HR Vision Podcast #12 – Learning in the Flow of Work ft. Travis Campbell

Ivo:
Hey everyone, and welcome to the HR Vision podcast. I'm your host Ivo, and every week I'm going to have a conversation that matters about HR. This week I have with me: Travis Campbell.

Welcome Travis! How are you?

Travis:
Hi Ivo, I'm doing great. Thanks for having me.

Ivo:
Awesome, awesome. Good to have you here. So Travis is a Senior Business Manager at LMS365, FourVision's preferred partner for employee development and as a learning platform. So today I'm actually very excited because we're going to talk for the first time in the podcast about Learning Management Systems and how they can improve the whole employee experience. So let's get to it. Travis. Are you ready?

Travis:
I'm ready!

Ivo:
Alright. OK, so let's start from the beginning. Who are you, for people that don't know you? We talked a couple of times before, but just for the listeners, who are you.

Travis:
Sure. So I'm Travis and I am, as you mentioned, a senior business manager at LMS365, which is a Danish Microsoft ISV, and I live in Denmark. I'm American by origin, but Danish by choice. And I've been here now in Denmark for about 14 years. I've been with LMS365 for nearly three years. And it's been a fantastic ride thus far. It's an amazing product category that we're in, HR tech in general and learning tech as a subset of that. It's just a fantastic place to be where you meet amazing people who just really burn for what they're doing, so that's great.

My background, however, is not so much HR tech and learning tech, but more focused on Microsoft. Pretty much the my whole career, I've been working with small Microsoft ISVs, Danish based ISVs, looking to expand internationally and I've always had this very sales oriented export role for export markets. Currently focusing on the UK, Ireland, Middle East and Africa for LMS365. High level background right there.

Ivo:
High level background right there. OK yeah I've seen in your profile that you worked a long time for for accounting companies or sort of that sort of that area. So a lot of numbers. Now what I want to understand is like how that transition happened. If you're happy with dealing a bit more with people than numbers, that's my question for you.

Travis:
Good question. So what you're referring to is actually a company that I started together with some partners. We built a tool specifically for the accounting segment and the background was that one of the partners was indeed an accountant, both starting at Deloitte and then Ernst & Young, and we did that for about five years. Had a successful exit where we we sold that onto an accounting consortium within Denmark. But that was kind of always a side gig to be honest.

Prior at the same time, I was also a sales manager for another Microsoft ISV and also partially for LMS365. Before we had that right.So previously I would say that the customers and the the profiles that I was talking with primarily at the main gig, was actually facility management, which is yet another group. Because we were creating a meeting room management tool, again built into the Microsoft ecosystem and making use of all of those existing tools.

Moving from from that segment to HR and specifically to L&D. Because in some organizations it's going to be the same, the same person, and definitely the smaller organizations they will be, you know, sort of moonlighting as a learning manager, as well as having an HR role. Once we get to the larger organizations, that's a very clear subset of profiles and I have to say it's a fantastic group of people who are really burning for this growth mindset for developing a learning culture internally in organizations. And I would say it's a pleasure and it's a privilege to be able to both have feet in the the Microsoft ecosystem; the partner ecosystem, talk tech with the techies. But at the same time have this real down to Earth, internal client focused role of an LMD manager because they're just, you know, they're constantly wanting to develop their their internal customers. And yeah, and they're just an exciting bunch of people to spend your time with.

Ivo:
Awesome, that's great to hear. If we dive a bit into the topic of this podcast, LMS and learning management systems, what are your general thoughts? Of course you can please talk about LMS365, what it is, what it does, but farther than that; What is the real impact that such such platforms can have for internal customers as you mentioned before?

Travis:
Yah, well I've been brought in at a really exciting time. In the industry here, for the last two and a half years, you know there was there was already a hard push towards digital transformation and the moving to more on-demand type learning styles. Then came COVID and that hyper escalated the scenario. So so for me and my View as a relative newcomer and not having necessarily experienced the entire face-to-face classroom based learning, that was probably at its peak five or ten years ago, but coming in in a very digitally enabled period of time. What I'm seeing is the move to what has previously been called the invisible LMS. Is also being referred to this concept of learning in the flow of work, but basically is just about relevance and providing the relevant training to the relevant person at the relevant time and in the relevant place so that when somebody is in need of knowledge, they're not jumping somewhere else. They're not needing to stop what they're doing, but able to get that in this flow of work and use this as an enabler. More than a top-down guidance of 'You must do these things' in a specific row at a specific time, but still necessary from a compliance and legal perspective.

But it's about simultaneously lifting up these colleagues of ours and ourselves, so when we are in need of knowledge, we're able to proactively go out and get that in the same platforms that we're giving value to our business in. And from my perspective, I think from the entire Microsoft ecosystem, this is very clearly being focused on Teams. That has been a pleasure to be at LMS365, primarily because that's what we do and also to be here, where we can see this trend that was so escalated by the need for everyone to work remotely and this mass adoption of Teams.

Ivo:
Yeah, that's very important. It's something that actually the pandemic really just amplified, because everybody was suddenly remote and you just needed to hav; You don't have training sessions in the company anymore, so you need to go digital for sure, so that's a great one. How does LMS365 do that? Providing that learning experience in the flow in the flow of work. How does it work?

Travis:
So basically what we're doing is we are taking the Microsoft 365 tools, which our clients are subscribing to and we only work with Microsoft 365. So it's a very clear segment where we're speaking with and we're taking these tools that they're already subscribing to, and they're already working with and we are adding in a management tool on top, so that we can pull them all together, and within the trusted Microsoft ecosystem that they're already proactively bought into, deliver this hidden LMS, this learning in the flow of work within the specific tools that they're using.

The two primary tools that we're working with is Microsoft Teams. For those organizations that might not be fully adopted within teams, and by that I mean using Teams and channels and the collaboration tools, beyond just video meetings. There there are organizations that for very good reasons haven't haven't gone that path yet, and there's still perhaps really SharePoint oriented; using SharePoint as an intranet. And those two, Teams and SharePoint, are really where we're then putting this learning in this dashboard so you can see what you're enrolled into, what you need to do, but also this on-demand catalog where you're able to search and find very quickly what it is you're looking for into those tools where these users are already really active. So those are the people we talk to, are those who are very active within Teams and/or very active within SharePoint.

Ivo:
That's that's cool. And what about, it's the only two options, or when you're working with a partner, such As FourVision, for example. You also help to have your platform on top of Dynamics 365 Human Resources, for example? Something like that. You can also do that connection?

Travis:
Yeah, absolutely. And what I see is that if the client is using Dynamics 365, they are most definitely using Microsoft 365. Where this meets HR, because we talked a little bit about the LMD role. The HR role, also wonderful lovely people, but a different priority. You know, they had they have not just learning, but they have all of the other HR responsibilities, and they're obviously very focused on a much broader HR tool. From that perspective, absolutely we are fully integrated within the Microsoft ecosystem and working closely together with FourVision to support your customers, primarily from an administrative perspective. So when we're talking about our footprint inside of Dynamics, that's typically from a admin and reporting perspective, and ensuring that anything that happens within Dynamics HR is then being reflected within the learning platform. And also whatever is happening in the learning platform is reflected within Dynamics HR.

My focus is primarily with the learners and I sympathize greatly with those learners who don't want to go into an HR tool.

Ivo:
I get it!

Travis:
I know that the HR crew, there might be some barriers there because, rightly so, they're very interested in their own tools. But the general public, not so much. So that's where the magic happens within the Microsoft ecosystem is the ability to provide both and have Microsoft 365 that the vast majority of medium and large companies are using for their day-to-day work. And deliver everything there and again provide this invisible administration level so that they're not needing to remind themselves of 'Where do we go? How do I get there?', but that it's just there. It's just there where they where they're used to to working.

Ivo:
But that's why we partnered up. You know, you take care of the learners. We take care of the HR people. So we combine those two together. That's why there's a partnership there. Very cool. Just one more thing about LMS365, which is the course catalog. I know that you guys can have anything right whatever the customer wants to put in their Coursera or from Microsoft Viva or whatever that is. I believe you guys can basically have the content catalog for learning. Suited to the customer itself, right?

Travis:
Exactly. So we are what I would refer to as content agnostic. We are the platform. We are not the content creation tools so to say; we are therefore for tying in organizations existing learning or their existing subscriptions. Be that with LinkedIn Learning, Go1, Skillsoft. Whomever you might be subscribing to these soft skills type training or health and safety type training and pull that in. You mentioned Viva. That's also a fantastic Microsoft platform and part of the same ecosystem that we're living in. Viva learning has been a long time coming. It's not quite there yet, but I'm really looking forward to when when it is there, because what this is going to do, basically, is take this whole learning in the flow of work to a whole new level. And we are integrated within that platform so that anything in our catalog will be serviceable within Viva learning. If you choose to use that as an organization.

But what is important to understand about Viva learning is that, first of all the background of why. Why did Microsoft do this? Why did they make this move? And it was a direct response to what we all experienced when everybody was sent home. You know, away from your colleagues, away from your day to day interaction, where you could ask, 'Hey, where do I find this file? Or how do I interact with this system?' And needing to very quickly, adapt to new ways of work. And no learning department is agile enough to handle that day-to-day switch and come with curated content and technical instruction on how to interact with an application. If it's from one day to the next. So all of this learning was happening in chats, it was Google and it was group chats and Teams channels where this kind of communication was really user user based and drawn in from their own experiences. And that's really what Viva is doing, it's taking that to the next level and allowing for this crowdsourced knowledge, so that if you're a manager of a small team instead of needing to go through the L&D team in order to create a small course or to get one published and assigned to your direct reports, you're able to then do that on your own.

What Viva is not doing, is all of this structured learning, which is also important based on rol.? If we're talking about needing to re-skill specific roles

Ivo:
Skills mapping, those kinds of things?

Travis:
That is not what Viva learning is and Viva learning will still be pulling that structure and that content from an LMS. And where our unique proposition here, in collaboration with with Viva Learning is, is that rather than providing all of the necessary on-demand, fun and useful stuff within Teams and Teams platform within SharePoint, and that's where that's where we were seeing the huge opportunity for those organizations interested in adopting Microsoft Viva, and we're looking at it as this learning experience layer on top of what we're already doing. All of this AI, the AI generated suggestions and whatnot, which which will just simply complement what we're doing, but it's by no means a necessity. I think we're going to see a lot of a lot of mid-sized companies. Between you know, under 5000 users look at the price tag of Viva and maybe think twice about about going forward with it.

That's my own personal take on it. I think that now we're finally seeing what each module is going to be priced at. I think that it's going to very much so position itself as an enterprise solution going forward.

Ivo:
Yeah, and I guess it's a new product as well, so he needs to scale up a bit before you know. Being affordable for those peopl I guess. We'll see how it progresses, but very interesting take there.

You know what a moving apart like for the general part of implementing these learning management systems, what are the most common challenges, if any, that you seen implementing this with customers are are? Is there a set of expectations to be made at the beginning? Do you see any challenges, common challenges to implement these systems?

Travis:
Yeah, that's a great question Ivo. I am a sales person, I would say it from my perspective. The biggest challenge for implementing a learning system is for our customers to be able to navigate the internal purchasing process. So I am in so many conversations with some fantastic, talented people who have a clear vision who have a very defined reason and an ROI of why they need to either implement the first learning platform in the organization, or why they need to replace a clunky and costly existing system. But the complexity of needing to get all of the stakeholders on board and needing to walk through all of these steps. Is just a very difficult scenario, especially for someone who doesn't buy things for their organization on a regular basis. So that that on my end of the project, that is by far the largest challenge of helping walk these people who've already said I want that one, pointed at it. And helping them to involve the people. Within IT, Could be architecture security operations, could be all finance, legal and defining an internal business justification for this project. This is really what I probably spend 60% of my time on when dealing and working together with clients is helping to map this out and understanding how to make how to make something happen because otherwise, without that approach, it never happens. And it's a shame because there's just so much effort going into evaluating a tool, so many meaningful KPIs attached to a project. So much potential for improving the productivity of the organization just for it to die. Because of simply not being able to get the right people in the same room.

Ivo:
On board, yeah. I was expecting you to say that because we face the same issues a lot of times. It's hard to get everyone on board. And do you feel you find it to be more the case in bigger companies. Or smaller companies?

Travis:
Well, it really depends on your definition of of large and small right? Because we and I think you probably have the same experience we have customers all over the map. Those customers that tend to purchase LMS365 who I wouldn't say we're the best fit for them, but for whatever reason that is, you know that is the segment which is where most attractive to that is around 300 to 5000 employees. We do have 50,000 plus employee organizations using our tools, but it's more this mid market segment. And there I would say from a 300 user organization up to a 5000 user organization. It's pretty much the same process and pretty much the same challenges. The benefit is that they probably know that they're familiar with the people we need to interact with at the smaller end. And the larger and we need to track them down, but in. In either case, it's still understanding who needs to be involved and especially now with the direction we're going in terms of security evaluations. And architecture conversations. I'm seeing this happen. At all levels of organizations, regardless of size.

Ivo:
Just just a small question about your process of overcoming these challenges. Do you try right away to get everyone that you think it will be needed in the same room you know, like IT or finance or legal? If you sense that we're gonna need these people, please talk to them, because they will need to be in this room to understand the too, the KPIs and how much better it will improve everyone's life in the company. You try to do that?

Travis:
Definitely, so I break, I break this down to the technical sale and the business sale. And the technical sale is really about guiding a client through the through the tool and getting a functional overview of what's going on and seeing if it's the right fit. And if it's the right fit, and if the client says "This is perfect.". Then at that point, yeah, we need to get everybody in the room. I don't want to do it too early because there are some organizations where we're not the best fit, where there's something else that would be would be more useful for them, and it would just be a waste of everybody's time to start that process. But as soon as we've been through, say, an admin trial where they've they've had access to a sandbox environment, played around, they had gone through all of their their required feature checklists and have, you know, decided that 'yes, we want to continue talking with you'. Then at that point. At that point, I will typically first determine do they have an approved business case. Oftentimes they don't. So then we'll start looking at that; how I can help. I have some templates that I run clients through and as part of that template, there's actually this stakeholder approval matrix and this is part of this business justification so that we can see 'Are we ready?', like fine that it's the right tool, fine that it has everything we want, but are we ready as an organization? And part of that readiness is very much so going through all of these roles and at least verifying: Do we need their approval? There might be some cases where it's simpler than all of that, and that's great. But if we don't find out in advance, my experience is that it will always come back and haunt you and the client at the last minute. And that's just really frustrating, especially for clients who have, you know, seen this as the tool that will solve their time constraints that will help them achieve their goals. And will help them move to the next level of their career to have that stopped after a years worth of work because we didn't talk to IT operations, for instance. That is the worst case, those are the worst days.

Ivo:
Yeah, I know you pain. Let's move on, just a couple of things. First I would like to talk to you about the the the the Microsoft community. You know the partner community. Of course we are partners, FourVision and LMS365. What is your general view on the on the partner community? I know that you sort of talked about that, but what is the power of having so many tools coming together to just get the employee experience way better?

Travis:
Well, there's you know there's the partner community. And then there's the ecosystem and they are deeply entwined, and I think that for us, when we were talking about it, the partner community is fantastic and it's great. But I think what's most important for clients is the ecosystem, by which I mean Microsoft 365, Azure, Dynamics 365. And if IT has made a strategic decision to go with the Microsoft ecosystem. Then it is just crazy to battle against that, first of all, inside of it. Because yeah, because of these processes of having a having to go through it. Approval and security reviews and all that. And then once you are in this ecosystem, that's where the partners and the ISVs and all of these additional tools just make it so much better. Because, while Microsoft is a fantastic organization, and I really enjoy working with all of my Microsoft colleagues, there are always gaps. There are always functional gaps, and what Microsoft has done so well, is encourage the growth of the partner community so that we can proactively come in and solve those problems. And improve on the existing tools that are there without our customers being entirely dependent on the giant beast of Microsoft to make those those functional improvements. So I don't know if that answers your question, but that's absolutely that's my take on on the power of the Microsoft ecosystem.

Ivo:
I think it's a great way to put it, so that was a good one. Let's move on to the future. You know, like. What do you see you know as as as trends as the future of this field? Not only Microsoft, but specifically like learn management management systems. I'm sure that you guys are always looking to improve your platform to make make it do better things and helping your customers. So what do you see in the immediate future or even the long future? I don't know, AI related, whatever that may be.

Travis:
I see a need to upskill an enormous amount of workers out there. We're a bit we've been sheltered in the IT community, I think in this respect, but there are so many workers who are going to be disrupted by, you know, the robots taking over the manufacturing sector and simplifying customer service centers and all of these very Human Resource heavy jobs. So we're seeing some very large organizations having a very clear focus on upskilling and reskilling so that these internal employees have an alternative career path. So in terms of that structured learning, which is a big part of what we're doing, we're seeing more and more of that. Not just training on my existing job, but some sort of an internal exit strategy for those jobs we're seeing in, you know, 5-10 years time, that might not be relevant. And then we might have a shortage of workers in another area. So these these very forward-thinking organizations are very clearly tuned in to that, and it's not really a feature or function type of move. It's just a, you know, a mindset of providing that type of education. What we're going to be doing in the near future is and the ongoing future is just continue to be that built-in invisible tool. We're oftentimes confused for just simply being a new Microsoft feature that's been rolled out. Yeah, and that's fine. That's great. That's that's the whole point of this. Learning in the flow of work, and the goal is to become even more transparent. A piece of the Microsoft ecosystem.

Ivo:
You just want to be native to the platform, right? So to the platforms they're using already, so you are kind of the ninjas of the learning platforms

Travis:
Exactly!

Ivo:
Alright, this this was great Travis. One last thing, it's kind of a challenge. Not really. It's just another question. If you had one thing to say, or advice to give to people looking for more ways to integrate the learning system or for integrate the first learning system in their companies. How is it important to have to upscaling and just grow the skills of your employees? If you had one advice to give them, what would you say?

Travis:
I would look at where are your colleagues and teammates delivering value to the business; in which platforms are they working, all day, every day? And deliver learning in those platforms. If we're lucky, it's Teams or SharePoint and you'll be giving us a call. But if it's not then then find out where it is and figure out how to how to get learning as part of that environment so that you can reach and get the most learner engagement as possible, because that's really what it's all about. Is the old adage of leading a horse to a stream, but not getting him to drink, we just want the stream to be right in front of him all the time so that when he's thirsty, it's right there.

Ivo:
Awesome advice. Alright Travis, thank you so much for for taking the time. This was a great conversation. I hope you enjoyed it too.

Travis:
Yeah, my pleasure. It was fun.

Ivo:
This was fun and I hope to see you soon. So for the listeners out there, take care and will see you next time.

Travis:
Bye!

Ivo:
Bye.