Learning Café — Our Take on Internal Learning

At enpact, we are very proud of the diverse, creative and friendly work environment we have established. Our colleagues, partners and businesses enjoy collaborating with us. We value our ability to focus on solutions that are story-driven, high-quality, genuinely collaborative and empower entrepreneurship. Our mission is to create engaging experiences that awaken people’s curiosity and spark a desire to know what will happen next.

Over 2021, our Learning Café had:

• 120+ Participants
• 10 Sessions or “episodes”
• 50% Internal and external keynote speakers
• 60% Total satisfaction rate

Learning is fun and easy

A focus on learning and development has been extremely prominent throughout enpact’s eight years. As our teams and our projects grew, we decided to roll out creative methods to engage our diverse team members.

“Tell me, and I forget; Teach me, and I may remember; Involve me, and I learn” – Benjamin Franklin

We formed the “Learning Café” during our annual retreat in early 2021. The Learning Café is a joint effort by dedicated team members who work together to create compelling learning and development sessions.

What’s next for 2022?

In addition to supporting the technical aspects of the Learning Café, such as recording live talks, allowing interactive breakout rooms and recording them so that they’re available later, the team also measures the effectiveness of each session. Upon joining the team, I built on the foundation established earlier by colleagues and friends. Thanks to that exceptional team, the Learning Café has been a success!

Promoting workforce collaboration

We do not spare any effort and are ready to go the extra mile to understand our team’s training needs. Our speakers include founders, mentors, colleagues and subject matter experts from all over the world. We reach out to speakers via networking platforms and personal and professional references. We choose each topic and host based on the relevance to our organization and the needs of our team. Sometimes we also choose a topic just for the opportunity to learn more about a new technology platform that could be beneficial to our work. Sessions generally last 120 minutes depending on the topic and we put a special emphasis on setting aside time for working groups so that attendees can interact. The sessions provide practical examples and exercises that help our teams more concretely understand what they’re learning.

Building diverse relationships

Participating in a Learning Café session is an opportunity to share knowledge in an engaging workshop and allows our diverse team to work together, have fun and learn all at the same time. We initially ran one session per quarter, but increased the number via a mixture of external and internal speakers. Most of the sessions delivered were able to meet the expectations of our participants.

At the end of the year we’ve had 120+ participants, which — in light of our packed schedules — is a success. And, our Learning Café celebrated a milestone: its 10th episode.

In the beginning, we struggled to accommodate groups in different time zones and geographical locations, which resulted in a low attendance rate and reduced participation in live sessions. Experience and feedback helped us address these challenges. We started by allowing flexible time during the day of sessions and worked to reduce the duration of sessions and make them more engaging by bringing in noted keynote speakers who covered in-demand topics.

Boosting employees’ morale

In my role as a human resource professional at enpact, I have found that the Learning Café has allowed me to engage with my remote teammates and better understand their needs, have more open conversations and help them do their best work. As we head into 2022, our plan is to host more sessions that directly target topics identified by our different project teams, because the required skills and training needs requested by our PR team are different from our M&E team which are then different from our content development team and so on.

“You don’t understand anything until you learn it in more than one way.” – Marven Minsky

The Learning Café is our way to learn, acquire and develop new skills in a relaxed and safe setting. Our colleagues get together during their workday, but aren’t discussing work in this exciting event.

To know more about our Learning Café toolbox and our take on making organizational training more collaborative and efficient, download the 3rd edition of our Yearbook!