cover feature
and operations, so organizations really have to expand their ho-rizons
to build leadership programs for young people much more
assertively.”
Younger workers want growth opportunities within their own
companies in fairly short order, and if they’re not offered, those
employees will go and seek them elsewhere.
“Now, people become leaders in the job, not by waiting for the
job,” said Bersin. “The companies that are most effective are the
ones who are willing to put young people in leadership roles as fast
as needed based on capabilities.”
He points to tech companies with young people in leadership
positions, who learn as they go.
“Their skills are much more technical in nature; they’re more
team leaders than organizational leaders,” said Bersin. “While we
still need senior leadership and that challenge isn’t going to change,
there’s a new breed of leadership being born.”
THE EMPLOYEE EXPERIENCE
Where there was once a zeroed-in focus on engagement, HR is
increasingly looking at a broader picture of an employee’s relation-ship
with an organization.
“A big issue impacting HR is what used to be called ‘employ-ee
engagement’ but it’s now the ‘employee experience,’” said Bersin.
“With a growing economy, people are working harder and there
are unlimited ways to work, including evenings, weekends and at
home.” In exchange for that commitment, the pressure is on HR to
make sure the employee experience a positive one.
“In an environment where huge salary increases aren’t expect-ed
in the next few years, employers are spending a lot more time
focusing on their internal organization and make it more effec-tive,
engaged, resilient and healthy, and that’s a major trend we saw
emerging last year,” said Randal Phillips, executive vice president
and chief client officer at Morneau Shepell.
“There’s this broader focus on the employee experience and how
that plays out in the different parts of HR,” said Mallon. “So in tal-ent
acquisition, for example, there’s a recognition of the importance
of candidate experience and its manifestation of the employment
brand. In talent acquisition, we say no a whole lot more than we
say yes, so how do we make the experience of the ‘no’ actually com-pelling,
where a person might leave telling a good story about us?”
LEARNING AND DEVELOPMENT
As the pace of just about everything picks up, traditional meth-ods
of learning and development have started to seem outdated,
and may even run counter to organizational goals of innovation
and agility.
“There’s a growing recognition on a couple levels that traditional
learning is very hierarchical and structured and on a 12- or 18- or
36-month planning schedule,” said Morrow. “That might not be
the right mechanism in a world that’s really dynamic.”
He says that employees are often taking learning into their own
hands, visiting YouTube and learning sites to brush up on specif-ic
skills.
“The question is, then, how do you incorporate video into small
learning chunks? How can you rethink the idea of our tradition-al
two- and three-day instructor-led course and take that down
to a series of 15-minute video segments to allow people to learn
at work?” he said. “Work and learning is converging in a way we
haven’t seen before.”
It’s not surprising that the $140-billion learning and develop-ment
industry has a negative net promoter score right now.
“It’s not very highly regarded in most companies, not because no
one has tried, but because technologies and tools for training fell
behind,” said Bersin. “For three or four years, companies have re-ally
been struggling with finding the right methodology to build
experiential learning and next generation training programs for
their employees given this change and their expectations; they ex-pect
things to be more like YouTube and Netflix and less like a
training catalogue.”
In the last year, however, Bersin says a broad range of tools have
hit the market meant to enable self-directed, micro and curated
learning.
“I think in 2018 there’s going to be a very significant adoption of
these tools,” said Bersin. “People are going to be able to build on-line
universities inside their companies.”
A big question, as L&D evolves, is how to make learning unique
to each employee.
“Organizations will have to solve the puzzle of how to make
learning more personal while at the same time more scalable,” said
Benjamin. “They almost work in opposite directions and we need
to solve for both.”
PERFORMANCE MANAGEMENT
For many companies, performance management has been an area
of focus, concern and even reengineering in the past several years.
“I feel like last year, though, it came to that forefront where or-ganizations
moved towards completely overhauling their systems
of at least piloting a move away from ratings, and towards a coach-ing
culture,” said Benjamin. At the same time, he notes, some
early adopters who may have gone too far swung back a bit toward
the middle. “They likely didn’t have that coaching mindset. They
struggled with ongoing feedback and how to equip their manag-ers
to give that feedback.”
There’s a balance to be struck, and organizations are moving
closer to that sweet spot.
SFIO CRACHO / Shutterstock.com
Employees often take learning into their own hands
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