Adoption is one of the biggest challenges faced by enterprise L&D teams. Encouraging busy employees to take time away from their desks to take part in training that they might not understand the impact of is a big ask – especially when they have KPIs to meet.
Ahead of my conversation with Kristina Scherb, a Workplace Transformation & Skills Development leader at Bayer, we reached out to the enterprise L&D community to ask what topics they wanted to see discussed and training adoption was by far the most common response.
I think that speaks to how universal this challenge truly is, and how there’s a hunger among the L&D community to understand how peers are approaching these common blockers.
As Kristina explained, even Bayer, one of the world’s leading healthcare organizations with tens of thousands of employees, doesn’t have a magic button that makes training adoption easy. Instead, they rely on a deliberate process that encourages their employees to embrace upskilling. How? By making it easy to do and making the training’s relevance obvious.
I wanted to highlight three things in particular about Bayer’s AI training rollout stood out to me during my conversation with Kristina:
Relevance Drives Buy-In
We often talk about “convincing” employees to take part in training initiatives and encouraging them to buy into the training programs we’re rolling out. When I asked Kristina about Bayer’s adoption strategy for rolling out AI roleplay training, she immediately spoke about creating relevance and adding value for everyone involved, which I felt was really powerful.
Rather than mandating workshop attendance or taking a top-down approach to Bayer’s training needs, Kristina began by working with the teams who needed upskilling on what approach worked best for them.
In this example, Bayer identified intercultural communication between global teams as a training need. Kristina worked with those same global teams (through self-assessment surveys and collaborative workshops) to understand their specific communication preferences before leveraging AI roleplays to train employees based on the feedback she received.
The AI roleplays that Bayer built with VirtualSpeech were based on real workplace communication scenarios that had caused friction in the past. They weren’t generic – they were specific and tailored to the employees’ exact needs.
Bayer’s global teams felt like the training was relevant because it was built collaboratively based on their feedback, and it added value as employees more clearly understood how cultural communication differences could impact the business as a result of this process (as well as improving the teams’ communication, of course).
I think there’s a real lesson that can be learned here from Bayer, one that’s applicable to L&D teams of all shapes and sizes. If our audience can understand the need for the training and how that time away from their desk will have a positive downstream impact, it becomes a lot easier to drive an authentic willingness to take part.
Preemptively Removing Common Blockers
It’s one thing for employees to see the value and relevance of training, but it’s another to get them to take part. When I asked Kristina about the biggest barriers to adoption that Bayer’s workplace communication training faced, she mentioned three things:
- Fully-booked calendars
- Hardware and software logistics
- Employee willingness
I have no doubt that every L&D professional is nodding their heads reading that list. The big takeaway for me was how Kristina and Bayer quickly built a plan that accounted for each of these blockers.
How do you work around fully-booked calendars and busy employees? Bayer chose to forgo long training sessions on communication in favour of using VirtualSpeech’s AI roleplays. This meant that Bayer’s employees could jump in and practice even in 5-10 minute bursts in between meetings or when working from home (more on that in a second). In fact, some of Bayer’s employees started using VirtualSpeech to prepare ahead of meetings, or to debrief afterwards – highlighting the importance of training that doesn’t require a whole hour blocked out in your calendar.
On the hardware and software side, Kristina initially grappled with how to roll out virtual reality headsets to these globally-distributed teams. Before long, she realized that while the immersion from the VR roleplays was impressive, the browser-based version of VirtualSpeech was just as impactful from a training standpoint, without requiring additional hardware. This is what enabled Bayer’s remote workers to take part in 5-10 minute micro-learning sessions with VirtualSpeech – without the headset set-up time, it becomes really easy for employees to jump in and out of the AI roleplays whenever, wherever they want.
With flexible, hardware-agnostic access sorted, the only blocker that remained was employee willingness – but Kristina had a plan. Launch events and town halls gave Bayer employees the opportunity to try out the AI roleplays in their most immersive form with virtual reality headsets provided by the company, before inviting them to try the desktop-based version at home in their own time. This created internal advocates and champions for the AI roleplays, with many employees encouraging their peers to take part after trying out VirtualSpeech for the first time at these events.
The takeaway here is that many of the most common blockers to adoption can be accounted for and planned around in a way that makes the training experience as easy as possible for employees. Hats off to Kristina and the rest of the Bayer team for creating a great rollout and adoption strategy.
Target High-Value Training Cohorts First
The last thing I wanted to highlight from my discussion with Kristina was something she said about how they targeted their initial rollout of VirtualSpeech’s AI roleplays.
Instead of introducing the training across the entire global organization all at once, Kristina’s team started with the goal of addressing immediate needs. When it came to intercultural communication, for instance, this meant starting with the teams who were working cross-culturally the most. Once that was successfully implemented, Bayer then introduced VirtualSpeech to other teams working globally, before also expanding the use cases of AI roleplays to include things like negotiation training for Bayer’s procurement teams.
This phased approach allowed Kristina and her colleagues to identify blockers as they arose, finetune the AI roleplay experience for employees, and build a strong network of internal advocates for this style of training.
I think there’s definitely a lesson there in not doing too much too quickly. L&D teams can sometimes make the mistake of trying to roll everything out at once, but this eagerness can quickly spiral into chaos. Bayer’s measured approach has allowed the company to upskill a huge number of employees successfully over a longer period of time.
Next Steps For Successful Training Adoption
I’ve covered some of my highlights from my discussion with Bayer’s Kristina Scherb here, but we’ve made the full conversation available for free here and I recommend checking it out if you’re in L&D, as we covered even more ground than what’s in this article.
And if you feel like you’re ready to implement AI roleplays for workplace communication skills like Bayer did, then reach out and chat to our team – we’d love to help you successfully roll out your next training initiative.
