How Udemy Uses Betterworks and Learning to Navigate Change

Arnaud Grunwald:
Hello everyone, and welcome to today’s Goal Summit 2020 session called “Resilience Through Learning – How Udemy Uses Learning to Navigate Change and Execute On Their Strategic Goals.” I’m Arnaud Grunwald. I’m the Chief Strategy Officer and Head of Product for OKRs, Engagement, and Analytics. And it is my privilege today to be moderating this session with Cara Brennan Allamano, VP of People, Places, and Learning at Udemy. Hi Cara, how are you?

Cara Brennan Allamano:
Good to see you.

Arnaud Grunwald:
A couple of housekeeping items. We are aiming to chat for about 30 minutes, and we’ll leave 15 for your questions in the end. We don’t have slides. The goal of this session is to be conversational, to exchange ideas for you to learn best practices when it comes to learning. We want this session to be as insightful for you as possible. So definitely post questions in the chat. If we don’t have the time to address all of them, we’ll make sure we follow up after the event. 

So we’ve put together the session because learning is such a hot topic. People are a company’s number one asset, and with everything that’s changing constantly in the world, you need people to adapt, to learn new skills, to develop, to A, keep them in the company, and B, make them better and grow them as leaders. And 2020 has been so rich in changes, it’s unbelievable, companies have had to adapt their business model, employees changing the way they work and interact. So we really wanted to ask an expert in the learning space to share best practices with you. So who could be more insightful on these topics than the CHRO of a fast-growing learning company? 

It’s my true pleasure to introduce Cara. Cara is the SVP of people, places, and learning at Udemy. She leads a global team of more than 70 people supporting about a thousand employees, and Udemy is growing fast with offices in San Francisco, Mountain View, Denver, Dublin, Ankara, Singapore, São Paulo, New Delhi, a lot of them working remotely these days of course. She was formerly at Adobe, Pinterest, Planet, really shaping the learning and HR teams for these companies. And she’s the founder of People Tech Partners and Startup HR, which are amazing HR tech networking groups and startup advisor groups that actually I was privileged to be part of. So Cara and I go not way back, but a few years back.

Cara Brennan Allamano:
Way back for Silicon Valley years.

Arnaud Grunwald:
So that’s my intro. And then I have a few questions, but really we want to get insights from you Cara. So let’s start with the very beginning. This session is titled “Resilience Through Learning.” Can you tell us a little bit about how you think about learning and the learning culture and how it cultivates resilience and enables employees to navigate change?

Cara Brennan Allamano:
Yeah, this is one of my favorite topics and it’s something we’ve been really thoughtful about at Udemy. And I think it helps to understand just how we think about the employee experience, how we think about talent management, how we think about managing through change. And that’s all through the lens of learning. And we start with the foundational belief that with a growth mindset, anybody can up-skill, anybody can re-skill, as long as there is that belief and that motivation. And one of our core values is always learning. So we work in the employee experience side to really thread that from the first phone call to after the exit where we’re going to be building an alumni program. And right now, all of our former employees continue to get access to our Udemy platform for free, because we want to hire, we want to support, we want to retain lifelong learners.

So that becomes a primary factor in terms of the competencies we’re looking for when we’re bringing people into the organization. And we found that when you do that, when you prioritize learning, it brings a lot of really positive things into the organization as a whole that really support a place of resilience. And so just a couple tips for those of us who are out there on the people side of business, I always like getting down to the brass tacks of how we do these things. And from the recruiting perspective, we have screening phone calls as well as interview questions that we relate to someone’s propensity for learning, someone’s growth mindset in terms of believing that up-skilling and re-skilling is expected and is something that is exciting and interesting to them. When we onboard folks, for example, into the people organization, everybody gets a growth mindset book that was written by Carol Dweck who established that concept.

And then throughout the employee experience, we’ve developed what we call an employee impact cycle. And each of those elements of the impact cycle, which includes a twice-a-year feedback conversation, we call it Feedback is Fuel, because again, we see that the more information you can get about how to improve and if you have a foundational belief that people are learners, you get excited about that, that’s something that does fuel your success. We have a career navigator’s discussion twice a year, which is encouraging and enabling that conversation between the manager and the employee. That’s really based on, where do you want to go, how do you want to navigate your career? And then that’s matched with Udemy courses and a plan for up-skilling that will help get you there. And the final really important piece for us is we have annual and quarterly goal setting and OKR setting.

So what we want to do is give people the skills to get where they want to go and then B, have crisp clarity around directionally how they should spend their time. And that’s where the OKR process comes together, where we ask individuals to work with their managers to set OKRs that are aligned up and down the organization. So a lot of our work, again, is based around a foundational belief that learning is the most important thing. And when we do things within the organization where we want to change things or want to move in a different direction, the first question we ask ourselves is, what is the learning that’s going to support this? If we have a fundamental belief that employees are capable of gaining knowledge, of thinking differently, how do we get that new knowledge? How do we get that information to them so that they can help navigate and understand this next stage that we want to move into?

Arnaud Grunwald:
Thanks. Thanks, and yeah, I really appreciate these details when it comes to building a growth mindset culture. I think the world of learning is really evolving. It used to be very much top-down, and now it’s moving to bottoms-up, micro-learning, or people determining their learning path. How do you implement that? How do you make sure that, well, people join and you say, “Learning is in our values. We have a culture of learning.” That’s still top-down, that’s still the company telling employees it’s who we want to be. How do you instill them in their daily lives to be these lifelong learners and to put learning as a central thing in everything they do?

Cara Brennan Allamano:
Well, it’s a commitment, as you said, from literally every Udemate, whether that Udemate is a CEO or a frontline employee. If you start with the belief and you start with an inclination toward learning, and again, that’s what we hire and select for, we have to create experiences internally and rituals that support that mindset and give permission to have space for folks to learn. I think a good example of that, we have a number of different things that we do around how to incent learning, but a good example of that is our DEAL hour. We call it our DEAL hour and deal, D-E-A-L stands for drop everything and learn. And that’s an hour every month that we literally calendar for everyone inside the organization, and we say, “This is time for you to drop everything, to stop your work that you have on your list to do today, and along with everyone else in the organization, to learn together, to communally learn.”

And what this means is you can learn independently, you can go read a book if that’s what you want to do during that time. Or what we also spend a lot of time helping people think about and incenting folks, is to use our platform, the Udemy platform. So during this time, we give prizes, we have Slack channels about what are the courses you’re taking today, what’s your favorite new course on the Udemy platform? And the really cool thing that I love about it is, again, we’re encouraging people to learn and we’re trying not to be prescriptive, like you said, not the top-down. We’re trying to say, “Go learn what you want to learn.” And so I have someone on my team that’s learning guitar. So she’s like, “I take that time to go take the guitar classes on Udemy and go do guitar.”

We have a conscious listening class. It’s one of my favorite courses on Udemy. So that’s my go-to during this period of time. We have some folks in different areas like on the marketing team or on the sales team, learning how to code. And then we try to create feedback loops and create additional excitement and engagement around the concept of learning, because if you do that, learning is a muscle, it’s a habit. So if you can do that organizationally and give people space and time and emphasize it when it’s tough, when you have a year like we did this year with COVID, people have that muscle exercise and they say, “Okay, I’m ready to learn through this,” is a phrase I’ve used. How do we solve for this through learning and how do we engage our employees in that self-engagement so that they can help lift themselves up and be able to raise their hand and say, “Okay, here’s working. Here’s what’s not.” But it’s all through the lens of how can I gain knowledge? How can I up-skill? How can I work through this with the support of the organization?

Arnaud Grunwald:
Great, great. And how do you balance, because there still needs to be a little bit of top-down I guess, you need to determine what kind of skills and capabilities you need as a company to grow in the direction where you want to grow. At the same time, you want employees to grow, to have their personal development plans and then become who they want to become. And in the middle, you have teams and managers. How do you balance these different pieces of the puzzle?

Cara Brennan Allamano:
There are some things that we can do formally, and like I said, we have a formal strategic planning process. We work through OKRs so that everybody knows directly where we’re headed. I think we also do a lot around internal mobility and encouraging people to think about their careers within Udemy, even in different departments and have an openness and understanding that part of supporting a learning organization where you’re constantly asking people to up-skill or re-skill means they may have interest in other areas. So we have a program called “Navigate You” where we post all of the jobs internally and we have a full process for internal interviews, and we really encourage that among our organization so it allows us to really retain amazing people that just want to do different things. 

But the question I have here is really around how do we think about the employee as the most important thing? How do we think about an employee-centric organization where we’re focused on what their needs are and enabling them to have the biggest impact? And then I do think there is a little bit of letting go. There’s a little bit of sitting back and saying, “We’re hiring the right people, we’re giving direction to the right people as best we can, and then we’re asking them to come to the table and engage.” And I’ve found that to be a really powerful approach and we’ve had a good amount of success with a really strong engaged employee workforce. And I would define our capabilities to be resilient by doing this, by putting together the pieces and also then opening ourselves up to letting employees show us what they need beyond that.

Arnaud Grunwald:
It sounds like what you’re describing is an element of trust, where if you set the right goals and you give employees the tool and the choice, they will self-align, they will self-engage by just giving them that choice. That’s very insightful. There’s a question in the chat. I said I would take the questions in the end, but it fits well at this time. Oscar Reyes is saying there’s been a lot of stuff going on with Udemy in 2020. It’s been quite the year for you. Well, let’s talk about 2020 first. Very concretely, maybe can you share a few things? I hope that by now most of the folks in the audience have adapted for 2020, but it’s always helpful to look back at what we did and how successful that was. So can you tell us a little bit about how has Udemy, a learning company, adapted to this crisis? What are the things that you put in place to make sure as a company and as employees, you could adapt to the new reality?

Cara Brennan Allamano:
It’s been quite a year, so I just want to call that out. I have to say that I’m really super proud of my Udemates, and I’m super proud of what we’ve been able to accomplish as a business. This has been a successful year for Udemy. I think what we learn from this is that the world when things get tough, people outside of just Udemy, the rest of the world, sees learning as a way forward. So we’re really proud to be a part of that. Our goal and our mission as a company is to improve lives through learning. And we’ve really been able to do that. We’ve seen doubling the size of our business this year. So again, very exciting, and especially moving into a virtual-first world, we understand that what we do is going to be really important, particularly to organizations, as well as individuals going forward.

That being said, it has not been easy and it hasn’t been easy for us as a company either. But, because again, we’ve hired people who are lifelong learners, we doubled down on that value. We doubled down on that behavior to get through this. And thinking about this year, the other day I was thinking back, wow, it was March 13th, quite literally the day we said, “Okay, we’re going to test out this work-from-home thing and we’ll see you all back in the office next week and we’ll do a postmortem and we’ll see what worked and what didn’t. So we’ll ease into this.” And March 13th was the last day we were in the office, and we announced last week that we won’t be back until at least July of next year.

So it was a very dramatic change and in order to navigate through that, we went back to our roots, we went back to learning. So made the decision on Saturday. The first phone call that I made on Sunday morning was to our learning leader, Shelley Osborne, our VP of Learning. She’s amazing. And I said, “Shelley, we have a huge organizational transformation to help our folks get through to move to a truly virtual-first environment while all these other stressors are going on in people’s lives. So let’s think about that and let’s see what we can do right now to help them exercise that learning muscle.” And I do agree, Shelley is awesome. So the very first thing Shelley did was sit down in front of her computer that night and put together a how to work from home, how to be in a virtual-first remote environment course and put it up on Udemy and got it out to our employees Monday morning. And it was amazing.

And she’ll say to this day, “It wasn’t perfect, it wasn’t slick,” but it was, “Hey, I have information. I have learning that I want to share with you all.” And you can imagine Arnaud, it reinforced a number of things for us. It reinforced that, hey, there is information, there is a way through this, there are best practices that we all can have. The second piece is we’re doing this together. We have leaders that will on Sunday night put together a course because we want everyone to feel that they’re supported through this process. And the third thing is we were able to do things together. This was something that we were all going to be putting our best foot forward with, which I thought was great. And what’s also interesting about that course is it became viral, and lots of organizations grabbed it off the Udemy platform and sent it out to their employees. And we made it a free course for everyone because we wanted to help folks there.

The second piece was that we immediately recognized that what used to be the world where people would go to work and then come home was now a work/home environment. And we leveraged what’s called a work-from-home campus. It was already in existence from Org Hackers and Itamar Goldminz, he’s amazing. And we made it our own here at Udemy. And what that did was map Maslow’s hierarchy, everything from how did you sleep last night, what kind of exercise are you getting, what kind of food are you eating? All the way up through, what are your relationships like, how have those evolved and changed? All the way up through, how can you be your best at work tomorrow, what do you need from us as an organization? And we turned it into a one-pager. It was a couple of questions with boxes for each area of the hierarchy. 

And then within a few weeks, we asked all of our managers to put aside time to talk with their direct reports so that everybody has that one-on-one conversation to go through that self-reflection process and ask themselves, “How can I help myself navigate through this work-from-home situation?” And by the way, out of those conversations came lots of ideas in terms of learning, courses, things we could do as an organization, benefits, we added a financial wellness and a mental health and telehealth component to our benefits. And then we’re now asking people to continue to revisit that, continue to revisit that work-from-home campus. Every month is bringing something new and different for folks at our organization, I’m sure at other organizations. And we’re trying to again, approach this through a learning lens but also look at it holistically.

And we don’t have it, we don’t have this figured out. I don’t know that anybody does. What I can tell you is overall, our organization, we’ve seen continued business impact and we survey our folks, we’re continuing to see a lot of engagement from our employees that self-reported they feel like Udemy is doing what we can to support them through this process. So it’s been a really trying year. I think about the folks on my people team who spend their days and nights doing what they can to help everybody be successful. And then I think my fellow Udemates, I think as you mentioned, it’s about trust. And for us, it’s trust and learning together that’s helped us build resilience.

Arnaud Grunwald:
That’s amazing. And doing that, a lot of us came home and had to learn how to do that. And you guys in addition, had a business that, I don’t know, doubled, tripled, in a matter of a few months. So adding the stress of these great challenges must have been quite a rollercoaster. I’d love to focus on the future now. We’re almost done with 2020. Let’s talk 2021, 2022. And what I love about your profile is that you started Start Up HR, you started People Tech Partners. So you’re very well connected with new technology, innovation, Silicon Valley. And I love to talk with you about the future of work. What do you think are some of the big ideas, again, related to learning, that are coming in the next couple of years?

Cara Brennan Allamano:
I think it’s fair to say, I’ve heard this a few times, I’ll repeat it here. What we expected on the people side of business to happen in five years literally happened in five months. We all knew that we were going to be moving toward more virtual-first work. I was very excited. I have been very excited to see the tools that are coming to the table that are supporting employees in a different way, that are making things easier to be in a virtual environment. It’s a full range of tools, right? Tools, benefits, everything that I would put under the future-of-work umbrella.

But we all thought we had way more time. We thought, “Oh great, we’ll think about employee communication this year.” I mentioned the benefits. We brought on board three benefit providers in two months, and that’s really fast-moving for an organization. That being said, what do I think the future looks like? I think the future looks like us really trying to tie together these tools in a way that makes, again, virtual work a lot easier for employees. I think people on my side, we’re trying to make things seamless from an employee experience perspective. We’ve been in a place where it’s like 10 logins, and maybe 20 logins, and a long list of you should go here to do this and you should go here to do this. I’m seeing a lot more platforms, even platforms like Udemy saying, “How do I connect with Betterworks? How do I connect with Workday? How do I connect with these other tools to make it a one-stop for employees?”

And then again, if an employee’s going to be able to navigate through this change, it’s going to be all about up-skilling and re-skilling. And it’s going to be about clarity, about what is the vision, what are the goals that employees are expected to meet, and then how do they gain the skills that are going to enable them to accomplish those goals. So again, I look back to our impact cycle. That’s what we call this annual cycle where we put together the employee events here at Udemy, and I look at those components that are really critical for us. Feedback about what an employee can work on and what they’re doing really well, so what they should reinforce in terms of their skills. Learning, and learning on an ongoing basis, and hopefully through our platform. But we also have a stipend, which we call uLearn that invites them to learn in any capacity. I love reading, every night I read. I use my uLearn budget to help me read and up-skill in that way too. 

And then we try and get really clear about directionally where we’re headed. And that’s where our OKRs come in. We have annual OKRs, we have quarterly OKRs, and we really want everyone in every seat at Udemy to have an OKR, personal set of OKRs and understand how that ties to the larger organization. Just practically the tools we use for those types of things are, we do use Betterworks, that helps us with our OKR and transparency around that, our OKR and our feedback cycle. We use Udemy as well as a number of other tools. We use Workday for our learning management system. So we’re tying those things together and I think that’s what the future of work looks like. And we’re going to continue to look for really innovative tools that will help continue to drive an optimized employee experience going forward.

Arnaud Grunwald:
Thank you. Yeah. Well, as the head of strategy here, I recently thought about who we really are at Betterworks. And the phrase that always came back is, “We want to be the great connector.”

Cara Brennan Allamano:
Ah, I love that Arnaud. Yeah.

Arnaud Grunwald:
We see strategy work, strategic goals being defined, sometimes staying stale on the shelf somewhere on a PowerPoint deck. We see people who want to do great work but sometimes are not really aligned with the strategy. And we see the projects that are being done, the work being delivered. And so strategy work and people are of course tenets of a company’s success, but they are disconnected.

And at Betterworks, we try through OKRs, through conversations, feedback, performance, empowerment, and also our engagement tool to connect these things. So, I do have a little surprise for you. I know that you’re aware that I’ve been working with your teams, and I promise to my audience here, Cara has not seen this. Cara knows that we’ve been working on something, but she has not seen it, so these are early screenshots of the integration between Betterworks and Udemy for Business.

Arnaud Grunwald:
We have a lot of customers who use Udemy and we want to put learning in the context of objectives and our OKRs. So how do we link that in a seamless way? How do we make sure? I’ve worked for very large organizations where learning was more like a duty that I had to carry out, but how do we make sure that people can define their learning courses in the context of their goals and in a way that makes a lot of sense for the organization and for managers as well? So here are a few screenshots from a development environment. Very soon as you define an objective, for instance, become the go-to person at Acme for Google Cloud data engineering, you’ll have a little Udemy for Business logo on which you can click.

Cara Brennan Allamano:
I love that, employer branding. Really important.

Arnaud Grunwald:
Then you’ll access the Udemy catalog, that would’ve been connected with by your admins. And of course, there’s a search bar. I can learn a new programming language, I can learn marketing skills, and I can select and connect one or more courses to my key results.

Cara Brennan Allamano:
Oh my gosh.

Arnaud Grunwald:
That is embedded in Betterworks. And when I save, this is my saved objective, you can see that your courses are showing as hyperlinks, ready for people to consume them. And also in almost real-time, we’ll update as people take their courses and we’ll know when people are 30% of the way, 60% of the way, 100% of the way automatically.

So you can track in Betterworks the way people actually complete their courses, not only the way they commit to courses, but if they’re taking these courses. And so the DEAL hours are probably going to fuel progress.

Cara Brennan Allamano:
My HR nerd brain is working here already, Arnaud.

Arnaud Grunwald:
So I hope it is as good as you were hoping it would be.

Cara Brennan Allamano:
Aw, thank you.

Arnaud Grunwald:
And I hope everyone is excited also in the audience. And I want to thank some of your team members. I’ve seen some of their names in the chat. They’ve been amazing to work with.

Cara Brennan Allamano:
That’s awesome. This was super cool. And you know what Arnaud? The point I wanted to also make here is we didn’t get to where we are today overnight. This has been something that we’ve been building toward at Udemy for the past couple years. And what’s really cool is I realized this year with the strong shift to virtual-first work, that tools now became even more important. And our employees are really asking for it and engaging with these virtual tools a lot more too. So I think it’s a huge opportunity, something that used to take us a lot more time because there were a lot more distractions honestly, in the workday, is now a lot easier with the right technology. So that’s super encouraging and I didn’t know that we were this far along with this stuff. So pretty cool. Thank you.

Arnaud Grunwald:
So I hope you’ll be able to use it soon. But I know some of our customers and prospects who are also super excited to just merge together processes that shouldn’t be separate really. Learning and making progress on my objectives should be in the same process. And I’m wondering if there are questions in the chat. I see a lot of excitement. I asked the question about 2020.

Cara Brennan Allamano:
Maybe there are some other HR people on here who feel the joy that I feel for this kind of stuff. I see the excitement too.

Arnaud Grunwald:
So I would really encourage people to ask questions to Cara at this time. So thank you for being a customer. I would love to understand your philosophy around OKRs. Why do you think Udemy adopted the OKR methodology and what are the benefits that you see versus other methodologies that you’ve used in the past?

Cara Brennan Allamano:
I think there are a couple of things that are nice about OKRs that are different than just a more traditional goal-setting process. I think OKRs, because you’re looking at things from a couple different levels, you’re looking at the objective level as well as the key results level. It allows you to have both that 50,000 foot perspective, and the, “What do I need to do this month?” And that’s really important, particularly in our environments where things are changing a lot, because you can look at a KR and say, “I have a key result. I’m driving toward this key result, I’m driving toward this key result.” And then something like COVID happens, right? And your world changes. And the idea is that that KR can evolve and shift a bit, but you still have your eye on that prize with just your objective, and that objective that’s really tied intimately with the other parts of your organization.

So an example for us within our people team is about creating a world-class employee experience. And for someone on the benefits side, that KR going in at the beginning of this year was great. I’m going to have my open enrollment period and I’m going to do an employee survey over time and I’m going to start looking at these areas that might be of interest to my employee base. But wow, COVID hit. My ultimate goal is to have a world-class employee experience, but that can look different within the context of a COVID environment. And it shifted that KR to say, “Wow, now we have an organization working from home, so let’s evolve that KR to something that is really going to be relevant and timely for these folks.” And that’s when we shifted to saying, “Okay, we need additional mental health support. We need financial wellness support, and we need additional telehealth support.”

Now, it allowed us, again, to prioritize that employee experience. And that objective was still very clear to the entire team and everybody stayed on track for that. But it did allow us to be agile when it came to how we manifest that and how we execute that within an organization. And I’ll tell you, for me as an employee, it’s really empowering to know that I have the latitude to own my KR, and I have a latitude to help determine how I achieve that objective, and that I can collaborate with other people on my team to help me achieve that objective.

So I think beyond just the clarity and the focus that the OKR process allows for, that there’s definitely a strong component of empowerment and accountability and engagement that comes from it as well in lieu of a more traditional goal-setting process where you might just have somebody saying, “Do this, do that.” It might not be as collaborative, it might not be as engaging, and it might not be as agile. You might not be able to pivot as quickly if you have very stayed goals that don’t account for some changes in your environment.

Arnaud Grunwald:
There’s actually a question from Leah. Thank you, Leah, for your question. What advice do you give in creating personal employee OKRs so you can build an organization of excellence? Do you have best practices in terms of people coming up with their OKRs?

Cara Brennan Allamano:
This is an easy answer for me. It’s make sure people have the learning they need to do it well. Shelley Osborne, our VP of Learning, again, built amazing courses on our platform so everybody has access whenever they need it. If they’re putting together an OKR at 1:00 AM, which hopefully they’re not up at 1:00 AM doing their OKRs, but people can do what they want in this virtual environment, they have the ability to go look at that and access that learning in that moment that they may need to get their job done. 

And I think a lot of times people go into OKR processes, I’ve been guilty of this in the high-growth companies that I’ve worked in, either assuming people understand them, assuming I understand the process, and that I can apply it effectively when in reality there might be a lot of things that we might not be fully aligned on what an OKR should look like in this specific org at this specific time. But when you have learning that everybody can rally around and everybody can access, everybody feels more confident in planning their OKRs and they can know that they have the support they need to do it and do it in a way that aligns with everybody else in their organization.

Arnaud Grunwald:
Thanks. That makes a lot of sense. And Leah’s follow-up was, what’s the best way to convince the executive team of that learning, perhaps tying back to strategy?

Cara Brennan Allamano:
Yeah, yeah. Always tying. First of all, with everything that we do on the people side of business, we have a responsibility to tie it to the business strategy. That’s what’s good for employees, that’s what’s good for business. And I’ve gotten very little pushback in lots of different organizations. I’ve worked with lots of different leaders when we’ve said, “Hey, we want to set people up for success, and here’s what we think we can do to do that.” And I’ve found very few people be like, “Oh no, I don’t want to set people up for success. I don’t want anybody spending time on learning to be better and growing in their role. I don’t want that.” I found a lot of times that it seems pretty logical that you would want to make sure that people have the information they need to do things well.

And I think you have to, again, when you’re putting together programs like this on the people side of business, you have to think about how, what is the means, how am I going to make this accessible? Arnaud, you talked about microlearning. How am I going to make it easy for people to learn? I’ll take this on as an HR person. 25 years ago when everybody was doing a lot of heavy in-person training, heavy in-person learning, and we would come in and say, “Well, we need five days of your team’s time this month to teach them how to do OKRs.” That was a much harder sell. It’s a whole lot easier for me to go to my executive team and be like, “Great, we have this cool new course that Shelley put together. It’s on the platform.”

And our platform obviously that we use is Udemy. “But it’s a couple hours. We’re going to ask your folks over the next month to dive into that and to learn.” And I’ve had almost no pushback on that because it’s a total value add for executives. And yeah, we do ask that as an organization, we have leaders that support people taking time to do these types of things. But when it’s flexible, it’s a totally different ask from a leader than when it’s prescribed, and like you said Arnaud, when it’s really top-down.

Arnaud Grunwald:
Yeah, I think what I hear from your response to Leah’s question is, the first thing you need to do is open up that conversation with the executives. In the executive boardroom it’s, “We need to achieve our objectives.” And if you come in and say, “Sure, but learning is essential. How do we increase the chances that people will be successful through learning?” That’s probably, for a lot of executives, and aha moment. Now, a little bit of self-promotion for us too, but with this integration that I showed between Betterworks and Udemy, we’ll be able, for instance, to send a report to executives as to how many of the courses that are being taken are linked to strategic objectives.

Cara Brennan Allamano:
What? That’s right. That’s so cool.

Arnaud Grunwald:
We have only one minute left, so I want to take the time to thank Cara for her help and her executive leadership and also her insights today. Thank you so much, Cara. Looking forward to collaborating more. And those of you in the audience, thank you so much for staying with us, and please hit the back button to go back to the agenda and to see the amazing sessions that are still to come in this Goal Summit 2020. Thank you very much, everyone.