Learning + Development

Summary

As an operations manager, I'm tasked with promoting learning and development (L&D) for the team. As a fully distributed team, I sought to integrate monthly L&D sessions to attend as a team. By gathering user insight, I was able to synthesize and develop a calendar of monthly learning topics for the 2022 year.

Audience

A fully distributed team of 35 people; made up of staff, fellows, project team members, and student analysts.

Team

Operations Manager

My Role

As the only operations manager, I conducted a feedback session with the full team in order to synthesize and develop monthly learning & development session topics.

Skills Used

UX Research: Participatory Design, Synthesis; Facilitation; Miro

Situation

In October, the Beeck Center added an Operations Manager to their staff to further prioritize People Operations. A key responsibility in my role is performance management and professional development. As an organization located within a university, we aimed to commit ourselves to not only be teachers, but lifelong learners.

Task

Our Executive Director wanted to have our fully distributed team have more opportunities to get "face time" with each other. With the new year approaching, she was interested in our operations team exploring how learning & development be expanded.

Action

I wanted to use this task to further flex by user research skills. Using Miro to ensure interactivity in a distributed environment, I received a 15 minutes timeframe to gather as much input as possible from our full team during our only monthly gathering.

I split our teammates into four breakout rooms and instructed them to brainstorm and sticky note as many ideas for learning & development sessions as possible. When we came back as a full team, I asked members to review and use the dotting method to indicate ideas they were also interested by.

Due to the short timeframe, I took this info to synthesize independently. I first grouped them into similar categories and prescribed them in a few themes:

Reorientation: topics that review/revisit aspects of the Beeck Center
Content Development: topics to further develop our subject-matter expertise
Technical Skills: topics focused on gaining technical skills to enhance our work
Team Cohesion: topics that promote teamwork and collaboration
Interpersonal Skills: topics to help us develop ourselves to be better leaders

After these themes were identified, I noted that some sticky notes were solid workshop sessions, while others were identified "different needs" the team expressed. Due to their not being a lot of time to gather feedback from our team, this was not a surprise. I collected and shared these needs with appropriate staff members to encourage our integration of this feedback into different spaces across our work.

With so many ideas and an overall energetic environment from the brainstorming session, I proposed to our Director that we integrate team-wide L&D on a monthly basis. This would not only ensure the full team we were continuous learners, but also provide more space dedicated to spending time as a team.