Balance the PUSH and PULL of Learning at Work w/ Daniel Johnson (Employee Learning Experience) + John Parsell (Learning Experience Technology Architect)

When should you PUSH training to employees, and when should you make learning resources available for people to PULL on their own?

Daniel Johnson and John Parsell from Merck sit down with JD Dillon to discuss the challenges of balancing the push/pull reality of workplace learning. They explore the complexities of L&D within a highly-regulated industry and the problems that can arise when employees get overloaded with required training. Daniel and John also provide practical tips for leveraging technology to balance push/pull learning and helping stakeholders understand why every problem doesn’t require a training solution.

For more about why Axonify is the proven employee enablement solution that equips frontlines with the essential tools to learn, connect and get things done, visit https://www.axonify.com.

Transcript

JD Dillon (00:11):
Hello, friends. How's 2024 treating you so far? Well, it's great to see you and welcome to the 42nd episode of ITK, your 25-minute deep dive into the modern employee experience and what we can do to make it better. I'm JD from Axonify, and today we're talking about gymnastics. Well, okay, we're not actually talking about gymnastics per se. What we're really going to talk about is a balancing act. You see, I've been in L&D for over 15 years now. I know. And the entire time I felt like I was being pulled in two different directions as I tried to help people solve problems and improve their performance. Because over here you have today, this is the immediate stuff, the training that has to be completed, onboarding, compliance, product updates, all of the different things that we're pushing to people because it's required by a stakeholder or a regulator or someone else within the business.
(01:08):
But then you have to go over here because this is tomorrow. This is planning for the future, career development, upskilling and re-skilling. This is the pull side of learning at work. And my question for you is how often do you feel like you're being pulled in these two opposing, but equally important directions? What we need to do is we need to help people solve today's biggest challenges so they can meet their immediate goals. But we can't lose sight of the long-term opportunities that we can help create through future-focused learning and skill development. And that means we need to find a way to strike a balance between the push and the pull of learning at work. And we need to do it while dealing with limited L&D resources and a seemingly unlimited supply of stakeholder requests and regulatory requirements. So how do we do it?
(02:01):
Well, before we went on break, I had an awesome conversation on just this topic with two of our friends from Merck, Daniel Johnson and John Parsell definitely know what it's like to work in a highly regulated environment. So they're going to join us and help us improve our gymnastic skills so we can find that balance between push and pull learning in the workplace. But before we welcome our special ITK guests, our first guests of the season, I wanted to tell you about a few very exciting things that are coming up here in 2024. Now, 2023 was a jam-packed year. We covered lots of different topics just on this show alone. Everything from company culture and learning experience, design to accessibility, and of course artificial intelligence. We may only be a few weeks into the new year, but we've already got lots of stuff planned on ITK and through a variety of other channels.
(02:51):
So first let's talk about, did you know I wrote a book? Well, I actually did a little bit more writing over the holiday break, and I'm very excited to announce that a brand new chapter to the book is coming very soon. AI meets the Modern Learning Ecosystem drops this February. So if you're trying to figure out what's the strategic impact of AI going to be on learning and development in the workplace, be sure to keep an eye out for the very next chapter in the Ecosystem saga. And speaking of freely available content, Axonify also dropped some including a brand new guide for frontline communications. So if you want to craft communication campaigns that actually reach your frontline teams with the latest information they need to make great decisions on the job, be sure to check out our proven communication tactics. You can get the guide right now at Axonify.com/communication.
(03:42):
And we're also going to be dropping a brand new version of our Ultimate Guide to Microlearning. You can find that over at Axonify.com/microlearning. Now last November, we spent three days collaborating with our customers and our partners at excom. And I know that everyone out there couldn't make it to the event in person. So what we're doing is we're dropping some of the best content from our in-person conference online for everyone to enjoy. So if you head over to the Axonify YouTube channel right now, you can already find our conversation on how you can influence your C-suite to buy into learning investments with Dick Johnson, the former CEO of Foot Locker. We've also already shared our opening panel session that featured Marriott. Giant Eagle and RedThread Research talking about 2024 trends in frontline work. There's even more awesome AxoniCom content coming very soon, including a video that might explain this very Barbie-inspired look that I dawned while in Nashville.
(04:42):
And of course, in addition to our AxoniCom event, we're going to be participating in plenty of events and conferences this year. Our team just wrapped up at the annual National Retail Federation event in NYC. Up next, I'm going to be sharing my Modern Learning Ecosystem story at Training 2024 here in Orlando. I'm also preparing brand new sessions on AI and L&D for the upcoming learning and HR Tech Solutions conference, as well as ATD24 in New Orleans this May. So I hope to see you out there in addition to hanging out here online every two weeks on ITK. That is just a quick look at some of the things that we're working on as we get the new year rolling. So be sure to follow Axonify on LinkedIn for all of your updates, and I hope we can work together to make sure that 2024 is a year packed with ideas, insights and a whole lot of fun.
(05:30):
Now let's welcome our special ITK guests, Daniel Johnson and John Parsell. Daniel is the Director of Employee Learning Experience at Merck, one of the five largest pharmaceutical companies in the world and a long-time Axonify partner. Before joining Merck, Daniel spent time with Motorolla enabling the channel and partner teams. John is Associate Director, Learning Experience Technology Architect with Merck. He previously worked in L&D with accolades in the healthcare space. He's also the host of the “Is training the answer?” podcast and a graduate of Bloomsburg University, which I believe means he's part of the Karl Kapp universe. Is that right, John?
John Parsell (06:06):
That is 1000% correct.
JD Dillon (06:08):
Just got to make sure we mention Karl as much as possible. Daniel Johnson and John Parsell, you are In The Know. How are y'all doing today?
Daniel Johnson (06:14):
Doing great, JD.
JD Dillon (06:17):
Thanks so much for joining us. 
John Parsell (06:17):
Yes, the same. Good.
JD Dillon (06:20):
And I want to start with you and get your perspective on that balancing act that I talked about at the top of the show. Now obviously, you work in a highly regulated industry and we often hear L&D professionals talk about the burden of compliance training long courses, often with irrelevant materials that often bore people to sleep, but they still check those boxes. So how do you think about balancing your regulatory reality with the desire to provide employees with the best possible learning experiences?
Daniel Johnson (06:49):
Well, JD, that's such an important question for us here at Merck. Up until just a couple of years ago, we were 100% a push organization, which really developed the wrong skills in our employees. So John and I have been working for the last couple of years on the marketing angle, refreshing the technology that we use for the employees, increasing our content catalogs away from that regulatory and compliance type training. And we're trying to pull it all together in that balance of push and pull and trying to co-mingle both of those. We're also working on informative programs with our learners to kind of give them the difference between both push and pull and how to present that in a single aggregated to-do list or learning system that we look for.
JD Dillon (07:38):
Now, you mentioned the term marketing, and I find that we often get hung up with the language that's associated with training in regulated workspaces because suddenly everything becomes compliance, safety, training, compliance, onboarding, compliance, and at a certain point the word starts to lose its regulatory meeting and it kind of just becomes this stand-in for the word required. So, John, I want to get your perspective on what you think about the difference between regulated training and required training as you determine your priorities and develop solutions.
John Parsell (08:13):
Sure. So regulatory training is just training that's required by an external regulator. The government-required training could literally be anything. I could make anything required learning as a stakeholder if I want my employees to take it. And so, really, I just think it's the balance between what do we need to do from a regulations perspective, but then also what do we feel like is required for employees to do so that they can complete their jobs in an appropriate way and we can upscale them so that they can be successful on the job pertaining to what they do for their role. But like I said, it could literally be anything I could say Your leadership training is required and really is up to us.
JD Dillon (08:57):
And I find that a lot of people just kind of thinking through that difference between what's externally regulated versus what's required for different reasons is an important part of the beginning of this conversation. But either side, when we talk about regulated or required training, there's typically a whole lot of pushing happening, and people just got to do the training because stakeholders, like you said, have to do the training. The state of California said they have to do the training. So the question becomes for both of you, what can we do to improve push training to make it more engaging, more of a value-added experience for everyone when it is something that we just have to do?
Daniel Johnson (09:37):
So JD, one of the things we've focused on is putting simulations into our push training to allow the learners to test up, as we call it, not test out because they've answered the knowledge checks that we need, but it then also gives them that reinforcement and the reinforcement programs are most important part of what we try to do from that push aspect. So we've reduced the in-seat time of our pushed training as part of this two-year journey that we've been on.
John Parsell (10:10):
Yeah, we're also automating, which I think is great just to add to that. So, for example, when you complete required training, if there's a reinforcement program that's associated with that, we have automated assignments into Axonify, the reinforcement platform that we use for long-term reinforcement of specific skills and behaviors. And so it just makes it easier. We're just reducing the friction of somebody accessing the training that they need to so that they can get in, they can get it done. And Axonify is great, like minutes, right? You go in five minutes, you take your training and then you're good to go.
JD Dillon (10:46):
Absolutely. And you mentioned in the beginning of our conversation, that you've been on a journey kind of from the world of push to a more balanced learning ecosystem. So if we take the opposite side of push, the pull side of learning and development, often the self-directed side, optional employee-driven type of stuff, I'm curious, do you find that there are certain topics that may be in your organization or you just kind of broadly see within learning and development that are typically kind of categorized on the push side of training that you think should actually lean more towards the pull employee driven side of what some examples of topics that we should be thinking about more from a pull pull perspective might be.
Daniel Johnson (11:21):
We had a little bit of an unfair advantage in this question, jd, because we were a hundred percent push. We even took our leadership content and pushed it to employees. So employees were nominated for programs. They then got the added benefit of being pushed to leadership training as part of that nomination. We're switching that around. We're making it more the employee's responsibility to own their career development and give them attractive catalogs that add to the content that they need to start developing. But leadership is probably one of the biggest areas where we've tried to demonstrate the value of a pull learning environment.
JD Dillon (12:02):
And how do you find, just the kind of follow up on that, the balancing act between the pull, the desire for people to own their career and to be able to pull resources and the reality of time and priorities. So how do you influence the organization to influence stakeholders who may be very used to the push version of training to realize that if people are going to take control, they're going to take hold of their careers? Do you need to afford them the appropriate time and prioritization to be able to take advantage of more poll resources?
John Parsell (12:36):
I think being able to show people the successes that we're having in terms of utilizing poll training is really important. And I think this is where consultation is such a key component of having conversations with these stakeholders, understanding their audiences, understanding what they're trying to do, showing them the value of what we've completed or what we've done from a poll perspective. And I think that's also where your early adopters are really important. Finding those organizations or those teams within your organization who are willing to try this on, and then taking the success that you have from that and utilizing that to keep that rolling and helping others see the value of pull versus push.
JD Dillon (13:22):
Got it. Got it. Now you mentioned technology already a little bit, but I want to dive a little bit more closely into the role that technology plays in helping establish this balancing act, especially for the employees themselves. So how do you think about technology, and how do organizations need to think about the role that technology plays in making it easy for people to complete the things they have to complete? Because push training doesn't go away in the story. It's about balancing, not completely shifting in one direction. So how do we use technology to make it easy for people to get to the things they have to do, but also make it easy for them to find and discover the things that they might get value from doing in a more pull scenario?
Daniel Johnson (14:02):
Well, we have several learning management systems, several tools that we do. So we decided the approach was to give them one place to start and to pull this all together from a single portal, very much like the LXP front end. But we've decided because of the large vendors that we use to deliver our training programs, we needed to take ownership of the presentation layer a little bit more customized and personalized to the individuals. So as they do things, as they select pull learning, it gets added to their aggregated to-do list, which is in line with their compliance training so that they simply open the portal, and see what happens. They look at it as a simple, easy-to-follow place. It also shows them things that they started and didn't finish. So we kind of give them reminders and help them on their journey.
John Parsell (14:53):
Anything to reduce the friction of that experience. There was a comment or a note in your book JD about logging into the LMS being just like an unnatural act, right? So it's exactly. It's just like when you go and you search for something, you don't have to go through all that. So anything that we can do to reduce that friction, make it easy. We're very focused on search, improving that experience, but then also making sure that the content is accessible and it's displayed in their language. We're a global organization, so we want to make sure that people feel like when they find what they're looking for, it's in their language and it's personalized for them.
JD Dillon (15:36):
Yeah, great points. Especially that idea around removing friction from the perspective of the employee. A lot of times, I find that we in learning and development might think something's a good idea from our side or design and experience or design content that we think is engaging, but then when you flip it around in the context of the person doing the job every day, there's often a disconnect in that experience, both from a technology perspective as well as just the learning experience itself. And that's one of the last questions I want to ask you is more of the motivation/engagement side of the story. So let's say someone has experience with maybe years of workplace training, and in a lot of cases, it's been a lot of spoonfeeding or a lot of pushing of training content and maybe a lot of that content hasn't been super relevant to me. And now we're on this journey where the organization's trying to find this balance and we need to get those people engaged and recognizing that no, not everything's going to be pushed directly at you or assigned to you, and that there is opportunity here if you're willing to put in the time, the effort, the prioritization necessary to really benefit from a more balanced push and pull learning experience. So how do you get people engaged, especially frontline workers, engaged in those opportunities when training is not something that's always pushed and required of them?
Daniel Johnson (16:52):
Well, that goes back to that marketing term. We're also a communications organization now, and we really try to embed this social media aspect of this. We want people to be aware of the successes others have had because I think one of the things that are so important from a learning organization is that we generate FOMO, the fear of missing out. If we can show people how others are benefiting from what we're providing, that automatically then pulls them into our potential audience or users that we have for the same content or similar content, and it allows us to reuse things. We've also focused a lot on those simulations, which shortened the punishing trainings that we had. As you mentioned, I've gone through fire extinguisher safety many, many times. Do I know how to use one? Probably at this age, but I can now test up on that one and answer those questions quickly.
John Parsell (17:49):
I think to add to that, it's really understanding your audience. Who are they? What devices are they using? How are they accessing training? When can they access training? And so the more the audience, the more you're able to find products that mean something to them, that are accessible to them, that work within the amount of time that they have. And so you can keep that in mind when you're looking to partner with vendors when you're looking to develop content. And so really, just understanding who they are. And then I think also the other piece is Dan has just architected this great solution here, and we've really started to collect a lot of data in terms of how learners are accessing content, how are they consuming it, what are they consuming? I think that really allows us to start making some data-driven decisions. And we're becoming more like a business. I know what products that people want. I can serve them more of that product, or we can look at what products they're consuming and make decisions. Well, how do we get them to start to consume these other products because these are things that are important to us as well, and we can make some good decisions there and really put our resources, time, money, and effort where it's going to make the most impact.
JD Dillon (18:58):
Yeah, that's a great point around leveraging day to ask more informed questions so we can best take advantage of the limited resources we do have to help people learn, develop, and solve problems. And I do think, Dan, you might've nailed the greatest potential litmus test for how effective an organization's learning strategy is. Because so many organizations do train people on how to use fire extinguishers. If you're walking into an organization as a new L&D professional, you should just take a fire extinguisher with you, walk up to random employees and say, use this. And if they can't use it, you're like, aha, something is wrong in this organization because I know everyone here has been taught how to do this, but can they actually do it? So that's a great point.
JD Dillon (19:36):
Last question for you all. It's a big question. It's the stakeholder question. So let's say that you've had people knocking on the door for years. We need training on, we need a 45-minute course on this particular topic. It needs to cover all of this information. So a lot of different stakeholders, be it product owners, the legal department, compliance, HR, they're very used to putting all of this in training and require people to do it. How do you get your stakeholders to shift that mindset and appreciate this idea of, no, it's not always a push solution we need, it's a more balanced reality based on how people learn the reality of the workplace and what people actually need to know and be able to do the job. So how do you get stakeholders to buy into this idea of balanced push and pull learning?
Daniel Johnson (20:23):
We work very closely with that data that John had mentioned, and we share that with them as part of the enticement to improve the program that they're looking for. We work with them to, when it's compliance-based, once it's pushed to the individuals, individuals don't engage in the thought process around it. They're not able to reflect on it, they don't think they need it. It's just get through the exercise, finish the exam, finish the assessment and get out of it. So we've really worked hard on all those different stakeholders, and you mentioned so many of them, which is so critical to the organization. A lot of 'em just want to check the box. I said I needed to do this, push it down to the employees and get it over with. We're trying to show them how the behavioral changes after that connection don't happen. So you have to get the involved learner in order to make this effective.
John Parsell (21:16):
We have a team of learning consultants, and we do our best to enable them to have these conversations with their stakeholders. And we like to think of our team as a learning enablement team. We enable learners to find, consume, and share content, but we also enable our learning professionals on our team to publish, deliver, and measure. But part of that is also educating our organization, and our learning professionals on how the system works, the value of the different programs that we have out there so that they can have really good conversations with these stakeholders to help them see what are we doing, how are we doing it, how might pull be a better option than push? And then, what's the impact of push versus pull? Because time is money, and if I push an hour-long training to a lot of people that could have been pulled, that's 500 employees, 500 hours of productivity that has just been consumed and is that worth the requirement? So I think just really enabling, helping our organization understand how to have a better conversation with their stakeholders, enabling them with that information helps our consultants do their job, and our consultants are great. They ask such great questions to get to the bottom of these issues and what the real need is.
JD Dillon (22:39):
Yeah, I love it. Turning it into a continuous conversation driven based on data and insights that people care about and focused on the outcomes we're trying to achieve, not just the experience and the completion of training itself. So great points all around. Dan and John, thank you so much for joining us today here on ITK. How can people connect with you and follow the awesome work you're doing at Merck? Dan, I'll start with you.
Daniel Johnson (23:02):
They can connect to me through LinkedIn. I'm always out there and open for all of that, and I enjoy this. It's been a long career, but it's not over and I want to continue to work with others and empower everyone to build culture globally.
JD Dillon (23:18):
Awesome. John, how about you?
John Parsell (23:19):
Same, the same. Connect with me on LinkedIn. I do have a website training answer as well, so you can connect with me there also, and sorry if you could hear my kids in the background, but fun outside.
JD Dillon (23:33):
They love the show too. Again, thank you so much and thanks again to Dan Johnson and John Parsell from Merck for helping us kick off a brand new season of ITK with useful tips on balancing the push and pull of workplace learning. Now, if you had a good time today, be sure to subscribe to ITK. Head over to Axonify.com/ITK to sign up for show announcements and reminders. You can also check out the entire ITK collection on the Axonify YouTube channel or listen to In The Know on your favorite podcast app. Be sure to join us in two weeks for our next episode as we're going to be joined by Dr. Keith Keating, author of the brand new book, A Trusted Learning Advisor. Keith is going to help us understand what it takes for L&D to finally make the shift from order takers to strategic business partners. So tune in on Wednesday, February 7th at 11:30 AM Eastern for our live conversation with Dr. Keith Keating. Until then, I've been JD. Now you're In The Know. And always remember to ask yourself the important questions like, what does a gymnast put on their popcorn summer? I'll see you next time. In The Know is produced by Sam Trieu and visually designed by Mark Anderson. Additional production support by Richia McCutcheon, Andrea Miller, Maliyah Bernard, Tuong La and Meghan Kay. The show is written and hosted by JD Dillon. ITK is an Axonify production. For more information on how Axonify helps frontline workers learn, connect and get things done, visit Axonify.com.