Growth is our Mantra
In looking back at this year and trying to wrap it up, we realise how much learning has been happening…and not only related to core job-skills. A lot of the learning has come out of a necessity to adapt to changing circumstances, of working in the home office – either with a bunch of ‘new colleagues” where some of them need a lot of support, or with no colleagues at all, perhaps feeling lonely.
Fun fact: the most popular MOOC (Massive Open Online Course) in 2020, with over 2,5 million enrolments, was Yale University’s: The Science of Well-being. This just goes to show that to allow for greater learning to happen, we must first learn how to take care of our mental and physical health. We also saw this at Spotify – the band members were really engaged by the offerings from the Heart & Soul team (mental health), the physical health and social well-being programming from the Px team (people experience), as well as the variety of learning and development offerings in the GreenHouse portfolio.
At Spotify, Growth is Our Mantra, and we believe that development and learning is happening everywhere, all the time, meaning that it’s mostly in the flow of work. The GreenHouse team’s main focus is to enable learning to happen, and we focus a great deal on making learning opportunities available to our band members so that they can drive their development together with the company.
To support this kind of learning environment the GreenHouse team learned how to pivot all classroom sessions to virtual offerings in a flash, and experienced a strong surge of sign-ups to all of the GreenHouse sessions during the spring and added a number of sessions, adjusted the topics to accommodate the needs. Introdays and our leadership sessions went virtual, we developed a ‘working-from-home hub’ in our learning portal, with learning content for individuals, teams and leaders. And we launched the Manager Manifesto, which further supports our leaders in being their best.
We’re looking forward to meeting our band members all around the world again in 2021 for some learning no matter if it’s face-to-face or online. Until then we will continue to reflect and apply the lessons learned from this year, to bring even greater learning experiences next year.
But first, it’s time for a holiday break, time for reflection. In particular, I’m sure the entire L&D industry will be reflecting on the ways we’ve all needed to learn how to stay safe (and sane) and figure out how to play in sync when your band (a.k.a. colleagues) is spread out like sprinkles on ice-cream – everywhere!
We’ll be back in 2021 when we’ve made those learning loops, ready to rise to the challenge of a brand new year with new learnings, experiences and controlled chaos!
