Guided product tour
Book a demo

No company, regardless of its size or experience, is immune to crisis or market turbulence. Even renowned names of the industry like Apple, McDonald’s, and Walmart faced hurdles and challenges. However, they didn’t succumb but emerged stronger and positioned themselves for success. 

Ever wondered how these companies survive and navigate through uncertain times? 

These companies or their employees are not afraid of change as they’ve cultivated an agile-driven environment. 

In the current era, agility has captured more attention, especially in the learning and development landscape. 

93% of business units that had fully adopted an agile model before the current pandemic did better compared to business units that hadn’t.

But wait, what is learning agility? 

Learning agility is the ability to be open to new ideas and solutions, trying new behaviors, accepting challenges, and learning much faster to keep up with the changing market scenarios. Learning agility helps employees swiftly blend and adapt to volatility.

“Success today requires the agility and drive to constantly rethink, reinvigorate, react and reinvent” – Bill Gates 

Why learning agility is important for frontline and knowledge workers

An agile-driven environment propels the employees to look at every challenge as an opportunity and motivates them to learn from that experience.  Learning agility is the key to success in a post-pandemic world for both knowledge and frontline workers

COVID has wreaked havoc in the business world and has caused digital disruption. Learning agility has become the revival plan for many companies globally. 

Whether your employees are on the field or behind the desk they need the shield of learning agility to respond to challenging situations and deliver great results. 

The frontline workers, being the face of the company, need to keep pace with the changing customer expectations and needs. Post pandemic there has been a dramatic change in customer’s requirements and pain points. Moreover, most of the customers have tapped the digital space so that has changed the game completely for the frontline workforce. The challenges have multiplied. For instance, due to the surge in the volume of orders, many delivery agents are delaying deliveries. They are getting poor ratings and the company is receiving negative reviews. Adding the agile strategy can organize and speed up the entire delivery process. 

The knowledge workers too are sailing in the same boat.  Digital transformation has accelerated to deal with the disruption caused due to the pandemic. Automation gained traction and there has been a rise in the use of digital products. Innovation needs to spread its wings wide to succeed in the world. 

To fit in this digital-first world, knowledge workers need to change their learning patterns and adapt to the new normal by embracing agility. COVID has drastically increased the demand for tech-related jobs and technology transformation. For instance, one of our clients, an independent full-service retail broking house in India, whose primary modus operandi was traditional and involved physical interaction between the broker and the customer, had to overnight pivot to a digital ecosystem to sustain itself. This led to an end-to-end shift in the business model and the way they work. They even digitized their training process with disprz. We helped them transition from a classroom to virtual training to create hyper-personalized learning journeys in a month.

Measuring learning agility readiness: Identify gaps using assessments

Are your employees agile and have the skills needed to adapt and survive in a changing landscape? 

Well, you can find that through assessments. Through questionnaires and MCQs you can gauge the potential of your knowledge and frontline workers.

Many new roles have emerged. Through assessments, you can find out if your employees are agile enough to take up the new responsibility in less time. Clear recognition of the strength and capability gap help in building an impactful learning agility strategy. You can take the help of a learning solution that not only helps in providing blended learning formats to engage employees but also provides assessments to create a strong agile workforce. A smart solution like disprz is a cherry on the cake as along with all this it even allows you to identify and benchmark skills for every role. Well, that’s not the end of the road, it supports multilingual learning. Most of the frontline workers don’t know the standard English language. So they can quickly learn in their preferred language and take quick assessments to test the knowledge, 

How do you make your learners more agile?

Here is how you can direct your employees on the learning agility pathway: 

Self vs push which is better for developing learning agile workforce

Agile employees need full control over their learning to thrive in ambiguous situations. This is why both frontline and knowledge workforce prefer self-paced learning rather than push-based learning. 

disprz conducted a study on the learning behavior of employees and found that Self-enrolled modules had 82% completions as opposed to 34% for push-based modules 

Push-based learning is effective in certain industries where specific norms or guidelines need to be followed. However, companies shouldn’t be confined to it. For providing flexibility in learning it is important to blend push with pull-based learning. 

Frontline and knowledge workers need on-demand learning in the world, which is why pull-based is of paramount importance for them. Employees can learn faster when they have control over choosing what they want to learn. Pull-based learning aligns with the learning agility culture’s expectations. This just-in-time learning is apt to adapt swiftly to the changing market needs. 

Prepare for the unforeseen challenges with subjective assignments and role play

Learning agility needs the practice to prepare the frontline and knowledge workers for unforeseen scenarios. One of the better ways to do this is through subjective assignments and role-plays

Put your employee in a difficult situation to understand how they will react. For instance, give a subjective assignment by creating a potential scenario for your customer success team. 

Create a hypothetical client who is comparing the product with the competitor who has added new features to strengthen the solution. So ask the team to explain how they will deal with such a situation. You can even have a role play with each team member.  Stress testing can help in assessing the agility of the employees to find out how efficiently they handle challenging situations, especially those who have to deal with customers directly. Give the knowledge and frontline workers enough opportunities to test, practice, and ponder over what they learn. 

Encourage collaboration

Collaboration can ignite the fire of learning agility. Employees can share knowledge and discuss differences in opinions in real-time when you open the door for collaboration. Ensure all your employees are on the same page by bringing on a common platform. 

For instance, disprz has a social platform called Buzz where all the employees can post their queries or share information that can be useful to other teammates. They can instantly connect with their peers when in a dilemma, and share what they are currently learning. Employees get to know what’s currently trending based on what others are learning. Social learning can help in finding quick solutions to the challenges that are arising in the world.

Conclusion 

The more agile your employees are, the better they can respond to challenging situations. Learning agility can be a game-changer for your business. So, choose the right learning solution that fits best in the learning agility environment. Preview and see disprz in action to find how it can help in making your employee more agile to confidently deal with whatever comes their way. 

About the author

Discover how Disprz can align learning and upskilling with your desired business outcomes.