Encountering barriers to business growth

People Talking seeks to transform the culture of businesses by developing communicative competence and human connection. The experts at People Talking work with individuals, leaders and teams to harness collective intelligence, elevate voices and create spaces for learning and growth.

Face-to-face workshops and one-on-one coaching are very important to the People Talking’s model. However, relying on this medium alone presented barriers to the business’s growth.

“We learned from our clients, and particularly during COVID, that it can be really difficult to bring teams together. There is still tension around bringing people together physically, so we decided to explore the opportunity to create some online content to support our face-to-face work,” explains Andrea Ibbot, Executive Coach & Consultant for People Talking.

Discovering the perfect digital solution

Unfamiliar with the world of online learning, Andrea soon discovered HowToo through a recommendation. 

“I actually came across HowToo on Linkedin,” reflects Andrea. “I was reading somebody’s post and he was talking about this wonderful new company called HowToo doing great things in this space. It was a women-led startup, not a huge, faceless corporation. So I was really delighted to see what HowToo could offer us.”

A call with the team quickly convinced her that HowToo was the perfect match for People Talking. With HowToo, the People Talking team could develop and update their online content as they needed. This keeps the project within an affordable budget, and gives them ongoing control of their courses.

Andrea says, “All our clients have different needs. Other platforms might require a technical specialist to customise our courses, but with HowToo our team can do it quickly and easily, which means we can get it back to our client without too much fuss.”

Furthermore, HowToo was the only platform that prioritised accessibility and inclusivity, two important values for the People Talking team.

“I loved the fact that the resources meet accessibility standards. I had not seen that in other products that I researched. Much of our content relates back to inclusivity and so it is wonderful to be able to practice what we preach.”

Taking their learning approach to the next level

As a business invested in the science of how people learn, People Talking knew that online learning could evolve their previous approach. Thinking about how the digital courses would fit into their programs was an exciting and revealing process.

“A lot of our content lives in our heads, so to put it down into a program helps us to think about what our participants need and what their learning journey might be. So it’s helped us to be a little more creative with how we work with our clients. Often we would just use a flip chart and a marker in a room. Now we've got a model that can be more interactive and people can get a consistent message from any of our consultants. Rather than just relying on somebody's memory, we've got this fantastic artifact that we can use with all of our participants.”

With no prior experience in designing digital learning experiences, the People Talking team felt confident to develop their courses thanks to the support of the HowToo and HowToo Xpert teams.

“Our team is mostly executive coaches and consultants, not specialists in technology,” Andrea explains, “But the staff at HowToo have been amazing. Everybody that we’ve worked with has been really helpful and has really supported us on our journey. I would absolutely recommend HowToo.”

Creating new opportunities to scale and grow the business

For People Talking, the greatest advantage of HowToo has been the creating the capacity to expand their business. Converting a portion of their content to an online format enabled them to streamline their teaching approach, freeing up time and capacity for their team.

“There’s a fair bit of teaching involved in the work that we do because of the models and theories we use,” shares Andrea. “By having some online content for people to look at and interact with before they come to a session with us, we don't need to spend so much time teaching, and we can then spend more time focusing on the conversation and practicing what we're learning.”

Before HowToo, their team was limited by the constraints of face-to-face learning which required small group sizes, each matched with a consultant. This approach was expensive and time consuming. 

With HowToo, People Talking can now expand their offering to new and existing clients, including the development of two new 12-month Leadership Development programs that include significant digital learning components.

“HowToo removes our barriers to scaling our business. With HowToo, we can go deeper in the organization and we can reach far more participants than we have ever been able to do before. So it's a game changer, definitely.”

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