The 5 Moments of Need Blog

Shifts & Pivots: What the Pandemic has Taught Us

This blog is excerpted from the Performance Matters Podcast. In the episode, Trends: Shifts & Pivots in L&D, Bob Mosher discusses specific trends we’ve been hearing, seeing, and experiencing in our current and ever-evolving professional landscape.

This post is a collection of a lot of information we have gathered over the last nine months. Since the pandemic hit, we have been honored to be a part of hundreds of conversations with learning and development professionals from around the globe discussing how this shift has affected the L&D industry as a whole.

Here, I will share two of the five ideas that we have come across; the full five ideas (listed below) can be heard in their entirety in the podcast episode.

1.   What we’ve learned overall as we’ve looked across the landscape of what is L&D and what we have heard from several leaders across the globe.
2.     The learner and how they’ve pivoted.
3.    What have we learned about how to develop, design, and deliver the information that has been profound and impactful throughout the pandemic.
4.    Shifts in roles and responsibilities in the learning field. There have been a couple of things that have emerged, some which have been around for a while but also new ones that have emerged out of this crazy time.
5.    Virtual learning and how has it changed the way we look at instruction. Clearly, it was the tip of the sword when we entered this back in March. Since then, many organizations have stood up some remarkable virtual solutions.

Let’s start in general terms. I don’t know how old many of you are, or how long you’ve been in the industry, but I remember the days of 2008 when another horrific financial crisis hit our world. Of course, this is a humanitarian crisis with the effect of the pandemic.

But when the financial crisis hit back in 2008, to be honest, our phones stopped ringing in L&D. We took this on the chin when finances were thin. Unfortunately, and we’ve talked about this before, we were not positioned as a need—as opposed to want, or nice to have—resource. And many of us, frankly, were on the wrong side of the ledger paper. We got cut, so to speak.

The—if I can use this word—“exciting” side of what we’ve seen with the pandemic is that it has shown how many organizations see us very differently. I’ve talked to a number of learning leaders. I’ll give one example in particular, of a leader with well over ten years in the organization as a senior leader. He had never spoken, personally, with the C-suite person in his company—ever.

But his phone actually rang within days after the pandemic hit. It is very telling that when a C-suite member thought to circle the wagons, he wanted to get things in order and was looking out into “how to survive in this,” L&D was top of mind.

Friends, that’s a remarkable opportunity. Here are the two words that came up almost unanimously when talking to others in the industry, “opportunity” and “acceleration.”

Opportunity from the standpoint of “Here we are now. We have a seat at the table. We are one of the first resources they are going to.” And they are not talking about courses. There is a significant shift in the “ask” from “courses” to “performance.”

This is a very different asks than we’ve been asked before and it opens a whole other set of opportunities. For one, a different conversation, and secondly, a different deliverable, which we’ll talk about in a bit.

Acceleration. As a dear friend of mine said recently, he used to deal with a bureaucratic vacuum when it came to technology. What he meant by that is that there was void which was made up of walls and barriers within organizations—frankly, IT being one of them—that we had to wait on, walk through, get the buy-in from—to get technologies into our ecosystem.

Well, look what happened with virtual technology. Many of us were asked to stand that up in weeks, if not days. No bureaucracy. Get it through procurement, get it through whatever part of IT we must so that this thing can work!

This is an amazing time for technology and learning. And so is your opportunity to get an EPSS in there, an LXP in there, and a content management system in there is greater than ever before. People are very receptive.

But—you must pivot on serving a need. You must pivot on associating that buy and that spend, not with just having one of those platforms but —back to number one, opportunity—what performance issues are you going to solve?

On the darker side, another general thing we found is that our current landscape has been exposing some cracks in the dam of our offerings. Training is not enough. A lot of workers are looking outside of our offerings for ways to serve and help themselves. We’ll talk about the learners in a minute. They are being remarkably innovative.

Now, friends, I’m not diminishing the importance of training. But what I am saying is—and I love this word—learners’ needs are very “raw” right now. They are feeling very desperate right now and that breeds receptivity, but it also breeds a level of scrutiny like we may have never seen before. The door is open—opportunity—but at the same time, we are exposed on an enterprise level around the effectiveness of how we engage, and what we build, like never before.

This is a remarkable time to shine and come out of this [situation] in a completely different place than before but at the same time, we have to be careful about just offering the same old thing to what is a very different world.

And lastly, clearly, there has been financial and budget implications but the interesting thing again—unlike 2008—is it’s not so much just an across-the-board cut, or furlough as we’re calling it today. It’s very discretionary and organizations are being careful. So, the degree to which L&D can be positioned as being vital to the organization and proactively help organizations meet the challenges of the day, be productive, support their workforce remotely and other things, the more valuable we’ll be seen.

Now let’s get a little deeper into some specifics. Learners. Let’s start with the most important people in the world, of course, right? Those who we serve. How have learners been pivoting?

I want to touch on four different things that have been talked about quite a bit, and I just love this first one. When the pandemic first hit back in March, April, May, we were clearly back on our heels. We were very much in survival mode. But what we’ve seen is a transformation—so many learners have gone from this survival mode of “What am I going to do?” to one of, “Darn it! I’m going to pick myself up by the bootstraps. I’m going to get my job done. I’m going to remain vibrant. I’m going to be a critical part of the organization. I’m going to be heard and prove my worth even though I’m at home.”

They have stepped up in some remarkable ways. Which has led to my second point, which is that many have become more independent in their ability to support themselves. And guess what! They’re also looking in new places for resources. We have a much more aggressive and impatient learner than ever before.

Back in the days when eLearning first hit, we called it “just in time.” We called it “on demand.” I think many would argue it may not have been. It might have been easily available. But I don’t know if learners would call it “on demand.”

Well, friends, we live in an on-demand world like never in my lifetime. And so, when you get up every morning and you have demands that hit you right in the face, you become aggressive and you become independent about finding those solutions.

So, the opportunity is, are the services and deliverables we offer what they are finding? Have you done some analysis on the resources that they are using? And not just of the options we offer, but have you done some open analysis of what resources in general help get them through the day? We’d be surprised when we find out the amazing resources learners have both made themselves, that need brokering and aggregation, and the information they are finding outside of the normal means. As we emerge from this, we can be in the forefront in aggregating, curating that information in powerful ways like it’s never been done before.

Many don’t like our initial approaches to virtual instruction. Now, I’m going to get a mixed bag of reviews on this and I get it. A lot of them are remarkably thankful that we stood up our virtual offerings so quickly, but candidly, the honeymoon’s over. The wave has crashed on the beach, and there is some disillusionment and fatigue, with virtual instructor-led. In many ways our learners are looking for us to innovate and re-invent virtual instruction. And guess what? That work will also have a profound impact on the classrooms we return to.

And finally, I don’t know about you, friends, but we’re hearing that more and more are just emotionally shot. This is difficult on every one of us. I don’t know if in my thirty-eight years of professional life that I’ve ever heard of lines of business asking for empathy content…Empathy content! Emotional intelligence content. Sure, there’s soft skills, and leadership, listening skills, how to get along and how to handle a difficult situation. Those content areas have been around forever. But the words being used today are emotional words. We must be cognizant to the pressure, the emotion, the stress, both at work and at home, that our learners are under. If anyone can do it in our enterprises, we are the most empathetic group I know in recognizing that and helping organizations work through it.

Download the full episode to hear the list of shifts and pivots in its entirety.

Don’t forget to subscribe to The Performance Matters Podcast to stay up to date on all the latest conversations and guests in The 5 Moments space.

Experience Matters: A Call Center Conversion

This blog is excerpted from the Performance Matters Podcast. In the episode, Experience Matters | A Call Center Conversion, Bob Mosher and Chris King, Chief Learning Provocateur at CEEK LLC, discuss his latest 5 Moments project tied to the pandemic and spoiler alert—built in just over one week.

Bob Mosher (BM): We are very excited about this particular episode. We know L&D is currently challenged like never before. As my dad always said, “There’s good in everything”, and we’ve seen some remarkable opportunities in acceleration when we talk to L&D leaders around what’s going on today. Which brings me to Chris King, joining us today.

Chris, let’s get right into this, give us some background and how The 5 Moments of Need and workflow learning have worked themselves into your journey.

Chris King (CK): I’ve been in the business now for twenty-plus years, but like many people in the training business, I was an accidental trainer. I was not working anywhere near training, and one day my college roommate called me up and said, “You know, I find myself the head of a training department and we’re hiring; I miss hanging out with you and I’ll pay you $10,000 more than whatever you’re making right now if you’ll come and work for me.”

And so, as a twenty-something, it’s like, “Uh, Yeah! When can I start?” He said, “I think you’ll be good at this.” And he was right, it was a good fit for me.

Since, I’ve done a little bit of everything. I taught myself instructional design. I’ve been an eLearning developer. I’ve been an LMS administrator. I was doing virtual delivery when I worked at Geico back in the early 2000s so was an “early adopter of virtual”. I then became a consultant proper in 2009.

And that’s when I first heard about The 5 Moments of Need. It was kind of back before you were even calling it that. A colleague and good friend of mine went to a conference and saw you and Con speak and she came back and said, “You should really look into this because it’s interesting.”

And she was absolutely right.

It kind of rocked my world as it does with many people when they first discover The 5 Moments of Need. I think that it has become kind of a guiding light for me.

You know, I knew I was on to something when I took an instructional designer to an RWA, Rapid Workflow Analysis, that I was conducting to start a course, and she was cold on it. She had never heard of The 5 Moments of Need or Rapid Workflow Analysis or anything like that. And I did the whole deal. When we walked out of that workshop, my instructional designer said, “I will never design a course another way again!”

That was so transformative for me. And that’s when I knew, we were really onto something here with workflow learning. And so, since then, I’ve been trying to find places to do it whenever I can. One of my challenges is that I’m not inside a company. I don’t have a team to work with to build it from the inside out. I’m a consultant that comes in, so I’m constantly trying to convince people, trying to talk people into this, trying to explain to them the benefits.

BM: My gosh, between kindred spirits, it just blows me away how we have to keep selling it. But darn it! In our industry, it’s been like turning an ocean liner around.

Walk us into what we’re going to talk about today. Give us bit about the comeuppance of this project and how it is different from other training projects you’ve done in the past.

CK: The pandemic is a chance to change the way we do business. I just want to say that out loud. It’s our chance to experiment with new things and I’ve been encouraging everyone that I talk to, “to change the way you’re doing business.”

For this particular project, the story begins back in April—right at the start of the lockdown.

A little background. We’re a certified implementation partner with Panviva and they brought us this opportunity to work with a company called Maximus. Maximus is a global outsourcing company that focuses on government-sponsored programs and they were working with a state department of health to stand up a contact tracing call center.

So really topical, very important work. The call center would be responsible for notifying citizens when they tested positive for COVID-19 and then collecting information about where they were and who they interacted with during their infectious period. They then would also conduct outreach to anyone who was designated as a close contact to notify them of potential exposure, ask them to quarantine themselves, and answer questions about where they could get tested or how they could get connected with state resources for help. So really a meaty, great outcome, great mission-driven project to work on.

What we were up against was these kinds of calls are long and heavy on both education and data collection. The script we received was 20 pages long and we’re not talking about a lot of white space in there either. We’re talking about 20-25 minutes per call on just the short ones with a lot of specialized terminology that needed to be translated from medical to plain language. Maximus’ hiring program focused on furloughed medical personnel to help with the communication challenges. So, we got a big complex script, we had a long workflow, but it was really the scale that was a little daunting as Maximus was hiring 500 agents to staff the center.

This was 500 people that would need to, from a cold start, be able to deliver a standard 20-page script and collect important—and I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say—life-saving data.

So we have a complex workflow, long stretches of scripting, huge number of call center agents. But, Bob, let me tell you how it got “interesting.” The CRM tool that the health department was using was still being built.

BM: Wow!

CK: They had a workflow and they had questions and answers, but everything was in a state of flux. You know, the menus were changing all the time, the icons they were using, so we’re shooting at a moving target for our training.

But I don’t think I mentioned—we were brought in eight days before go-live.

BM: Oh, jeez!

CK: So, for the Maximus training team this whole thing was like planning a wedding with 500-person guestlist—in just three weeks.

BM: Yeah, wow! Perfect analogy!

CK: Yeah! So, you can imagine how everyone was feeling when you kick off a project like that with those kinds of time constraints. The list of unknowns was just amazingly long. And this thing had to launch on time.

What we wound up doing was create a workable performance support tool in Panviva over a weekend. We didn’t even have a chance to actually do a Rapid Workflow Analysis with the team. I mean, we had to take the script and the SOP—we had access to the test environment for the CRM—and we had several meetings with the state department of health SMEs. And that’s really what we had to work with.

After we got through that weekend we spent the rest of the week adding processes for software tools. We added resources for how to log into the eight different systems the agents needed to access. And we spent the time updating information as things changed. And then that call center went live, on time, at the beginning of May.

BM: Wow! So what parts of the EnABLE methodology worked in this really unique case for you?

CK: As I mentioned, there was no time to do the normal Rapid Workflow Analysis. And I have to admit we spent a lot of time fixing things that we would have worked out in that workflow analysis if we’d had the time to do it.

So at least we had a workflow. We were able to pull the workflow out of the SOP. And, Bob, I know you’ve talked in the past about how in your early days as an instructional designer, you didn’t really pay attention to workflow because it wasn’t what you would consider learning or what you were designing.

We were forced from the beginning to focus on that workflow. Because that was central to what we were doing.

The workflow focus of the EnABLE methodology really helped us out there. I think we did chunking right. We never had the chance to create a proper LEAP plan. But I did use the LEAP template to track the documents we were creating to make sure that we didn’t leave anything out, it helped us stay organized.

You know, I think another thing that was super important to us was writing style. Beth and Carol in The 5 Moments of Need Designer Course spent a lot of time talking about how to write for performance and—I have to emphasize this—it makes all of the difference, especially in this kind of call center, live performance kind of environment. I mean, we spent most of the month of August rewriting instructions and reducing the length of the documents to make them more focused, short and to the point, and easy to scan.

BM: Just incredible. So, hey, friend. Huge adoption here. Right?

CK: Yeah, eight days to “train” 500 agents on a 20-page script that supported a CRM that was still in the beta stage right in the middle of a pandemic? This is not something that ADDIE could even envision, much less support. Right? So typical systems training? “No way! We don’t have time for that!”

There was no way training in any conventional way could get this team on their feet in the time we had.

So really what we did was, we said, “We’re going to put all of our effort into building this EPSS. And then the training for your agents needs to focus on having them trust the EPSS. Trust the performance support tool that they are going to have. I think that’s one of the things the Maximus supervisor team did right. Day in and day out, they told their teams, “You have to follow what it says in the tool. You have to follow the script. You have to follow the questions that are being set up for you. Because the CRM is changing all the time. The questions are changing. The script is changing. Everything is changing.”

You want to talk about a “super-moment” of change? I mean, we were living that moment of change for 5 weeks. Every day.

We were publishing stuff in the middle of the day to the tool. So, there was no time for conventional training on this. This was, “I’m going to train you how to use the EPSS and that’s what we’re gonna do.”

That’s all we had time for was learning in the workflow.

BM: Wow. My friend, brilliant as always. I can’t think of a better ambassador. And we can’t thank you enough for your friendship, your partnership in this journey, your great work, and the voice that you have become. It’s just been wonderful.

Listen to the full episode to hear Chris’ advice and takeaways from the project.

Don’t forget to subscribe to The Performance Matters Podcast to stay up-to-date on all the latest conversations and guests in The 5 Moments space.

Lessons Learned Beginning a 5 Moments of Need Journey in a Pandemic

This blog is excerpted from the “Beginning a 5 Moments Journey” episode where Bob Mosher and Scott Schmoldt, training manager at UMR, discuss why the pandemic catapulted his team into a performance-first mindset and the lessons he’s learning along the way.

Bob Mosher (BM): Today we have the privilege of talking with a wonderful gentleman, a young leader that Con and I admire and have watched grow in such a remarkable ways with his team, Scott Schmoldt, the training manager at UMR, which is a subsidiary division of United Health company.

We’re excited to hear your story, my friend. We get a lot of wonderfully experienced folks on this podcast, some a little further down the workflow learning journey than yourself and your organization. And that’s wonderful. They tell such a great story. But, at the same time, a vast majority of our listeners are new to the journey and to making the shift to workflow learning.

We’ve watched you do such a masterful job studying this, understanding it, and communicating it. While at the same time, nurturing and mentoring your team into it.

So excited for you to tell that story. Why don’t you start out with a little bit about yourself and what drew you into this area?

Scott Schmoldt (SS): I appreciate it, Bob. I appreciate the “young” reference. I feel like I’m getting older all the time, but I always knew that I wanted to be an educator. Growing up, playing sports, a lot of times my coaches would tell me that “You know what? You’re a better coach than you are an actual player.”

So I always knew that there was going to be some sort of educator track in my future. Being in the first class of the new millennium, I was encouraged to go into education because the theory was that if you graduated from high school in 2000, and then get your degree in 2004/2005, and Baby Boomer generations would start to retire, there would be a need for educators, especially for male educators, in the elementary grades.

And so that’s the track that I went down. As I went through school, got my degree and started to apply for positions, lo and behold, those generations really weren’t retiring. They were staying in their positions for a variety of reasons.

So, I spent a couple of years—a year and a half—doing some long-term sub positions, I was in a second grade class and a three-four multi-age class. I also did a stint in a sixth grade class. And the market was just super saturated.

My wife also graduated at the same time as I did, got a job in the city that we were living in and so we didn’t really want to move. I really wanted her to build her career so I started to look elsewhere and eventually ended up landing a position at was called at the time WASA Benefits. It’s a legacy organization of UMR.

I started out there as a trainer and was facilitating classes, a couple years after that I moved into an instructional design role, did that for several years, and then moved into a leadership role about a decade ago leading people here at UMR in the Learning and Development space.

BM: Wow! It’s amazing how similar our journeys are, friend. I was an elementary ed major myself. But similar to your background there was an influx of opportunities and I find myself, like you, here in this role. So remarkable—a lot of good educators in this business.

So, my friend, give us a little bit about your team. Give us an overview of your learning organization and those that you support.

SS: Sure. UMR is a third-party administrator section of United Health Care. United Health Care is one of the largest insurers, if not the largest insurer of health in the country. And UMR is this branch off from United Health Care that offers third-party administrative services. My team’s primary responsibility really is that of onboarding and helping to initially educate the front-line call agents and claim processors who are responsible for taking care of our members.

And I would say, in general, we have a pretty traditional L&D team. I have a mix of people who are technical writers who write policies and procedures. I have instructional designers who are creating a lot of the content. People who are in the classroom. And then we have coaches as well that are responsible for some after-class support. So pretty traditional in terms of our team and the overall support that we provide for our organization.

BM: So what brought you to this, Scott? Obviously, like you say, you’re kind of chugging along there. You’ve got a fairly traditional team. The content areas, onboarding and others, are fairly stable and traditional in a sense.

What turned the corner for you in how you got to this place? What motivated you to take the journey in the first place?

SS: It was March of 2020—I think everybody is going to remember this as the date that we pivoted. I believe what happened is that because of COVID, and all the awfulness, frankly, that it’s brought, there materialized a bright side to it. Which is, it ripped wide open and it exposed where I believe most traditional L&D teams—ours included—were deficient.

And, you know, we saw the business needed to pivot quickly, and because of the traditional approaches that we had taken, we weren’t able to meet the needs. And so that’s what really initiated this. It was primarily centered around the need to go virtual very quickly.

And another thing it did was, and I didn’t know the language at the time, I’ve learned this along the way—it exposed that we’re pretty good as an L&D enterprise at meeting the Moments of New and More of the 5 Moments of Need.

But we’re not all that great at providing what they need at the Moment of Apply. And definitely not, at Solve and Change.

So that’s really where the journey started and why we went down this path.

BM: Yes, Con often says that this is probably the most remarkable Apply, Solve, and Change moments our industry has faced, right?

For the longest time, we were able to throw New and More at Apply, Solve, and Change, and just assume that it all blurred and people were fine. But to your point, when your support structures, literally the building you go into every day, is ripped out from underneath you, you are thrust into Apply in a sometimes terrifying and very lonely way.

Scott, can you tell us a little bit—if it’s okay—about the solution you journeyed into first. What area did you tackled, and in this new approach, what were some lessons learned in guiding a team through this kind of transformation?

SS: I mean, we really are in this first phase. And that literally is getting our programs “virtual ready.” Making sure they are adapted to this new virtual space.

And so that really was where the GEAR methodology has entered in around redesigning our ILT courses. And that’s still the phase that we’re in. We’re right now adapting all of our programs to the GEAR methodology and making sure that all of the facilitator guides that we have and the activities that we have—it’s all centered around that methodology. And so that really was the first step that we have taken. And we are still there.

One of the things that I’ve had to learn is patience and persistence.

I know that when I first started this, because the sense of urgency was so great, I wanted to just do it and do it quickly and get it done. And the reality is that it does take time. We’re turning the Titanic here, not the SS Minnow, so it’s going to take time and there needs to be patience to understand that it’s an iterative approach. As you embark on this journey, it’s not something that’s a “one and done.”

This is a long-term strategy of re-shaping what L&D does. You’ve got to take a step back, re-evaluate the bigger picture of where you’re trying to get to. And once I did that, I started to see the team embrace that as well. They started tackling tasks that were achievable today, that were achievable for next week, that were achievable for next month.

We’ve gotten to a really good place where we’re on track to have all of our programs completely converted over to this new GEAR methodology by the end of November.

BM: Wow! I applaud your transition. But that had to be tough for your team! They were fairly grounded in a more traditional approach. When they began this shift in mindset did you find them encountering certain challenges or things they had to overcome to get here?

SS: Yeah. So a couple of things again. This is all language that I’m learning from you and Con, frankly, and from other leaders in this industry who are farther down this journey. But the two words that I keep saying to my team is “methodology begets….”

I know that’s a phrase you’ve used before, Bob, and it’s so true. It’s “methodology begets the facilitator guide.” “Methodology begets how you deliver it.” “Methodology begets how you create the policy and procedure.”

And I think for so long what we’ve done, which is my second point, is we focused on content over context.

Listen to the full episode for additional 'aha' moments from Scott as well as his vision for his entire team and how he plans to get there!

Don’t forget to subscribe to The Performance Matters Podcast to stay up-to-date on all the latest conversations and guests in The 5 Moments space.