Business & Public Sector
LEARNING to LIVE WITH the ‘COVID World of Work’!
Uncertainty abounds whilst we do our best to maintain a motivated workforce in the face of the inevitable redundancies, bringing newcomers into the workplace, pressures of childcare, school and increased family commitments to the vulnerable. Keeping everyone safe and well-informed are but two of the many challenges for staff and customers alike in a world in which we are all learners.
We have had a number of ZOOM meetings with our panel of employers from the business and public sectors to try to work out what we might do to help. … The consensus, ‘we are all on a massive learning curve and if learning didn’t feature as a critical success factor when it came to business or civil service planning it certainly should now’.
So, whilst ‘Goodwill’ is the accepted measure of customer satisfaction, Learning Power seems set to become a measure of the capacity and motivation of our staff. That gives ELLI, (the Effective Lifelong Learning Inventory) a vital role in determining not only an organisation’s capacity for learning but thereby, its propensity for change, and being fleet of foot, as the new COVID world unfolds.
Explore ELLI
Where did Elli come from?
Ellie has been research-validated, both academically and operationally, among more than 100,000 people globally drawn from all walks of life. The research teams, working in Bristol in the UK and Penn State University in the USA, found, beyond any reasonable doubt, that there are just 7 basic dimensions, the raw building blocks, that hold the key to our capacity for learning.
Why is ELLI Unique?
- It plots the learner’s strength and weaknesses.
- It doesn’t ‘trait cast’ by tracking change.
- It monitors the ‘learning journey.’
- It upstages most psychometric tests.
- It creates a ‘growth mindset.’
THE 7 DIMENSIONS THAT DETERMINE LEARNING POWER
ELLI has 2 more vital attributes … it tracks changes in the student profile as the student’s responsiveness to learning changes AND is highly sensitive to the immediate learning environment, whether that be in the home, lecture theatre or coffee bar.
ELLI is extremely easy to use and helps to restore learning disciplines…
Input:
Participants answer an on-line questionnaire and become excited to be doing something with an immediate result. They don’t have to think too much and are given only 4 possible, repeated answers, to every question ∙ very like me ∙ quite like me ∙ a little like me ∙ not like me.
Output:
An immediate, but simple, spidergraphic with a user-friendly single page explanation. Participants can have fun comparing notes with one another, which also furthers their understanding of how they learn.
Further Explanation
Interpretation and suggested Interventions: Available in more detail with Learning to Learn with ELLI. Download £9.95
ELLI is the instrument that plots where the employees are now as learners and saves the observation and guesswork otherwise needed to make a judgement! What is more, it enables the tracking of progress both with an employee’s understanding of how they learn and the success of alternative intervention methodologies or courses within an organisation’s CPD curriculum.
The 2 CASES illustrated below demonstrate 2 very different applications of ELLI and the critical importance of assessing Learning Power to every organisation, large and small.
CASE 1 … an SME with a turnover of £2.2 million and delivering a healthy profit.
The Marketing Director and Managing Director had worked together in a previous life, although as client and supplier rather than immediate colleagues. They had been employed together as the team to turn around the company’s fortunes as it struggled for survival in a competitive but growing market. For the first couple of years, this partnership worked a treat with the lack of the necessary skills in the labour market counteracted by an, at first, highly speculative investment in youth. Experienced employees were trained to pass on their skills to a cohort of young people grateful for such an opportunity in a depressed job market.
Learning had always been this company’s hallmark, and fundamental to its early successes but the change in the business cycle from ‘turn-round’ to ‘accelerated growth’ was revealing an operational and communication disconnect between the Marketing and Managing Directors.
An HR professional suggested that to obtain ELLI profiles might throw light on the issue.
It did …. and the answer found to be remarkably simple: both were powerful learners as they had already proved, but they were misreading one another’s habits and behaviours. Once these were understood teamwork resumed, and the Board moved on to create one of the UK’s most successful companies.
| Marketing Director’s resourcefulness and confidence in his ability to make a difference by show-casing his expertise are often the hallmarks of an extrovert. His general demeanour, nonetheless, was that of an introvert. | Managing Director was also supremely confident and a natural leader with the usual extrovert behaviours. However, with a more balanced learning profile, she was much more likely to be considered before offering an opinion and thereby often displaying the hallmarks of an introvert. |
CASE 2 … a government department living in fear of wholesale redundancy when the majority of Civil Servants had anticipated a job for life.
Government threatened redundancy of between 25 and 40% of the workforce at all levels causing distress, demotivation and delays to many projects and programmes. Ministers had warned of the necessary cuts in the interests of reducing public debt and public borrowing and the onset of a period of austerity. Many Civil Servants had believed themselves to be immune to such measures, and their Principals became concerned for this lack of realism.
Departmental Principals knew learning to be the driver of propensity for change and sought to adopt ELLI to assess the learning capacity of their staff.
In the event, there was a stark contrast in the profiles of those who had joined the Civil Service in mid-career and those who had joined straight from school or university. These profiles were taken at 6-monthly intervals.
| Senior member of staff who had joined the Civil Service as a specialist in mid-career and was using the threat of redundancy to demonstrate renewed commitment to the Department, its external partners and committed timelines for delivery | A profile common among ‘career’ Civil Servants showing a pronounced spike in Resilience. In this case, Resilience masked a willingness to accept the inevitable and a lack of preparedness to recognise that current skills and experience were marketable find and could be traded to find alternative employment. There was no progress in this instance after 6 months of intervention. |
ELLI PRICING:
- FREE ELLI TRIAL for 5 nominated employees at registration
- Just £5 per registered participant buys 2 profiles for everyone registered, a ‘starter’ profile AND a ‘follow-up’ profile at a time of the student’s or manager’s discretion
- All profiles are anonymised and only visible to the participant and the organisation’s internal administrator.
Thank you for your interest and for getting in touch with us