Do More With Less: Your Lean L&D Guide
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Learning and Development (L&D) is a vital part of every organization. No matter a company’s size or structure, L&D drives success: improving productivity, building morale, and contributing to the bottom line.
But what if you’re part of a small team? What if you’re just a one-person HR operation juggling multiple roles? For small businesses, a fully fleshed-out L&D program may feel out of reach.
That’s not the case. You don’t need a massive budget or dedicated department to build a program that moves the needle. Litmos’s ebook, L&D Made Easy! Your Guide to Impactful Lean L&D, is your roadmap to lean L&D. In this ebook, we show you how to create impactful learning experiences that meet your organization’s needs without wasting time or resources.
This article gives you the highlights, boiling down our guide’s main points, offering actionable insights for small L&D teams that want to make a big difference.
What is ‘Lean’ L&D?
“Lean” is a word that’s often heard in business, but what does it mean to make learning lean?
Lean thinking is an agile methodology. It’s about meeting tightly-focused business goals with less waste. It also means that an organization is always experimenting, trying to meet their goals more efficiently with less and less waste.
By this token, lean L&D is focused on the business goals of your organization. You produce exactly the learning that is needed to further your goals, and produce nothing you do not need.
- This doesn’t mean your organization is only producing compliance content to tick a box
- This does mean that your team is being resourceful, intentionally creating learning content that meets business goals
How to Build a Lean L&D Program
By design, effective lean L&D is tailored to your organization. This means you can’t just jump in and start creating content — it’s important to know your goals, exactly what your resources are, and how those resources can best be used to meet organizational goals.
Start with a plan
Planning is always important, but when you’re working with a small organization or on a shoestring budget, having a plan is key.
Some training — like mandated regulatory compliance — is lean by nature. It’s necessary, and you can’t do without it. However, when it comes to the rest of your offerings, you will have to start with an investigation. Because a lean L&D program is purpose-built to meet your learners’ needs, you’ll need to take a long, deep look at your organization, its existing learning, and its limitations.
L&D Made Easy gives you a list of questions that will help get you started with this process.
Identify your Biggest Business Challenges
Do you know why you’re building a training program? If not, it may not be possible to create an effective L&D program.
Treat your own organization as if it were your client. Really investigate the problems this learning will solve, and the goals you need the learning to achieve. This may mean that you have to dig deep into your organization’s business challenges, looking at data, talking to colleagues in different departments, and clearly defining your business’s top business challenges.
Keeping an open mind is important. You may assume that increasing sales is a top priority, only to learn that your business’s biggest challenge is retaining staff.
Once those challenges are defined, you can build learning objectives that correspond to your business needs.
Get Company Leaders Involved
Leadership should always be involved in learning; especially if you’re taking a lean approach to L&D. Senior leadership should be involved in planning your program from the very start of the process; leaders are strategists and they’re deeply in tune with organizational needs, limits and future goals. A good leader thinks two or three steps ahead, envisioning how an L&D program can evolve to meet future training needs.
There’s another practical reason to include leadership in planning for L&D; they hold the purse strings. When leaders are involved in L&D planning, they can prioritize access to resources rather than being asked to allocate funding later in the planning process.
How Does Lean L&D Support the Skills-Based Organization?
Skills-based organizations, which place emphasis on collections of skills rather than on job descriptions, are becoming increasingly common. It’s a lean approach to work, because focusing frees a worker from the constraints of their role and allows them to tackle jobs they have the skills to address.
However, this approach to work can seem overwhelming to L&D professionals, who may not be sure which skills to train in their workforce. How does this work with a lean approach to learning?
The answer is to be choosy. You can’t train every skill, but you can offer some of the most durable skills. Also, not every skill is well-suited to L&D content. Offer the ones that make the most sense. Don’t try to boil the ocean.
Start Small When Implementing Lean L&D
It’s tempting to try and do it all when you’re building a program, but that’s not what lean methodology is about. Often, you’re building the plane while you’re flying it.
That means you need to start with the most critical learning objectives, and build that learning first, making sure you take the time to get them right. Once you’ve launched a pilot of your l&D initiative, you can iterate on your learning content, changing it to reflect feedback and adding more bells and whistles.
Managers are Your Most Important Allies
When it comes to reinforcing training, managers are your secret weapon. Because they’re with your learners every day, they can use coaching to back up your training and help learners meet objectives. This is especially important in lean L&D: no matter the size of the company, there’s always a manager.
Using Technology to Scale L&D
When you’re working with lean L&D it’s important to leverage technology. By using artificial technology (AI) learning solutions, you can automate repetitive tasks so that your team is able to focus on creative work and problem-solving. This is a force multiplier for small L&D teams: technology helps a lean team do more with less.
Take the example of Litmos’s AI Learning Assistant: a conversational, natural language search interface that uses Generative AI to quickly find information. Administrators and learners can ask questions about content, and receive answers with citations.
Rather than browsing courses, searching for the information yourself, AI surfaces the information quickly; you can then recommend, assign, or track a learners’ progress in that course.
Lean Learning Drives Purposeful Changes
The Litmos ebook, L&D Made Easy, is your guide to resourceful learning design. No matter how small your team is, and no matter your business goals, it is possible to deliver effective learning content.
Done right, a lean L&D strategy is an intentional way of building learning content: you take the time to learn about your most important skill gaps, talk to your chief stakeholders, and create learning objectives that will help your company achieve its business goals.
Lean L&D means using the resources you have, like managers, to reinforce learning. It also means seeking out technology that helps you do more with less, like training tools that provide actionable learning data and Artificial Intelligence (AI) capabilities.
By embracing lean methodology and leveraging the right tools, organizations of any size can build a sustainable, effective L&D strategy. Ready to try it? Connect with Litmos today to explore how our solutions can help you accelerate performance and drive real revenue impact.
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