Where to apply upskilling in a hybrid work model

We know this is a daunting shift. Hybrid work won’t only transform your organization’s talent strategy, employee experience, and management styles, but comes with adoption of new technologies and a spotlight on the ever-widening skills gap. Yet despite these challenges, hybrid work also presents new opportunities—and with the right tools, frameworks, and support, organizations can seize them. A focus on upskilling your organization’s workforce can help you successfully adapt to the new, hybrid working world. 

In what follows, we’ll walk you through the process of upskilling in a hybrid work environment. To aid in this task, we will define upskilling, demonstrate how organizations can apply it in a hybrid model, discuss common challenges and best practices, and examine how approaches differ among varying employee groups.

In our 2019 research, “The Upskilling Crisis,” 56% of companies described their skills gap as moderate to severe before the pandemic upended the way we work. Now, employees and their managers are faced not only with utilizing an increasing number of new systems, technologies, processes and data sources, but doing so in a new working culture.

But what do we mean by upskilling? How does it differ from skilling and reskilling? A quick primer:

Organizations tend to run into some common issues as they begin their upskilling journey—all of which can be exacerbated by the shift to hybrid working. Here are some of the pitfalls we see most often and how to solve them:

Misunderstanding the problems to solve.  

Too often, organizations start with the skills, attitudes, and knowledge their people need to learn, instead of identifying what business results they want to create and what behaviors are needed to get them there. By using a combination of qualitative and quantitative assessments—from employee and customer surveys to extensive data analysis—we help executives answer these questions first so they can better design, assess, and continuously improve their learning programs.  

An IT group, for instance, recently came to us because its managers were struggling to be effective in a remote environment. Together, we helped the group identify the actual business problem, which was a lack of engagement and productivity among the company’s IT workforce. We helped them realize the skills these managers were missing, namely more effective coaching and leadership.  

To do this, we spent time with the company’s leaders to define their vision for improved employee engagement and productivity, assessing the current and future state of the team, and collecting information from employees about what qualities they’d like to see in a manager. From there, we helped prioritize various aspects of upskilling the managers that led to better employee engagement, identifying available learning programs and ensuring that the upskilling program went as planned. 

Expecting the technology to do all the work.  

Business leaders often get caught up investing in tools rather than the people who need to use them. For instance, our 2019 upskilling survey found that employee adoption is the biggest roadblock to implementing new employee enablement technologies – and yet 84 percent of respondents said they sometimes or never redesign the employee journey before onboarding new technology.

This is particularly important given the ways in which these experiences will continually change in adapting to hybrid work, and how the pandemic has exacerbated gaps in expectations between leadership and their teams.  

This was the case for a healthcare provider’s revenue cycle management function. While shifting to a remote working environment was made possible by the organization’s technology capabilities, the biggest barrier to success had been the lack of trust: Managers lacked confidence that their teams could be as productive without in-person oversight. To be effective in this new way of working, their managers had to upskill to find new ways of engaging and understanding their employees’ productivity; their employees, meanwhile, had to upskill by becoming more self-reliant and independent.

Focusing on training instead of focusing on learning.  

The traditional and most commonly available training and workforce development approaches are focused on helping companies maintain an adequate level of proficiency. This entails a lot of memorization, one-off (or annual) training sessions, and, consequently, time spent on tasks that don’t necessarily add value.

Rather than spoon-feeding employees with rote training programs, effective upskilling creates a continuous learning loop by providing actionable knowledge such as structured practice, such as scenario-based learning and problem solving, and persistent refinement, such as coaching, self-evaluation, ongoing assessments and feedback. The shift to a hybrid environment—where there will be less in-person training, heightened uncertainty, and fatigue with virtual programming—underscores the need for such resilient learning practices.  

Ultimately, it’s these practices that can empower business leaders to upskill their people in a hybrid environment. A customer care center we worked with, for instance, consistently observed long, inefficient, and unengaged calls with customers. Rather than being present with customers’ issues, agents were preoccupied with remembering how to handle various matters or sifting through complex reference materials.  

To fix it, we worked with the client to pilot a new learning approach that gave their agents actionable knowledge accessible in real time—in office or at home—eliminating the need for memorization. This freed their attention so that they could be focused and present with the customers – and paved the way for an estimated $5M in savings due to reductions in handle time, repeat calls, and training time.

Not budgeting enough for it.  

Overall training expenditures have been dropping since 2017. Leaders are often hesitant to spend on such programs, which tend to be perceived as being costly to build, maintain, and measure. However, it costs an average of 3.5x more hire a new employee compared to upskilling an existing one.

By its very nature, upskilling is role- and level-specific, which means approaches differ among employee groups. To demonstrate these differences, we offer examples of various approaches and compare upskilling needs and challenges for three different groups.

Process-oriented workers 

The need: Learning to problem-solve. Front-office workers  need to access information quickly and comfortably to deliver a superior customer experience. If they’re too busy remembering information or steps, they won’t be present in connecting with customers to problem-solve, especially if they’re toggling between in-person and digital experiences. Back-office workers also need to understand how their often repetitive tasks fit into the overall process and goals of the business, including how to operate across siloes. In a hybrid work setting, the goal is to keep self-motivation and resourcefulness high while minimizing mistakes.  

The answer: Scenario-based learning programs. Rather than relying on detailed reference guides, these workers benefit from interactive trainings focused on problem-solving. Rather than giving them the information, it’s about giving the tools to find the information. Identify several problems for them to solve—individually or as a group—and 9 times out of 10 they’ll figure out how to use the tools better than if you showed them a step-by-step process. This type of upskilling helps process-oriented workers lead to problem-solving fluidly in the moment, both on their own and across siloes, which is paramount in a hybrid model that still has many “unknowns.”

People Leaders 

The need: Helping others learn by leading, not doing. Mid-level managers need to transition from effective doers—which was likely what got them promoted in the first place—to effective people managers. Executives, on the other hand, need to support these managers in this transition. Both groups require an upskilling approach that prioritizes learning over training—where, as leaders, they can serve as an employee’s sounding board and coach. The need for empathy and vulnerability at this level is extremely important, especially in moments where everyone is facing “crisis fatigue.” 

The answer: Resilient learning techniques. For employees looking to become people managers, training approaches are often ineffective. Rather than prescriptive lessons, they need to learn through on-the-spot coaching and continuous feedback from above and below them. Most importantly, they need time to make the switch from doer to manager, or manager to executive. Leaders need to be willing to hear feedback from others and model a vulnerability in responding to that feedback.  

Knowledge and skilled workers  

The need: Evolving skills with technology advancements. If they’re going to avoid their expertise becoming outdated or surpassed, knowledge workers must see learning as an ongoing practice. Similarly, skilled workers must reskill and upskill to keep up on new technologies: In 2019, 60% of such employees believed to some extent that their current skill set would become outdated in the next 3-5 years.  

The answer: Give time for training—and application of it. Organizations need to give these workers the time and space to actually learn new skills, which means protecting time for knowledge workers to learn and giving them the workspaces and resources to try out new ideas and skills. Skilled workers must understand the “why” in upskilling: Why will it make my life easier? My job better? My work more productive? Will it increase my longevity as routine work becomes more automated?

Upskilling is not easy for most organizations. With 43% of managers telling us in 2019 they don’t know how to upskill or reskill their employees, this leaves a hefty burden on organizations to apply more wide-scale upskilling through structured programs. Hybrid work adds yet another layer of complexity to this already challenging endeavor. But it also underscores the importance of leveling up your workforce to adapt in changing situations.  

To get started, executives can start thinking about the following:  

• Understand the differences between skilling, reskilling, and upskilling. The investments and strategies that are effective for solving one issue may be ineffective for another.  
• For straightforward work that is tactical or process-oriented, use actionable knowledge and other performance support material—accessible from anywhere—to reduce the burden of memorization in skilling and reskilling. This frees up capacity for upskilling. 
• In hybrid work environments, upskilling is particularly crucial when it comes to fostering self-evaluation, quality orientation, and the ability to solve problems independently – without the supports found in a traditional office environment, like asking a neighboring colleague a quick question or water cooler discussions. 
• Before shifting to an upskilling approach, get clear on the business results you want to drive, the skills you will need to get there, and where the gaps are today. 
• Remember that upskilling is often role- or level-specific. What qualifies as upskilling for one role may be an irrelevant time waster for someone in another. That means one-size-fits-all upskilling programs don’t work well and you will need to group like employees together to design upskilling programs specific to their needs. 
• Reduce the learning effort required to perform routine work through better learning programs, as well by optimizing processes and tools. You will always need to skill and reskill your people. By doing that more efficiently and effectively, you’ll free up bandwidth and resources to invest in upskilling.

While this list is based on decades of experience in helping organizations navigate change and upskill their talent, we understand it’s a mindset shift that can require significant organizational change. Our advice? Focus on one area of the business to start—for instance, your most underperforming unit or a group that’s really hungry for change. Then scale the effort beyond a pilot, building on your successes.  

Now is the time to ensure your organization is approaching upskilling in the right way to drive the business results you need. And lay the groundwork for a vibrant post-pandemic future.