Learning at Work Week 2023

In 2023, the Learning at Work Week takes place from the 15th to the 19th of May. A week fully dedicated to building learning cultures at work, aiming to reinforce the importance and benefits of continuous learning and development in the workplace. In the latest Inside FARFETCH, Senior People Development Manager, Thomas Merrigan, explores how FARFETCH Group is joining this movement brought to life by many organisations in a unique event personalised to our people's needs. Hear it from Thomas!

We all know that time invested in development brings reward. However when you are aiming for the stars, it can be easy to take your eye off yourself. Learning at Work Week (LAWW) 2023 is a great opportunity to spotlight the learning and development opportunities we offer at FARFETCH Group and encourage our people to take a minute to focus on them, with the output being more rocket fuel on their journey.

Committed to the development of our people and our goals as a team of supporting the business, we are joining this movement brought to life by many organisations as a unique week-long annual event to build learning cultures at work, aiming to reinforce the importance and benefits of continuous learning and development in the workplace.

We're now kick-starting an entire week with more than 30 global and local, in-person and virtual events with internal and external speakers covering important topics of today and for the future. We've broken records with over 3,500 enrollments across all our sessions and have seen a truly inspiring collaboration from all the teams around the business. Let's rewind and take you through the process and how we got here! 

Storytelling

We teamed up with our Employer Brand and People Comms team to define what the 2023 Learning at Work Week theme “Create the Future” meant to us. How did this resonate with our current reality at FARFETCH Group and even beyond in the macro environment as we see it evolving?

Topics such as High Performance, Artificial Intelligence and Career Development all sprung to mind, and we began to envision a conversation between a future version of yourself and you today… what would they guide you to focus on? This was the motto of our promotional video and the base of our storytelling.

The Vision

Having a story is one thing, making it an impactful intervention is another. 

We are a global business with some local nuances, a challenge many of my peers can relate to. So what would bring all of these very different people together? We imagined a festival of learning. 

A “mainstage”, the sort you might see Stevie Wonder on at Glastonbury or Kendrick Lamar at Primavera, the big moments for the week holding the top acts – either homegrown talent (internal Subject Matter Experts) or the international acts (external speakers). 

Then we considered other experiences at festivals, more intimate performances on other stages – it felt like how learning used to be, on a small scale, physically together again where possible.

This became a global schedule of events, accessible to everyone at the FARFETCH Group and regional schedules of either in-person or more intimate smaller virtual sessions.

The Schedule

We formed the Global and Regional Schedules defined by the topics that most resonated with our people and the central theme through four pillars: Explore, Learn, Develop and Inspire. These pillars work as guiding principles and helped us structure our agenda in a way our audience would quickly understand the goals of each session.

Here are some highlights of the 30 events we are hosting throughout the week:

Lessons Learned

As I mentioned, so far we have seen the highest enrolment rates ever at FARFETCH Group on events across the week. We are yet to wash up the project, however here are the learns we have had already:

1. Be LOUD: Our Director of Employer Brand and People Comms said at the start “Let’s Get LOUD!” and Andreia meant it! Having a consistent branding and a strong comms plan have been pivotal in our success, wouldn’t have the traction we needed without it. The team took a cute idea of a learning festival and turned it into a story and experience that appealed to everyone and looks credible.
2. Be Relevant: We used the output of the Development Needs Analysis we were running in parallel to select the topics we knew people wanted. There’s no other way really.
3. Be Bold: We were very ambitious from the start, we have actually never done an initiative of this scale and so it took some guts, having the buy-in and confidence to deliver something impactful is key. Influencing leadership and involving them early on was a critical success factor.

In Conclusion

The conversations this initiative has already brought to the forefront of our business shows that Learning at Work Week should be an unmissable opportunity for any L&D team today. We are left asking ourselves why have we not done this before?! 

In our annual HUMU happiness and retention survey, our people tell us how much they value development opportunities and the event has confirmed their commitment to taking them. It’s already being described as a turning point in our learning culture’s maturity.

Whilst it has tested our entire team, with so many stakeholders involved, dependencies on others and continuous problem solving (don’t mention finding replacement speakers) – it has been a real todos juntos (Portuguese for all together!) team effort, more so than any big program or course roll out would ever be. I have observed new working relationships form and networks grow through the project, further rewards to be reaped when it is back to business as usual in June.

I encourage everyone to follow our social media channels where a Learning at Work Week takeover is happening. You’ll be able to find out more about the events happening this week and stay connected to what we’re doing across the FARFETCH Group.

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