“We have over 300 people in that community now who are collaborating, sharing and accessing resources. That’s something we might have got to at the end of 2020, but we’ve been able to do that in a couple of weeks.”
Gemma Paterson, Head of Development Experiences and Innovation, Legal & General
Overview
Founded in 1836, Legal & General (L&G) is a market leader in life insurance, workplace pensions and retirement income.
During the pandemic, Legal & General set out to find a way to equip its employees with the resources and skills that would help them support their teams through remote working and other challenges of COVID-19, and far beyond.
Group Talent and People Development Director, Tanya Bagchi, and Head of Development Experiences and Innovation, Gemma Paterson, wanted to give L&G’s leaders quick access to information they could use at the point of need.
Content needed to be bite-sized and actionable so leaders could get to it quickly and use it to navigate things like remote working. Tanya and Gemma also wanted to connect leaders through a digital community so everyone could support each other during this challenging time.
The challenge
In a conversation with Fosway’s David Perring, Gemma Paterson talked through the new challenges L&G were faced with when the pandemic hit:
“We were due to send a bunch of people offsite for three days, I think two weeks after lockdown started. Obviously we weren’t going to do that. So what we actually did is ask, ‘what are you struggling with right now as leaders?’ People told us it was how to engage remote teams, how to manage remote teams, how to work in an agile way, it was how to look after our own mental wellbeing and our own resilience. So what we did was we went away and said ‘right, how the heck are we going to tackle this?”
“I presented the problem we had to the team at Hive Learning and they said well, look, there’s a real opportunity here. Let’s look at how we can build the community digitally around some of the challenges that people are having. And that’s what we did. We set up Hive Learning, I think it was two weeks from having the conversation to it being live. We ran a series of webinars over two months where we’d run a webinar every two weeks and between that there’d be missions and challenges that people can do. And it really helped people. That’s what we were measuring. We weren’t measuring engagement or happy sheets or things like that. We were actually going out and saying how are you working differently? How is this impacting you? What could be better? And just being able to work in that agile way in sprints and designing content as we went. I was so proud of the whole team, everyone just really pulled together and collaborated. It was brilliant to be part of.”
L&G leaders thrive in extraordinary times with Hive Learning
Gemma and Tanya worked quickly with Hive Learning to bring L&G’s leaders onto the digital platform in just two weeks. It was the first time that hundreds of L&G leaders were brought together in one place and the business saw the benefits almost instantly.
In an interview with Raconteur, Gemma shared L&G’s goal of getting hundreds of people collaborating, sharing and accessing resources by the end of the year — amazingly L&G were able to see the benefits of peer learning “in a couple of weeks”.
Gemma attributes this to the fact that the whole world has shifted and people are more open to experimentation. Digital or online learning is more interactive and user friendly than the days of click-through eLearning.
Using Hive Learning’s platform, L&G has built a peer learning culture through a central source of truth where learners are encouraged to “pay it forward”. People are prompted to share information with others on the platform which bakes in an element of accountability and means everyone goes on the same journey at the same time, even if it’s virtual.
The peer learning approach has been incredible for L&G as a way to build psychological safety in a digital space and using the business’s bright spots to create a ripple effect of change.
In a conversation with Fosway’s David Perring, Gemma Paterson, said:
“One of the things that we’ve used Hive [Learning] for is to role model the bright spots where that’s happening. So where there are people who do feel more psychologically safe or more comfortable to show up and give feedback and participate in discussions… we really focus our energy on those bright spots. So as opposed to trying to get people who don’t believe in it or don’t feel safe to do it, rather than trying to wrench people into getting involved in conversation on the platform, we’ve really leant into the people who are already having [those conversations] and allowed them to create that psych safety in that digital space that others can sort of see ‘oh actually it’s okay because I can see this person who I know having this conversation and I can get involved’. The team at Hive [Learning] have been really great at helping us compile a playbook of things that work and don’t work.”
Hive Learning and L&G’s teams worked together to release timely content that got conversation flowing. L&G’s webinars were supported by platform activity to continue the learning and conversation that learners gained from the webinar itself. With the help of Hive Learning’s metrics revealing the most popular kind of content and formats, L&G was able to tailor their approach with each cohort and improve the learner experience every week.
At a glance:
Industry: Financial Services
Region: EMEA
Employees: 8,500
Use Cases:
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