Filling in HR’s new role on the leadership team requires facts about your workforce, the right topics on the agenda and a best-in-class approach in order to reach maximum impact. But how can you achieve all of this? In this blog post, you will get a fast-track of the latest Learning & Development research and results.
Today’s best performing organisations focus on continuous learning and areas of improvement at the workplace. During the past few years, CSO Insights has found a 30% increase in wins for Sales Departments when monitoring the organisation with learning and improvements opportunities. However, several of our clients prove that other areas of an organisation can improve their performance greatly by applying these same methods.
The Millennials are coming
Dedicated and trained employees add to the productivity and efficiency of a company. That’s an undeniable fact. New research from LinkedIn shows that employees achieve their goals when provided access to ongoing learning and training. We’re not talking about regular classroom training – this is very expensive and fails to anchor learning in practice. It’s about applying digital learning with an easily accessible tool to make sure they actually utilize this new knowledge. Traditional knowledge sharing is old-fashioned, and studies clearly show a low success rate with this method.
Why is that? Estimates by PwC show that by year 2020, Millennials will comprise more than 50% of your employees. Along with the following Generation Z, they constitute a growing proportion of employees as a unit. HR needs to take this very seriously. To keep up, you need to provide the digital solutions this group demands! 25% of Millennials will leave their job within a year, and 44 % within two years. Times are changing and new demands need to be met. Otherwise you will have a huge churn in employees resulting in less productivity and added costs.
Realtime learning and skill development
Recent studies show that employees do not think their skills are used correctly. More than 60% think their skills lack sufficient development, and only around 30 % believe that their company is using their skills to their full potential. Luckily, many of the clients we meet are ready to change this. Unfortunately, many are stuck with a leadership team that doesn’t take this seriously and doesn’t push to act on it. But the main reason is usually that companies are limited by an existing digital solution providing them with an old-fashioned, complex and expensive approach. These solutions fail to match the needs of today’s organisations. Supportingly, new research shows that around half of the HR organisations actively look for more user-friendly digital solutions, and nearly 80 % view their existing solutions as too fragmented!
Employees want to learn in new and different ways. They expect real-time learning that is easily accessible anywhere and whenever needed, fulfilling demands of gamification and social sharing. (Mobile) access, context and continuity are most important. We actually forget more than 50 % of what we learn within one day, and within a week of a training, we forget almost 90 %. Flexibility and access is the most desired employee benefit.
Success is more than profits
Including People Improvement in the learning program is very important, as well. Many employees feel that the company is too focused on profits, and not enough on soft areas such as personal development. Nearly 90% feel that the value of a business should be measured by more than just its profits. The quick win is this: you need to make sure that learning doesn’t just entail getting access to training, but also includes measuring the impact on the individual through soft, behavioural KPI’s and skills. This will give learning a whole new dimension, motivating employees to do more! And importantly, providing the tool demanded by the organisation.
A third dimension of it all is to make it easier for your managers to become great leaders by giving them access to easy feedback tools on skills and soft KPI’s. This gives the highly requested two-way relationship that is needed as well, as 80% of learning takes place on the job through interactions with others. To reach a great work engagement culture and reduce employee churn, managers need to act as leaders providing continuous feedback on areas that matter to the individual employee. This moves people outcomes.
Optimising information search
Research from McKinsey shows that employees spend nearly 2 hours every day searching for information. View learning and training in your organisation as the best way to reduce this. Instead of searching for information in various ways, employees can use the training platform to find relevant information from a credible source, i.e. your company!
Great onboarding matters!
And lastly: nearly 70% of employees are more likely to stay with a company for 3 years if they experienced great onboarding and training. Best-in-class companies are 35% more likely to begin onboarding processes before day one.
So, get started! It’s pretty simple and easy, and you can be up and running in days with the right approach, even if you think you are stuck with the wrong digital platform.
