In a post-pandemic world, the question of how to keep employees engaged and connected has never been more critical.
For top L&D leaders, the answer comes in the form of facilitated learning. This increasingly popular approach complements on-demand learning with live, expert facilitators.
By prompting group discussion and problem-solving, live facilitators encourage learners to be active participants rather than spectators. After the sessions learners and cohorts can apply what they’ve learned to their specific roles or projects. The result is a powerful cohort training format that harnesses the power of group dynamics, meaningful connections, and diverse points of view.
Let’s take a closer look at the 5 main reasons your L&D program needs facilitated learning:
- Your employees crave human connection
Employees are looking for a more human way to interact. Remote working and dependence on digital tools for communication can add to the risk of isolation and digital overload. Facilitated learning gives you the opportunity to reintroduce a human connection within a group learning setting. This not only makes training more attractive to individuals; it helps to support company culture by bringing together dispersed colleagues for a collective purpose. - Learning is more impactful when it’s purpose-led
As social animals, we learn better together. Cultivating a sense of belonging and relatedness enhances the learning experience. Facilitated learning places emphasis on sharing insights, ideas, and experiences to find solutions and achieve a purpose together. This improves employee engagement and helps cohorts form crucial bonds. The experience stays with employees and empowers them to exercise their skills collectively into the future. - Facilitated group learning deepens knowledge
With facilitated learning, employees engage in activities that invite them to reflect on ideas and experiences related to their roles. Group discussions, open-ended questions, or role-playing are activities associated with deep learning, where learners develop a more sophisticated understanding of principles and how to apply them. This translates into a more effective and consistent application of skills across an organization. - Delivering cost effectiveness and human-touch scalability
Facilitated learning can help L&D teams deliver blended learning that delivers the best of both worlds: self-directed learning to encourage autonomy plus small group training sessions steered by an expert guide.
Whether virtual or in-person, group learning with a live facilitator is cost effective and easy to repeat and scale across your organization. Facilitated learning is quicker to organize and easier for your employees to attend, so they spend less time away from work. You can count on facilitated learning to enhance existing courses or design your new courses around it. - Your front-line managers need human-centric skillsets
Modern organizations have evolved, and leadership responsibilities are often passed to team leads and frontline managers – making them the main drivers of company culture, skill building, and performance. It’s important that you provide these key personnel with learning programs that effectively develop critical human-centric skills. Facilitated learning is an ideal way to invest in dynamic and personalized cohort training for people who need to lead change and motivate teams.
Learn together. Work better.
By encouraging collaboration and critical thinking, live facilitators create deeper engagement and understanding, helping to embed skills across the business.
This impactful yet cost-effective approach to training can also help to restore connections among cohorts and enhance company culture – crucial in today’s remote and hybrid-working environments.
From a learning and development investment perspective, facilitated learning improves return on investment, because these dynamic learning experiences can enhance every aspect of business, from skills acquisition and retention to resilience and innovation.