It is one thing to hypothesize about learning as a platform (LaaP), but it’s entirely another to put it into practice. Nonetheless, progressive organizations are demonstrating that it can be done, and perhaps there are none more progressive than ATB Financial.
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With approximately 5,300 employees, ATB Financial is a community-focused regional financial institution based in Alberta, Canada. The organization has been “using banking to create happiness” for Albertans since 1938. Though it has a long and distinguished history, the company is anything but traditional in its culture and in its approach to learning.
Debbie Blakeman, vice president of People & Culture at ATB Financial, describes the company as being “the ideal size with a leadership team that focuses intentionally on culture, which enables the organization to reimagine learning.” She elaborates, “With our record-high employee engagement providing a springboard, we have capitalized on unleashing the power and passion of our internal crowd or peer-to-peer learning system in a very big way.”
As Meriya Dyble, director of Learning Reimagined, at ATB Financial, further explains, her organization’s journey toward learning as a platform is linked to the company’s strategy to become “a technology company that does exceptional banking,” rather than a bank that simply uses technology.
With this shift, leadership started to consider the skills, environment, and tools that would be required to support an agile, digital business, along with how the learning organization could keep up with the rapid pace of change in business. It quickly became apparent that the traditional approach to learning would not be sufficient to support such a significant transformation.
“Our learning strategy is based on the idea of evolving the learning organization’s role from creator to connector,” said Dyble. “We had an opportunity to experiment with this concept last year, when the company deployed the G Suite (i.e., Google) to enable its digitally focused vision. We brought together a multidisciplinary group dubbed the ‘G Team,’ and we tasked ourselves with not only transitioning to a Google shop, but also creating a work renaissance. The objective was to unlock the potential of over 5,000 team members and empower them to reimagine the way they work.”
Peer-to-Peer Learning
Dyble further noted that achieving this goal required a completely different approach to learning. She explained, “The idea of peer-to-peer learning and many-to-many, rather than one-to-many, really resonated with me. My hypothesis was that learning needed to become more of a connector than a creator, so we likely didn’t need a big team of learning professionals to make this transformation happen. Instead, we needed a way to harness the amazing community ATB had created.”
In order to break through silos and leverage the passion and creativity of the organization, Dyble called for volunteers from every part of the business to help ATB transform. More specifically, she asked for 50 team members to put up their hands and be change agents.
Successful candidates would gain a once-in-a-lifetime experience where they would participate in a 30-day boot camp and then be tasked in helping to create a work renaissance. Almost 400 people applied, and 50 were chosen from across the province, spanning all generations and every area of the business. Dubbed the “G Evangelists,” none of them had ever done anything like this before.
“While we were working with the G Evangelists, it became apparent that their talents could best be used to focus on people and work impacts rather than technical support,” said Dyble. This led to the creation of a second level of support focused on technical skills.
Also, because so many team members had put up their hands to be G Evangelists, the learning organization sought to build upon this momentum and to leverage “the crowd” as much as possible. This desire spawned the G Academy, which was a self-driven assessment of skills in the G Suite.
Dyble elaborated, “People already used Google at home, so we figured there were some very capable individuals out there who could support their peers.” Using the tagline “I teach, I learn,” the organization enticed team members to take the assessment and teach others how to use the tools, thereby furthering their own expertise.
The first 250 to pass the G Academy received early access to the G Suite. “We were hoping to get at least 250 team members to pass and have them ready to provide support on technical questions for launch. To our delight, we had 1,300 pass the G Academy in two weeks. The power of peer-to-peer was totally unleashed.”
Peer-to-Peer Success
This peer-to-peer approach allowed the early adopters to expand their portfolio of capabilities and experiences, exposing them to new business areas and data they otherwise would not have encountered. “This really shined a light on how much networking and building connections can strongly enhance the capabilities of our organization, much more so than trying to create the right content,” commented Dyble.
From these early wins, the learning organization quickly saw the value in putting a digital platform in place to connect learners with the right people, experiences, and information that would evolve their thinking and allow innovative ideas to come to fruition. In other words, the platform would support an “ecosystem that connects learners—where radical personalization is the norm.”
“We are in the process of creating this digital platform, while also transforming into an Agile development shop, where ‘squads’ are tasked with embedding learning into the DNA of the organization,” shares Dyble. These “squads” comprise people from learning as well as developers, designers, data scientists, and system architects from across the organization’s larger digital transformation.
The goal of these horizontal, cross-functional groups is to create an always available, continuously growing digital ecosystem that embeds learning into the business. “One of the game changers for us is the simple ability for our team members to share all of their knowledge and content with one another,” explained Dyble.
She continued, “Our platform not only enables that, but also allows us to continue the conversation in a way that leads to self-organized teams coming together to tackle challenges and implement ideas. With this ecosystem, learning has become a way of connecting people, information, and ideas with business problems that need to be solved.”
As the learning organization at ATB Financial goes down its Agile development path, it is starting to look, and even sound, dramatically different than a typical learning department. For instance, both within learning and throughout the entire company, hierarchies are becoming flatter and employees’ titles are being fashioned to more directly reflect their missions and the value they bring to the business, as in “chief evangelist” and “director of learning reimagined.”
And perhaps most significantly, learning is becoming seamless. “For the most part, people in the business should have no idea that we’re the ones delivering the opportunities and experiences they value and want more of,” said Dyble. “Learning is moving behind the scenes. It’s no longer a siloed department; it’s an ecosystem through which people can be successful,” she concluded.
Conclusion
In the age of knowledge capital, the ability for organizations to create a learning ecosystem is a competitive differentiator. Those that provide developmental agility, informational empowerment, and environmental enablement by approaching learning as a platform will increasingly have a competitive advantage, both in terms of improved business performance and better talent acquisition, development, engagement, and performance.
ATB Financial has demonstrated that it is possible not only to implement a whole new concept of “learning as a platform,” but also to place learning at the heart of corporate culture—and, in so doing, to forever change how learning delivers value to the business.
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| The article originally appeared on the Deloitte blog, here, and was compiled by the following authors: Michael Griffiths, Principal at Deloitte Consulting LLP, mgriffiths@deloitte.com. Josh Haims, Principal of Deloitte Consulting LLP, jhaims@deloitte.com. Terry Patterson, Senior Manager at Deloitte Consulting LLP, tepatterson@deloitte.com. Lindsey Straka West, Manager at Deloitte Consulting LLP, linwest@deloitte.com. Meriya Dyble, Director of Learning Reimagined at ATB Financial, mdyble@atb.com. Debbie Blakeman, Vice President of People & Culture at ATB Financial, dblakeman@atb.com. |