning value — and why it’s so important to the future of L&D. 

By 2022, we will be spending $7.4 trillion globally on digital transformation technologies, according to the IDC. That’s a lot by any standard. While value shouldn’t be measured purely in monetary terms, this gives a good idea of the scale we are working with. Despite this, 54% of all employees will require significant reskilling in that same time frame, while only 22% of companies see a return on their investment in digital transformation projects. 

According to an estimate by Training Industry, 74% of CEOs want to see ROI on their learning and development programs, yet only 4% say they currently do. In part, this is because the L&D industry has yet to settle on standard measurement models. LinkedIn’s 2020 Workplace Learning Report found that “the top strategic focus area for L&D this year is to measure the impact of learning [as] survey data indicates that there isn’t an industry standard.” 

A lack of digital maturity exacerbates matters, with Fosway finding that 59% of professionals think their company’s digital learning adoption is immature in the wake of COVID-19.            

It’s little wonder then that Go1’s State of Learning Report found that executive buy-in remains the final hurdle for L&D, with 40% of learning professionals saying executive buy-in is missing from their learning strategies. Given all this, it makes sense that value is a hot topic in L&D. 

At times, this can feel like a vicious cycle, so how do we break it? 

These figures show a clear disconnect between the value L&D thinks it is producing, and the value learners and executives are actually extracting. This doesn't mean that L&D isn't producing significant value. Far from it. Rather, the ways we think about value — and the ways this value is articulated — are simply not connecting. 

The L&D value is there, but are we harvesting it and communicating it in the best way? Enter, business value vs learning value. 

According to Laura Overton, learning value focuses on principles such as activity, engagement, usefulness, and efficiency of learning, whereas business value relates to things such as performance and culture. She expands, saying, “learning value provides us with a great indicator about how our formal or assigned learning is being received, applied, and used, but it is not a great starting point if we want to deliver business value.”

In many ways, focussing on learning value keeps L&D in a separate bubble, while business value means taking a step to ensure your learning is aligned with broader, top-level business goals. 

As Laura Overton says, “business value is scarier. We are part of a bigger system at play, and as a result, we lose control of determining our success.” 

It’s not all doom and gloom though, as a business value mindset also “allows us to work with a perspective of exploration and growth.” Speaking of which, let’s dig further into the benefits of business value. 

According to Emerald Works’ Back to the Future report, “when it comes to engaging and aligning with business leaders and the workforce, most L&D teams struggle to focus on solving the most pressing business challenges their organisations face. Based on our 2020 findings, only one in two currently analyse the problem before recommending a solution. And only 25% regularly communicate performance impact to senior management.” 

There’s that disconnect we mentioned earlier, rearing its ugly head again. Clearly, the learning value L&D thinks it is creating is not cutting through on a company-wide level. On the plus side, this is where focusing on business value can be extremely beneficial, offering an opportunity to take L&D to the next level. 

A learning value mindset focuses primarily on measurable learning outcomes, such as completion rates, attendance, engagement rates, and test results. While these are perfectly valid measurements, they can be rather narrow and don’t always account for wider business factors. 

In contrast, a business value mindset looks at the business problem “in the context of wider factors”, taking a broader, more holistic approach to L&D’s value. By looking at things such as performance, culture, and KPIs, L&D can begin to understand larger organisational problems, as well as the context in which learning takes place. By doing so, we can then take an informed approach to how L&D can solve these problems. 

Again, Emerald Works' assertion that “most L&D teams struggle to focus on solving the most pressing business challenges their organisations face” comes to the fore. This is worth emphasising, because reading that should have alarm bells sounding for L&D professionals. 

Thankfully, switching from a learning values mindset to a business values mindset means factoring in wider business challenges, which can go a long way to solving that problem. 

And that's only the tip of the iceberg. For more statistics outlining the benefits of business value, be sure to read Business value: L&D’s bedrock of digital success. 

Getting started: 3 concrete tips for showing business value in L&D 

Overwhelmed? Because we sure are after all that. All L&D needs to do is solve ‘the most pressing business challenges their organisations face’. Piece of cake, right? 

So, once you’ve taken a few seconds to digest that (or scream silently at your desk), let’s get back to earth with 3 concrete tips for getting started. Trust us, it’s not as scary as it sounds, and the benefits are well worth it. 

1. Understand what you’re trying to solve

According to Emerald Works, “only one in two [L&D teams] currently analyse the problem before recommending a solution”. That’s not ideal, to put it mildly. Remember, don’t just default to the same old solution. That standard L&D answer might not always be the right one. 

Instead, break the learning values status quo, and look at bigger business contexts to understand what your learning is really trying to achieve at an organisational level, and, more importantly, why. When in doubt, ask why! 

2. Ask the right questions & consult the right people 

On the topic of asking why, it’s important to ask the right questions to the right people, to fully diagnose a problem. According to Laura Overton, “Learning value is a safe place for L&D to play, as the outcomes are under our control. They are safe and familiar.” Too often, this is a case of big fish, small pond.  

To leap to a bigger pond, L&D teams need to branch out of their comfort zones by asking the right people the right questions. Ask yourself, is this just an L&D problem, or are there other factors at play? If it's the latter, consider how your solution will impact other stakeholders, and who you might need to work with to get the bigger picture. This may include consulting your learners, team members, members of other teams, or even executives. Remember, business values look at the big picture, so it pays to ask more questions, think outside the box with your solutions, be honest with your feedback, and consult the right people!

3. Align learning goals and business goals 

It may sound simple, but often the simplest solutions are the best. To implement a business values mindset, ensure your L&D goals are aligned with broader business goals. Hopefully, they already will be, but if not, there’s no time like the present. 

To help achieve this, our articles on the knowing-doing gap and conducting a training needs assessment are great places to start. 

For more expert tips on extracting business value, be sure to check out Michelle Ockers’ article for Go1 on Crafting a Digital Learning Strategy that Creates Value. 

You know what you need to do, now, for the small task of putting it all into action. We know shifting mindsets at an organisational level and getting everyone on board is no mean feat. So, be sure to check back in with the Go1 blog next week, when we’ll be exploring ways to change the L&D mindset to confidence and courage, as part of our ongoing deep dive into Digital Foundations. 

If you can’t wait that long, you can always check out some of our other awesome blog posts in the meantime, otherwise, see you then! We’ll be waiting. 

Keeping an open mind and challenging L&D status quos can be the first step to understanding business value vs learning value — and why it’s so important to the future of L&D. 

Understanding business value vs learning value

Running a small business has always required hard work. There’s the long hours, the people management, the administrative duties, and the stress that goes along with balancing these aspects. In fact, one in three small business owners report high levels of psychological distress.

However, the impact of COVID-19 over the last nine months has presented small business owners with challenges they couldn’t have seen coming. Unfortunately, this has had an adverse effect on their mental health and wellbeing. 

What issues are small business owners facing?

Depending on the sector, these challenges are as varied as they are difficult. Many small business owners have to reduce the amount of hours that staff work, or stand employees down entirely. Others have been forced to close businesses, then re-open, then close again. 

There’s dotting the Is and crossing the Ts for JobSeeker and JobKeeper payments, keeping up staff morale and communicating all of the above to workers as transparently as possible.  

These, combined with the regular challenges facing small business owners, can generate a huge amount of stress and contribute to poor mental health and wellbeing. 

What does this mean for small business advisers?

When small business owners are under the pump, they naturally turn to small business advisers for support. Yet due to COVID-19, small business advisers have also been affected, with the ability to provide in-person support compromised by physical distancing. However, there are still ways they can assist.

There are several signs advisers should keep an eye out when it comes to their clients. These can range from a change in behaviour, such as being unusually quiet, to business-specific problems like poor cash flow. 

In light of these trying circumstances, Mental wellbeing: support yourself and small businesses online training course for small business advisers was created. 

Freely available through Go1, this collaboration between Beyond Blue and Xero provides business advisers with the tools to support the mental health and wellbeing of small business owners during these unprecedented times.  

This course was developed in consultation with small business advisers to ensure it included the most accurate, up-to-date information. There was also a conscious effort to design the resource to be as straightforward as possible to apply in practice.  

A key contributor in this area was Tim Hoopmann, a Beyond Blue speaker who also runs Spinn Business Solutions, a venture that helps businesses increase efficiency and reduce stress. 

Tim believes one of the major advantages of the course is that it helps educate small business advisers about what to look out for, and offers the tools and confidence to approach these conversations.

“Working closely with small business owners in any capacity comes with great responsibility and during the COVID-19 pandemic, many have required additional support,” he says. 

The course is also something that advisers can continually refer back to, which is key given that each small business owner’s situation will be unique. 

“It's been important for advisers to be mindful of the fact that everyone's experiences are different, approaching every situation with care,” says Tim.

Regardless of these differences, Tim maintains the importance of small business owners prioritising themselves. This rings true for small business advisers too. 

"Taking care of your wellness and mental health is the first step towards better business. When we take care of ourselves, it puts us in the best position to operate our business and take care of those around us – our teams, our customers and our suppliers,” says Tim.

“This is a must do course for anyone who deals with the small business community. It has great takeaways for helping build confidence in how to navigate these very important conversations with clients.  In addition, the principles will provide benefit to your day to day life."

This course is freely available nationwide thanks to our partnership with Beyond Blue. 

See how our collaboration with Beyond Blue is providing business advisers with the tools to support the mental health and wellbeing of small business owners during these unprecedented times.  

Challenges facing small business owners and how to combat them

Written by guest blogger Michelle Ockers, Learning Strategy Expert and host of the ‘Learning Uncut’ podcast. Michelle helps build future-ready learning organisations. She is a leading contemporary learning practitioner at the forefront of modernising learning and keeping the profession relevant and impactful in organisations.

How is it that despite L&D's long-standing fascination with learning technology, 49% of learning was still being delivered face-to-face in classrooms at the start of 2020? Benchmarking shows that in the ten years to 2020, the number of digital learning tools used in organisations more than doubled from an average of 10 to 25. 

L&D is clearly curious about technology.  And there’s plenty of it to be curious about!  

The market is booming with new providers and tools.  Even before Covid hit, 50% of organisations were expecting to increase their investment in learning systems during 2020. 

However, this investment in technology is not translating to higher organisational impact. Benchmarking consistently shows that learning leaders have high aspirations yet make limited progress to achieve them. According to Emerald Works, at the start of 2020 only:

25% of learning leaders report impacting productivity

21% of learning leaders report improving organisational performance

18% of learning leaders have helped provide a faster response to changing business conditions

This is a perplexing conundrum!  In a nutshell, despite increasing investment in learning technology:

high levels of face-to-face training persist until we are forced to make a shift, and

L&D continues to struggle to create value

One significant reason for this is that L&D has focussed on the wrong kind of value – learning value rather than business value.  Laura Overton recently provided a compelling argument for why business value is L&D’s bedrock of digital success and the need to shift mindset in order to build stronger digital foundations.

Further insight can be gained by looking at how L&D teams responded to the pandemic.

2020: the swing to digital content and classrooms

The fierce urgency of the moment created by the pandemic demanded that L&D professionals adopt digital learning approaches.  A study in May 2020 found that 94% of L&D teams had to change their strategy in response to COVID, with two in three teams making significant changes to what they do and how they do it. 

There was a big push was to digital content. For example, National Australia Bank saw consumption on their third-party content platform explode from 15,000 hours per year to 9,000 hours per month. Another big shift was the move from physical to virtual classrooms.

In this early period, L&D decisions were driven by expediency.  As Dani Johnson, RedThread Research co-founder, put it, “All of the rules changed, and organisations needed to very quickly get their people up to speed on something that resembled sameness.”  For many, that ‘sameness’ meant that content and classrooms were their immediate response.  It was all that they were equipped to support. However, while content is essential to support learning and performance, more is required to change behaviour and create business value. 

While acknowledging that organisational policies and technology infrastructure are often a barrier, the key hurdles lie within L&D.  This is good news as it means we can do something to make a change.

L&D team skill levels as reported by learning leaders at the start of 2020 include only: 

32% have adequate technology/infrastructure skills, compared to 40% in early 2018

32% have adequate skill with virtual classroom/webinar delivery 

29% have adequate digital content development skills

In part, these gaps reflect the challenge of staying abreast of the accelerating pace of change in technology and shifts in expectations placed upon L&D.  

More fundamentally, the L&D mindset gets in the way. Key shifts needed to break through the digital learning conundrum are shown in the figure below. Specifically, fear that technology will make L&D redundant rather than augmenting what they do and allowing them to create more value. In addition to adopting a business value mindset, those L&D teams who create the most value let go of tight control and share responsibility for learning with others. They see others as connected contributors to learning rather than passive recipients of content and training. This shift engenders the curiosity to use technology to do things differently, rather than just doing things more efficiently.

We can learn a lot from those L&D teams that had already changed how they viewed their role and put in a sustained effort to build their digital capability over a number of years. For these teams, the adjustment required to support their organisations to adapt to COVID was more about the volume of work and focus, rather than about how they support learning. Examples include:

Deciem, a small globally distributed beauty product manufacturer, focused on engagement and co-creation using their LXP as a hub for content, communication and community;

Reece, a plumbing retailer in Australia and New Zealand, developed a completely peer-group facilitated leadership program with content just 25% of the digitally enabled learning approaches used; and

The sales enablement team at GSK pharmaceuticals in India used a gamified digital approach to engage teams in challenges that built skills for new virtual sales channels.

Additionally, we can draw upon two robust bodies of research about learning innovation and technology: 16 years of L&D benchmarking from Emerald Works as well as the 2019 learning technology ecosystem report from RedThread: 

Reimagine how you create value as an L&D professional. There is much higher leverage in enabling continuous learning through shared responsibility rather than L&D controlling learning. Be aware that your current technology may be creating blind spots, so put it aside as you seek to look beyond content and classrooms to innovate. Take it a step further to unshackle your mind and drop the assumption that all learning activity needs to be tracked.

"I realised that you can create such a blended, flexible, co-created strategy that reinvents what a learning moment is and when and how people learn. It's been transformational.  It's hard to see that if your technology doesn't serve you the right way." – Kristina Tsiriotakis, Deciem.

Define the value proposition for learning in your organisation for all of your ‘customers’ – senior leaders, managers and the broader workforce.  Ensure you have a documented strategy co-created with all stakeholders that describes the organisation’s vision for learning and how this will be achieved.  Digital is just one pillar in a well-rounded learning strategy that is aligned to your organisational strategy and culture. 

Adopting a human-centred design approach means starting with the user experience, and then considering the technology that will best create this experience. This is just as relevant for the design of your overall technology suite as it is for specific learning solutions. Find out what technology people in your organisation use for work, learning, and social connection, as well as why and how they use it. Use these insights to inform your technology roadmap. Additionally, ensure that you consider all relevant use cases. Consuming content is just one of 11 learning technology functionalities that organisations use to develop their employees.  Others include experimenting, connecting and performing – as well as administrative functions performed by L&D.

"Our lens is not the technology. Our lens is the experience we want to deliver. What we consider very deeply through our human-centred design process is “What is the ideal experience or the best experience that we may be able to deliver to affect learning transfer? And to really enable and support our people in this experience?” – Gareth Killeen, Reece 

Lesson 4 – Think ‘I can become capable and confident’ 

The skills required to craft a digital learning strategy include technology management, digital design and delivery, organisational learning strategy and human-centred design.  Every member of your L&D team needs a broad understanding of the contemporary technology landscape, plus proficiency with the tools relevant to their role.  Larger L&D teams often have specialist roles to manage learning technology and lead technology-enabled innovation.  Regardless of whether such roles are in place, create an environment where all L&D team members are able to keep themselves up to date, experiment, and share new ideas and practices with one another.  

Business value mindset: Critical to successful digital learning strategy

Something fundamental needs to shift if L&D is to break through the pattern of ‘sameness’ and low levels of organisational impact despite high investment in technology.  Breaking the digital learning conundrum requires different thinking. A shift in the L&D mindset is a critical first step to crafting a digital learning strategy that creates business value.   

3 tips for crafting a digital learning strategy that creates value

Approach your learning strategy with a business value mindset

Define the value proposition for learning in your organisation

Co-create a well-rounded learning strategy 

Describe the experience you want to deliver to support your learning strategy

Research how your people use technology for work, learning and social connection

Technology is an enabler of learning and performance, not the saviour

Learning is a responsibility shared by people, not outsourced to technology

Technology augments L&D people rather than replacing them

For more insights, be sure to subscribe to the Go1 newsletter to stay on top of all the latest L&D trends. Or, you can book a demo today to find out how Go1 can help with your team’s learning needs. 

L&D has long focussed on the wrong kind of value – learning value rather than business value. Michelle Ockers takes us through her tips to craft a digital learning strategy that creates value.

Crafting a digital learning strategy that creates value

L&D has long focussed on the wrong kind of value – learning value rather than business value. Michelle Ockers takes us through her tips to craft a digital learning strategy that creates value. 