Unlocking the power of group learning at scale: A faster, more impactful, and consistent approach
Here’s a scenario that we see all too often: It’s the start of the fiscal year, and a prominent financial services firm has just unveiled a new initiative focused on enhancing employee wellbeing. The initiative, named Wellbeing First, aims to equip company leaders with the tools and knowledge to foster a supportive and healthy work environment. Emma, a dedicated team leader in the marketing department, is passionate about supporting her team's mental and physical health. She's been particularly vocal about the importance of work-life balance and stress management.
As the date for the Wellbeing First workshop draws near, Emma learns that due to budget constraints and the sheer size of the organisation, the in-person training is limited to the top 200 senior leaders. These leaders are expected to absorb the training content and subsequently disseminate the knowledge to their respective departments.
Several weeks after the training, Emma’s director attempts to share their insights from the workshop. Despite their best intentions, the director's presentation is vague and does not provide any meaningful learning or actionable insights. In a token effort to support the dissemination, Emma and her colleagues are invited to join a webinar with hundreds of attendees and then given access to a digital platform with e-learning modules and articles they can consume at their own pace. Still, there is no meaningful shift in behaviour or mindset across the organisation.
The scenario at Emma's company echoes a common decision organisations end up making when orchestrating expansive learning, cultural, and reskilling initiatives. Opt for high-impact, facilitated delivery to a select few, hinging on magical dissemination to trickle down the benefits, or deploy less-effective learning alternatives at scale. On the rare occasions they do attempt large scale rollouts, they came at a huge cost, both financially and logistically.
This can be seen in the 2024 LinkedIn Learning report, which revealed that upskilling programs at scale continue to lag.
“Most weighty initiatives (expensive, one-size-fits-all programs that aim to reskill hundreds or thousands of employees at once) are still at the planning and activation stages. Each year, fewer than 5% have advanced far enough to measure success.”
As this trend continues, large-scale learning initiatives will continue to be forced to trade off scale and impact.
Group learning at scale
The Neuroleadership Institute, a global research organisation that uses neuroscience to help organisations develop better leaders and managers, recommends a new model in how to deliver large programs in organisations, which they call everyone-to-everyone learning. “In this model, the entire organisation goes through the same virtual learning experience within the same time frame, with self-paced as well as synchronous activities… Simply put, you’re able to shift from a model of teaching a few people a lot slowly to teaching a lot of people a little bit very quickly. And at an organisational level, this ends up being far more effective.”
We saw this “everyone-to-everyone model” used in 2018, when Starbucks shut down their 8,000 stores for an entire day for diversity training. A Washington Post article describes what it looked like for employees that day: “To complete the curriculum, Starbucks employees broke into groups of three to five people and progressed through a guidebook, complete with pages to mark up by hand, as well as video and audio clips played on an iPad. During training, store managers did not take leadership roles but instead worked alongside their employees.”
While this is a commendable example of prioritising and delivering group learning at scale, we don’t know what it cost Starbucks to roll out this initiative. It was probably expensive—the profit loss alone was $12 million. Because of the enormous cost, group learning at a company-wide scale, delivered quickly, is rare.
The Makeshapes approach
At Makeshapes, this concept of everyone-to-everyone learning is made possible through a unique combination of features, enabling groups to learn together without the requirement of a highly trained expert or facilitator. Through our approach, we untether the need for a facilitator in order to have discussion-rich group learning at scale.
The benefits of rolling out at scale can be broadly categorised into three areas:
- Impact: By making impactful learning accessible to everyone, you are able to ensure the learning is distributed effectively across the organisation. It allows you to reach a tipping point in delivery that can actually have a meaningful impact on organisational culture and behaviours.
- Consistency: When you deliver the same quality of learning experience to everyone, people feel valued, and you can be confident that the key messages have not been lost or watered down through the rollout.
- Speed: Traditional rollout, with expert facilitators or using train-the-trainer methods, tends to be slow, often taking months or even years. With on-demand group learning, you are able to roll out as quickly as you can get organised—not to mention design the learning experience to be shorter, making it easier to schedule and integrate within the normal rhythms of work.
The result of the Wellbeing First initiative at Emma's company highlights the limitations of traditional learning rollouts in large organisations, where the choice between scale and impact often leads to compromised outcomes. However, by embracing new approaches to delivery, organisations can achieve a new level of scale and speed while ensuring all employees get access to critical learning and feel valued in the process.
Recently, Zespri International embraced everyone-to-everyone learning and used Makeshapes, with stellar results. Angus Bell, who led their small-and-mighty Safety and Wellbeing Team said: “Don’t be afraid to go big, because the opportunity for impact is powerful and deep—much more so than just gently nudging things along. The impact that we achieved through this [initiative] has really surprised me.” To learn about Zespri's organisation-wide circuit breaker and its global impact, read the case study.
challenge
solution
Unlocking the power of group learning at scale: A faster, more impactful, and consistent approach
Here’s a scenario that we see all too often: It’s the start of the fiscal year, and a prominent financial services firm has just unveiled a new initiative focused on enhancing employee wellbeing. The initiative, named Wellbeing First, aims to equip company leaders with the tools and knowledge to foster a supportive and healthy work environment. Emma, a dedicated team leader in the marketing department, is passionate about supporting her team's mental and physical health. She's been particularly vocal about the importance of work-life balance and stress management.
As the date for the Wellbeing First workshop draws near, Emma learns that due to budget constraints and the sheer size of the organisation, the in-person training is limited to the top 200 senior leaders. These leaders are expected to absorb the training content and subsequently disseminate the knowledge to their respective departments.
Several weeks after the training, Emma’s director attempts to share their insights from the workshop. Despite their best intentions, the director's presentation is vague and does not provide any meaningful learning or actionable insights. In a token effort to support the dissemination, Emma and her colleagues are invited to join a webinar with hundreds of attendees and then given access to a digital platform with e-learning modules and articles they can consume at their own pace. Still, there is no meaningful shift in behaviour or mindset across the organisation.
The scenario at Emma's company echoes a common decision organisations end up making when orchestrating expansive learning, cultural, and reskilling initiatives. Opt for high-impact, facilitated delivery to a select few, hinging on magical dissemination to trickle down the benefits, or deploy less-effective learning alternatives at scale. On the rare occasions they do attempt large scale rollouts, they came at a huge cost, both financially and logistically.
This can be seen in the 2024 LinkedIn Learning report, which revealed that upskilling programs at scale continue to lag.
“Most weighty initiatives (expensive, one-size-fits-all programs that aim to reskill hundreds or thousands of employees at once) are still at the planning and activation stages. Each year, fewer than 5% have advanced far enough to measure success.”
As this trend continues, large-scale learning initiatives will continue to be forced to trade off scale and impact.
Group learning at scale
The Neuroleadership Institute, a global research organisation that uses neuroscience to help organisations develop better leaders and managers, recommends a new model in how to deliver large programs in organisations, which they call everyone-to-everyone learning. “In this model, the entire organisation goes through the same virtual learning experience within the same time frame, with self-paced as well as synchronous activities… Simply put, you’re able to shift from a model of teaching a few people a lot slowly to teaching a lot of people a little bit very quickly. And at an organisational level, this ends up being far more effective.”
We saw this “everyone-to-everyone model” used in 2018, when Starbucks shut down their 8,000 stores for an entire day for diversity training. A Washington Post article describes what it looked like for employees that day: “To complete the curriculum, Starbucks employees broke into groups of three to five people and progressed through a guidebook, complete with pages to mark up by hand, as well as video and audio clips played on an iPad. During training, store managers did not take leadership roles but instead worked alongside their employees.”
While this is a commendable example of prioritising and delivering group learning at scale, we don’t know what it cost Starbucks to roll out this initiative. It was probably expensive—the profit loss alone was $12 million. Because of the enormous cost, group learning at a company-wide scale, delivered quickly, is rare.
The Makeshapes approach
At Makeshapes, this concept of everyone-to-everyone learning is made possible through a unique combination of features, enabling groups to learn together without the requirement of a highly trained expert or facilitator. Through our approach, we untether the need for a facilitator in order to have discussion-rich group learning at scale.
The benefits of rolling out at scale can be broadly categorised into three areas:
- Impact: By making impactful learning accessible to everyone, you are able to ensure the learning is distributed effectively across the organisation. It allows you to reach a tipping point in delivery that can actually have a meaningful impact on organisational culture and behaviours.
- Consistency: When you deliver the same quality of learning experience to everyone, people feel valued, and you can be confident that the key messages have not been lost or watered down through the rollout.
- Speed: Traditional rollout, with expert facilitators or using train-the-trainer methods, tends to be slow, often taking months or even years. With on-demand group learning, you are able to roll out as quickly as you can get organised—not to mention design the learning experience to be shorter, making it easier to schedule and integrate within the normal rhythms of work.
The result of the Wellbeing First initiative at Emma's company highlights the limitations of traditional learning rollouts in large organisations, where the choice between scale and impact often leads to compromised outcomes. However, by embracing new approaches to delivery, organisations can achieve a new level of scale and speed while ensuring all employees get access to critical learning and feel valued in the process.
Recently, Zespri International embraced everyone-to-everyone learning and used Makeshapes, with stellar results. Angus Bell, who led their small-and-mighty Safety and Wellbeing Team said: “Don’t be afraid to go big, because the opportunity for impact is powerful and deep—much more so than just gently nudging things along. The impact that we achieved through this [initiative] has really surprised me.” To learn about Zespri's organisation-wide circuit breaker and its global impact, read the case study.
challenge
solution
Unlocking the power of group learning at scale: A faster, more impactful, and consistent approach
Here’s a scenario that we see all too often: It’s the start of the fiscal year, and a prominent financial services firm has just unveiled a new initiative focused on enhancing employee wellbeing. The initiative, named Wellbeing First, aims to equip company leaders with the tools and knowledge to foster a supportive and healthy work environment. Emma, a dedicated team leader in the marketing department, is passionate about supporting her team's mental and physical health. She's been particularly vocal about the importance of work-life balance and stress management.
As the date for the Wellbeing First workshop draws near, Emma learns that due to budget constraints and the sheer size of the organisation, the in-person training is limited to the top 200 senior leaders. These leaders are expected to absorb the training content and subsequently disseminate the knowledge to their respective departments.
Several weeks after the training, Emma’s director attempts to share their insights from the workshop. Despite their best intentions, the director's presentation is vague and does not provide any meaningful learning or actionable insights. In a token effort to support the dissemination, Emma and her colleagues are invited to join a webinar with hundreds of attendees and then given access to a digital platform with e-learning modules and articles they can consume at their own pace. Still, there is no meaningful shift in behaviour or mindset across the organisation.
The scenario at Emma's company echoes a common decision organisations end up making when orchestrating expansive learning, cultural, and reskilling initiatives. Opt for high-impact, facilitated delivery to a select few, hinging on magical dissemination to trickle down the benefits, or deploy less-effective learning alternatives at scale. On the rare occasions they do attempt large scale rollouts, they came at a huge cost, both financially and logistically.
This can be seen in the 2024 LinkedIn Learning report, which revealed that upskilling programs at scale continue to lag.
“Most weighty initiatives (expensive, one-size-fits-all programs that aim to reskill hundreds or thousands of employees at once) are still at the planning and activation stages. Each year, fewer than 5% have advanced far enough to measure success.”
As this trend continues, large-scale learning initiatives will continue to be forced to trade off scale and impact.
Group learning at scale
The Neuroleadership Institute, a global research organisation that uses neuroscience to help organisations develop better leaders and managers, recommends a new model in how to deliver large programs in organisations, which they call everyone-to-everyone learning. “In this model, the entire organisation goes through the same virtual learning experience within the same time frame, with self-paced as well as synchronous activities… Simply put, you’re able to shift from a model of teaching a few people a lot slowly to teaching a lot of people a little bit very quickly. And at an organisational level, this ends up being far more effective.”
We saw this “everyone-to-everyone model” used in 2018, when Starbucks shut down their 8,000 stores for an entire day for diversity training. A Washington Post article describes what it looked like for employees that day: “To complete the curriculum, Starbucks employees broke into groups of three to five people and progressed through a guidebook, complete with pages to mark up by hand, as well as video and audio clips played on an iPad. During training, store managers did not take leadership roles but instead worked alongside their employees.”
While this is a commendable example of prioritising and delivering group learning at scale, we don’t know what it cost Starbucks to roll out this initiative. It was probably expensive—the profit loss alone was $12 million. Because of the enormous cost, group learning at a company-wide scale, delivered quickly, is rare.
The Makeshapes approach
At Makeshapes, this concept of everyone-to-everyone learning is made possible through a unique combination of features, enabling groups to learn together without the requirement of a highly trained expert or facilitator. Through our approach, we untether the need for a facilitator in order to have discussion-rich group learning at scale.
The benefits of rolling out at scale can be broadly categorised into three areas:
- Impact: By making impactful learning accessible to everyone, you are able to ensure the learning is distributed effectively across the organisation. It allows you to reach a tipping point in delivery that can actually have a meaningful impact on organisational culture and behaviours.
- Consistency: When you deliver the same quality of learning experience to everyone, people feel valued, and you can be confident that the key messages have not been lost or watered down through the rollout.
- Speed: Traditional rollout, with expert facilitators or using train-the-trainer methods, tends to be slow, often taking months or even years. With on-demand group learning, you are able to roll out as quickly as you can get organised—not to mention design the learning experience to be shorter, making it easier to schedule and integrate within the normal rhythms of work.
The result of the Wellbeing First initiative at Emma's company highlights the limitations of traditional learning rollouts in large organisations, where the choice between scale and impact often leads to compromised outcomes. However, by embracing new approaches to delivery, organisations can achieve a new level of scale and speed while ensuring all employees get access to critical learning and feel valued in the process.
Recently, Zespri International embraced everyone-to-everyone learning and used Makeshapes, with stellar results. Angus Bell, who led their small-and-mighty Safety and Wellbeing Team said: “Don’t be afraid to go big, because the opportunity for impact is powerful and deep—much more so than just gently nudging things along. The impact that we achieved through this [initiative] has really surprised me.” To learn about Zespri's organisation-wide circuit breaker and its global impact, read the case study.
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