The New Wave in Talent Management: The Integrated Learning Ecosystem

Are your employees fully engaged with the goals of your organization? Are they onboard with a solid understanding of your company’s direction? Do they thoroughly know your brand? We spend so much time and energy strategizing about how to improve our organization’s success as well as investing in tools and training, but are these efforts truly working?

As I took a deeper dive into the questions above, it was quite the eye opener when considering my own corporate training experiences. Sure, there were organizations that did very well with engaging their workforce and increasing the level of commitment, however it was usually a single visionary or two that engaged employees to capitalize on transforming raw potential into high performance. Often these visionaries were available to coach, engage and motivate the workforce to be their best, which translated into increased performance and revenues.

Today’s Talent Management: Questioning the Status Quo

In today’s economy, most of us are already stretched for investing the time it takes to raise the level of performance effectively. And the current processes targeted to successfully onboard new employees or to develop tomorrow’s leaders for your organization often fall short of the company’s—as well as the employee’s—targeted goals. Even the more seasoned professionals with great potential are frustrated and disengaged when they are left to building their own roadmap for success within an organization. Whether they work for a global organization or a local firm, most employees are provided training materials in the form of manuals, self-paced courses delivered through an impersonal LMS, online forms and documents, and various assorted job aids or instructor-led courses.

Although these present a good foundation, what happens after the completion of the training to encourage, develop, and engage the employee to perform to their full potential? And how often does an employee go through the learning process solo, or have to identify their own career path from a series of training courses? Employees are left feeling isolated, and frustrated, when there are no cohorts (or coaches) to discuss their progress through the curriculum, yet according to the corporate HR and learning systems-the employee has successfully completed the required training. If this frustration is not recognized and addressed, leveraging an employee with high potential to add value to the organization becomes a sluggish process, hindering productivity, and leads to unrealized revenue; or even worse, you could lose the employee altogether to a competitor. HR is not to blame, they have done their job. However, your organization is left to repeat the process, and absorb the additional costs of hiring a replacement. If no action is done to correct this issue, the cycle continues. Is this what we consider a successful employee lifecycle?

So how do we successfully train and develop employees in today’s corporate environment?  Most organizations have reduced department size and have increased responsibilities of the tenured employees, and the likelihood of adding additional resources are slim.  Relying on your corporate HR and learning systems can help you complete a required checklist of learning courses and compliance tasks, but how do we motivate/engage high potential employees to increase company performance and revenues?  Costly technology alone, such as a corporate Talent Management System, does not address the humanistic needs of the employee. And when selecting the right software package, how do you really know which one will meet your needs when they all promise so much but fall short of delivering a complete, holistic learning experience?

Catch the New Wave: An Integrated Learning Ecosystem for Your Workforce

It appears that the Integrated Learning and Talent Ecosystem is becoming the next wave of corporate performance to successfully engage the employee on the job from day one, and continue to motivate the employee long after their onboarding or other targeted training curriculum has been completed. Having peers and colleagues actively supporting an instructor-led classroom or WBT provides the ongoing human factor lacking in most Learning Management systems and does not require huge investments of time for the cohort to contribute to the trainee’s success. By adding cohort or social learning to your processes, you are not replacing your existing learning systems but enhancing them with a layer of technology—such as SharePoint™. This layer lies on top of your LMS, HRIS, and any other portals or document repositories that are used in the training processes to funnel, coordinate, and deliver your internal curriculum materials more effective learning ecosystem. Most companies already have some form of SharePoint™ in place, which quite often is being underutilized or is not recognized as a development platform. Interestingly, when reviewing its capabilities/functionality, SharePoint™ provides a viable and scalable platform to blend with other systems and content to deliver engaging curriculum. Combining this technology layer with your existing tools and resources not only enables a holistic learning process; it reduces or eliminates the cost of purchasing additional expensive learning/talent management software packages.

I know that most of us are overwhelmed in our current roles, but when you consider how the lack of engaged employees significantly impacts the company’s performance and the bottom line, you can either gamble on the hopes the employee will succeed or address the issue head on. And while most might view that utilizing technology to address the humanistic factor in training and performance improvement would be implausible, consider the increasing popularity of social media and how it has already established itself within our mainstream culture. By integrating social technology into a training curriculum, you can create an interactive learning experience that not only continues long after the corporate curriculum checklist has been completed, but initiates dialog/camaraderie between internal colleagues that never would have been established utilizing the traditional training processes. This evolves into a more holistic, integrated learning environment or “ecosystem” for your workforce, challenging them to be their very best while reducing the time to productivity. You have taken high potential and created high performance! And that is what I consider a success!

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Posted in: Thought Leadership