Faces of HR: Circles.Life's Guiam Wainwright on using AI to observe employees' L&D needs

Guiam Wainwright, Head of Special Projects and Data, People & Culture, Circles.Life, and his team don't consider L&D as just a perk. It’s a way to deliver on a promise to employees to help them grow. Read on to find out about this mindset, and how to implement systems to support it.

Q What is Circles.Life's approach towards keeping your employees motivated and energised around learning in a startup culture?

We strive to build a culture around growing and learning. L&D is a core concept for any business that tries to constantly reinvent itself and disrupt. We try to match the desired personal growth of the employee to L&D and use our programmes as a method to reduce attrition and raise engagement.

This means our employee base strengthens constantly in the ability to deliver business goals while employees themselves find the growth they seek and this gives them a reason to stay.

Q How will AI and adaptive learning affect corporate learning as we know it?

L&D is not just a perk with us. It’s a way to deliver on a promise to employees to help them grow. We use AI to observe our employee base - see how we work, where we struggle, and calculate where help (in the form of L&D and others) can be more effective.

This enables us to proactively, and with complete customisation, get the most relevant L&D programme in front of an employee at the crucial moment where it will make the most impact.

Q Can you outline some of the essentials for transforming a learning experience into performance impact? How would you identify whether performance has improved as a result of a learning programme?

You need to have a trusted method of breaking down goals and outcomes to a measurable format. This could be OKR, KPI, whatever works for you, but it has to be consistent and maintained.

Equally, you need to be able to observe the work patterns of your employees and what L&D programmes you have deployed and when they are used.

When you have those three elements, all able to tracked consistently, you can see the improvement in performance following deployment of L&D - and this lets you know what's working and what isn’t, for when you optimise.

Q The primary concern for L&D practitioners would be to measure the impact and effectiveness of learning. What challenges are we facing with learning analytics right now, and how can we employ this further?

My favourite analytics story is that of Moneyball, where data is used to take a terrible baseball team to the top of its League.

The challenge in L&D is the same faced in HR across nearly all analytics. How do we adapt systems and processes to catch up with more modern tech, and get the use of those new processes followed consistently across an organisation?

We need to not only be a master of L&D but add a blend of product manager, digital marketer, and analyst to the role.

Q What do you want delegates to get out of your session during Learning & Development Asia 2019?

Primarily an understanding of how best to use their existing data to learn how to deploy L&D more effectively. If there isn’t an underlying data structure, then I’d like people to know what to consider when setting it up and what the pitfalls and must-do things are!

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Catch Guiam Wainwright’s session at #LearningDevelopmentAsia this 17-18 September 2019 as he delves further into unlocking valuable data insights to quantify learning effectiveness.

Visit the event website to check out the stellar speaker list and reserve your seat! Or you can simply email our friendly colleagues at:renamelt@humanresourcesonline.net and ryanc@humanresourcesonline.net to find out more.