Beyond the Launch: Turning Great Learning Programs into Lasting Engagement Campaigns with Melissa Adeson from Spotlight Retail Group

Julia: Welcome to L&D in 20, your go-to resource for all things workplace learning, brought to you by Go1. I am your host, Julia Nieradka, Manager of Customer Success at Go1. Today on the show I'm very excited to be joined by Melissa Adeson, Learning & Development Manager at Spotlight Retail Group.

Melissa has 26 years of experience in L&D, and it's safe to say she's an expert in the field. Melissa, welcome to the show.

Melissa: Thanks for having me.

Julia: In today's deep dive segment, we are going to be discussing how we can utilize marketing instead of just communications to build a learning environment. So Melissa, what role does marketing play in creating a learning environment?

Melissa: It's a really great question.

So, when we come to a learning environment, we can get really wrapped up in the content that we're delivering or, how it is that we are getting the information across to the people that we are effectively trying to, you know, bring forward and, and help do what they're doing.

When it comes to marketing, it actually gives us a structure in the backend on how to deliver what it is that we've got going on. So it gives us the ability to provide structure to what we're doing. We get targets, we can look at the language we're delivering, and the ability to, to also find something that works and be able to prove it, um. In learning and development, as terrible as it sounds, proof that we're here for a reason is always something that we have to consider.

Julia: I love the way you framed that, and on that, like how do you balance the needs versus wants of learners when you're designing what your learning products will be?

Melissa: Well, and this is where the marketing comes in because every, you know, every organization that I've worked in, it becomes about compliance training. What do my team need to get to do what they do? Whereas what we look at and, what we have a passion for, is what do the team need to be the best at what they do?

And it really is that balance between both of them and the ability to make that work for the whole organization. What do they need? What do I need to sell to them? And also what do people need to actually get that to day to day? And we have to do both.

Julia: Yeah, absolutely. And I guess on that, how should L&D leaders be thinking about marketing versus communications?

Melissa: Well, it's really funny actually. So communication when we train it is a two-way street. So it's about how people are responding backwards and forwards and how we interact with the people around us, whereas marketing is very much what can I do and how can I interact with someone to get them to make the choices and take the actions that I need them to take?

So really what we are looking at is, communication is one of the channels we have to our team, rather than the way we communicate or the way we do what we do. I tend to find that we can get wrapped up in that compliance side of things, so we communicate to people when we need them, or to do something. If we want them to do something it becomes less of a communication channel, marketing gives us a wider variety. It gives us ability to structure how we review the systems, the programs that we are doing, whereas communication just says, do these. And then it becomes, if it's compliance, we then also communicate with people when they haven't done what we've asked them to do, but we don't do that for anything other than compliance training.

Julia: Yeah, and that distinction is so important. Communication as a directive and marketing as a persuasive sort of human-centered piece.

Melissa: That's exactly it. Marketing is also about changing small parts of the campaign to see what changes you get in the outcome or the actions of the team members. So, you don't wanna just go, well that didn't work. And can all of the work that you've done, when all you need to do is go, man, I used email to deliver it, what I should have used is our intranet, or I should have gone through the leaders and had them deliver it to their team.

Julia: Often those building learning experiences don't have a marketing background. And so what do more L&D leaders need to know about marketing if that's not an area they're strong in?

Melissa: There is a really old model in marketing, which they call the Four Ps of marketing, which is product, price, placement, and promotion.

So the main thing that you want, we wanna understand when bringing marketing into what we do is that each section of our campaign can be changed. Like I said earlier, we, we change one portion to see if what we change delivers a better result to our, uh, to our team members. And so being able to break that down somehow is finding that model. Now I find those four Ps really easy one because I remember them. Um, and it gives me a really good way to decide when am I gonna change certain things so I don't change the product very often. So in retail we might change, might choose to change the product, but in learning there isn't, you know, you can't change the product by not giving people learning. You might change the price. Not a problem. If it's got a cost associated with it, then we change the price. We make it cheaper, we make it more expensive, we make it less available or more available in L&D when they, when people aren't paying you to do the course, it's about availability. You know, is it a leadership program? Do they have to have completed other training for it? That's a price they have to pay, so I use time. And use the team members' time as a price rather than, here, give me money.

Then we look at placement. How have I placed my campaign? Not how have I placed the content, but how have I placed the campaign to capture people's attention? You know, if I need to train my distribution center, for example, they are out on the floor and they don't use email. We don't even give them an email address. So email can not be the way that I place, can't be where I place this. It's gotta be in the lunchroom. It's gotta be some, you know, through their leader. It's gotta be sending someone out to their, to them and pulling them off the floor to get that happening. So we really need to understand that placement of where we, where we start to get, capture people's attention. And then from a promotion point of view, well what's going to happen? You know, how are we going to promote that through using the, our distribution center as an example, we have five different main languages in our distribution center. So from a promotion point of view, we have to make sure any promotion is in their first language. If we look at our, um, support office team, they have access to email. Maybe we start with that. There's also, they're in the office on a regular basis, so maybe we put posters up, maybe we capture their attention with, uh, you know, a fun little tagline. Anything that looks from there, what is the promotion that keeps people entertained and changing one of those and testing it?

Again, it's not a failure if nothing happens, it just means something hasn't worked. So it gives us the ability to work through it and do those mid review type concepts. When it comes to it, I'm now, I'm never one for doing something and then have no results whatsoever. But if I get one result, I mean that something's worked and something hasn't, now I adjust that.

Julia: And having seen how you work, I think one of the things that you do really well in the business is you've got a really strong push-pull strategy where you are pushing out certain types of learning, but you're also doing the marketing and advertising, and you're thinking of all of those different promotional ways of keeping it interesting for learners.

And I think that is a huge differentiator. Um, in making

Melissa: and capturing our learners at different points in their employee cycle becomes really important.

So, you know, in Australia, you know, the NA national average of tenure in an organization is 3.3 years. So if that's the case, then we want to have a campaign that covers some of that 3.3. So when we say tenure, that's usually in one role.

If we can offer them another role, they stay for longer. For workers over 45, for example, it's actually about six years and eight months. So you've got a longer period of time to to, to teach and engage with those people. For people under 25, it's one year and eight months. They're looking for something new. So we need to start to look at what am I delivering those people? What is keeping them engaged, and how do I go about using that? If we look at 3.3 years, every 3.3 years, we will have had to touch every single employee.

Julia: Generally, in your opinion, Mel, what is most lacking in L&D marketing efforts right now?

Melissa: I think the main thing that I find is that mid-campaign review. So we go out and we, we deliver training or we provide the opportunity for people to access the training and then we kind of don't do anything else with that. We have to look at it and go, this is working, but I don't think two months is the, the time it needs to go. I'm gonna bring back the end of the campaign. And then it's about taking the analytics that go with that.

You can't have analytics unless you put the analytics in place before you start. So you have to be able to track how people are engaging with what you're doing.

You cannot assume, and learning and development, we make a lot of assumptions that people are engaging the same way as we would engage.  Which is not true because learning and development people do a lot more training than anybody else in the organization.

Julia: I love that connection around you sort of get the added benefit that. Because you're doing so many different types of campaigns, you have more data and more analytics to be able to track how engagement is going across the business and what different groups of people are engaging with what types of campaigns. So there's a little bit of an added benefit on the off the back of that.

Can you share an example of a learning campaign that used these marketing principles you've just discussed with us to drive real change in behavior?

Melissa: I actually have one at the moment that we are running, which is one of my favorites, and actually focused on the people using time to learn rather than what they're learning. So we, we flipped our focus at, I don't, I don't care what they learned. We are not giving them content, we're not giving them anything.

What we are doing is focusing on how they use their time , So we've kind of broken it up into about three different stages. So the first one is those small condensed learning, what we call bite-sized learning., And what we do, we, that is we go at the beginning of your day, take 15 minutes. One to plan your day.

So it means that people come in and they know what they're doing, but once you've planned, find a learning that will help you deliver that day to the best of your ability and do a bite-sized piece of learning. So we use the Go1 system so that they don't have to come and ask my team for it every day. Go in, find the training that you would like and complete it. And it just gives people a process in the backend with, to get themselves into a habit. So once it's a habit, my life becomes a lot easier because they're always doing it means that the analytics that come out of the system showing that people are doing a regular amount of learning. ,We did three and a half thousand, trainings via through the Go1 system, like completed trainings in the last year, which is extraordinary. We want that. We want more of that. Now we know that we want more of that.

Julia: You've given everybody so much to work with today, and I think if I had one final question about this, it would be, you know, because you've got so much experience and you've had so many different initiatives that you've built from the ground up and scaled them, what would be your one piece of advice for somebody who's maybe never done that before around scaling a learning program from humble beginnings?

Melissa: The biggest thing that I want people to know is that you do not have to be finished to start. It's not a test. It's not school. You don't fail if it's not complete. So yes, the, you need to start somewhere. So start with what you know. Start with the content that you have available to you and then deliver that. I always like to think if we were so, so, learning and development we have to remember is actually a saleable product. There are organizations out in the world Go1 being one of them who sell content. We need to remember that this has always been my train.

I've always been one of those people who can step in and train anything, which is fantastic, and I need to have one day more worth of content than the people I'm training.

 You basically just say, this is step one, let's get everybody doing step one, and then I'm gonna bring step two in, and then I'm gonna engage with step two, and then I'm gonna bring in step three And then to be honest, by the time you get to building the third step, it's so different from what you thought it was gonna be to start with because of the feedback that you've had. You'll start to actually build a better program than whole program deliver walk away, move on. And that's where that marketing comes in. What am I learning? How am I delivering this training, and how am I making this the best piece of content that this team member needs, that this group needs? It's also really important to know that we do not succeed without middle manager approval, not senior level approval.

Senior level approval is actually really easy to get. Tell them how, how you're gonna help them save money. Tell them how you're gonna keep your team trained. You've got them, right. It's the people who have one-on-one conversations with their team. It's the people who write their performance plans. It's those people saying, have you spoken to learning and development? Have you actually done the course, done the training, and then have a continued check-in to make that work? If the middle leaders find it important, then our life becomes much, much easier. So the first thing I did when I started was I bought in a mandatory learning goal inside our performance management system. So everyone has a learning goal. I don't care what it is, but they have to have it, and it's part of. their star rating, if they don't complete it, they don't get, they, they don't get a star rating for it

Julia: Mm-hmm.

Melissa: because the managers need to be incentivized to ask the question as well.

When they become too, task focused, then their team doesn't progress, which is fine for about a year, not fine after that.

Julia: And I think a lot of this is so important because, what we're seeing and what we're hearing from you is that L&D is something that, like marketing is iterative. It's not a finished product, and I think that's so empowering for a lot of our listeners to hear and that they, you know, just start with what you know and grow from there. It's a great reminder that progress beats perfection every time.

Melissa: Everytime. And nobody knows what you were going to deliver them, they only know what they get. So if something doesn't work, just can it and put something else in. Nobody knows. Nobody knows that you are gonna do some amazing thing on influence when, and if that doesn't work, you just put in something new on communication, everyone goes, well that was the best training course I've ever been on. It doesn't matter. And now you've got another piece of content for future.

Julia: Exactly. Thank you so much.

Melissa: Now let's get into our next segment, AI at Work, where we deep dive into how you're using AI to work smarter and how you're helping your teams to do the same.

Julia: So, Mel, how are you advising L&D leaders to think about AI at work?

Melissa: So we're starting really simple. So using AI to do the things that take us quite a lot of time. So building slide sets, summarizing research, um, matching images to content. Um, you know, creating the support structures or the collateral that go with. Content and the words that we use when we are building. It's about making our life easier to deliver what it is that we are looking for, creating whole packages around that. But it's also around, teaching AI to our team members, not just in learning and development, but in organizations. So one of the things that can be, um, that needs to be considered is if our team are putting content into AI, what happens to that content? You know, if they're putting, oh, can you clean these numbers up for me? And they put an entire lot of, you know, P and L numbers into an AI, do they know where that goes and where it's being saved? And if they don't, they shouldn't be doing it. So it's, it's making sure that our cybersecurity rules are in place and bringing AI into those end. This is where that balance of who's the content owner versus learning and development come in. We need to guide people and say, Hey, you haven't considered this in this training that you've asked us to provide for the team. Or you've got a trainer and they're talking about cybersecurity and it's really important. What about AI? It is part of our role to ask those questions, not to do the work, but to ask the questions so that we are always kinda keeping those covered. Are we teaching people how to use AI as well as how are we using it?

Julia: Now moving into our Future Ready segment where we talk about the future of work and how L&D leaders can prepare themselves and their teams. So Mel, can you tell us about your take on the future of work and what should L&D leaders be preparing for, and what is a trend that you might be noticing?

Melissa: We just talked about AI. AI is definitely one of them. I think it's all about those technology advancements if we've got decision making robots coming in. Do we need to teach our team how to make better decisions? So all of those basic decisions that we all, you know, cut our teeth on much, much earlier, they're not made by people anymore. So how do people learn to make decisions and therefore how do we train that?

Virtual learning. So virtual reality training I think is gonna be really big where someone can actually feel like they're inside that space still, hopefully getting that more one-on-one interaction. It's not through a screen, it's actually through that interaction going in. And how do we do that and what does it look like? And if AI can learn to respond, you know, my car yells at me when I don't look at the road, which is fine, except when you're at a roundabout and you look to the side, it says, look at the road. Look at the road. Like AI does all these things. If someone's not looking at their computer screen, my AI can tell me that they're not reading what's going on. There are lots of ways we can bring it in.

Julia: Absolutely. And I know given how much you love to test different things in the business, we're gonna see some of this and I'm really excited to hear how it all goes. So thank you for sharing that with us.

Melissa: Pleasure.

Julia: Now for our final segment, the Learning List, my question for you is, what are your favorite, uh, L&D related content pieces or resources at the moment?

Melissa: So at the moment, I am a little bit obsessed with an oldie, but a goodie, um, which is The Influence by Robert Cialdini. So all of the, the, the training that's associated with that influence becomes the biggest thing in learning development. Part of our job is to make sure they know it's there to influence them, to use it as it goes, bringing in more AI into the world, the influence that people have on all of the processes is the thing that's gonna make the difference. So our job is gonna be really important to teach people. How to be people, people. So many peoples, not a lot of time. Um, we need to teach them how to interact with people 'cause that's the only thing that AI is not gonna do well.

Julia: Absolutely, and I know I'll definitely be checking out the longer form of that text by, uh, Robert Cialdini, and I really appreciate you sharing that with us. So thank you so much.

Melissa: Easy as.

Julia: Thank you so much for joining us.

Melissa: It's a pleasure. Thank you to having me.

Julia: Thanks for tuning into the show. I'm your host, Julian Nieradka, and that wraps up another episode of L&D in 20. To continue the conversation, send me a message on LinkedIn through the show notes. Your comments will help inform future episode and who knows, maybe we'll even feature some of your questions on the show.

We'll catch you on the next episode, and until then, keep learning.