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“The traditional role of a chief learning officer can sometimes feel isolated,” explains Michal Corba, Head of People and Organizational Development at PwC Switzerland. “Today, whether you’re still in that specific role, or whether your position has become more multi-disciplinary, you need to work with teams from across your organization to drive cultural transformation.” Â
PwC’s brand values are based on building trust and creating sustainable outcomes. Very quickly after joining the firm six years ago, both Corba and the firm came to the view that learning was just one part of a broader cultural-transformation challenge – and that this needed to be tackled more holistically. Â
“There were many challenges on the table to successfully make the change happen,” he says. “It was clear that it would not be enough just to run some training from time to time; if the learning space really wanted to impact the organization, we needed to work together more forcefully with different fields.”Â
In that context, Corba’s responsibilities have expanded to touch upon areas such as talent management, inclusion and diversity, organizational development, and well-being. “We’ve created a powerhouse with shared goals,” he reflects. “That’s the only way to work, because so many disciplines are connected to the way people develop. And once you start to care about helping people prepare for roles that don’t exist today or why people are leaving the organization today, you see that it cannot be done only through the learning and development space – you need access to different knowledge and stakeholders.”Â
“If you’re going to have high expectations of your people as an organization, you need to invest in them even before you start to make demands of them.”Â
It’s this principle that underpinned a major change initiative led by Corba’s team at PwC to overhaul the firm’s onboarding processes. “We felt we needed a thread that was consistent from the moment that candidates first entered our recruitment processes through their first days, weeks and months in their new role,” he explains. “The story we told and the promises we made during those first interviews have to be the experience that the candidate lives throughout.”
“We do both virtual and face-to-face welcomes for staff joining the company, but we invite our community groups to join those sessions; we want to make it clear that we will empower you to be successful.”
To deliver on that vision, Corba and his team has worked with colleagues from across PwC – including learning and development, recruitment, HR operations, and IT – to put a range of new supports in place for the company’s new joiners.Â
These begin with a new landing page for people appointed to roles but yet to actually start at the firm. This includes a broad range of information, and advice from previous new joiners on the questions they had when starting at PwC. The welcome page also includes information on PwC’s communities – groups of staff with common interests who come together to share knowledge and support; these range from the firm’s LGBTQIA+ community to its parents group, to its community of women in technology.Â
These communities can play an important role in helping to make new joiners feel inclusive, Corba believes. “We do both virtual and face-to-face welcomes for staff joining the company, but we invite our community groups to join those sessions; we want to make it clear that we will empower you to be successful.”Â
To optimize this experience, Corba’s team has developed a framework for personalizing the interaction with new joiners, including efforts to connect them to communities of interest. PwC is also experimenting with virtual spaces, in which new joiners can meet one another, attend introductory sessions together, and reach out to others in the organization who might prove useful. “Ultimately, we are trying to build a circle of support,” he explains.Â
It’s a goal that reflects PwC’s brand values – building trust and creating sustainable outcomes – and also reflects the realities of recruitment. In a world where talent shortages are increasingly acute, retaining staff is every organization’s best bet of maintaining the skills it needs; that means building a bond between employees as early as possible in a new relationship. “It’s ultimately a serious risk-management challenge,” Corba reflects.Â
During the pandemic, leaders explored new ways of working with their teams, experimenting to see how people could continue to support one another effectively despite the circumstances forced upon them. This has led to a conversation about leadership culture: “What is the specific situation facing a particular employee or team? What are their boundaries? What are their values? What do they see that maybe you don’t see? And how are you going to create the psychological safety for them to open up in front of you without feeling the danger of retaliation?”Â
These are questions that go well beyond the remit of traditional learning and development roles, but Corba urges peers in similar roles to push through such limitations for maximum impact. He argues that it is imperative for organizations to build more constructive dialogs between different groups of employees – particularly across different generations and their contrasting attitudes. “We’re interested in the idea of “reverse mentoring,” where you pair a younger employee with an older member of staff, so that people begin to understand one another better and how to work with different opinions.”Â
It’s a mentality that feeds through into another initiative that Corba is currently running at PwC, focusing on how to build more effective feedback mechanisms. The reality of feedback, he points out, is that what people say is colored by what they know about how it is used. Where people have to work together, for example, they may feel reluctant to be open and honest.Â
As a company, your performance is obviously extremely important to us, but we also need sufficient time and investment to develop our people, so we need to work out how to combine this.
One solution, Corba suggests, is to think about creating feedback processes that are separate from the more traditional sessions focused on performance, which look at people’s delivery, their targets and so on. “We’ve introduced feedback focused on development, separate from performance, based on coaching,” he explains. “Then we attach your whole upskilling and learning and development plans to the questions that raises; it makes for very bespoke development.”Â
It’s another example of how Corba’s learning and development remit has taken him into new areas – in this case, some elements of performance management. “As a company, your performance is obviously extremely important to us, but we also need sufficient time and investment to develop our people, so we need to work out how to combine this,” he says.Â
The early signs are encouraging, Corba adds, with staff welcoming the opportunity to talk about their development needs in a space that feels safe, rather than potentially confrontational. But it’s an ongoing project that feeds into the broader theme of cultural transformation.Â
In the end, learning and development functions have no choice but to confront such imperatives, Corba concludes. Even in the absence of an organizational rethink that brings different functions together more formally, Corba believes greater collaboration and co-creation are now crucial for the learning and development function to deliver impact to its learners and its organization. Â
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