I’ve been hearing more noise recently about returning to the office. The pressure being put on people to return to the workplace is increasing significantly, although the research tells us return to office mandates impact performance negatively and demotivate employees. I’m hearing lots of organisations selling it as people wanting to get back together for face to face activities.

The natural extension of this is to ask if this means learning, and, if the learning is the work, of course it does. The next assumption made is that people want a return to face to face courses.

Wrong.

Of course there is a space for physical face to face connection for learning. That doesn’t necessarily mean a reversion to the traditional courses we operated before.

People want some face to face, some online, some reflection, some activity, some practice and application in work. Not everyone wants a course. It’s a scaling tool which suits the learning function more than the person wanting to learn.

Think about mandating people to come to a face to face course – it is probably not as welcome as you think.