Workday Podcast: Best Practices for Supporting a Flexible Workforce

Bill Gosling Outsourcing, like many businesses, had to quickly pivot from brick-and-mortar offices to a virtual workforce when the pandemic hit. Joel MacCharles, vice president of learning and innovation, shares what his organization has learned so far.

While world events have forced many businesses to go fully remote, statistics show that many companies were already moving toward a more flexible working environment. A recent study by Global Workplace Analytics revealed that remote work has increased by 91% in the last decade. 

Bill Gosling Outsourcing, a global customer communications solutions firm, was one of the many organizations that had to rapidly move from an on-site workforce to a virtual one. On this episode of the Workday Podcast, I chatted with Joel MacCharles, vice president of learning and innovation, about how Bill Gosling Outsourcing not only navigated the impact from the shift, but also found added value through innovative learning strategies. 

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Below are a few highlights that MacCharles shared during our conversation. You can find our other Workday Podcasts here.

  • “We’ve been using Workday Human Capital Management and Workday Learning in a lot of different ways to really retrofit the organization while being remote. Whether we needed to distribute a notice, create a course, or get an urgent message out and track who was seeing it, we would create learning courses and enroll people in them. That way we could see who had completed a course and who hadn't, even if it was just reading a PDF of a policy. One of the first challenges we faced was people needing to set up a computer at home—people who had never set up a computer before. We made a course available through the Workday app that walks through the steps of setting up a computer.”

  • “Going fully remote actually sped up some opportunities for the firm. We had hoped, eventually, to create an increased presence in virtual training. We had the idea that an instructor can teach over video and use different breakout rooms to run sessions.This has created the environment we needed to finally do that. One of my facilitators is actually finding higher engagement, higher opportunity, and higher learning through training in this virtual environment. Our training now lacks borders; we have mentors in one country mentoring people in another country. That didn't exist before this [pandemic].” 

  • “My advice for other businesses would be to not hold yourself to a preconceived constraint of what your tools can do, so you can find easy ways to use and share them. Like I mentioned, if I need to get a notice out to a team, I can use a learner enrollment to get that message without having to involve anyone else. Managers, who already have existing learning dashboards to track their team's progress, can quickly see who is doing what and seamlessly communicate that back to clients.”

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