Was Slack's Week-Long Learning Shutdown A Bad Idea?

There’s been a lot of talk about Slack’s recent week-long hiatus dedicated to learning in the past few weeks.  "Ranger Week" involves employees temporarily putting aside their regular work duties to study various modules offered through Salesforce's Trailhead online learning platform.  And to achieve Ranger Status, Slack employees need to complete approximately 40 hours of online learning. With all the debate on this approach, HowNow Head of People, Pauline Taylor, joined Gary to talk through the pros, cons and improvements to be made. Read HR Grapevine’s article on this: https://www.hrgrapevine.com/content/article/2023-10-24-slack-announces-radical-week-long-shutdown-due-to-an-internal-skills-crisis Running order: 0:00 Slack’s week-long shutdown 2:28 Taking people out of the workflow 6:09 The importance of context 10:23 Relevance and structure in learning 17:51 Learning with purpose and autonomy 25:14 Feedback for learning initiatives 27:05 The impact on wellbeing 29:36 How to improve this approach How to connect Connect with Pauline on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/paulineparsley/ Connect with Gary on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gary-stringer-copywriter/ Follow HowNow on LinkedIn: https://www.gethownow.com/ Learn more about what we do: https://www.linkedin.com/company/10956378