Activate: Foundational learning for HR transformation

From administrative work to conflict resolution, HR teams have numerous responsibilities necessary to keep organizations functioning like well-oiled machines. At the same time, you’re expected to lead total HR transformation during an era of change moving at bullet train speeds. So, how do you start your HR Transformation Journey? By building up foundational learning in the Activate stage.

If you’ve seen our introduction to this transformation model, you’ll already have some idea of the steps involved. But whether you have or not, this article will guide you through every aspect of the Activate stage, including signs you’re in it and how to progress to the next one.

Whether you’re responsible for L&D specifically, or HR in general, this model of HR transformation will help you modernize your approach and support everyone in your organization.

What is the Activate stage of HR transformation?

Activate is the first of four stages in your organization’s HR Transformation Journey. As you probably guessed from the title, this stage is about building a foundation of basic learning and compliance training and delivering it consistently across your entire business.

Foundational learning establishes stability and reliability for HR’s basic training policies. This sets you up for the more advanced and expanded learning capacities you’ll develop in the next stage. It’s necessary because, at the beginning of Activate, leaders and employees are likely to see workplace training as a tick-box obligation and little more.

Establishing consistent compliance training for everyone will prove the value of learning to both employees and senior leaders. Employees see their skill-based blockers start to melt away, while C-suite sees this reflected in productivity and efficiency metrics.

This way, when you move onto the Grow stage of your journey, you’ll have already begun to convince key stakeholders, making it easier to secure a mandate for further HR transformation.

What the path to foundational learning looks like

Since organizations expect HR teams to lead the HR Transformation Journey in addition to keeping up with a mountain of admin and support tasks, it’s best to start by relieving some of the burden from your newly emphasized responsibilities. It’s also vital to make foundational learning as accessible as possible, considering how little buy-in you’ll have from employees at this point.

It’s for these reasons that you should start by choosing a modern Learning Management System (LMS). Unless you have an in-house solution to upgrade, this may involve experimenting with trials and free versions while you convince stakeholders to fully invest.

“Honestly, the most intuitive LMS I’ve worked with.”

Rusty Bramlett, Learning & Development Manager at The Wagner Companies

Next, you’ll start enrolling everyone in compliance training programs and track their progress. This can be done manually, but you should automate these functions if your LMS has that capability to keep advancing in HR maturity.

Simply having basic training and compliance in place isn’t enough to graduate from the Activate stage. You’re likely still in stage 1 if:

• Training execution still requires manual enrollment and follow-up.
• Stakeholders confuse a system being set up with it running reliably.
• Late or inconsistent documentation split across channels (inboxes, spreadsheets, etc).
• HR is assessed on compliance tracking and delivery rather than how training impacts employee capabilities.

How managers and employees experience the Activate stage

Fragmented tools and HR systems mean managers lack critical insights, which forces them to be reactive rather than proactive. The lack of automated learning management and reporting also means they’ll have to keep up with their team’s development manually. But your managers might be reluctant to do this if they view learning as a distraction.

As more employees complete compliance training, however, managers should realize its importance as regulatory blockers fall away and their team starts meeting its deadlines more consistently.

Meanwhile, your employees are likely to feel disempowered at the beginning of Activate due to the lack of foundational learning to help them progress, and the absence of other HR systems that would give them a voice like employee check-ins. Once they finish compliance training, however, they’ll be more able to work autonomously and gain a much greater sense of control.

The cost of lingering on Activate for too long

The pressure to modernize HR is building quickly, as only 33% of HR professionals say their systems are fit for the modern workforce. The longer you spend setting up foundational learning, the longer you’ll ultimately spend balancing transformation against administrative obligations.

Beyond that, progressing past Activate sooner means resolving friction that’s likely holding your HR team back in everyday work.

Right now, HR is probably spending more time enrolling people, sending reminders, monitoring completions, and chasing audit data than it is improving the quality of courses and learning systems. Progressing beyond Activate means automating those tasks so your team can focus on impact and accessibility instead. It also means replacing fragmented, manual reporting with consistent data you can actually trust when managers ask about course completions.

That consistency extends to onboarding too. When learning delivery is standardized, every new hire gets the same quality of support regardless of which team they join. And when the C-suite asks for a progress update, you’ll already have the data ready rather than pulling it together at the last minute.

How to move beyond foundational learning

Once you complete the Activate stage of your HR Transformation Journey, every part of your organization should have full access to essential compliance training. Additionally, your choice of LMS should enable you to start setting up and standardizing key workflow automations so you can balance HR’s escalating obligations.

Using these automations will reduce the manual friction around learning management and reporting. In turn, this will increase the visibility of foundational learning by making data collection and reporting more consistent.

Through more consistent reporting, HR can more effectively link their activities to business objectives and priorities, which is essential for convincing senior leaders to increase HR’s L&D mandate. Once you’ve accomplished all of this, you’ll be able to move onto the next stage of your HR Transformation Journey.

Get ready for the Grow stage of HR transformation

With Activate in your rearview mirror, you’ll finally be able to turn your attention to the next stage in your journey: Grow.

Like Activate, the Grow stage of HR transformation concerns increasing your organization’s learning and development capabilities. Since you’ll have compliance training and basic learning management squared away, you can turn your attention to increasing the variety of course options to support any number of career paths in your organization.

In Activate, you sowed the seeds of stakeholder buy-in. In Grow, you’ll harvest that goodwill and use it as a mandate to drive L&D investment, providing personalized learning paths and total accessibility across every team and department in the business.

To carry on with your journey of HR operating model transformation, check out our article on the Grow stage next.

If, on the other hand, you want to learn more about this journey’s ultimate endpoint, join the wait list for our Human Success Playbook today!