Practice at scale: a live EasyCoach demo with real customer stories

Most organizations know their teams need to practice. The hard part is making that practice scalable, consistent, and actually useful.

In this session, William Salm from Equity Trust Company and DeJuan Taylor from Station Casinos share how they’re using EasyCoach to bring practice-based learning to their teams at scale. William walks through how he built over 70 roleplay scenarios to take volume off leadership’s plates and give new hires a consistent way to prepare for real client conversations. DeJuan shares how Station Casinos is using EasyCoach across multiple departments, from table games and food and beverage to leadership development, and how he’s gotten his teams to actually show up and engage with the roleplays.

After the customer stories, Khushboo Gulabrai, EasyCoach Product Marketing Lead at Easygenerator, takes you through a full live demo of the product, covering how to build a roleplay, how to share it with learners, and how to track performance and skill development over time.

Whether you’re exploring practice-based learning for the first time or looking to scale what you already have, this session shows you what it looks like in practice.

Speakers webinar transcript

Ashling: We’re here today to talk about, yeah, we’re hiring the right people, why performance is still a problem. I’m joined by the lovely Derek and Laura. So I’ll let them introduce yourselves. Laura, you’re first on my screen. Would you like to go first?

Laura: Yeah. Hi everyone. So thrilled to be here. My name’s Laura Overton. I work in learning. I have done for the whole of my career. I’m the author of the L&D leader. But I think most people know me for the research that I did for over 20 years into high performing learning teams. So super interested in hearing from you today, in the chat as well, so that we can address this issue once and for all.

Ashling: And Derek, I know you’re going to help. Thank you.

Derek: Yes. And I’m Derek Bruce. I am the chief learning officer at Easygenerator as well. But prior to my six months at EG, I spent many, many years doing head of L&D roles, leadership development, and also a HR business partner role for my sins as well, so very much in tune with some of the roles I see in the chat as well.

Ashling: Nice. And then I guess before I hand over the conversation, I can say a few sentences about why we’re here today. I’m really excited to hear what you both have to share from experience. But why we thought this topic was pressing is that most organizations today do have a skills gap. The WEF puts it at 39% of workers need a new core skill by 2030, which doesn’t leave as much time. And the question that most L&D teams are wrestling with right now is whether or not they should be doing something about it. So it’s whether what they’re actually doing is working. Are people building the skill that drives change? Is it going to help when it comes to change how they’re doing their jobs, or are they doing more of a checkbox exercise, just completing tasks that look good in a report, but it’s not really having impact when we look at the day to day. So this is what we want to dig into. I’m going to take more of a backseat today. We are going to have a conversation, so please do make use out of the chat. Not so much the theory of skills based learning, but the reality of it. So Laura, I’ll hand over to yourself.

Laura: Oh, that’s brilliant. Thank you so much. And I think what would be great before we even start is to actually look at your reality. We’ve made an assumption from the data that many organizations are struggling to keep up. You mentioned, Ashling, about the World Economic Forum. But the half life of skill seems to be going down by the hour. The relevance of skill seems to be going down by the hour as well. It seems like this isn’t something we’re measuring in years anymore. This is very fast media. And I’d love to know in the chat, we as learning professionals or as talent professionals, we want to give our organization, individuals, our teams, the best opportunities we can. But at the same time we’re still year on year saying actually performance isn’t there. That skills gap, Ashling, that you were talking about before, isn’t there. So love to know from you what you think might be keeping us stuck. Please use the chat, because your insights are so powerful for us. But Derek, have you been stuck in this, or do you find it just easy, plain sailing?

Derek: Yeah, I mean, I think while obviously there’s an idea that a lot of stuff we do is amazing, I think I’ve struggled as well in terms of a whole transition from program to performance, because I think sometimes the programs are not quick enough, or also programs aren’t actually linked to what a business needs sometimes. And I think we as L&D, we sometimes have this amazing idea, something which is new and shiny, really, really cool, and we put it into place, and then the people who get it, we needed this a year ago. So that’s one of the experiences that I’ve had where sometimes the speed of delivery is actually what slows down, and actually then means performance isn’t where it needs to be.

Laura: Yeah, no, it’s really interesting. I love, Brian, that you came straight in there. We’re buying from senior leaders. It’s amazing, isn’t it, Brian? You know what the senior leaders can say, we can’t get the right skills in the right place, and yet at the same time aren’t dedicating to building their own. So I think that I see that in my data worldwide. And Jesse, you’re talking there about, and Andre, also about communications and support. Are the right people involved, need to be involved? Do they need to know that they need to be involved? And that comms thing, I guess, is also coming through for you, Virginia, there as well. I think Barbara, you’re picking up on the fact that this is a holistic issue that we’re dealing with, isn’t it? It’s a systemic issue. It’s not just picking on skills and our performance, but how we adopt new technologies, how we adjust our products offerings to our clients, how we shift service offerings to client expectations. Shelby, I think that’s really interesting, you talk about low learner engagement. What are you seeing in here, Derek, as well in this chat too?

Derek: I think the learning progression thing, I think, is an interesting one, because there’s a lot of content available from everywhere now. I think sometimes we also need to be aware that as L&D professionals, if somebody wants something when they want it, they can probably find it. And our role may not always be to create awesome content, but to make sure if somebody wants something or needs something, they can find the right content. So I think that’s also a slight evolution of if we look back at what we’re doing 10 or 15 years ago, making stuff, almost facilitating learning, education, and skills now. And I think that engagement piece, people, if they are engaged to fill a gap or pain point they have, they will learn. But we need to make sure that link between the content or what they need to do and the gap is very close.

Laura: Yeah, absolutely. And I think Prates has really picked up on that point as well, about programs being designed as an isolated event rather than closing that gap in with performance as well. And it struck me, I saw some interesting research from PricewaterhouseCoopers with individuals themselves rather than with their bosses and managers, saying that actually they want to be in the right place at the right time. So there is a readiness for individuals to want to have skills, and yet there isn’t always that engagement with the initiatives that we provide them under the guise of giving them skills. I think one of the things that we need to recognize is that there may be some really good people already in our room, already in our organizations, and the performance is still the problem. It probably isn’t about have we hired the right people, which is maybe, to your point, Brian, the bigger priority for business leaders. But it’s actually, have we got the right conditions for them to be performing? And Derek, I think you’re starting to open us up into that, and I can assure you that the data is absolutely behind you in terms of those organizations that are able to close the gap. And I think co-creating value back into the organization is really important. So there’s a bit of a tennis theme here, because I am a Wimbledon girl, and I brought the tennis here for you today. Some of the theory behind what we wanted to share with you today comes from, as I said before, 20 years of my research, and what I’ve been always interested in is this axis, on the right hand side, which is about the value we bring back to the business. Are we bringing back value that’s linked to learning efficiencies, more people through more courses, more for less? Or are we bringing back value that the business leaders that we’re interested in are talking about, performance, culture, the speed of rollout, time to competence, ability to do the job, ability to adapt quickly, those business goals? And what I found over the years is that the majority of us are in that more transactional and performing L&D space, that sense of being producers of brilliant programs. But ultimately those that were delivering high performance in businesses were those that shift from perhaps thinking of themselves as learning professionals, as producers, enforcers, compliance, through to becoming enablers and collaborators. So Derek, to your point, that data absolutely backs up what it is that you’re saying, that those high performing teams are letting go of their identity as producers to say, how do I step into that role to equip the organization to learn for itself? And that ultimately involves a massive pivot point of change, of letting go and shifting how we see ourselves as learning professionals in that space. And yet with all of these models, all of these tools, all of these technologies, still only 10% of us have shifted into this enabler role. So having a model, seeing this, nodding away, does not close the gap. And what I looked at instead was, what are the principles behind high performing learning teams? Not what models do they choose, but what were the principles that they were applying to their thinking and their actions in their organization, that actually all of us could try, rather than just leaving it to the high performance? Because Derek, I know you followed my work for a while, but those high performing teams, they weren’t the ones with the highest budget, they weren’t the ones with the best tech stack, they weren’t the ones with the biggest teams, but they were ones who consistently, constantly reviewing this performance loop. They’re constantly tuning in to what’s actually happening in their business, constantly thinking not only about aligning to business but connecting to the individuals, and grounding themselves in what was actually going on in their organization, their culture, their world of work. When it came down to responding to what they were seeing, they were choosing from a basis of not what have I done in the past or what does my boss want from me, but what does learning science say to apply to the problem that we’ve uncovered? And sometimes, yes, that’s courses. But they don’t stop it there either. The improving, in this TRI performance loop, is all about continuing, not at the end of a program, but continually monitoring what’s important to the organization, sharing what they’re finding with other people, and adapting continually their process. This looks so familiar to all of us because it’s based out of the data of our great practices of the past, but it is not common practice. Knowing something isn’t necessarily common practice. Before I move on, Derek, is there anything that jumps out?

Derek: Yeah, I think there’s a couple of things that jump out. I think one, when I spent some time working in the Netherlands for a Dutch bank, we kind of evolved from a traditional HR operating model to an agile model where all the things we did became products. Performance management was a product. Reward was a product. It wasn’t an individual intervention. And each product team had an L&D person, a tech person, a marketing comms person, and a business person. And it allowed a lot of the stuff you were saying to happen, because you had the right people in the room. And it also moved us away from looking at things as individual interventions, and looking at things as in, if we’re bringing this individual product to market, who are the customers, what do they need, what issue is it resolving, what’s the pain points, how do we make sure it continually evolves and iterates. And I think this loop, even under the concept of performance consultant, which was very common a few years ago, is a brilliant simple way for us to keep answering the question, am I doing this, or am I not doing this?

Laura: I think professionals, absolutely. And Abika was flagging that many of our existing programs are checking the box, that enforcer role, and not impacting the daily work. What this is doing is, how do we shift our perception of what we do from being program producers to helping others be equipped and ready. And it’s these principles that really allow us to potentially do that. I want to share with you a case study that came out of our L&D leader book. I had an opportunity, together with Michelle Ockers, to interview Lisa Christensen from McKinsey. You could say McKinsey have got the biggest budget in the world, they may not be relevant to what I’m doing, but I want to tell you their story, because the world had shifted during COVID for McKinsey consultants. Typically a young person coming up through the ranks would be going out for customer visits, in coffee shops, in airports, continually talking and adapting and learning from each other. It was a natural way of life that COVID just cut off. And what they found out was that this was really turning up in the data, about people being reluctant to give feedback anymore, or to receive feedback, because they were just stuck at their desks and in their Zoom calls. And yet that feedback loop had already been proven within McKinsey as being a vital aspect of their culture. So Lisa and the team started to delve into that data, and what they found out there was that this wasn’t just a skill. You wouldn’t say, okay, let’s do a feedback course, let’s teach people how to give. They said actually the problem was, when they really looked at the tuning in to the individuals, it was a problem of, I was struggling to feel confident enough to receive it without feeling defensive. It was an emotional barrier rather than a knowledge barrier of receiving feedback. And so they applied some really strong behavioral science, and said, this does not need a course delivered from central. What this needs is a process of change. And Receive to Grow was a really simple four week email campaign that was hosted by local leaders. And it completely shifted the culture of feedback within the organization. So it’s a story I want to come back to, because it isn’t about courses, it’s about tuning into what’s actually needed to shift the behavior. Before I move on, Derek, you’re about to share some insights.

Derek: I think I was just nodding, because I think one of the things L&D has got stuck, and I think we’re almost at this tipping point now, is we’re keen to move away from this order taking persona and keen to move towards this performance consulting, almost internal consultant kind of role. And yet the challenge we have is how it’s perceived. So I was chuckling, because obviously looking at Receive to Grow, that isn’t a training course. That’s almost like a way of actually addressing a gap with a very specific need. And that’s it. It’s not a three hour e-learning course, which could be amazing, but no one actually then benefits from. So we need to also be conscious of the roles we play, and how we play them, in L&D as well.

Laura: Yeah, I think it’s really important observation there. And the importance about the TRI principles is it’s a continual loop of continually navigating that world of constant change, of brick walls, people saying, no more, no further, and I’m too busy with my own world of work. It’s not the hard work that you think it might be, it’s also a mindset to adopt. This tuning in principle, it’s about what works in your organization. Not what works in McKinsey, but what works in your organization. But there are some principles that we can learn. The common shared destination. Those high performing teams were around three or four times more likely to say, we’ve agreed what needs to be done from the business as a result of this program. But many of us don’t actually do that. There are ways of tuning into that. And certainly at McKinsey, Lisa, what she did was there was a range of data, but there were also a range of people who all cared about this particular issue. The second area is understanding where the individuals are struggling. But to really start to ask questions about, is this a learning issue, or is this a work environment issue? And as the McKinsey people were starting to dig in, they realized this isn’t actually a, we don’t know how to give or receive feedback. It was an emotional challenge of feeling confident to receive feedback. It’s very easy to sit down with a cup of coffee in an airport lounge and have a chat. But when you’ve got to ring someone up and ask for something that may not be palatable, it’s a very different thing. And this concept from Japan, this go to Gemba, spending time at the workplace, is so vital to understand, is this a learning issue or is this a business issue. And the really interesting thing about McKinsey is they took part in a skill set surge, and realized it wasn’t just learning and development who were interested in this feedback loop. They had people in performance consulting, in people analytics, in talent, and the senior business leaders, all saying, this has become a problem for all of us. It meant the CLO didn’t say, well, if I’m in charge, it must be a training course. It was, how do we all use our internal expertise around this issue to really make sure it happens? So that’s tuning in. Derek, if you’ve got any more examples of where that’s worked for you.

Derek: Yeah, I mean, I think one of the nice examples we had when I was at Signify, which is another Dutch company, was we had a load of first level managers who, when we did engagement surveys, were talking about their experience as being a manager. We realized the trend of their discourse in terms of being engaged, being comfortable, being confident, was lower than other managers. And we realized that we weren’t giving them enough support in that transition from employee on a Friday night to manager on a Monday morning. And rather than making a program, we just got a bunch of them from across the different locations, ran focus groups, and actually asked them what they needed. It was almost, what is it that’s causing the pain point for you in this role? What are the three or four things where, if you’d had this before you started your job, what would have made it much easier? And we then developed not initiatives, but experiences and journeys and reference points and relationships. But the key thing was, rather than creating a course, we actually had this mindset which was, if we do something, so what? What’s the outcome? And we realized if we went ahead the old way, it would have just been another existing bunch of learning which wasn’t helping guys in the first place. So bringing them close to us, getting them involved to co-create experiences, whether it was learning or buddying or mentoring, allowed us to support them in their roles to be better managers. But it came from them and us partnering and co-creating the way forward, rather than us thinking we knew best. Learning is not always the answer, in a context of a formal course or an e-learning or even a book. Sometimes it can just be connecting people, different experiences as well.

Laura: Yeah, absolutely. And Jesse is saying a similar thing in the chat. When you’re asked for something, it’s an opportunity to open up a conversation and say, well, why is it that you want this? So this kind of principle of tuning in can unlock tiny opportunities, and also massive opportunities to make a difference in the organization. Mika, good question there. How do you determine whether it’s a skill gap or a broken way of working? Tuning in helps. Turning up helps. Looking around what else is going on in the organization helps. There are some really clever techniques, work of Bob Mosher, the five moments of need. But just for me, in my observation, being aware that we need to look for it is the best place to start. Derek, have you got any thoughts for me?

Derek: Yeah, I think that’s a really great question. Is it a skill, or is it a cultural issue as well? And I think when you then determine if a person had the skill, and if they applied the skill, nothing would change, then it’s environmental. So if we give loads of leaders the ability to have great feedback conversations, but then the managers above them are not doing it, then there’s a challenge, because the environment doesn’t reinforce them doing it. So why do they do it? And I think that’s when you discover it’s a cultural thing, environmental. A lot of the time we’re asked to fix stuff which were environmental or structural, not learning. There’s never going to be, it’s almost like playing tennis with baseball bats. It highlights that we’re never going to be successful, because the solution we’re going to give is never going to fix a problem. And it goes back down to tuning in, being able to say, actually, this isn’t a learning thing, we cannot fix this. It’s that bravery as well.

Laura: Yeah. And also finding out who else has got that challenge. But once we have tuned in a little bit more and understood, maybe we are able to help fix that performance loop, not to deliver a program, but to address the performance loop itself. The R in the TRI principles is about responding, and constantly what I would say is choose practice over content. Match our response to the performance that’s needed rather than the training that has been requested. For Lisa at McKinsey, they dug into behavioral science, because when they realized it was an emotional resistance, they needed to look at how do we shift and nudge behavior to make it feel safer for an individual. If we use nudges, and send out little short challenges that weren’t too tough, that it lost people, the science tells us if we challenge people too far, we lose them, but just enough, to think, well, I’ll give that a go. So actually choosing the opportunity to create practice over content really makes a difference there. And design what we are doing for doing, not just knowing. They did this four weekly campaign, small spaced repetition of ideas. One of the examples McKinsey used was to say, treat feedback as data, go and get some data, and then map that data. But the other thing, and Joyce, thank you for segueing into this, the culture is a massive issue. And often what I found, particularly with transactional learning and development teams, is that there’s a lot of blame culture. But what the high performing teams did, there are seven or eight times more likely than the transactional teams, was to say, actually we equipped the line managers to help their teams apply this learning. And McKinsey went one step further with their Receive to Grow program. They said, this isn’t coming from us centrally, we are putting this in the hands of you as local leaders, because you’re the ones who said this is a challenge. And that flow, that surge from the business leaders, got an incredible adoption and a real shift in behavior. So Derek, any observations on that one?

Derek: Yeah, the other thing about managers, I think, is not only bring them involved, but when we do bigger interventions, simple things like briefing them so they know what we’re doing, involving them in design, and helping them help us determine how we measure success. If I’m going to be a manager taken away to do some amazing experiences around feedback, communication, delegation, we don’t ask the person reporting to them, what are they seeing different as well, and what they want to see. So I think there’s these opportunities where we need to think about the impact of this person with this performance improvement, and involve those people too.

Laura: Yeah, that’s such a powerful point. It would be great to hear from you in the room, as we move towards the close, where does that opportunity to practice break down for you? Is it about the scale? How do we deliver that kind of personalized experience to people at scale? Joyce, I really appreciate the fact that you’re talking about, forget the training if it’s not relevant, that relevance is so vital. I did some research with 50,000 workers over a period of five years, and across the board, when I asked them why they learn stuff to do their job, relevant, timely relevance, every single time they say, look, this is what motivates me. And if we don’t, it’s not relevant, then we’re not going to practice either. Abigail, what McKinsey did in their campaign is they turned the email not only into a nudge, but also used the email to get people’s feedback. That insight really shifted the dial. We do depend on managers, Virginia, and as coaches as well. But here’s a challenge, Derek, when we ask managers to be coaches, often they feel that they’re trying to be an extension to the learning and development team, rather than being at the heart of their own job. Derek, what’s your view on that?

Derek: Yeah, I think that’s 100% true. I think when you’re talking about lots of people who move into managerial leadership roles, they’ve moved into those roles because they’re awesome at something which wasn’t leadership or managerial, they’re awesome at finance or sales or marketing. So even with the most amazing support and development, some of them just don’t have that nuance. And then given you don’t get consistency if you make managers the only place where you can coach, we get different levels of sophistication, different levels of engagement. And that’s where the opportunity breaks down as well, because I may have a great manager who can do some great coaching, you may have a manager who’s a complete nightmare, and that lack of consistency is also a challenge, which then makes me, as an employee, reluctant to want to practice as well.

Laura: Yeah, there’s an inequity that comes out, a lack of fairness in that process. Oh, Virginia, go for it. If a manager can’t coach, they shouldn’t be a manager. I think that’s a powerful statement there. I think one of the skills gaps that’s opening up, what are the essential things that we’re going to be needing to do in this new world of work? I mean, I think that technology can really make a difference. Maybe there’s other opportunities to be able to do that.

Derek: Yeah, I mean, there definitely is. Again, as Easygenerator, we have an amazing part of what we do called EasyCoach. When I think about my people, the ability to practice, I can see them struggling. And I think there’s many ways the whole concept of being coached and using AI to support you can be used now. And one of the many ways is also supporting scale.

Laura: I think this is a really interesting conversation to pick up. I’ll give you a completely honest, open perspective on this, is I am a terrible coachee. When I’m working with a live coach, I am not very good at all, because I always feel as though I have to perform for them. And then I was introduced to some AI coaching, and it completely changed how I look at that process. A key thing in this kind of principles of continually closing the loop isn’t just about how we are tuning in, how we’re responding in the right way. But at each stage, how close are we getting to that destination? It’s measuring what matters to the performance in the game that is important here. McKinsey had so many different data sets that had nothing to do with learning and development, but everything to do with company performance and the way that people were connecting and engaging, and that data was being used. So it’s not necessarily what’s easy through our learning management systems, but actually what matters to the performance and the success criteria of the teams we’re working with. Some of the tools and the technologies and AI, the way it helps us to analyze insight coming back from Slack chat rooms, from conversations with customers, all of these things allow us to check in regularly. Are we getting closer to the goal we’ve agreed about feedback, about customer service? I’m going to end with the story of McKinsey. They put out this program, but they used the signals, and decided rather to have it as a catalog program. It’s now absorbed into other initiatives, rather than having it as a standalone initiative. They were willing to let go. They were willing to say, actually, this is becoming a way of the rhythm and routine of the way that we do work, the way we give and receive feedback. These principles are tuning in, responding, improving, continually, through the conversations we have, through the way that we look at data. That’s what closes the performance loop. It’s not just another little three thing triangle. This has come out of 20 years of data. And I think one caveat about the role of managers, managers should be coaches, but also they should be therapists, they should be directional, they should be individuals who can allocate tasks. It’s a very difficult role. So I think our role as L&D is also to make sure we equip them as well, and cut them some slack, because the role of managing people in 2026, with all the nuances, is a big role as well.

Ashling: Absolutely, absolutely. Now, we may have missed something in the chat, but if you’ve got questions about creating the conditions to help people perform, we would love to answer them. And if there’s one word from today that you think, I want to take this forward, please share that in the chat. I was having a look at the chat, but you were very quick on your feet, Laura, and I believe you got all the questions.

Laura: I’ve just seen Joyce’s comment on culture. And I think that is one of the big things, having an organizational learning culture, and it depends on people. My very first study, called Linking Learning to Business, one of the things I noticed was that the people who were getting really powerful performance results weren’t just talking about building a learning culture, they were working with the culture they already had, and used it to amplify learning opportunities. As a quick one, from Abigail, which is examples of things to be tracked, there’s a phrase I heard called vanity metrics, which are the things which we as L&D love to track. Bums on the seats, how many courses we did. Happy sheets. And what needs to be tracked is the impact of what we’re doing. Are we tracking the engagement scores of the people who have been on those development programs and their teams? Are we tracking how long they stay in the organization? Are we tracking succession of those leaders to different roles? It’s about tracking the things which impact the organization, rather than tracking the products we’ve produced. Andre’s got a really interesting question about what’s a good way to reach the right people without creating issues in the chain of command. One of the things I’ve noticed, when interviewing people, is curiosity, asking for access to learn more. It may just be permission to attend a meeting, to explore and to listen and to learn, as a stretch opportunity. It may not work if you’ve got a blocker of a manager saying no, but it’s much harder to say, I just want to learn more about this. Have you got any thoughts on that one as well?

Derek: I’ve got the opposite thought, which is probably, my career is based on some of it. It’s almost like arts of forgiveness. So sometimes just do stuff and ask forgiveness later, depending on your culture, company. But I find sometimes the blockers, the curiosity, and understanding the person who’s blocking it, what’s their anxiety about you doing whatever it needs to do, what’s driving them, blocking you. And I think there’s a five why question kind of thing. You go why five times.

Laura: That’s a beautiful way of understanding why somebody’s stopping you. There’s also a question from Jesse about the root cause. The five whys conversation is a really lovely way of people being kind of driven down to really say what the issue is, but without irritating them.

Derek: I think this is London UK style, I would suggest.

Laura: Yes. I just finished recording a podcast with my co-author, Michelle Ockers, about the seat at the table. And often we don’t have that seat at the table that we wanted. But there were others who would say, I’m going to pull up my own chair, I’m going to act above my pay grade. I know somebody I work with who says, I know this is above my pay grade, but I just went and asked. And what she was doing was pulling all the threads together, like Lisa did in the McKinsey search. She would go out and say, it’s above my pay grade, but let me find out how I can maybe work something together. Asking for permission doesn’t always work. Forgiveness sometimes does.

Ashling: I see that brings us up to the hour. I think you got all the questions, I’ve been keeping an eye on the chat, so I’d like to take an opportunity to thank you both so much. Thank you, Laura. Thank you, Derek. That was a really honest conversation, really open.

Transcript produced from VEED subtitles. Speaker attribution assigned based on context and role.