Pandemic has given L&D a real opportunity to step up and show leadership - Sarika Sharma

TeamLease has been conducting a knowledge sharing initiative called L&D Dialogue Series since 2019, where they invite industry leaders from the L&D fraternity to come together to discuss and debate on the topic of interest. In one such session, they invited Ms. Sarika Sharma, Assistant General Manager, Human Resources and Heading Learning & Development, Universal Sompo General Insurance Co. Ltd. Sarika Sharma is a passionate strategic HR and L&D Ninja with experience in handling a diverse range of HR operations and training people in various domains as result oriented professionals with exposure and HRD functions expertise.

Let’s see what she has to share.

How is the L&D function coping with COVID aftermath?

The pandemic had scaled its impact on every aspect of life. Needless to say, the business world had to reconfigure and reboot several office paradigms to deal with the transformed scenarios. There are some ramifications seen in HR and L&D broadly. Covid drastically shifted the learning process. The development practitioners have been challenged to step outside of their comfort zone, be curious and embrace new ways of delivering learning with the high impact of the digital age. The pandemic has given them a real opportunity to step up and show leadership to navigate organizations into the new world of learning and development. Digital learning and development had already been accelerating over the past decade. With these uncertain times, some organizations and industries have been quick to embrace the change. Developing the tools, processing and capabilities to support the growing need for learning delivered for the 21st century.

The COVID has actually pushed learning and development into the mainstream of organization activities. The L&D teams were the most active during the lockdown and activities via virtual networks became the highlight of the daily schedule for all the employees of the organization across verticals. Watch the conversation here

But online learning came with its own set of challenges and setbacks. One of them was definitely people not switching on the cameras. Face and body language of the participants plays a very important role. So as L&D practitioners, they had to make these sessions as interactive as possible. Sarika shared her personal experience of conducting these online sessions. She would start the session with some pleasantries and make sure that every participant unmute themselves and communicate with the team.

The emotional well-being of employees while crafting the L&D strategy

Especially during the COVID, it came to the realisation that it's not only about physical health, it's also mental health that we have to take care of. Sarika Sharma conducted various sessions on mental wellness and mindfulness. They used to call doctors and also tied with Practo, a wellness organization, and started having these people come on board giving employees sessions. They have also conducted yoga on International Yoga Day. Watch the conversation here

Creating awareness is an integral part of an L&D department. To make everyone aware, they had short snippets of knowledge on general insurance, processes or products, compliance, soft skill, etc. So they started doing this recently, for the last 3-4 months, during the lockdown. During the actual COVID, they used to share snippets on mental health and mindfulness.

E-learning is the future

Technology plays an extremely crucial part in the new virtual workplace, which experts have predicted to be around for some more time. In order to make the experience as seamless as possible, a learning management system, LMS, has emerged as a viable option.

The LMS, learning management system is undoubtedly going to play out a crucial role. In Sarika’s organization they had an in-house LMS but after COVID, created a proper LMS module with all the modules, e-learning materials, and proper libraries. The idea behind an LMS was to provide assistance and training to each and every department. For example, the salespeople, do not have time to open up their laptop or check up on their mobile, and with the help of LMS, they can read whenever and wherever according to their convenience. In public transport, like a rickshaw cab or something, they can just open up modules and start reading. Watch the conversation here

In continuation to that, another topic worth discussing was game-based learning. So game-based learning has really emerged as a center of discussion and a lot of HR folks and l&d folks speak highly about it. Ms. Sharma also agreed with this concept being the next in-thing in the world of virtual learning. Young people don’t really want anything manual or physical, they all want everything into some activity or gamification. As a company, they have not experimented with anything concrete on this. But things are definitely going in the right direction.

The discussion concluded with a thank you note to the guest speaker Sarika Sharma from moderator, Hardik Mehta. There were a lot of takeaways from the session, and surely the larger HR and L&D fraternity will have a lot to chew on from this insightful conversation. Watch the conversation here