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Welcome to issue #57!

The connection between learning and employee experience is definitely a subject that I often indulge in. My full-time role is the one of a People Experience Manager, and as a team, we also look at how we can improve the employee experience of our colleagues through learning & development. This resource from Kineo talks about just that, the impact of L&D in the EX.

First, let's define Employee Experience 

CultureAmp defines it like this: EX encapsulates what people encounter, observe, or feel over the course of their employee journey at an organization.

Now, how does L&D impact EX?
Just by reading this definition, you can realize how many of the products and services we offer as L&Ds are actually directly focused on improving the experience of our colleagues in our organizations. The resource mentioned above explores how onboarding, career development, and social learning, which we own, are also important to EX.

I would challenge you to go even further. If you think about it, growing the skills of people managers also impacts how someone feels in the workplace. A great culture (and we are part of fostering that as well), can bring make or break a relationship between someone and their employer. And these are just two other examples.

So if improving EX can also be on our radar, why don't we use EX KPIs as well to measure our performance? If you have any thoughts on this, would love to hear them.



Enjoy and read on,
Lavinia

This newsletter is built with the full psychological, design, development, and brainstorming support of Nifty Learning.
L&D Jobs of the week
L&D Newsroom
Such an interesting read about toxic cultures, as a follow-up to some statements that appeared about companies such as Away, IDEO, and BrewDog. It talks about how progressive and mission-driven companies are at risk of becoming toxic and what you can do about it. Thanks, Marie Krebs for sharing it with me!
I always keep an eye on the Spotify blog to make sure I'm not missing their thoughts on L&D, so I was really glad to see they explored upskilling this week. They talked about being reactive and proactive as L&Ds when it comes to skill-building, and why being proactive also means empowering people to own their development. Loved it!
The Butter community 
Register
If you haven't heard of Butter before, I suggest you take a look at what they're doing. Beyond that, they are building a community for people who run collaborative virtual workshops. That's so, so cool, and you can join the community even before the official launch starting this week.
It's already researched and well-known that hearing about the impact we have drives performance up. This article takes a deeper look at the five sources executives should explore when talking about meaning and impact: society, company, customers, team, and personal success.
Such an interesting listen to be shared with all your people managers. Dwayne Edwards, former Marine Corps Captain, and product manager at Volvo Cars of North America talks about the importance of intuition when it comes to leadership, how it starts with trust and self-awareness, how to build it, and when to use intuition vs data.
People have been asking recently for collaboration resources, and as soon I saw this list from IDEOU I thought it might be worth sharing. They have articles, videos, case studies, all to serve you as inspiration when trying to improve collaboration.
I've heard of continuous learning before, but never of emergent learning. The main difference is that continuous learning taps into an organization's existing resources, emergent learning taps into the yet unknown. Since we're constantly experiencing the unknown, this is a pretty nice intro to the concept.
A nice list of the coolest L&D podcasts out there, which I have to admit are in my ears throughout the week. Since I've found my favs in there as well, I strongly recommend you taking a shot at listening to them.
I love that by the end of the MAAS event you also get the presentation on LinkedIn. This time they tackled branding, what it is, where to get started, the value proposition canvas, and how to be consistent in your communication as an L&D.
If you've been fully remote, are planning to stay this way, or have never experienced a virtual workplace but you have to now help build one, this Dropbox toolkit will do wonders. They explore communication, teamwork and well-being in a virtual first workplace.
I bet you're in the 99% of those who've heard or even read something written by Daniel Goleman. In his new newsletter issue, he talked about his emotional intelligence model, diving deeper into self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, and relationship management.
This article is a summary of a new Sloan MIT research exploring one roadblock to organizational learning - workplace hierarchies and their finding that corporate leaders who are engaged in skill transformation need to be mindful of workplace hierarchies during three types of skill transformation: upskilling, reskilling, and “newskilling.”
Overheard on LinkedIn
Forgetting is an integral part of learning. Relearning reinforces earlier memories. Relearning creates different contexts and connections.

- randymatusky
Visual of the week
One-time learning events vs Long-term learning programs
Our purpose in L&D is to help people go through the awareness - understanding - using - mastery loop. One-time learning events my secure awareness and maybe some understanding. But long-term learning programs, combining different learning methods and making use of spaced repetition and deliberate practice are the ones that also help in reaching application and mastery.
Thanks to Gabriela Pana, Roy-Ben Yehuda, Monica Tripp, Neetu Kumari, Cleber Sant'Ana, Andrei Szatmari, and Marie Krebs for sharing Offbeat in the past week.

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This newsletter is created through the joint efforts of Lavinia Mehedintu and Nifty Learning. Offbeat is our way to support the L&D community around the globe. We only share resources we find insightful, and we add our interpretation of how readers could apply what they learn. Could we be wrong? Definitely. We strongly encourage you to share your feedback and thoughts at lavinia@offbeat.works.

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