Top 10 Ways to Better Harness Hybrid Learning

Our ten best takeaways from leading learning in remote and hybrid environments.

By Rachel Geil, Director @ Thoughtium
Published December 2021

2. Establish a Magna Charter

Every team, and every working style is different. Before undertaking a collective project, or learning experience, set your guidelines and expectations for working together. We like to do this via a working charter that acknowledges remote needs, and sets standards for hybrid interactions.

3. Start with Empathy

Before setting out to implement any new learning program, put yourself in the shoes of each learner, whether they are remote, in-person, or hybrid. What is it like to dial into a training session? What notifications are popping up in the corner of the screen, vying for attention when it is a remote program? Now is the time to reposition ourselves to what our learners are saying, doing, thinking, and feeling, so we can better meet them where they are — no matter their physical location.

4. Find the Right Platform for Your Purpose

There is no one-size-fits-all for a hybrid learning experience, and there are thousands of creative technology platforms intended to support learning, from collaboration to information dissemination. Spend time at the beginning of your design process mapping out your learning objectives and what modality best achieves them. Perhaps there is a podcast that learners can consume without being tethered to a desk. Maybe a program will be best supported by an ideation tool, rather than a group Zoom. Be careful not to let the shine of tangential features overshadow the function the tool is trying to serve, and never feel pressure to go outside of a budget to accommodate technology. These services range from free, to fee, to subscription, so leverage what is right for you and the learning team.

5. Exercise Balance

For every in-person event, create a remote event. For every in-person opportunity, consider a fair and comparable equivalent for remote colleagues. For expense policies and budget allocations, keep your remote employees top of mind to ensure they are receiving the same benefits as in-person ones. This sort of mindfulness also does not need to start at the top, or come from remote employees — if you find yourself in-person more frequently than your colleagues, look to step up and advocate for those at home, including those who may be left out of experiences or plans because of location or personal circumstances.

6. Seek Inclusive Ways to Measure Hybrid Learners

Sometimes, a piece of pivotal feedback comes from the manager at the desk next to you or the passing conversation in the office kitchen. Stay alert to moments that demonstrate a measure of learning, and make sure all learners are given access to the same modes of measurement, so as to be held to the same benchmarks.

7. Curate Equal Exposure to Leadership

Remote or hybrid employees will likely get less face-time with key company leaders than their office-based counterparts. This can cause colleagues to feel disadvantaged in their opportunities for both learning and career growth. As L&D professionals, our duty is to look beyond the classroom to help cultivate these informal connections, and leverage opportunities such as virtual office hours, fireside chats, or casual “block walks” to help employees build relationships with leadership. In these environments, too, a person’s relationship with their manager becomes an even more important proxy for their relationship with the company — especially critical in the time of “The Great Resignation.” Focusing on developing managers and reinforcing their integral role in a positive employee experience is another way to create an impact on both actual and perceived employee growth within your company.

8. Revisit What Career Paths Look Like

Speaking of growth trajectory, remote or hybrid employees might need extra TLC when it comes to creating a feasible career path. It could look different than those employees in the office, but it must offer them the same possibilities. We can be intentional first in helping define the skills needed to succeed at the next level, and then get creative with facilitating what experiences they use to gain them. Consider developing alternative options to traditional shadowing or rotation that comes from being in the same physical workplace; in fact, re-imaging what it means to “shadow” could lead to even more exposure to work your company does at other sites. Regardless, L&D professionals are in a prime position to help these remote employees succeed.

9. Make Learning a Progression

Rather than asking learners to sit in a classroom for 4 hours straight — or join a Zoom meeting for 4 hours straight, hybrid learning environments offer the creativity to mix-and-match learning modalities based on needs. There are incredible opportunities to enlist a range of learning modalities as part of a progression, be it virtual/in-person, synchronous/asynchronous. For example, what used to be a full-day, in-person session could now consist of a pre-read, a short virtual workshop, on-the-job application, virtual peer-coaching cohorts, and in-person time for further collaboration and celebration. By lengthening the time frame of the learning, without lengthening the hours devoted to learning, the learners get more time to digest, practice, and reflect than ever before, leading to higher rates of knowledge retention and actual change on-the-job.

10. Keep it Simple!

Many L&D professionals feel the pressure to accommodate virtual and in-person learners at the same time, often to the detriment of both groups’ experiences — (not to mention the additional headache of trying to design for each). Many organizations try to do both, while we would be better served to commit to one or the other for a specific experience. If you must combine, we recommend collaborating on a clear working charter that defines the guidelines and expectations for working together, and clarifying what interactions will look like. For instance, at our company, that means every person dials in on their laptop for video calls that involve some people who are together in a conference room and some who are remote. This way we can all see each other’s faces — our remote employees are not just talking at our room-view side profiles.

We have found that these principles have worked for us and many of our clients — so far. However, we are always learning. We therefore embrace a mindset of “perpetual beta states,” make a commitment to revisit our ways of working regularly (described in our Work 2.0 Toolkit), and pledge to carry our intentionality to measure the effectiveness of our learning programs in a hybrid learning environment.