HR learning: 7 Nov, 2016

1.

5 stage HR maturity model: Integrate processes for better results

As an organization begins to transform, understanding the current maturity level is crucial to contextualize technological adoption and integrate learning and management processes to create better employee experiences.

A critical function within the realm of HR, L&D plays a crucial role in attracting, building and retaining talent. In a recent webinar with People Matters, Kieran King, Vice President of Global Customer Insight at Skillsoft, shared that “the more a company’s learning and talent agenda align with the overall business strategy and integrate with one another, the more effective HR will be in ensuring business productivity.” She added that CLO Magazine has also deemed the trend effective.  It has become essential for HR professionals today to integrate processes, people flows and systems in order to deliver a significant impact to business goals.

As the aspirations of the workforce are changing and the workplaces are revolutionizing, the way people learn in an organizational set-up is also changing – presenting unseen challenges to the L&D professionals. The function today is evolving as “growth partner” that does not just focuses on current performance improvement but also is an integral part of long-term strategic capability building. Therefore, forward-thinking L&D teams are those who are striving to stay on top of the domain trends in this volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous (VUCA) environment. To help the L&D leaders make meaningful decisions, the People Matters-BITS Pilani L&D Trends Study 2016 was conducted to uncover some of the most pertinent trends in the domain. The study surveyed 122 respondents across industries to gauge their perceptions on what is driving the L&D function, its role in the whole organization and how is it being executed on the ground.

What should be the biggest L&D priorities? What should be the key metrics to track successful conversion of these priorities into business outcomes? How are ways of reaching out to learners evolving? What are the top higher education programs that support continuous learning at organizations?

The five stages of maturity

Organizations today have an appetite to grow. As a result, HR professionals have had to play a critical role to attract and scale talent within these organizations. Skillsoft’s five-stage maturity model clearly demarcates the different stages that HR professionals need to go through to evolve their talent management and learning practices, with transformation being a crucial, separate stage.

• In the first stage, learning and talent are two distinct processes which operate in silos. This stage is marked by an organizational culture that is conventionally hierarchical and less collaborative in nature.  There is also a high probability that learning and talent functions run on two completely different platforms, isolating one’s journey from the other. This stage’s reactive approach makes the learning function significantly less agile. This stage is around HR conforming to meet a set of objectives.
• “The Stage Two organization is called the target organization,” says King. “Here the HR functions start to understand that there are pathways they can create between learning and talent management processes.” This is the stage where executives begin to show more interest in raising employee engagement by linking learning and talent management. Learning and HR heads also initiate a more proactive relationship with the business to understand the business problems better and create plans accordingly.
• The third stage is a transformative period. At this stage the organization gets rid of the compartmentalization of learning and HR activities, to make more holistic processes that increase employees’ engagement and motivation. This stage also represents a shift from the ‘command and control’ type of management and puts employees in the driver’s seat to allow them to chart their own career paths.
• Stage four is referred as the continuous stage. The company has undergone transformation and people management practices are relatively stable. Employees have higher engagement levels and are motivated to perform well. As King puts it, “In this stage, learning and talent experiences are cohesive, continuous and personal.” The workforce culture is responsive and adaptive to change. HR operates as talent architect with a greater contribution to business productivity. 
• Fully mature, stage five organizations have become self-developing organizations. At this level, the business fully empowers individuals to take control of their own development and career trajectories and, as a result, attracts the best talent in the market. The HR team in this stage has well-established long-term and short-term strategies. They now have the ability and budget to create world-class employee experiences which are not isolated to talent management or learning, but consider the end to end experience.  

An organization's maturity is often a critical factor in implementing a learning management system (LMS). A clear understanding of HR’s current maturity level helps organizations reassess their position and create a growth strategy that aligns with their needs.

2.

Here’s how Tata Consulting Engineers cracked online learning

Identifying the right partner and creating a learning strategy that is aligned to business objectives is important to make the programs work.

The focus of the business is primarily in design engineering and supervising project management. The TCE team, therefore, also includes construction supervision jobs which require employees to work out of the construction sites. Hence, the need was to identify learning tools that would enable an ‘anytime, anywhere’ interface that caters to all types of employees. From a skills point of view, our focus was also on identifying courses on project management skills and soft skills. 

In order to ensure customized learning, we mapped our competency structure with the course content with the help of Skillsoft. This meant creating clusters of employees and identifying the courses and skills that would be most relevant to that level. Employees were broadly divided into four groups: 1) Individual contributors 2) Team contributors 3) Managers and 4) Senior Management. For example, a training for a junior level employee might focus on skills for communicating with peers and managers, while the same communications training at the managerial level would focus on team management and stakeholder communication. Thus the entire approach became highly ‘need based’ and closely tied to the business objectives. And this very fact of ‘meeting business objectives while learning continuously’ became the greatest value proposition

To promote a culture of learning and employee driven development, and in order to ensure that employees benefitted from the initiative, a communications campaign was launched called ‘Friday@5’. Friday@5 focuses on the time-strapped employee and connects a simple behavioral change technique with a powerful process to enable people to learn and reflect. The motto is to #LEARN&REFLECT. 

This involved sending links to learners every Friday@5pm that comprised of short stories and blogs which took readers only 5-minutesof their time to read. These bytes were connected to other related learning material on the portal. The feedback from this exercise drew a great deal of engagement and utilization. TCE also stringently tracked the status completion every month and sent reminders to the learners. Through these engagement activities, TCE aspired to build a culture and habit of learning and it actually yielded some great results, for instance:

-    Over 2000 employees of TCE are now registered users of Skillsoft

-    Over 13000+ resources have been referred 

-    Over 16000+ resources completed in a year by 1100 users

-    More than 31 skills were focused on in the different Learning programs 

-    300+ unique resources were referred

-    1400+ users completed their Training Plan

-    Employees expressed more confidence in their ability to do their job

Apart from utilization, TCE has measured the progress by inviting first-hand feedback from the learners and it has been great to hear success stories from the learners where the ramifications are not just limited to learner’s workspace but have extended to their personal lives. In the upcoming years, we would like to leverage the knowledge of analytics to measure the impact of this learning initiative on the business performance. For example: tracking employees’ attrition by comparing people who have taken the course vs. those who have not.

3.

Ways to address evolving learning needs

With organizations today choosing to undergo transformation processes, most find themselves in the spot today to address the growing learning needs of the business. How can HR leaders today improve the efficacy of their existing learning processes? Here might be a few solutions.

Being caught in the middle of the transformation storm, organizations have little to no option but to undertake the tumultuous journey of business transformation. Driven by both the changing consumer preferences to evolving technological applications to increase the efficiency of processes, business today are updating practices, infrastructure and people skills to become competitive again and to leverage the opportunities that these factors bring along with them.  As business transformations bring in process changes within the company, a parallel move to upgrade employee skills is needed. With companies slowly realizing the benefits of automation and advancements in the fields of cloud computing, robotics, and artificial intelligence, their application to restructure business processes is being increasingly undertaken.   

So what can L&D experts do to ensure that the organization's workforce is ready to meet its business needs? These following options might shed some light on the issue: 

1. Develop a culture that promotes learning agility - Learning agility refers to the human capacity for rapid, continuous learning derived mostly from experience. 
2. Utilizing MOOCs properly - MOOCs or Massive Open Online Courses, since their inception during the late 2000’s have been a great way to create a continuous learning program that reaches out to a large group of people with similar learning needs. 
3. Creating a need to be self-aware - As corporate learning evolves to deliver institutional needs by using the latest tool and techniques to customize and make content relevant for the learner, HR leaders today are also responsible for ensuring a culture of self-awareness is maintained within the organization.
4. Use design thinking - As companies have begun to depend on various MOOCs and other SaaS based learning management systems,  designing the course content and delivery mechanisms with the employee in mind becomes a great way to ensure that high rates of content adoption by the workforce. Using components of design thinking, companies today can help build a more employee friendly learning modules which do not just focus on the business need but rather on building processes that make employees more impactful in their work.