What does it mean to take an “influencer approach” to learning?
For Adrienne McKee, an engineering manager at Sysco LABS, it looked like taking inspiration from TikTok to create “Tech Tocks,” quick-hit, ad-hoc videos that deliver important information in the span of about a minute.
“Almost overnight, we found not just great engagement but a reinvigorated, authentic enthusiasm for seeking out learning further,” she said.
With colleagues spread across the globe, McKee said it’s essential to look for new ways to enhance her team’s learning experiences. Having a distributed team makes it hard for team members to stay in sync, which is why her team created Tech Tocks to make it easy for everyone to be informed, regardless of when or where they’re working.
“Really, the task of building a better learning culture is to break down those walls so we can all move forward together,” McKee said.
Having accessible, engaging learning opportunities has helped her team keep up with a constantly changing industry, putting them in a better position to drive progress at the company — and evolve in the process.
Below, McKee shares how her team has enhanced its learning culture, the positive impact this has on the work they produce and her advice for others in the field who are eager to improve their team’s approach to knowledge-sharing.
About Sysco LABS
Sysco LABS is the innovation arm of foodservice provider Sysco. Its teams develop e-commerce solutions that help the company’s customers browse products and place orders, track orders in real time and gain insight into their accounts.
How does your team cultivate a culture of learning, whether that’s through hackathons, lunch and learns, access to online courses or other resources?
In the developer experience at any org, teams dive into projects without time to learn. When things change, people are expected to try to catch up on their own. I’m always looking at our processes and opportunities — lunch and learns, dedicated knowledge training, all the hits —and thinking, “How do we make learning something easier?”
While trying to build more engaging documentation, we realized we wanted to change. We’re bombarded with information all day, and people don’t spend their limited attention on long content. After seeing success in condensing integral info into
Taking inspiration from the world outside of work, we wanted to encourage a kind of influencer approach to learning. So, we pivoted and created “Tech Toks,” quick-hit, ad-hoc videos that deliver a key piece of info in just about a minute. Almost overnight, we found not just great engagement but a reinvigorated, authentic enthusiasm for seeking out learning further.
How does this culture positively impact the work your team produces?
Improving our learning experience is so important to me because we have colleagues all over the world. Meetings across time zones means for some, it’s the first thing of their day, while for others, it’s the end, and plenty are somewhere in between. With all the info coming in across email and other channels, there are so many barriers to our time and attention. Really, the task of building a better learning culture is to break down those walls so we can all move forward together.
And that’s where Tech Toks and those other shorter-form videos and quizzes have really helped. In the past, rolling out a new process meant hosting a meeting and presenting a deck, and by the next day, it often felt like it never happened. This time, I tried something different: I created a Tech Tok on it, included links to the deeper dive documentation — no call, no meeting, just posting it in the right channel — and guess what? We’ve had the best compliance on that process than any previous time. You’ve still got to do the work by making good materials and engaging long-form info, but the speed and energy of these short videos deliver key info while opening the door to a more active, engaged approach to the process.
What advice would you give to other engineers or engineering leaders interested in creating a culture of learning on their own team?
I would say that, at the end of the day, there’s only so much you can control, so you’ve got to make a choice on where to focus to make the biggest impact. With change coming so fast and from so many angles, teams can get thrown into deep water without enough time to learn how to swim. These changes happen and can even be a huge paradigm shift from what happened last week, last month or the last fiscal year. We can’t just expect people to try and catch up midstream on their own.
“We can’t just expect people to try and catch up midstream on their own.”
The challenge we chose was breaking down those barriers — so much information, so much complexity, so many meetings, so many emails, all across so many time zones — to make the connections that inspire momentum. By being honest about how and where people pay attention and making it a bit more fun, we’re able to engage more closely with big, need-to-know, integral info in a way that respects people’s time, energy and effectiveness. Everyone’s organization has its challenges, and there’s so many different ways you can approach them. So far, finding ways to simplify learning has helped us. You’ve just got to be honest, try and see what works. Make it a priority, keep it simple and make it connect.
