Was Slack's Week-Long Learning Shutdown A Bad Idea?

There’s been a lot of talk about Slack’s recent week-long hiatus dedicated to learning in the past few weeks. 

"Ranger Week" involves employees temporarily putting aside their regular work duties to study various modules offered through Salesforce's Trailhead online learning platform. 

And to achieve Ranger Status, Slack employees need to complete approximately 40 hours of online learning.

With all the debate on this approach, HowNow Head of People, Pauline Taylor, joined Gary to talk through the pros, cons and improvements to be made.

Read HR Grapevine’s article on this: https://www.hrgrapevine.com/content/article/2023-10-24-slack-announces-radical-week-long-shutdown-due-to-an-internal-skills-crisis

Running order:

0:00 Slack’s week-long shutdown

2:28 Taking people out of the workflow

6:09 The importance of context

10:23 Relevance and structure in learning

17:51 Learning with purpose and autonomy

25:14 Feedback for learning initiatives

27:05 The impact on wellbeing

29:36 How to improve this approach

How to connect

Connect with Pauline on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/paulineparsley/

Connect with Gary on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gary-stringer-copywriter/

Follow HowNow on LinkedIn: https://www.gethownow.com/ 
Learn more about what we do: https://www.linkedin.com/company/10956378