8 Key Takeaways From WorkRamp LEARN Europe

WorkRamp LEARN landed (virtually) in Europe this week, and we gained many fantastic insights and actionable takeaways from our all-star lineup of guest speakers.

At WorkRamp LEARN Europe, People, Customer, and Revenue leaders shared their advice to boost employee performance, supercharge customer education, grow revenue, and more. 

Read on to learn from industry leaders from organizations like Go1, Normative, Matillion, Deel, and more, and check out on-demand replays from WorkRamp LEARN Europe. 

Learning is the efficient growth engine

WorkRamp’s CEO and Co-Founder, Ted Blosser, kicked things off in his opening keynote session. 

As Ted shared, our goal for this event was to take the magic from our first LEARN summit and replicate that magic here in Europe. 

And one of the most prominent themes for the event is how we get the most out of our teams and customers. 

“Learning is the efficient growth engine,” Ted shares. “Learning helps our team members perform more effectively and helps us sell more to customers and improve customer satisfaction through tools like customer education.”

But there’s one big problem that might stop us from reaching our goal, and that’s the issue of complexity amongst our learning initiatives. Companies have too many options and tools to deliver learning programs. Organizations use separate HR systems, content, providers, sales tools, and more.   

But we have a solution to this problem: The Learning Cloud. A learning infrastructure that powers all of your learning programs within your organization on a single platform. 

The Learning Cloud combines Employee Learning to improve performance, upskill employees, and increase revenue, and Customer Learning to supercharge customer education and increase customer satisfaction. 

And Ted shared three major Learning Cloud updates:

• European Data Center. Dedicated to the EU region. Keep your data only in the EU. This update will be launched by the end of the year.
• WorkRamp AI Assist. Adding intelligence into the Learning Cloud. AI Assist will enable content creation, generative AI, coaching and feedback, natural language processing (NLP) capabilities, and a discovery and recommendations engine. With AI Assist, you can natively edit content and create content from scratch directly within WorkRamp without using third-party software.
• Development Tab. Give your learners the ability to self-serve from 85,000 courses. Learners can choose languages and learning preferences and find the topics they care about, from negotiation to leadership development. 

The Learning Cloud is the foundation for efficient growth.

More on the Learning Cloud: build, organize, and manage training content in a centralized location

After Ted kicked off the event, WorkRamp’s Director of Solutions Engineering, Erin Paugh, took a closer look at the Learning Cloud, including one of the newest features.

Erin demonstrated three different components of the Learning Cloud: the Employee Learning Cloud, the Customer Learning Cloud, and the Admin Console.

Employee Learning Cloud

When employees log in to WorkRamp, they’re greeted by information and training assignments specific to them. This gives them a consistent experience and lets them see exactly what they need to accomplish.

Users can:

• Access a variety of training formats. Guides, Flip Cards, videos, texts, tutorials, and quizzes to boost interactivity and engagement
• Create Challenges. Give learners use cases or scenarios and have them complete a Zoom recording. Use Challenges for manager roleplays, pitch certifications, support teams practice on ticket responses, and more.
• Create live instructor-led events. Integrate with Zoom and track attendance. Add events to Google Calendar. 
• Create standalone training and/or Paths. Learning Paths give users a list of all the training they need to complete to go through a path. Provide a blended learning experience using guides, challenges, ILT, SCORM files, and more. 

Plus, the newest addition: the Development Tab.

• Learners have access to prebuilt content. Everything from soft skills and professional development to leadership training. 
• Browse, filter, preview, and add courses to the learner homepage. Users can get all the prebuilt content in a central location without using third-party tools. 

Customer Learning Cloud

With the Customer Learning Cloud, you can:

• White label and add custom CSS. Make the platform match the look and feel of your brand.
• Customers can interact with training in various formats. Users can go through Paths and Certification programs. Customers can receive a badge at the end of training to publish on their LinkedIn profile. 
• Set up live events. Create webinar series, on-demand, or live sessions. All centralized within the customer academy

Admin Console

With the Admin Console, you can:

• Build, organize, and manage training content in a centralized location
• Setup user governance and permissions
• Create a variety of training types using the drag-and-drop editor
• Access prebuilt content, admins can pull that into the system as SCORM files
• Reporting. See who’s completed training. Access manager-level reporting and global reporting. Track usage, see top learners, search history, and build your own reports

Read more: WorkRamp Expands Learning Cloud to Help Employees Drive L&D and More

Everything is about our customers

Organizations have been forced to pivot strategy based on economic headwinds and unprecedented challenges. As a result, it’s more important than ever to help customers succeed to boost retention and turn customers into loyal brand advocates.

In his session, Top 3 Tips for Growing Product Adoption & Revenue, Erick Ferreira, Sr. Data/ETL Manager, Matillion Academy, shares his advice to increase product adoption and help customers succeed.

“Everything is about our customers,” Erick says. “We have a value in our company; we call it customer obsessed. Everything is about people using the products.”

So how can you empower customers and increase product adoption?

According to Erick, it starts with creating educational content at scale that helps users know the product and feel more engaged with the product and the brand. 

Creating something that could scale up and where users could access content 24-7 was the catalyst for creating Matillion Academy.

“We could only train 5 to 8 people per week; we couldn’t train more because people demanded quality,” Erick says. “People don’t get the real training with a 100- or 1,000-person training. So creating the content once and having everything in one place, that’s why the academy was born.”

Erick’s advice for creating effective customer education content? Use data and customer feedback.

“Jumping into the more human aspect of training and creating fun exercises,” he says. “Start creating challenges around data so people can really be engaged.”

Erick also shares his advice for smaller teams that want to create a customer education academy.

“If anyone is asking for advice on how to do an academy without resources, yes, you can do it,” he says. “You can just start. And once you start getting traffic, you can increase the people working with you, the multimedia, videos, lights, formatting, and all these types of things.” 

Read more: 5 Customer Academies That Drive Product Adoption

At the base of the pyramid, the first block is trust

In her session, Proven Tactics That Improve Leadership Performance, Celine Grey, Sales Enablement Director, Normative, shares her philosophy on leadership and how effective leaders must cultivate trust within an organization.

Celine explains that she has a foundation to build any leadership enablement or leadership teams within the organization, and those foundations are based on the book, “The 5 Dysfunctions of a Team,” by Patrick Lencioni.

The book looks at leadership as a pyramid, and each level must be solid to build to the higher parts of the pyramid. For example, the first block is trust, and Celine explains why trust is so crucial in an organization.

“When you don’t have trust, you’re going to have team members that behave in a very different way,” Celine says. “People aren’t going to ask for help; they’re going to conceal information. They’re going to avoid talking about certain topics. In turn, what that does is not conducive to teamwork. But if you’ve got trust, you create an environment for people to speak up, voice issues, or praise. Team members that help each other ask for help. So you can leverage the strength of everybody.”

 Once you have that trust, what does that enable you to do as a leader?

“It enables you to have critical conversations,” Celine says. “Which means you can confront issues quickly. Solve problems together. Develop practical solutions, and get input from team members without asking.”

Celine shares her tips for creating a culture of trust in an organization. “Trust starts with the leader,” she says. “The first thing we ask leaders to do is be vulnerable with their team.”

For example, at Normative, they open every meeting with a question. They ask everyone how they feel on a scale of 0 to 10. But the important thing is that the leaders must share first and are usually encouraged to start with something around a 5 or 6.

“If the leader starts and says ‘I’m a 10,’ there’s no chance anyone will feel anything less than an 8,” Celine says. “It’s quite surprising because they’re open about it, and then the rest of the team follows.”

Conversely, in critical conversations or when team members share ideas, the leaders should go last. Because if the leaders share their ideas first, no one will want to contradict them.

“Once you’ve opened that trust and transparency,” Celine says, “you need to let your team talk.” 

Read more: What is People-Centric Leadership

We see customer ed not as a theoretical nice to have but as a key part of speeding up time to value for customers

How can teams scale customer success to provide a five-star customer experience? 

In her session, CustEd: The Power Tool to Scale CS Efforts and Build Customer Loyalty, Amy Elenius, Manager, Customer Education, Gorgias, shares how to use customer education to provide a positive customer experience and be more effective and efficient. 

“We see customer ed not as a theoretical nice to have, but as a key part of speeding up time to value for customers,” Amy says. “One of our primary focuses is decreasing time to value, and that’s where education sits. We do that by removing the barriers to product adoption, and we see that as a primary function for education within the customer success org.”

Amy shares that the goal is to bridge the gap between the product and the end users and transform 1:1 processes into a scaled initiative. The full effect of this touches all parts of customer health and the customer journey to increase product adoption, boost NPS, and increase customer retention. 

Amy also shares the two considerations here team uses to prioritize customer education content.

1. Which 1:1 function are we trying to replicate? If your customer academy or community had a job description as a human, what would that be? For example, at Gorgias, the academy takes the place of an onboarding manager, and the help center is a support agent.
2. Where are customers seeing the most friction, and what are the biggest blockers to product adoption? You need data for this. Look at things like search terms. Look in your help center and see what the top search terms are. What topics are people writing in about? Which features have the lowest adoption in the first 30 days? These things give you insight into how to move the needle with the slightest change. 

Read more: How to Use Customer Education to Improve Customer Experience

Innovation and transformation in L&D is so important; we need to get learners involved from the get-go

 The benefits of learning and development (L&D) for employee development and organizational success can’t be overstated. The challenge, however, is creating engaging content and getting learners involved.

In her session, 5 Ways L&D Can Impact Employee Productivity, Andrea Burow, Learning & Development Partner, Knowledge Services, shares the strategies her team uses to boost performance and make L&D engaging and collaborative.

“We have office hours,” Andrea shares. “to provide an outlet for team members to reach out to us–creating that seamless experience and giving an outlet that’s enmeshed in our culture.” 

Andrea also recommends getting employees involved in the content curation process. 

“Even before we launched, we got learners involved in the process,” Andrea says. “We asked them to be involved in vetting the content. Then, we launched with employees who were involved in the process. That was such an important part.”  

Another creative strategy that has worked well for Knowledge Services is creating podcasts to promote team member engagement.

“Starting this year, we launched “Know it Alls,” Andrea says. “Our podcast talks about everything that’s happening in L&D every month. In each episode, we have a co-host from a different team, which gets other teams involved in the process.”

Read more: How to Keep Learners Engaged in a New L&D Program

As we think of the desire for people to reskill, one of the things we want to do is make it ubiquitous in terms of you can access it

We’ve already talked about the importance of L&D, but how can companies leverage learning for global growth?

In this fireside chat, Building Skills for Your Global Workforce, Andrew Barnes, CEO and Co-Founder, Go1, shares how skill development and learning have evolved and how to provide the right learning content for employees’ specific needs.

Andrew explains that Go1 started based on an opportunity to help teams discover the right content for professional development, upskilling, and reskilling.

“The complexity of knowledge just seems to get more and more specialized,” Andrew says. “Unique skills exist in society now. So it becomes challenging to help a team learn new skills when each of those roles will have very different topics and skills to cover and providers to work with.

“Could we make it easier to discover content, matchmaking supply and demand? Through partnerships, particularly with WorkRamp, make it seamlessly available within the interface organizations use to train their staff. That’s where we saw the opportunity; how do we make it easy to access the right skills?” 

One goal for Go1 is solving the issues of disparate L&D materials.

“What we saw back then and still see today is that content may be procured from 40, 50, and sometimes 100 different vendors,” Andrew says. “Similar to music, people would buy individual CDs. But suddenly, we have evolving tastes, and the need to gain new materials was a constant process. A solution like Go1 lets you access all those vendors in one location.

“As we think of the desire for people to reskill, one of the things we want to do is make it ubiquitous in terms of how you can access it. So how can we lower the barriers to access?”

Andrew also predicts how skill development and learning content will evolve.

“The idea that people might go to school and be equipped for a career for 30 years or so without needing to reskill just seems to be an artifact of the past,” Andrew says.  

So while the need to upskill and reskill will likely continue in the future, some of the big unknowns are around the existing roles and skills needed to match those roles. 

For Andrew, the challenge is figuring out ways to make learning more immersive.

“When we think about the ability to learn skills in a more immersive sense, that’s something we want to be skating towards,” he says. “We want to help expose learners to different ways of learning. Particularly when it might be a topic during training on unconscious bias or having a hard conversation or something where it becomes more impactful to do it in an immersive setting.” 

Read more: What is Employee Reskilling, and Why is it Crucial for Thriving in the Future of Work?

Give your HR team the right budget and the power in the company to be able to take care of your team

During his keynote session, LEARN with Alex Bouaziz, Deel’s CEO and Co-Founder, shared why your people are the heart of your organization, empowering HR teams, new and emerging trends, leadership in remote teams, and more. 

First, Alex notes how organizations and HR teams have experienced significant events over the past 3 to 4 years. Not only is it important to recognize HR teams for their resilience and ability to pivot, but it also gives them the resources they need to support your employees. 

Alex says: “It’s giving them the right budget and the priority and the power in the company to really be able to take care of your team is the most important part.”

Deel’s mission is to help companies hire globally and build the backend infrastructure and all the HR solutions to manage a global team. Alex explains how investing in the HR team was integral to Deel’s growth. 

“We brought on our HR leader when we reached 400 people, which was very fast, but it was done on purpose because we wanted every leader at the company to know how to use the product, but also to really value the work that an HR leader does, he says. “From the hiring, sourcing, managing people, operations, like all of those steps, we wanted our leaders to truly have insight so they value HR leaders in the company.”

Alex also shares his learnings for rapidly scaling a global team. 

“We came up with a principle on the culture side called Deel speed, which is very much about delivering high-quality things fast,” he says. “And the idea that you should never push something that you could do today to tomorrow. So as we scaled, we could scale the culture with us. There are many things we need to figure out, and we’re definitely not perfect. Still, the core culture of Deel is around being very customer-centric, being a global company, and being very caring for each other.”

Read more: 3 Ways to Create a High-Performance Culture at Work

The learning doesn’t have to stop there. Get all the expert insights from WorkRamp LEARN Europe in our on-demand replays.