Blended Learning Furthers Guild’s Inclusion by 33%

Guild is on a mission to unlock opportunity for America’s workforce through through education,skilling, and career mobility.. Guild knew education was also critical to fostering diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging (DEIB) within its own organization, and came to Paradigm with two specific goals:

• Create a common DEIB foundation for all employees, with a shared vocabulary and understanding around DEIB concepts.
• Establish a shared understanding of how each employee can further DEIB in the organization, and why that was important at Guild.

3,900 hours of learning completed

+33 percentage increase in employee understanding of how to foster inclusion

To meet those goals, Guild launched a blended learning journey using Paradigm Reach. First, they engaged senior leaders, knowing executives could play a large role in driving engagement and emphasizing the importance of DEI learning. All senior leaders participated in a DEI learning pilot group, ensuring that their perspectives and ideas were taken into account. Those executive sponsors then helped launch the larger training initiative to the organization, with the CEO and the CHRO sharing what they learned and why DEIB was important to Guild, and encouraging all employees to prioritize DEIB learning.

From there, Guild rolled out online training to all employees that provided a common DEIB foundation, used live discussions to deepen learning, and provided tools to help apply learning.

Specifically:

• Online training: Guild created learning journeys in Reach around three topics —microaggressions, bias, and allyship. These paths combined online courses and microlearnings that empowered employees to learn at their own pace.
• Live discussions: Next, volunteers from all over the organization led discussions twice a month that drove engagement and deepened learning. Guild’s DEIB team met with those volunteers to prepare them for the conversations, and Reach discussion guides provided structure. According to Guild’s DEIB director Abby Hollern, “Seeing a colleague leading discussions encouraged employees to lean into this training — when they saw a trusted peer prioritizing DEIB, it helped emphasize how important it was. These group discussions not only help employees learn more about DEIB, it gives them a chance to engage and connect.”
• Tools: Guild knew it was critical to give learners concrete tools to apply what they learned to their everyday work, and leveraged Reach’s practical resources like workbooks and checklists. Guild not only included these in the learning journey assigned in Reach, but they also used them when employees had DEIB-related questions and in advance of key processes. For example, when going into a performance cycle, the DEIB incorporated the Inclusive Performance Management strategies resources into prep for people managers and reminded those managers that they could revisit the course.

After almost 4,000 hours of training completed across the company, Guild has seen measurable impact — before working with Paradigm, 63% of Guild employees reported in a pre-survey that they understood how to use strategies to help their workplace be more inclusive. After rolling out Paradigm Reach, that number jumped to 96%, a jump of 33 percentage points.