Having a strategy to develop employee competencies improves overall individual and organizational performance. The first step to competency development is making sure all stakeholders — trainers, learners, leaders, HR, L&D — have a solid understanding of the strategic business objectives and mission of the organization so learning investments line up with your goals.
Competency gaps in employees, particularly those requiring technical development, are best focused on an individual basis to develop specific skills required to perform well in certain roles. Compliance and certification needs to be a consideration for some industries, such as banking, insurance and financial services, or construction, building and maintenance.
In our experience, development best occurs through a combination of learning opportunities. This is composed of what is commonly known to most L&D professionals as the 70:20:10 learning model, where 70 percent of learning is derived on the job, 20 percent from people (mostly the boss) and 10 percent from courses and reading.
Learning opportunities shouldtap into mobile-enabled programs and social technologies to allow for more just-in-time collaboration and on-demand learning. The best programs are flexible, scalable and are aligned with the organization’s goals and growth objectives.
Each month Workforce looks at important stats in the human resources sector. Here are the topics we're keeping an eye on for August 2014. Comment below or email editors@workforce.com. Follow Workforce on Twitter at@workforcenews.
Unfortunately, what you describe is all too common in our workplaces. The supervisor’s lack of response is why employees often quit complaining.
Bullying is a persistent and malicious behavior that intimidates, degrades and robs others of their humanity. It may be subtle and nuanced (eye rolling, isolation, ignoring someone, gossip, etc.) or overt behavior such as yelling, swearing or assault.
If the complaints have been coming to you as an HR professional, you have a responsibility to follow through — particularly if the supervisor does not. One of the primary problems: HR receives a complaint about bullying, but fails to take action.
When HR receives a complaint, specific questions need to be asked about the misconduct:
What are the observable, objective behaviors (rather than euphemisms such as bullying) that constitute misconduct?
How often does it occur?
Who is the target?
Who witnessed it?
It is imperative to determine if the misconduct is directed at someone in a “protected class” due to their age, race, religion, disability and gender, to name a few. Your organization puts itself in peril by failing to investigate allegations of bullying or harassment. Although there are no federal or state anti-bullying laws, employees and their attorneys are getting creative in suing employers for “bullying” using various tort laws. Conducting an investigation and following through on any findings is the first step to minimize your liability.
Train all supervisors and managers on their legal and ethical responsibilities related to bullying, discrimination and harassment. Additionally, they must be trained on how to intervene when they are informed of or observe the behavior. Often managers don’t intervene because they lack the skills. This is a second opportunity for HR — teaching the skills and then coaching the supervisor to use them when required.
Assuming your organization has a code of conduct policy, emphasize to supervisors their responsibility to make sure all employees adhere to it, ensuring the workplace is free from intimidation. If the supervisor fails to adhere to your requirement, despite training and coaching, then it is time to approach the supervisor’s manager with a documented report of the problem. It then becomes a performance management opportunity for the supervisor’s manager.
SOURCE: Susan Strauss, Strauss Consulting, Eden Prairie, Minnesota, May 10, 2014
The National Business Coalition on Health appointed Brian Klepper as CEO. Klepper, a longtime health care analyst and entrepreneur, has been involved in a wide range of health care activities. Most recently, he was chief development officer of WeCare TLC, a Lake Mary, Florida-based work-site clinic and medical management firm. He succeeds Andrew Webber, who resigned from the NBCH last year.
D. Sangeeta
Nielsen Holdings appointed D. Sangeeta to the role of chief diversity officer. Sangeeta will be responsible for ensuring that Nielsen, which provides information about what consumers watch and buy, aids innovation by using diversity as a competitive advantage. She previously served as the executive sponsor of the Asian American Advisory Council at Nielsen.
Nathan Christensen
HRAnswerLink named Nathan Christensen as president and co-CEO. Christensen comes to HRAnswerLink, a Portland, Oregon-based HR technology company, from the law firm Perkins Coie. Christensen has also been recognized by theSuper Lawyers publication as a “Rising Star.”
To be considered for People Moves, email a brief announcement and a high-resolution photo to editors@workforce.com. Include People Moves in the subject line.
Which is the best company for HR? It’s a thorny problem to tackle. But finding an answer starts with asking a relatively simple question: What does “good” look like?
That basic question raises a whole set of additional questions. A dizzying number of factors creates the foundation of a workforce management leader. Of the hundreds of things that HR organizations do for their parent companies, how do you determine which are the right ones to consider when comparing Company A to Company B? Just because a question is difficult doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try to find an answer.
To find out which companies are the best for HR management, Workforce editors, along with researchers from the Human Capital Media Advisory Group, the magazine’s research arm, created a statistical formula to sift through publicly available information to separate the best from the rest. The result of that analysis is the inaugural Workforce 100 list.
For 2014, Automatic Data Processing Inc. came out on top. Consulting companies Deloitte and Accenture duked it out for the second and third spots, followed by fast-food giant McDonald’s Corp. and consumer products-maker Procter & Gamble Co.
While we’ve come up with one answer to the question of which companies are best for HR, we look forward to the conversation with you that results in furthering the discussion.
METHODOLOGY
The Workforce 100 chart indicates the rank order and scores of the 100 companies that performed best in seven core areas: workplace culture; employee benefits; diversity and inclusion; employee development/talent management; HR innovation/management; leadership development; recruiting and talent acquisition. The working assumption is that high performance in these categories would provide a reasonable proxy for overall HR excellence.
To create the Workforce 100, researchers collected available data from a representative list of benchmarking and ranking programs in the identified categories (see component lists) and generated a score based on indexed performance in two areas: breadth of recognition and depth of recognition.
The reason for this method was to create a ranked list that made comprehensive HR performance the primary focus rather than excellence in one core area. Using this method, organizations that are recognized on multiple lists but do not perform perfectly will be ranked higher than organizations that are ranked in one area but perform better.
To generate the score, researchers averaged and weighted overall representation on lists across the seven core areas. For example, ADP, the top-ranked company, was recognized on five separate component lists and therefore had a higher possible score than McDonald’s, the fifth ranked company, which was recognized on four component lists. That measure of broad participation was then indexed to overall performance of the company on the component lists.
The top ranked company was given the highest indexed score on a scale of 10, and the others were then ranked according to their performance against that benchmark.
COMPONENT LISTS:
Best Companies for Healthy Lifestyles (National Business Group on Health)
Best Companies for Leadership (Hay Group)
Best Company Retirement Plans (Wall Street Journal)
Industry: Computer and electronics-maker Cupertino, California
Employees: 50,200 Performance Index: 5.245
93 Jiffy Lube International Inc.
Industry: Automotive services Houston
Employees: 20,500 Performance Index: 5.194
94. American Specialty Health Inc.
Industry: Health care and wellness San Diego
Employees: 900 Performance Index: 5.143
95. Assurant Inc.
Industry: Insurance (various) New York
Employees: 16,600 Performance Index: 5.092
96. BD
Industry: Medical technology Franklin Lakes, New Jersey
Employees: 30,000 Performance Index: 5.041
97. Boehringer Ingelheim Pharmaceuticals Inc.
Industry: Pharmaceuticals Ingelheim am Rhein, Germany
Employees: 47,400 Performance Index: 4.990
98. Campbell Soup Co.
Industry: Consumer products Camden, New Jersey
Employees: 20,000 Performance Index: 4.939
99. Chrysler Group
Industry: Automotive manufacturing Auburn Hills, Michigan
Employees: 73,700 Performance Index: 4.888
100. Compass Group
Industry: Food service Surrey, United Kingdom
Employees: 500,000 Performance Index: 4.837
Sources: Publicly available company information, compiled by Workforce staff.
Notes: Employee numbers are global unless otherwise noted. All numbers are approximate.
Top Five by Region
Workforce 100 companies represented every region in the U.S. as well as eight international locations. New York/New Jersey came out tops followed by Northern California and the Chicago region.
20 New York/New Jersey
10 Northern California
8 Chicago/Northern Illinois
7 Washington, D.C., area
6 Minneapolis area
Largest by number of employees:
Wal-Mart Stores (No. 32)
Top Five by Industry
The Workforce 100 list is a good barometer of broader economic activity. Health care and financial services had the most companies on the list, followed by technology, insurance and consumer goods.
Engaging employees and managers in taking personal accountability for learning and development requires a quality foundation that they see as relevant and valid. Changing the culture is a final outcome, not the opening argument. A quality foundation needs to be established around the purpose/mission/goals of the business unit, the goals of the job, the skill/performance requirements of the job and the current state of the individual relative to the requirements.
Benchmarking the job’s talent requirements using a role’s key accountabilities will go a long way to creating this quality foundation for individuals.
In manufacturing production, there are technical skill requirements across most of the jobs. There are also certain soft skills that enable high performance. Training for technical skill competency and ignoring the soft skill development needs for the job can greatly affect the expected outcome. Ensuring any initiative is seen as relevant and valid for the manager and employee will make the following strategy steps easier to implement.
To increase engagement in creating the foundation for training and development personal accountability, try using these steps:
· Increase urgency for change by developing a change vision first. This requires creating a compare and contrast current and future state image (not data) that makes it personal.
· Share success stories/examples of what current state and a desired future state look like.
· Based on that new sense of urgency from some, look for the early adopters from both managers and employees. Build “pilot teams” based on the individual interest to follow through with pursuit of the change vision – to take personal accountability for training and development.
· Budget appropriately for development – don’t make it difficult for managers to cost-justify training budgets. Expect success stories to drive other, slower adopting managers to start budgeting for the same training for their employees. Low ROI on a training initiative won’t likely be repeated by others.
· Enable the “pilot teams” to determine their own vision – to define what needs to change (that results in a learning and development objective) and the best way to make the vision a reality. This doesn’t replace a learning and development (L&D) function or staff. The pilot team members have their own job to do. They don’t have time to research the training options but they do have insight and opinions that can help an L&D staff member define, focus and compile relevant research. The L&D member can then report back to the pilot team what solutions they identified and empower the pilot team to evaluate and select the right L&D solution.
· Keep in mind the 70percent-20percent-10percent training rule – 70percent of learning will be through experience, 20percent through exposure and 10percent through education. Create a L&D strategy with that formula in mind.
· Communicate to the greater organization what is happening and share any success stories coming out of the initiative – do your homework prior to communicating, especially to understand what people are feeling.
· Empower action by employees and managers. Recognition and reward systems are certainly part of this – they need to inspire, promote optimism and build self-confidence in program participants. You want to reward behaviors/efforts that you want repeated. But a great L&D solution is usually something participants will easily “recommend” to co-workers. Rather than taking the success and rolling it out as a mandate to all, use “classes” or “cohorts” where the members of the new class or cohort are nominated by a manager or past participant. By creating a sense of “by invitation only” you create a natural interest by others and will create demand for the training. Be sure to watch for bosses who seriously disempower their subordinates.
· Look for early wins from the training. Make those wins as visible as possible to as many people as possible – wins that are meaningful, unambiguous and speak to powerful players whose ongoing support you need.
· If the training solution is applicable to a broad cross-section of the operation, don’t let up with a pilot. Once the pilot has been deemed a success, look for ways to improve it using participant feedback and immediately organize and implement the next offering of training. Limit the number of participants. If you need to be more aggressive, start offering the training program more frequently but only one class registration at a time to maintain a sense of demand for the program. Include training and development personal accountability as part of the performance review process.
· Use training personal accountability success stories from employees to showcase in new hire orientation and use the promotions process to place people who are taking personal accountability for their own learning and development into influential and visible positions.
According to John Kotter at the Harvard Business School, “a culture truly changes only when a new way of operating has been shown to succeed over some minimum period of time.” Trying to shift the norms and values before you have created the new way of operating does not work. The vision can talk of a new culture for training and development personal accountability. You can create new behaviors that reflect personal accountability for training and development. But those new behaviors will not become norms and take hold until the very end of the process as I’ve outlined above.
As the talent wars heat up as the economy gets better, it will get harder and harder to find good people. The global job market is steadily improving, which means talented workers, especially those with coveted information technology skills, can be more selective about the jobs they pursue.
And with more companies hiring, they have a lot of options to choose from. One in four executives expects to bring on full-time, permanent employees in 2014, and 42 percent expect to hire temporary or contract workers, according to a recent CareerBuilder survey. And these hiring organizations are likely to discover that finding eager, well-qualified candidates isn’t as easy as it used to be.
Deloitte’s 2014 Global Human Capital Trends survey shows that 79 percent of global leaders say retention and engagement as well as talent acquisition are among the most urgent issues they face today. And that puts their future at risk.
“In a skills-constrained environment, a company’s ability to find, attract and access highly skilled people is critical to success,” the report said. Yet just 13 percent of respondents consider themselves ready to handle current talent acquisition and access trends.
Are You Ready?
If you happen to fall into that 13 percent, congratulations. You are positioned to gain a competitive advantage over your peers. For the other 87 percent, however, it’s time to take a hard look at your approach to recruiting.
Whether you plan to hire 30 people this year or 3,000, you need a formal recruiting program that harnesses technology, social media and the communication skills of your managers and recruiting team to attract and retain the best people.
Fast Track:
More than 60 percent of executives say they rely on social tools for sourcing and advertising positions.
“More than anything else, recruiters need to build a rapport with the hiring managers,” said Lisa Rowan, an analyst with IDC. “That’s where a lot of recruiting programs fall down.”
That means recruiters and managers need to operate as a team.
When managers don’t provide feedback to recruiters, or they fail to make time to interview candidates and follow up on their decisions, it adds time and frustration to the hiring process. That keeps vacant positions open longer than necessary and sends a negative message to the candidate community.
“You have to think about the candidate experience as well as your own needs,” said Madeline Laurano, research director of talent acquisition solutions for Aberdeen Group. “You don’t want to send a bad impression.”
Plan
Create a brand: Your employment brand sends a message to potential recruits about what it will be like to work for your company, so think about what you want them to know, Laurano said.
Your brand might tell them you offer a fast-paced environment with room for growth, a fun place to work where they will love their job and make friends or a startup environment where they can have a lot of responsibilities right out of the gate.
Fast Track:
Recurly’s Sarah Mascardo said a good rule of thumb is that you have to reach out to 100 people to find four top candidates and one quality hire.
“Your employee brand should be tied to your core values but separate from the corporate brand,” she said. “It needs to be front and center of all your hiring communications, from social media postings and job ads to career-site messaging and videos.”
Define what you need: You can’t hire good people unless you know what you are looking for. Ideally a company will proactively develop profiles for every critical role in the company.
These profiles can be assembled through interviews with managers and employees. A review of the characteristics of high performers can also be used as a benchmark for “what good looks like.”
In-house or outsource: Before you can start hiring, you need to decide who will do your recruiting. Some companies outsource, others build an in-house team and many use a combination of both.
There are pros and cons to each model, Laurano said. The benefit of staying in-house is that those recruiters tend to understand the culture better, they have stronger relationships with hiring managers, and they are focused on finding great people for your company — without worrying about the needs of other clients.
But if hiring isn’t your strong suit, or you don’t have the resources, network or ongoing need to have a full-time recruiting staff, outsourcing is an easy way to secure good candidates with little effort.
Choose your tools: Recruiting technologies, including applicant tracking systems, automated screening, video interviewing and analytics tools add efficiencies to every stage of the process.
Roadblock:
More than 40 percent of business leaders say they are not ready to address talent and HR analytics, according to Deloitte’s research.
Define your process: Creating a consistent hiring experience across the organization ensures managers and recruiters know what is expected of them and recruits have a positive experience. The most important recruiting tool to start with is an applicant tracking system, which acts as a one-stop-shop for the storage and management of recruiting data.
A good recruiting plan requires:
• A process for opening a position. As part of this process, the hiring manager should assess the skills identified for the role, and talk to recruiters about their timeline and goals for hiring.
• A sourcing strategy. Based on the position, and past successes filling similar roles, recruiters should know where to post job openings and look for passive candidates, including social networks, job boards, campuses, association sites and their own career websites.
“Being active in the social media space is instrumental in branding your organization and attracting talent, as the sites all aid in the effort to create awareness around your organization and touch-points with potential talent,” said Terri McClements, U.S. human capital leader at PricewaterhouseCoopers.
• A referral program: Employee referrals are the strongest base for recruiting among internal sources, according to SilkRoad’s 2014 “Top Sources of Hire” report. These referrals yield 57 percent of interviews and 61 percent of hires.
• A process for narrowing the candidate list:This step may include automatedprescreening, background checks or initial interviews to narrow the pool to a short list of candidates.
• An interview process: Get commitment from managers for a set amount of time to do interviews, and let candidates know what the interview process will involve.
• A final decision-making process: Make it clear to everyone involved in decision-making how quickly they will be expected to make a choice.
Do
Participate in workforce planning: An effective recruiting strategy begins with workforce planning to make sure your talent acquisition plan supports the strategic goals of the business, said Jonathan Brown, vice president of global solutions at Futurestep, a Korn Ferry company. “This is a great opportunity for talent managers to get a seat at the table and demonstrate their value to the business.”
Roadblock:
“Remember you are selling this job as an opportunity to the candidates,” said Futurestep’s Jonathan Brown. When organizations act like they are doing recruits a favor by interviewing them, the experience can feel more like a trial, which may scare off good candidates.
Start with a rough idea of how many people you expect to hire for the year, then drill down:
• Identify titles and locations of the positions.
• Set deadlines for when critical roles need to be filled.
• Look at past hiring data and industry research to determine how long it is likely to take to fill each position.
• Create an annual budget, taking into account salaries, and cost of hiring.
Create a timeline: Using your workforce planning data, make a rough plan for the year, keeping in mind that every role requires a slightly different hiring strategy and schedule. Remember this is just a rough plan, and not something that can be succinctly broken into 12 identical chunks, Brown said. “Some months recruiters will have nothing to do and others they will be swamped.”
Get your name out there: Even if you are not actively recruiting, you should still be networking — especially if you are a young company getting ready to grow, said Sarah Mascardo, talent manager for billing company Recurly. “You want people in the community to know who you are, what you do and the potential opportunities you will offer,” she said.
When Mascardo joined Recurly in 2013, she began by hosting tech talks, and attending job fairs and recruiting events.
Start looking: When positions open, talk to the hiring manager about their expectations to create a timeline and profile for the new hire.
Build a short list: Use automated screening tools, background checks, application reviews, and initial interviews to narrow your candidate list, then schedule interviews.
Bring them in: Make sure hiring managers and their teams make themselves available for prompt interviews and decision-making — but don’t overburden them. “They need to be a part of the process to ensure quality hires, but you also have to respect their time,” said Jim Gillece, senior vice president and chief people officer at AlliedBarton Security Services.
Make an offer — promptly: When you force candidates to wait for weeks, it creates a negative experience, Rowan said.
Follow up: After the hiring process is completed, interviews managers and new hires to get a sense of the recruiting experience and what could be improved.
AlliedBarton: 100 Hires Every Day
AlliedBarton Security Services is on a tremendous growth trajectory that has kept its recruiting team working around the clock. “We’ve doubled our staff four times in the last 10 years,” said Jim Gillece, chief people officer.
Last year alone his team hired 30,000 people. And what’s even more impressive is the number of applications his recruiters reviewed — more than 800,000, according to Gillece. Adding to the challenge is that every position has a slightly different profile. “If we are hiring a security guard to sit in a lobby where thousands of people pass by every day, they better be extroverted,” he said. To make sure he’s hiring the right people in the least amount of time, Gillece has a formal recruiting process that begins with a competency profile, and includes psychological assessments and background checks, behavioral interviewing and metrics to track the effectiveness of the program, including time to hire and cost. “We start with the end in mind,” he said, creating a profile of “what good looks like.”
Gillece is also piloting automated video interviewing technology — in which candidates answer pre-set questions about their background and experience on a video, and send it to the company for review — to further increase efficiencies.
Review
Track your metrics: Measuring the results of your efforts does three important things.
• It proves the value you bring to the company.
• It helps you identify problems in your process.
• It gives you data to hone future talent acquisition efforts.
Some common metrics tracked by recruiters include:
• Volume of candidates in the pipeline per hire.
• Time to hire and cost per hire.
• First year turnover.
• Sources used to find candidates.
• Successful hires per offer.
Report back: “Create checkpoints in your talent acquisition cycle to review how you are doing compared with your targets, and report that to senior leadership,” Brown said. Then use that data, including lessons learned about what worked and what didn’t, to shape your acquisition goals for the next 12 months.
Recruiting Roadmap Review
We’ve organized our online Roadmap into three phases to help you implement the planning and execution of your performance management program. Below is a summary of the “Plan,” “Do” and “Review” of recruiting.
PLAN:
• Define an employment brand that embodies your workplace culture and make it part of every recruiting message.
• Define abilities for key roles, using past performance data, high-potential profiles, and interviews with managers and workers.
• Choose an applicant tracking system and other technologies to support your recruiting efforts.
• Establish a clear hiring process, including formal steps for opening a position, sourcing candidates, reviewing applications, interviewing and making offers.
• Define recruiting metrics, such as time-to-hire, that align with strategic goals.
DO:
• Participate in annual workforce planning to affiliate recruiting plans with strategic goals.
• Interview hiring managers about their expectations for new candidates.
• Conduct your search, using social media, job boards, internal referrals and any other sources that promise strong candidates.
• Narrow the application pool, using automated screening and/or first interviews to create a short list of possible hires.
• Get manager commitment for prompt interviews and decision-making.
• Follow up with managers and new hires to get their feedback about the recruiting experience.
REVIEW:
• Regularly analyze recruiting metrics to prove results, identify problems and analyze lessons learned.
• Report results to senior leadership to demonstrate the value of the program.
First, there really is a skill shortage. A recent survey by Accenture found that 46 percent of U.S. executives worry their companies won’t have the skills to compete during next year or two. This skills gap spans the globe, from North and South America to Europe and Asia. Although unemployment is high, people with needed skills are in short supply.
Here is a five-step plan for dealing with it.
1. Complete competency maps for mission-essential jobs. That will tell you which types of knowledge, skills, work attributes and experience people need to competently perform those jobs. Use the competency maps to conduct a competency assessment that identifies skills gaps. Use this information to develop career paths, succession plans and recruiting strategies.
2. Determine who could be moved to new positions and who must remain until the skills gap is minimized. After that, develop skill-acquisition initiatives to prepare talent for lateral or upward moves. These initiatives could include formal job-skill training as well as shadowing, mentorships, informal learning from peers, online forums and so on. You should have a mix of e-learning/mobile learning and instructor-led training to sustain engagement and interest.
3. After addressing internal development needs, look outside the organization for new talent. It’s possible to expand your talent pool by loosening the qualifying criteria. The current trend is to stop looking for the “perfect” candidate and hire based on potential and more generalist skills. You may also want to look for candidates from outside the core industry who have the aptitude to do well in yours.
4. Be selective when interviewing candidates, but look for opportunities to hire rather than reasons for rejecting. To help with selection, use online resources that are inexpensive and accessible. Do actual follow-up on references and request them to provide additional references.
5. Build your talent network. Many organizations are partnering with local colleges and universities, tech schools and trade schools to identify programs that can teach the skills needed to be successful in their business/industry. Talk with your local colleges to see what they offer and share what you need. Be open to internships that bring smart seniors or graduate students to your workplace to help with meaningful projects. Look to organizations that are closely related to yours that might serve as a talent source for you. Maybe they have someone who has topped out and is looking for more of a challenge, one that your company could offer. Rather than raid a competitor, become a partner who provides job opportunities that a smaller company might not have. It’s a good recruiting tool for them and you could pay them a finder’s fee.
SOURCE: Alan Landers, president, First Step Training, San Diego, April 3, 2014
You are entirely on point in realizing that the choices you face with respect to learning and development are more important than they ever have been. And, not to put too fine a point on it, but the health care industry isn’t all that’s changing. So, too, is the deal in the workspace, the expectations of employees and clients, and a delivery window that is shrinking by the day. So, your L&D approach must take into account highly targeted, strategically anchored content offerings, intelligent and efficient delivery modes, and a host of changing expectations. Here are a few thoughts:
Voice of the Customer
The first stop on your journey should be to make sure that the client’s voice is well-represented. Don’t assume that you know what clients are facing and what they need from your organization. Take the time to engage them and ask about both their immediate and anticipated needs. Listen hard, and then make sure that their needs are well-represented in your L&D plans and priorities.
You would do well to look at your workforce as clients, too, albeit the non-paying type. They can tell you a lot about what’s working and what’s not with respect to their preparation, and identify some needs that paying clients haven’t even thought about yet. Avoid at all cost the trap of letting trainers clutter the agenda with their favorite chunks of content. Then, be exceptionally well-prepared to fight for the right L&D priorities and the resource Commitment (capital ‘C’ intentional) to breathe life into them.
One Size Fits One, But …
On one hand you’ve got to achieve critical mass by making sure that certain competencies are well-shared in the organization. But on the other hand, you need to do a fair amount of micro-targeting. People will no longer endure, let alone embrace or pay for, learning content that is poorly designed, delivered in the wrong mode or at the wrong time, or attempts to treat everyone the same.
Find a way to get senior executives, the organization’s rock stars and other centers of influence seriously involved. See to it that everyone has a personal development plan and is expected to accomplish it. For that matter, all staff members should negotiate both the terms and funding for their development plan. In other words, let them own it. Be willing to take a fresh look at various delivery modes, including gamification, coaching, shared services and the use of MOOCs. Don’t be afraid to incorporate a heaping dose of fun.
Career Development Isn’t What It Used to Be
During the last 60 years, average job tenure in the U.S. has shrunk from nearly 20 years to about four years. Indeed, in a gig economy the word “career” has taken on completely new meaning, since a person’s body of work can be literally all over the map, housed in an assortment of short, disparate stays. For L&D purposes, that means you’ve got a much shorter and steeper runway to help people gain the needed proficiency.
Nowhere is that more evident than with your leadership cadre. Not unlike football quarterbacks who go straight from the college ranks to starting NFL jobs — something that used to take five years — emerging leaders are commonly thrust into managerial roles with little to no preparation whatsoever. On Friday, you’re an individual contributor, and on Monday, having had all weekend to get ready, your life changes.
Unlike the college player, most of them have not even had the benefit of coaching, because their bosses are completely overwhelmed by their own jobs. Make a determined effort to provide your emerging leaders with some coaching. If you can do nothing else, make sure that real leadership qualifications are baked into the selection criteria for management positions at all levels. Good luck.
Learning in the workplace needs to be constantly adapting and evolving to continue to build talent in the most effective way for the learner. Performance-based learning, or PBL, is a great way to accomplish this. Although it can be difficult to design and implement, conducting it properly pays a huge return on investment.
PBL is a type of teaching and learning that emphasizes gaining specific skills for a job. The outcome of learning is the focus rather than the functions and information being taught.
Studies have shown that PBL can cut lesson time by up to 50 percent for students while increasing their retention. Employees absorb the necessary skills and require fewer “touch points,” making them more effective on the job and within a shorter time frame — a big win for management.
With an organization of 600 people, taking the time to focus on which employees need improvement with what skill may seem overwhelming and unrealistic. Your PBL curriculum can be manageable if you divide it into these three steps:
Determine your competencies.
Design your training around learning outcomes.
Make it tangible, real and a little sticky.
Determine your competencies: Meet with your team leads and/or managers to determine core competencies. If possible, conduct a companywide survey to gain a pulse on what skills are lacking. The questions and outcomes must focus on which skills need improvement, not just the knowledge that has to be acquired.
To help your training take shape, take the top 15 to 20 needed skills and group employees with like needs. Your curriculum will become specialized and therefore more realistic to manage.
Design training around learning outcomes: Customize your training based off the survey results. Tailoring your training modules (instead of offering a blanket studying course) will encourage participants to learn vs. coasting through the curriculum. You can design your training program by:
Intermixing live training, webinars and e-learning to reinforce the outcomes by capitalizing on different learning styles.
Structuring time and encouraging employees to practice, make mistakes, reflect and try again.
Allowing for peer-to-peer regroup sessions to discuss the lessons and help each other improve.
It will take more upfront work, but learners need to learn by doing. Through PBL, employees can master a skill and there is less downtime spent on retraining those skills.
Make it tangible, real and a little sticky: To have a truly successful PBL curriculum, students need to take responsibility for their own scholarship. Education allows for increased confidence and ability. However, as with all lessons, an air of uncertainty and self-doubt can ensue. Overcome these limitations and make it stick at your organization by:
Re-evaluating the skills learned to ensure PBL is still applicable and effective.
Delivering direct and sincere feedback in a comfortable environment.
Having virtual (weekly newsletter, social media, community board, emails, etc.) and in-person (morning meetings, evaluations, etc.) recognition sessions on PBL skill accomplishments.
