“Learning is not attained by chance. It must be sought for with ardor and attended with diligence.” – Abigail Adams
People who have this ability to learn new things or gain knowledge from others and apply them to their work moves forward in society and have an indefinite future. From the last three years, not everyone was working online, but this pandemic has changed everything.
Now, from studies to office meetings, everything is conducted online which has somehow reduced interaction with people. The trend of virtual meetings has increased from the last few months, everything like virtual classes, coachings are moved online. Digital tools have enhanced face-to-face work.
In such a pandemic situation, companies and leaders have put learning aside and are finding ways to survive at this time. Companies have paused major learning initiatives like training courses, keeping a check after team meetings. In this downturn period, they have canceled all learning and mentoring sessions, due to budget issues.
In these hard times, anxiety runs high and the instinct to preserve the world takes over everything. As per experts, COVID-19 will stay longer and will leave behind long-lasting changes in the way people work and business takes place.
During this survival, learning will be the foundation for people and companies to take them up. As the world and business have shifted from offices to online works, businesses are struggling to reinvent themselves. Now, companies need to learn new trends to know what kinds of new products and services will appeal to their customers and learn the process to create them. Leaders should adopt new strategies to make their employees feel more energized, focused, and stay tuned to customers’ changing needs.
It doesn’t matter whether you are a CEO, executive, or senior manager, or any employee, you should focus on learning to adapt to new trends and stay in lead. Now the most challenging part for businesses and leaders is learning. Learning online is more complicated than having a Zoom account and continuing business.
Business leaders are adapting virtual platforms to stay tuned to their work and to recover their business from loss. Instead of learning new ways of working, everyone is just copying each other’s methods of working to survive in this pandemic. Now, everyone needs to take a pause and think about what each learning initiative aims to do or how they can adopt new ways of learning in their lives to survive.
Sometimes, during these online meetings and work, leaders tend to obsess about the ideas they want to communicate, but are unable to show them and create confusing communication for empowerment. If companies or leaders are not fully prepared then it will be quite hard to learn digitally in a crisis. So, leaders need to be confident and share their ideas or opinions on virtual meetings, that is ultimately what learning is meant to accomplish and it can be done online too.
Learning is a seldom or a relationship, in which you can free up thinking and fosters growth. In this crisis, leaders and teachers must know that learning is the most valuable thing during work to overcome this period. Leaders and teachers should integrate with different kinds of learning to lead people and businesses through it.
Meanwhile, socio-emotional learning is very important because this period is full of emotions and society is suffering a lot emotionally. So, you need to adapt to different circumstances. In this period, socio-emotional learning can be helpful, you can ask each employee during virtual meetings to share their current experience and then facilitate a conversation about what people need from each other.
Cognitive is another way. Earlier, people used to read, process, and use given information to complete their tasks. Now, cognitive learning can be useful during this time, to focus on information and skills. You can get that factual information from any article or any class, colleague. During this remote work, you can just prepare a slide deck of information and use different skills to represent it. Also, when others are just focusing on completing their work, you can find ways to facilitate cognitive learning.
Bringing new ways of learning culture is not just a catchphrase in these times. Companies and leaders need to protect themselves and their people. What matters the most is courage as much as competence. You have to take work virtual and need to keep it human.
It doesn’t matter from where you are working: an office or remote work, you just need to adapt new skills to learn things while working virtually with others.
