Community is the key to success at Learnerbly, where Marie Krebs, People Operations Manager, has worked hard to create a culture that emphasises collective action, as well as individual success.
Naturally, as a workplace learning provider, Learnerbly is proud of its internal learning culture and emphasis on employee wellbeing as a path to driving individual and team performance. Before the pandemic, the company already offered benefits such as personal learning budgets to spend on its platform, a healthcare scheme, the option to work from home and flexible hours, with some of the team already distributed.
When Covid-19 hit, however, the company’s primary concern was how best to support its people through the disruption and all the physical and mental strain that came with it.
“We spend so much time at work, it was crucial we adequately supported each other to the best of our capacities, and that only works if each person is empowered to have a say and make an impact at an organisational level,” said Marie.
In early March, when news of the pandemic first surfaced, the company ran a two-day full remote drill to assess what would and would not work in the case of a long-term full remote working roll-out. Employee feedback was gathered and new initiatives were implemented based on this. Learnerbly publicly shared the results of this survey to help other companies to understand what the key blocks and challenges could be.
An adaptable response plan was then drafted and, based on employee feedback, everyone was encouraged to work from home as much as possible.
The main issues the company faced during the transition to full remote working were:
“Teams that had never operated remotely like business development and customer success needed to understand how to do so overnight. Regardless of the support offered, it's a huge challenge. While our product team had partially remote experience, we had no idea how we were going to deliver our most significant feature in a completely new working environment,” explained Marie.
Simultaneously, the business launched a furlough-special version of its product to enable organisations to support their furloughed employees for free during this tough period. This drove high engagement, which was an amazing reward, but also required lots of work from the team.
“We moved fast, we gave clarity over the things we could control and acknowledged uncertainty about the things we couldn't control,” said Marie.
“With no power over the situation, our leaders were deliberately vocal about acknowledging that this is a difficult, challenging, unprecedented situation and encouraged everyone to share their concerns and seek support as needed”.
Managers embedded these practices in their weekly one-to-one sessions with their reports. The business also implemented alternative means of socialisation and support across the business, including: