Return-to-office (RTO) mandates may make headlines, but hybrid working remains the prevailing setup among 74% of organisations – according to 2025 CIPD data. What does this mean for L&D professionals?
- You don’t have control over where learning happens.
- You can curate content to your hearts’ content, but you need to find ways to ensure it is valuable and used.
- You need to encourage and inspire daily learning, rather than event-based learning.
How do you go about doing this (without breaking the bank)?
Here are some ideas that L&D can share with line managers to encourage daily learning for hybrid workers.
Encourage curiosity
Create a list of questions that encourage curiosity. For example, during a morning check-in a manager could offer provocative questions such as:
- What did you do yesterday that you won’t do again today?
- What’s making your job easier or harder so far this week?
- What are we assuming to be true that we could test?
Questions such as this can provoke reflection and inspire change.
Set up learning spaces
‘Ask for help’ channels. Create a thread or group on your virtual communication platform called, ‘Ask for help here’. This space can become a useful way to bridge the gap between the office and the alternative workplace. It builds on the traditional heads-up and call out a question across the office that is a regular feature of in-person workplaces.
Silent co-working for periods in the day. This technique involves individuals logging into a virtual meeting or moving to a shared in-person space. The session starts with a declaration of intention along the lines of ‘during the next hour, I will…’ followed by quiet time where everyone gets on with the task at hand. At the end of the designated time, everyone gives a short report on what they have achieved. For those individuals required to complete mandatory online learning, this can be a useful way of ensuring that it is completed.
Idea-sharing groups. Set up sharing sessions where team members can come together for 15-20 minutes to share a challenge and receive solution ideas from colleagues. This could be linked to the weekly experiment so that a feedback loop is included.
Topic presentations. Create ‘pick a topic’ sessions as part of regular team meetings. Teams choose a topic from the curated content available on their LMS or intranet and, during a team meeting, use 10 minutes to share one insight gained about the topic and a comment about how they could use that insight in their daily work.
Experiment with low-risk opportunities
Each week, invite all team members to take part in an experiment called ‘I’m going to try…’. This encourages individuals to work on areas that they want to change or develop.
For example, one person might try blocking out time in their diary for report writing and another might try a new way of running a meeting.
At the end of the week, invite feedback on how the experiment went and whether the person will continue with the new way of working, tweak it or abandon it altogether.
These micro-tests create low-risk opportunities to learn and adapt. This builds confidence and momentum within individuals and their teams.
Use AI thoughtfully
Encourage the use of AI tools as a thinking partner or coach by providing a list of prompts that can help your learners with reflection and deeper understanding. Example prompts include:
- Ask me three questions to help me analyse this report and draw meaningful conclusions.
- Suggest six criteria that I could use to conduct a cost-benefit analysis.
- Ask me a series of questions, one at a time, to help me prepare for a sensitive conversation about sickness absence.
Next steps
These simple, budget-friendly ideas support everyday learning in a hybrid working environment. Each idea encourages individuals and teams to take control of their learning and apply it immediately to make their lives easier. As they see their working day improving, they are more likely to create learning habits.
Get started with creating daily learning habits:
- Choose one of the ideas from this article and pilot it with your own team.
- Create a short guide for managers to equip them to introduce these practices with their own teams.
- Encourage connection between these ideas/experiments and organisational goals.
- Review your current digital content and check that it inspires action rather than consumption.
- Provide guidance on how to use AI as a thinking partner.
