Our platform has been designed to place knowledge in between learners to engage, integrate and apply for continuous capability building. Thus, Sideways ultimately helps establish and support a culture of learning. For modern learners, our digital behaviours within Sideways are native. To them, moving between digital and analogue worlds is how they live and work. For enterprise leaders, we recognise Sideways can present adoption challenges. It can seem as we’re asking the business to encourage unfamiliar new behaviours. Fear not - core to our Sideways platform is unleashing a culture of modern learning through various behavioural supports including:
“If only Unilever knew what Unilever knows!” A commonly stated sigh within Unilever HQ. There’s knowledge within your business that could step change learning and performance if only every knew. Similar to problem-solving, we help identify gaps that if known and shared would directly impact performance now! We then work with internal fans to find the pockets of knowledge that know (using the left & right networks that exist but are hard for leaders to tap).We bank that new knowledge and use it as a cultural engagement mechanism for people to engage and use Sideways.
We use learning to help create internal fans - fandom for what you’re about, your culture and your continued success. From years of cultural and fandom innovation in our other working lives we know within your organisation is a small % of people who ‘get it’ and are motivated to be part of cultural journey going forward. These are the Sideways ‘starter’s we’re looking for. We can collaborate with you to call out these people and invite them in to co-create Sideways in to the culture. We’ve proven that from starts such as this, a better culture of learning can build and grow. We do this via workshops focused on different enterprise needs:
Every business has a long list of problems that never get resolved or solved- they’re a drag on performance and they leak cultural equity (through frustration or a seemingly ‘lack of care’).Sideways can fix that. In fact, we use the fixing of immediate problems as cultural ignition to show case the power of ‘left & right’ problem solving. This starts with gathering a motivated team and asking the simplest of questions - what problems are there that we could solve right now? We facilitate a problem ‘dump’ if you will - and then immediately follow up with ‘which of these could we solve right now?’… We find the best solutions, bank as new knowledge and alert the right people/teams/locations to come and learn in Sideways. From this kind of simple start, new solutions build and grow as Sideways behaviors become adopted across the culture.
One of Sideways unique features is helping people ‘ask’ for knowledge they need to know. These ‘asks’ going out to either their team, their location or indeed the entire organisation (permissions granted) for someone who knows to respond with an answer. We can design the use of Ask & Answer as a dynamic way to to engage staff with Sideways. Our digital translation of this powerful human interaction - turning left or right to ask our peers - is an exciting way to build new learning performance.
In todays ‘always be learning’ world, it’s still a curiosity how many leaders aren’t yet comfortable with internal broadcasting as a cultural engagement mechanic. We’ve worked with many hesitant C-Suite leaders and helped showcase the ease and power of video (albeit we help shoot and produce to begin with).We then use Sideways to ensure this kind of modern communication reaches every employee - by placing it top of people’s Playlists .We then call out to the team, location or organisation with click through links that take them direct to the leaders must see/have to see content. In this way, Sideways is supporting a new approach to cultural connection and communication.
