Unlocking employee engagement and retention - Mindaugas Petrutis (Coho)
Peer learning is the way to bridge the gap between on-the-job learning and formal learning in companies. What makes this learning model tick and how do you scale the benefits with AI?
The Guest
What fascinates me is; how do people build relationships and learn from each other when you bring a group of people together. If this is successful, it falls way beyond the kind of basic learning tools because you start tackling, truly tackling employee engagement and retention with something like this. And that unlocks very different budgets and speed as to which you can move within an organization.
Mindaugas Petrutis is the CEO of Coho, which is enabling companies to curate peer groups at scale. This came as a spin-off from On Deck, the global startup community for founders. For Mindaugas, his journey in community building began nearly a decade ago, creating spaces for meaningful interactions and learning while working at InVision and On Deck. Through his work in assembling nearly 400 peer-groups, he unearthed a key insight: true professional growth stems from a blend of challenge and support found in diverse, thoughtfully curated peer groups.
Now he's scaling this concept and the v1 will be out later this year. The goal is to democratise access to this rich learning model, ensuring professionals across all fields can tap into the power of peer interaction. This approach counters the prevalent issues of loneliness, disengagement, and retention in the modern workplace.
The view of the Garage
Peer learning is an integrated part of the social learning process when joining a company, however it is often done in an ad-hoc manner without formal structure.
For a company like Coho, the question is; how will this become a must-have solution for L&D/HR teams to invest in? Which means to be on the priorities list together with learning platforms, content authoring tools and perhaps even skills-based talent development tools. To get this started, a few things need to concur:
Leadership buy-in and culture shift
To fully appreciate the value of peer learning, there needs to be a top-down mandate to embed a continuous learning culture and less emphasis on formal authority & expertise. Leaders must advocate for the value of peer learning, not just as a supplement, but as a core component of the employee development strategy. How can leadership be encouraged to prioritize peer learning alongside traditional training tools and formats?Defining metrics that matter
Defining and measuring the impact of any learning program is critical. Traditional L&D metrics may not fully capture the benefits of improved teamwork, communication, and job satisfaction that peer learning fosters. New metrics might include employee engagement scores or direct feedback on peer interactions' effectiveness in solving real-world problems. What are KPIs that are impactful and actually measureable for such an initiative?Seamless platforms & tools integrations
Any new learning platform needs to integrate smoothly with existing LMS and talent development tools. Both to get data from existing systems and send it back to provide better learning & talent development opportunities. How can you leverage AI and machine learning to dynamically adjust learning groups based on emerging needs and feedback from existing systems?
Overall, as a first step Coho needs to clearly demonstrate how corporate (group) peer learning directly contributes to business outcomes, such as faster onboarding, higher employee retention and more rapid skill acquisition. With these proof points in-hand, it will be easier to start advocating and selling into L&D/HR and leadership in companies who can benefit from accelerating their social learning.
What do you think is needed for peer learning to be successful in companies? Feel free to comment 🗣️
Coho company profile
Segment: Corporate learning
Business model: B2B
Geo: Global
Year started: 2022
Funding: Pre-seed
Location: (remote) Lisbon, Portugal
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Extracts
Onboarding and keeping data relevant
We pick out certain personality traits. So our onboarding is pretty complex. We ask a bunch of things. How they behave in a group situation? What are their goals? What are their challenges?
And also keeping it just in time. So just because somebody said a year ago in their onboarding form, hey, like this is what I'm dealing with right now. It's not relevant. It's probably not relevant today. So finding ways to continuously have that just in time data. And so taking all of that and then curating it down into a group of people is our edge.
Integrations with LMS / learning platforms
You know that these folks are talking about, in real time, the things that they need, that they care about. And so being able to integrate with learning management systems, you then can start building a true recommendation system for the employee needs.
Instead of saying, here's a bunch of stuff that we think you should be learning, you'll be able to start recommending content and courses or whatever it is through that. So again, integrating with those systems, I think is going to be critical because in those conversations lives a lot of rich data that otherwise you're probably only getting from biannual surveys or that kind of stuff. So I see a massive opportunity here way beyond just the concept of the peer groups. It's what you're able to learn from implementing those and then how you then integrate with your existing systems to give a better, more personalized experience for your employees.
AI facilitator
One of the ways we're using it is by building an AI facilitator for the groups. Certain nudges at certain points are actually more beneficial than having a facilitator or relying on a facilitator. Having a facilitator for every group prevents any kind of scalability, and two, you're then really relying on that facilitator for the group. Some facilitators can be great, some not so great, they might leave the group midway, we've had that happen, and then the group falls apart.
Actually what the group needs are very smart, just in time nudges, summaries of conversations, prep agendas based on previous conversations that they've had. And so you can build that with AI now. We all have note takers in our conversations. It's the same kind of concept. It's then taking that information and constructing a conversation. Kind of reconstructing a facilitator type experience.
The learning dynamic of a group
Through running or creating all of these groups over the past couple of years I just noticed a pattern; how people progress the most professionally and personally over a continuous period of time. And what I mean by that is one perspective is good, but five are even better.
And there's just a different dynamic and a richness of conversation when you have a small, really well put together group of people versus just kind of a one to one exchange. Often I think coaches and mentors maybe don't have the agency to, not necessarily to tell you what you to do. They more ask the questions, right? You often have the answers. So I think peer groups play, have a different, add a different layer and dynamic to this, which is you're able to hear five different perspectives of how somebody has done something like that exact situation that maybe you're faced with or you're dealing with. So they're not necessarily telling you to do it in a certain way, but they're telling you how they did it.
The complexity of creating peer-groups
A lot of companies have thought about implementing the true concept of peer learning, but they either started and failed or got scared of the complexity. Because it is complex, right? Let's say you have tens of thousands of employees. How do you put them in groups of six? Without losing your mind or having to hire a team.
I talked to a former L&D for leadership at a huge company in the US. And they had realized that their leadership team, which was large enough, could benefit from a peer group concept. And they looked into how to try and implement it. And they gave up before even attempting it. Because of the sheer complexity of doing it.
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