Category: Learning & Development

Employee-led learning has a lot of potential benefits; is your organization taking advantage of them? From catering to different learning styles to lowering the burden on human resources and learning and development departments, this alternate approach to the more traditional, top-down processes can revolutionize how your organization reaches its training goals. Why limit these benefits to just training, though? Employee-led learning can help with engagement, retention, and more, but how about empowering your team members to grow a wholly employee-led culture?

We’ve said it before, and we’ll definitely say it again: the transition to hybrid work represents an incredibly exciting opportunity to transform the way workplaces work for people. Rather than returning to ‘business as usual’, we can instead imagine a new way of doing that delivers a world-class employee experience to every worker, no matter where they’re based. Shifting more of our processes to be employee-led rather than top-down can help us get there, and quickly, too. In the following sections, we’ll outline what’s been demonstrated so far around the outcomes of employee-led learning, then discuss ways to encourage more employee-led efforts throughout your organization.

How employee-led learning can help you achieve your training goals

Way back in 2017, McKinsey estimated that 375 million workers (14% of the global workforce) would have to change their occupations or acquire new skills prior to 2030 due to advances in technology and automation. In the early, pre-pandemic days of 2020, they further reported that 87% of executives were already experiencing skills gaps or expected to within a few years. Unfortunately, at that time fewer than half of the respondents had a plan to address the problem, and the pandemic has only accelerated the issue.

During the pandemic, employees had to adapt to a lot of new changes virtually overnight. While some companies engaged in extensive training to ensure that everyone was up-to-speed, many employees had to self-train on a number of fronts. Although live walkthroughs can help, employees who had to use new software every day in order to complete job functions that previously occurred in person had to learn as they went along in most cases. Essentially, remote working has been hailed as “an overwhelming success for employers”, and much of the learning process was employee-led as workers retreated to their homes and sorted out the logistics on their own. We already know this can work, and with asynchronous working expected to become the norm post-pandemic, live, company-wide, in-person training is really no longer viable. That’s where employee-led learning comes in.

As a final point, the recruiting firm Hays surveyed 23,000 respondents and found that while many are certainly seeking specific knowledge and expertise, the top skills employers are looking for are soft skills. This was true as far back as 2018, though. When LinkedIn Learning published their 2018 Workplace Learning Trends Report, their findings showed that the most in-demand skills were leadership, communication, collaboration, and only then role-specific skills. Unsurprisingly, training for these soft skills was the most important focus for talent development efforts as well.

From the employee side, the data also showed that 68% of employees prefer to learn at work, 58% of them prefer to learn at their own pace, and 49% prefer to learn at the point of need. In other words, employees want to learn, and they want to be able to direct their own learning so that they can learn what they need when they need it. This makes sense given that 94% of employees say they would stay with an employer longer if the company invested in their career, but their main reason for not learning as much as they’d like is that they don’t have the time. Converting to an employee-led learning approach meets all of these employee needs and empowers team members to work on difficult topics like soft skills in an environment in which, and at a time when they feel comfortable.

How to integrate more employee-led initiatives into your post-pandemic workplace

Now that we’ve explored why employee-led learning makes sense, all that’s left is to find the right systems to enable it at your organization, right? That may be the best choice for you at this point however, why not consider taking things a step or two further? Why should learning have all the employee-led fun? Below, we’ve listed a handful of other ways you can integrate employee-led efforts into your employee experience.

• Employee resource groups/affinity networks. ERGs are one of the most obvious employee-led efforts you can integrate into your strategy. This employee-led approach dates all the way back to the 1960s, and can confer a wide array of benefits. ERGs are typically part of an organization’s diversity, equity, and inclusion strategy, but affinity networks in general can be expanded to encompass many different employee needs and interests. By empowering employees to form groups around identities, interests, or needs that are important to them, you can deliver a more tailored employee experience that meets more employees’ needs without increasing your overhead. Employee-led communities can help better support working parents, assist with mental health needs, or just provide social and/or recreational opportunities with colleagues, so they can create a great deal of value across the organization.
• Innovation. Companies like Google understand that if you give your employees space to innovate, your organization will ultimately come out on top. Their ‘20-percent time’ policy, in which employees are allotted 20% of their workweek to focus on projects they believe will benefit Google, has spawned such advances as Google News, AdSense, and Gmail. Innovation is crucial to staying on the cutting edge of any industry, and if you’ve hired well, you likely have an untapped brain trust languishing amongst your employee ranks. Make the most of that resource! In addition to employee-led learning, employee-led innovation efforts can supercharge your company’s products and services and help you succeed in the long-term. If Google’s approach seems like too much to start off with, consider giving employees one day per month to work on bottom up innovation projects with their colleagues. Still too daunting? Even running hackathons once or twice per year for employee-led innovations can make a radical difference in whether your company remains a leader, or falls behind.
• Social impact. As we recently discussed on this blog, social impact is extremely important to employees, and even more so after the pandemic. Why should you invest time and money in top-down fundraising or service activities though, when many employees may not be interested in the cause you chose? Instead, empowering employee-led impact efforts can ensure higher levels of team buy-in alongside greater payoff in terms of engagement and retention as employees get to support organizations whose work they are truly passionate about. Plus, your company will benefit from a significantly stronger employer brand boost as employees post and talk about the great charity work they get to do as part of their jobs.
• COVID-19 safety. Returning to the office in whole or in part represents uncharted territory for every company. Why not involve your employees in your planning and execution to ensure your return is a success? Taking an employee-led approach to COVID-19 safety entails asking employees their opinions on when and how to return, integrating them into the work of deciding on processes and policies, and having volunteers ready to help out on the ground as employees come back on site. You’ll need employee buy-in to make this effort a success either way; you might as well involve them in all aspects of the process to lighten some of the burden on you.

Employee-led learning has been around for years, and it’s because it offers a flexible framework within which every team member is given the tools they need to succeed. As we envision a whole new world of work though, why wouldn’t we apply this intuitive framework to more initiatives such as diversity, equity, and inclusion; innovation; social impact; and more? It can be daunting to imagine putting more power in the hands of employees, but it can also be liberating as it frees you up to spend your time on more pressing matters. If you’re interested in exploring the employee-led approach but would like to start off with some guardrails, we invite you to check out Workrowd’s platform. We’ve got a central hub for all the initiatives employees can get involved in, but we’ve also included straightforward administrator settings and on-demand analytics so you can always monitor how things are going. If you’d like to learn more, drop us a line at hello@workrowd.com; we’d love to hear from you.

If you asked the average person, they would likely tell you that HR leaders and startup founders don’t have much in common. Startup founders are typically viewed as fast-moving risk-takers, while HR has long been perceived as highly risk-averse and resistant to change. In reality though, tech founders and People leaders have a lot more in common than it might appear at first glance. They both have to manage a large number of competing priorities at once, they both have to deal with rapidly changing objectives, and they both have to navigate all of this amidst a high degree of uncertainty.

One benefit startup founders have over HR leaders is that they typically have the final say as to what course of action the company will take, making it easier for them to make decisions quickly and remain agile. Just because some HR teams operate within the context of large companies with layers of bureaucracy though, doesn’t mean that they can’t take some of the principles of agile startup building and apply them to their own work. In support of more innovation in HR, we’ve summarized what HR can learn from startups (and vice versa!) below.

The value of agility, regardless of department or role

In the early aughts, agile software development came to the fore as a way to speed up processes and reduce time to market. It is grounded in the knowledge that every endeavor involves a high degree of uncertainty, and enables cross-functional teams to self-organize and self-manage in response to these ever-changing circumstances. It does not prioritize hierarchy or policies, but rather places the focus on responsiveness and progress towards the goal.

There has been a great deal of discussion in HR circles recently around the rigid focus on policy as a tool to solve problems. If we’ve learned anything this year, it’s that in order to be effective in a variety of circumstances, more innovation in HR is needed and policies must be able to flex and adapt. This is just the arena in which agile processes are primed to succeed. Additionally, agile encourages involving the end user (for HR, the employee) in the development process both early and often. By talking to customers, developers can ensure they’re only building the features that users truly want and which will have the most impact towards enhancing the digital experience. This couldn’t be more important in context of supporting employees during a year that has involved so much upheaval. The need for agile processes and innovation in HR is urgent.

Startup maxims that HR should take to heart

HR has a pressing mandate as we continue to flounder under the crushing weight of the pandemic, and it is one that will only become more urgent as we eventually begin to emerge from under the threat of this scourge. People are struggling. HR is the department tasked with supporting them through that struggle, and it is not an easy job. Accordingly, and as we’re in entirely unfamiliar territory, HR would do well to think of themselves akin to a startup where teams must effectively ‘build the plane as they fly’. This has already been the case over the past 9+ months, and realistically, it should continue indefinitely. We’ve seen the future; there’s no room or reason to go back to ‘the way we’ve always done it’. It’s time to move forward without hesitation and drive more innovation in HR.

In support of that goal, we’ve assembled a brief list of startup maxims for HR leaders to begin mulling over as they work towards a more agile approach to their field and more innovation in HR:

• If you’re not embarrassed of your first product, you launched too late. This is perhaps the recommendation most at odds with how HR has historically operated. In the past, HR has typically given projects excessively long lead times in order to ensure that every ‘T’ is crossed and ‘I’ is dotted before rolling anything out to employees. For instance, most large companies’ digital transformation timelines were upwards of two years before lockdowns forced them to accelerate that to two weeks. Waiting to roll out initiatives until they’re ‘perfect’ just increases the likelihood that whatever you’re launching won’t meet employee needs. Get it out there earlier, get feedback, and iterate on it to actually make it perfect.
• Fail fast. Doing small tests of innovative solutions rather than undertaking giant, sweeping projects can help HR better serve the entire employee population more quickly. If you want to try a new innovation in HR but you’re not sure it will work, devise a small test with a limited subset of employees, and see what they think. If it doesn’t work, you will only have wasted a minimal amount of time and resources. If it does work though, you won’t have spent years wondering whether it might be useful with nothing to show for it, and instead will have an already completed pilot to justify moving forward with it.
• Your most unhappy customers are your biggest source of learning. HR has typically viewed troublesome employees as problems to be solved rather than opportunities to be seized. Maximize the impact of your employee surveys and particularly of your exit interviews to identify critical needs that aren’t being met. Turn dissatisfaction and disengagement around by jumping on every chance to learn and improve. Really begin to think of your employees as customers of your services and products, and make sure that every one of them would give your ‘company’ a 5-star review.

HR has had a lot to deal with this year, and many antiquated systems and approaches proved fallible in the face of the onslaught. Now is the time to take a page from the agile technology startup’s book and prioritize ‘user’ feedback; build responsive, cross-functional teams; and move quickly and innovatively. One way we’re doing that at Workrowd is with the upcoming launch of our Global ERG Network, a new community for ERGs, BRGs, and Diversity Councils to network and learn across the globe. Packed full of best-in-class resources, exclusive events, and on-demand analytics, you can learn more in our post here, on our page here, or at our upcoming webinar on 12/15. As always, you can also reach us directly at hello@workrowd.com.

Well, it’s finally election day here in the U.S. It’s certainly been a long road to get here, and no matter what the outcome, the next few days are likely to be pretty emotional for many employees. As our media outlets have grown increasingly sensationalistic, and the two parties more and more polarized and obstinate, the disagreement and animosity have spilled over and we’re now hearing of many tense political conversations at work. In an age when many companies claim to be focused on striving for inclusion, how do people’s party affiliations factor into the equation?

The old recommendation to never discuss politics or religion in ‘polite’ conversation has become untenable amidst a 24-hour news cycle that thrives off of these two supposedly taboo topics. Things have gotten so out of hand that it’s even impacting people’s health and wellbeing. As far back as September of 2019, a survey found that 40% of respondents felt that politics were a source of stress in their lives. Approximately 20% reported losing sleep over it, and roughly the same number noted that politics exacted an emotional toll on them. The numbers are undoubtedly higher now, on the day of the election, and after such extraordinary circumstances in the lead-up. How do you manage all of this as an employer?

Pros and cons of allowing political discussions in the workplace

The overwhelming advice to employees across the board is to simply avoid having political conversations at work at all. Many workers seem to agree. During the also extremely polarized 2016 election season, 79% of survey respondents noted that coworkers are the people they would be least likely to discuss politics with, beating out even neighbors and complete strangers. The logic behind this is difficult to dispute; many people don’t know their colleagues very well, and yet they have to see and collaborate with them every day. If they get into any particularly heated political conversations at work, it can impact both their prospects with that employer, as well as the general office environment due to the increased tension.

On the one hand, you run the risk of employees fighting to the point of not being able to work productively together, and potentially even coming to blows, while on the other hand, completely ignoring the fact that employees are stressed and anxious isn’t a stellar option either. By forbidding employees from expressing themselves or voicing their concerns, they have no choice but to bottle up their anxiety which leads to distraction and disengagement. While in many ways this conundrum requires choosing the lesser of two evils, there are some strategies you can pursue to find some middle ground.

Strategies for enabling healthy dialogue

There are a number of alternatives to stifling and ignoring people’s beliefs without inviting full-on battles into your office. While encouraging political conversations at work outright is likely inadvisable in efforts to prevent anyone from feeling offended and/or victimized, it’s important to at least acknowledge that a big national event is underway. Pretending it’s not happening isn’t going to lead to any sort of positive outcome. Consider the following steps to help support your employees through this charged time:

• Make it clear that the company understands that employees are under immense stress right now. As mentioned above, it’s important to lead with empathy during this time. The election is undoubtedly impacting your employees, so to pretend otherwise is simply tone-deaf. Ensure your managers are being mindful of the stress that their direct reports may be under, and acknowledge that they might not be at their best.
• Don’t ban political speech that otherwise complies with your larger behavioral requirements. Political conversations are going to come up; it’s simply a fact of the current day and age. Banning them and making them punishable simply makes employees feel like they can’t bring their whole selves to work, and sets unreasonable restrictions on employee interactions. Stress that your standard expectations of respect, professionalism, etc. remain in place, but don’t add to employees’ anxieties by threatening termination if they slip and mention something about this huge issue that is undoubtedly on their minds.
• Take a stand against hate as a company. The political rhetoric in this country has reached a fever pitch, but as a company you can still take a stand against hate and in favor of acceptance without it being political. Make sure your employees know you’ll support them no matter which candidate they choose, and offer them security during this highly unstable year.

As has long been the case, political discussions in the workplace are often better when just avoided, but you can still take steps to ensure your employees feel safe and supported. If you’re looking for ways to keep your employees connected during this decentralized time, consider checking out Workrowd. We’ve got solutions for diversity, equity, and inclusion, professional development, social impact, and more. You can reach us at hello@workrowd.com.

One of the key issues the pandemic has exposed is the extreme importance of workplace communication. Companies without strong internal communication processes immediately saw the shift to remote work ratchet up existing issues and break down chains of command. Employees have been left struggling to access the information they need to get their jobs done, and utilizing any and every channel to contact their colleagues with no regard for the time or day. Furthermore, those organizations without a culture of transparency saddled their employees with the added stress of not knowing management’s position on potential layoffs, making it even more difficult to concentrate and complete tasks. Despite all the tools we have to enable communication within organizations, there’s still a lot of operator error in terms of how, when, and what we share.

Numerous studies have found that employees rank transparency within a company as the biggest contributor to workplace happiness. While this may not seem particularly surprising upon first reading, consider it in context of the fact that many organizations look to free food and snacks, happy hours, game rooms, etc. as first line strategies for improving employee engagement and company culture. While in reality, employees believe opportunities to volunteer are more important than these sorts of perks, employees also report that the novelty of these benefits wears off within a few months and it’s really the company culture and feeling safe and valued that drives retention and productivity.

A desire to feel safe and valued in the place(s) where people spend one-third of their lives makes sense; in the absence of these assurances, it’s difficult not to be perpetually distracted and anxious. Workplace communication plays a critical role in this. If employees are constantly wasting time struggling to find or access the information they need, or are experiencing slights from their managers and/or peers (whether real or perceived), how can they feel secure or effective? Instituting productive communication practices can fundamentally alter the company climate, helping to drive key business outcomes. Not the least of these is revenue, as SHRM estimates that poor communication costs the average 100,000+-employee company $62.4 million per year.

With all this in mind, what are some ways to improve workplace communication to boost employee happiness, and in the process increase retention and productivity? The first step is to formally lay out communication procedures and expectations. While it may sound overly cumbersome and difficult for employees to follow, equipping staff with clear and concise guidelines on what to do and when, will actually ease stress and reduce the time burden on employees when determining how to respond in various situations.

This should not be a quick job for one or two people. Take the time to actually evaluate where your company is today, where you want to go, and then lay out concrete steps and policies to help you get there. Designing communication procedures is a great opportunity to engage an employee task force, in order to ensure the new standards have buy-in across the organization.

The next step, of course, is to clearly communicate these policies and procedures to employees. Consider distributing them via email as well as posting them in easily accessible locations such as company wiki/intranet homepages, in a top-level folder on shared drives, or even on the wall if it’s appropriate for your workplace and guidelines. Make sure to engage employees in this process and do not simply hand down the decree without discussion. Take the time to get employee feedback, answer questions, and provide concrete examples of the policies in action.

We encourage you to go beyond just outlining when to use email vs. chat vs. in-person channels, to cover how employees at your company should treat each other, how they should treat customers, and what’s expected of them when they’re out in the community. Give your team the gift of full transparency, so they can do their jobs without the threat of unknown violations and the subsequent consequences. As the saying goes, ‘clear is kind’.

During these frightening and constantly shifting times, it’s more important than ever to ensure that your employees are informed and engaged. If you’re looking for an easy, all-in-one solution to manage employee groups and events, project teams, employee task forces, and more, consider checking out Workrowd and let us know what you think. We strive for a culture of openness, transparency, and constant improvement, so we’re always interested in feedback, positive or constructive. You can reach us at hello@workrowd.com.

While we’ve still got a long road ahead, it seems that we may be seeing the beginnings of light at the end of the coronavirus tunnel, at least on the health front. The impact of this crisis truly cannot be overstated, but we must be resilient and take strategic steps to forge a path forward. Those of us who are still employed owe it to those who have suffered unexpected losses of income to respond swiftly and smartly to rebuild what’s been lost. Towards this end, it’s time for more companies to capitalize on the power and potential of employee task forces.

Many business leaders at this point are dealing with rampant mixed messages and a long list of Catch-22s. The most pressing instance of course, is that in order to keep their companies alive and well, employees need to come back to work. However, in order to keep employees alive and well, they need to stay at home. As we start to envision what the new normal will look like, executives would do well to remember that they have a seldom-used secret weapon to draw upon: employee task forces.

Once we’ve managed to curb the rampant spread of the virus, there will be many deliverables to meet all at once. While a number of them will need to be spearheaded by executive leadership, there will be quite a few others that employees can help move forward. For instance, companies that were forced to furlough and/or layoff employees may have to bounce back from a culture deficit depending on how the cuts were handled. Others may be attempting to redesign an antiquated telework policy, while still others will be looking to restructure part or all of their organization as a result of the changes the pandemic brought with it. All of these are areas where it’s not just helpful for employees to weigh in, but imperative.

Developing effective task forces shares some of the same steps as developing effective employee resource groups, which we wrote about here. It’s important for there to be both buy-in and strategic vision from the top, so that the ideas and plans the task force devises actually get implemented. Accordingly, some form of executive sponsorship will help ensure that the team has the leverage they need to get things done. If you can’t find a high-level colleague to champion the task force, it is a clear sign that the objective in question isn’t important enough to the organization to warrant employees’ time at this point. Nothing is a bigger morale killer than having people spend time on something that immediately gets shelved, so do your due diligence upfront to ensure that you’re setting employees up for success.

Beyond having high-level support and engagement, it’s important to recruit the right mix of people to drive your task force. For starters, it is crucial for the task force to be comprised of folks from a variety of different departments so they can socialize the group’s progress across the company. Additionally, members should be dynamic and active players within the broader organization who are excited about the work to be done and prepared to share their passion with their colleagues. Front line managers will likely have the highest motivation to make changes as they feel they will benefit their employees, but make sure the selected individuals are respected leaders who can rally the troops. Change is hard and uncomfortable for most employees, so without charismatic leaders to communicate the value and importance of the new initiatives while simultaneously calming fears, the task force’s work may be met with resistance and fail to gain traction.

Just as with your ERGs, employee task forces can drive positive change within your organization from the bottom-up, as long as the right supports are put in place. As we head into a new, post-outbreak era, it is time to move away from fully top-down, authoritarian processes and give employees the autonomy they’ve been seeking. Assemble and empower employee task forces to help you build a healthier, more successful organization coming out of this crisis.

If you’re intrigued by the idea of employee task forces to help grow and improve your organization, we encourage you to check out Workrowd as a way to launch and manage your various groups. We’ve got all the tools your employees need to collaborate, along with administrator settings for you and analytics to give you ongoing insight into the process. You can reach us at hello@workrowd.com.