Summary

Our healthcare client provides national leadership for all their nationwide organisations, heading up strategies that oversee their own employees’ working conditions, the population’s health, and wide-ranging medical research.

As a result of pandemic-enforced changes to working practices, the institution needed to ensure some clinical staff and all support staff had access to evolved policies and learning around new and appropriate managerial behaviours. They also needed to roll out learning on the working habits and procedures best suited to these newer work structures.

This learning also needed to be deployed in a way that produced good quality data to quantitatively inform any potential changes to their future development and communication strategies.

The challenge

Compared to before the pandemic, more employees now work in a remote or hybrid manner. Therefore, the organisation had an increased need for learning to be available digitally and in the flow of work.

Additionally, with requiring discrete cohorts of learners to access learning around different skills, delivery of learning materials needed to be demarcated into separate sections that clarified what the learning was, whether it was suitable for the learner, and what the intended learning outcomes were.

Furthermore, they had a wide range of intended learning goals. Therefore any new learning materials had to deliver against two separate managerial frameworks and a wellbeing framework, as well as cohering learning on the equity, diversity and inclusion agenda.

With a workforce that is now dispersed and increasingly resource-stretched, they also wanted to allow workers to have agency over their engagement with learning, choosing how deep they wanted their study to go. Additionally, the organisation needed this learning to act as a way to communicate changes in policies and practices that had taken place as a result of the pivot to new structures. With 1.2 million full-time equivalent staff in England, any deployed learning material would have to be accessible by, and cater to, a wide variety of learning needs and styles, too.

The solution

As this healthcare provider is not exactly a workplace technology frontrunner – when looking to find a partner to deliver this learning, the organisation had only recently acquired intranet capability – they thought an e-learning approach would best serve their intentions. However, due to budgetary and time constraints, they needed this learning to be rolled out within a two-month time frame, a much shorter timespan than it traditionally takes to deploy e-learning programs.

Hemsley Fraser had an alternate solution to this learning dilemma: suggesting that a suitable way to quickly and effectively deliver engaging learning around skills, practice, and policies would be to enter into a learning partnership that delivered content to learners using Fluidbooks. 

As Hemsley Fraser’s Fluidbook is a digital-first, personalisable, cross-media approach that combines multiple ways of learning, as well as assets and prompts to internal and external content, in an interactive single format, it was well-placed to simultaneously work as their communication-come-learning tool. 

Our client liked this outside-the-box approach. Firstly, Fluidbooks were able to be deployed quickly and could serve multiple learning outcomes; the result of Hemsley Fraser having a library of core content Fluidbooks they can personalise for clients based on their specifications. Hemsley Fraser can also incorporate client or other third-party vendor content into this format. 

As well as these capabilities, the Fluidbook can facilitate both high-level overview learning and in-depth study, catering to a wide variety of engagement preferences. As it can also link to external documents, they were able to use the Fluidbook to signpost policy changes, too.

The Fluidbook also acts as a centerpiece to organisational learning, with learners able to comment, like, and share Fluidbook assets with colleagues. And, as a result of its design-led approach, the Fluidbook also reduces learning complexity making it user-friendly and engaging.

How this worked out

Hemsley Fraser quickly delivered five Fluidbooks matched to different learning frameworks. Using a partnership approach, these Fluidbooks were adapted to both client specifications and learner needs, with Hemsley Fraser ensuring that the material met our client's branding requirements and it could be iterated as the learning strategy evolved. 

The Fluidbooks also took different approaches where appropriate. For their Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion Fluidbook, Hemsley Fraser used the 15:1 approach, breaking down four main topics into fifteen digestible elements. Workshop material was also included in this Fluidbook, allowing teams to self-host group work at a time that suits them best. For the Corporate Athlete Fluidbook, third-party vendor content was broken down into six different sections to showcase how best to ensure personal wellbeing and development.

The results

Crucially, choosing Hemsley Fraser’s Fluidbook approach allowed the organisation to deliver learning quickly. This is because the Fluidbook relies on an innovative design approach, and pulls together content – whether it is client learning assets, content that Hemsley Fraser has already created, or material from other vendors – into a format that can be deployed at speed, and is narrative-driven, engaging, and cost-effective.

Hemsley Fraser could also ensure that Fluidbook designs matched their branding guidelines and that they would link seamlessly into their intranet and LMS. This ensured that all Fluidbook learning became a coherent part of their employees' overall digital experience. This approach also allowed the learning function to measure which content within the Fluidbook was engaged with, which links were clicked, and where the exit points were, providing data collection capability which has gone on to inform future learning strategy.

Crucially, the Fluidbook can also be iterated and changed to meet evolving needs. As one learning manager said: “We were astounded at the capability.”