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Hybrid working is now an essential offering for organisations to recruit the best candidates, but it can also risk hindering consultant development and thus business growth.
However, with a more strategic approach, these challenges can be overcome and even turned into organisational advantages.
Organisations risk missing out on three crucial learning opportunities in a hybrid work environment. If not addressed, these challenges can result in a lasting learning gap, particularly for graduate recruits. Therefore, it’s essential to ensure these three learning opportunities are preserved.
1: Learning by witness
Osmosis learning is vital to the overall development of consultants. There is so much personal development value in watching and listening to colleagues in their day-to-day roles. Colleagues will always do things differently, and each individual can take pieces of what they witness in person and implement them to form a repertoire of effective approaches.
2: Learning by sharing
In addition to witnessing, actively sharing and seeking out colleague advice is key. Nipping to a colleague’s desk quickly to ask them how they’d solve a challenging project issue is the value of having a diverse team of individuals, and hybrid work stunts their ability to do so. Thus, we often see consultants spending time reinventing the wheel rather than relying on the support of their colleagues.
3: Learning by conversation
This more impromptu, unscripted way of learning might be the hardest to replicate, as it evolves organically through interaction as opposed to active work and problem-solving. A water-cooler chat between colleagues that starts with “How’s it going?” can go in all sorts of directions. Maybe a manager strikes up an exchange with a team member informally and the conversation goes down the path of a method the team member is going about a certain task that could be made more efficient. This offers the manager the ability to deliver real-time feedback and coaching, avoiding a potential future project delay.
These challenges are hard to spot, as they manifest themselves gradually. Often, when they are identified, it’s too late.
This isn’t to say that hybrid working is always a negative! In fact, with a bit of creativity, you can introduce simple mechanisms that replicate this lost learning potential.
1: Osmosis learning
Schedule regular opportunities for junior consultants to join calls, allowing them to watch and learn from the way senior colleagues manage interactions.
To go a bit deeper, implement a ‘buddy system’ linking junior and senior consultants to facilitate this learning, shaking up the system at regular intervals to deliver team-wide learning partnerships.
2: Team-wide learning
Ensure everyone, regardless of seniority, has 30 minutes in their calendar weekly that can’t be taken by client responsibilities or leadership conversations. At each meeting, a team member shares a 20-minute presentation on a project problem or observation, followed by a 10-minute Q&A session. This acts as a central catalyst for the pooling of team knowledge, both from the presenter and attendees.
Make sure to record the presentations, too. These can be pooled into an ever-growing internal learning resource, offering insights into projects past and present not just for those who attended but for future recruits as well.
3: Unstructured chats
Schedule 5-minute huddles between project managers and team members – e-coffee breaks. The key to making these meetings work is a lack of expectation. You don’t learn something groundbreaking in every coffee break in person – sometimes two people might catch each other up on their weekend activities in passing.
This is part of the process – by putting in place opportunities to build connection and understanding, teams will become more comfortable sharing problems and supporting each other.
L&D opportunities that used to happen organically in an in-person office can be replicated in this hybrid era, with just a little creative thinking.
At Elevation Learning, we partner with organisations to develop bespoke, creative L&D strategies, supporting consultant development in-person and remotely. If you think we can help you, feel free to get in touch at info@elevationlearning.co.uk.