It’s a good question. I could answer it in numerous ways…
- Because… why not?
- Because we should
- Our assessment of L&D is only as good as our data
- It adds to our credibility as a leader in learning innovation
- It’s a new way to interact with our clients
- We love meeting new people in L&D
- It’s already bringing fond memories flooding back of the research I did for my post graduate dissertation
All of those would be true (except maybe the last one).
But in all honesty, why are Interactive Workshops really running a research project? There are two reasons that stand out more than all the others.
- We are curious.
We have just lived through an unprecedented (there’s that word again) 12 months. By now we’re a bit sick of talking about it, but it’s still hard to believe that last March we were thrown into so much uncertainty. Overnight, organisations in every industry had to react, flex and adapt to a different way of working. I’m not even sure we’ve fully processed it all yet. But what I do know is that behind all the help offered to employees for better ways to cope within unusual circumstances – or even thrive in them – are hardworking L&D and HR teams.
One of our core values at Interactive Workshops is intrigue. I’m intrigued to know what L&D professionals think about the year we’ve just lived through, what they think might happen next, and how they think L&D will continue to change. - We want to give something back.
In my role at Interactive Workshops, I have the absolute pleasure of working with so many Learning and Development professionals who go above and beyond for their employees. This past year I have seen these individuals adapt learning to the virtual world, provide content topics as they’ve become pertinent including wellbeing, resilience and homeworking, fight for budget to deliver the resources to everyone and genuinely listen to what their people really need. They are the people who take the extra time to talk to an individual, offer support and an attentive ear, all because these people really do care.
In a very real sense, this research project isn’t just to satisfy our curiosity about the interesting people we work with. It’s to give something back to the people who’ve worked so hard to make the lives of employees better this past year and for years before that. We could clap on the doorstep, but we thought that presenting our distilled insights from this research back to L&D professionals in a workshop might be a more preferable way to acknowledge and celebrate their work. So next month we’re doing exactly that. We want to get all these great people together… and build a community.
