Monica Lloyd, a PreSales Manager at Ascentis, has always been an advocate for education and collaborative learning. In the midst of COVID-19, learning is a continued topic, and she is helping other organizations apply the concept virtually.

In this episode, Monica explains how much more employees retain when they have a rounded learning experience. You’ll hear how collaborative learning requires ownership, action, and teaching others in order to be truly effective. 

Connect with Monica via LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/monicalloyd/ or via email [email protected]. 

Truth You Can Act On

1. Master your facilitation skills.
Supporting Quotes:

Monica Lloyd: “We put together a different training. One of the things we started doing is we do mentorships, and we also do very real world examples where we sit them down and say, ‘Hey, you were hired. You have previous sales experience. Tell me what you have done in this situation.’ And then we have people share. We used to do it in a classroom environment where we could do that sharing, and the way we've adapted it in the last three months is on a Zoom meeting. And it's interesting because you have to call people outright. ‘Hey, Bob, like tell me about your experiences.’ And with those shared experiences we'll also start shaping the training and changing the training. Every time I give the training, it's different every single time, and a lot of it has to do with things that we learn from the participants along the way.”

2. Inspire your leaders to serve as teachers to their peers.
Supporting Quotes:

Monica Lloyd: “Active learning can be peer to peer. It can be watching a best practice video and finding a challenge and getting maybe even a group together on a Zoom meeting and figuring out how to solve that challenge in today's workplace.”

Monica Lloyd: “A lot of times we're used to top down, saying ‘This is what I think it should be. I'm going to tell you what it is,’ and in collaborative learning, you're really stepping out of it. If we go back to the wizard of Oz, you're playing Glinda, right? Glinda at the very beginning could have told Dorothy the answer was click your heels together and go, but she wouldn't have learned anything.”

3. Collaborative is a constant initiative.
Supporting Quote:
Monica Lloyd: “You can't do collaborative learning in a vacuum. It has to be constant. So every month you're revisiting it. ‘Is this still relevant? Do we need to change something?’ And especially now, and everyone uses the word “new normal”, and I'm actually changing that. I'm going to start a trend of calling it the “now normal”, because it's normal today, but it doesn't mean that it's going to be normal tomorrow. So those training materials are going to change and evolve, and you need the people that are in it, that are experiencing it to give you the changes.”

Book Recommendation

• The Four Agreements by Miguel Ruíz
• Extreme Ownership by Jocko Willink 

Sponsor

• Ascentis –  Ascentis is a SaaS-based Human Capital Management software that offers easy-to-use HCM, HRIS, online payroll, talent management, recruiting, and timekeeping solutions. Request a complimentary review of your processes and policies at https://www.ascentis.com/gutscience