The Evolution of Coaching

Coaching is a big dang deal right now. A developmental method that, in the past, was reserved for leaders, future leaders, and problem children has, in a sense, gone mainstream. In a nutshell, more org leaders are using coaching for more reasons, more coaching flavors are surfacing, and more coaching configurations are being developed.

Let’s explore some of the larger changes we’re seeing.

From scarce to abundant(ish)

To put it simply, there is a larger supply of coaches. According to ICF’s Global Coaching Study, there are approximately 71,000 professional coaches in the world as of 2019, a 33% increase over a 2015 estimate.¹

Not only is there a larger supply, but access to that supply has been simplified. The pandemic has normalized virtual connection, making it easier to receive coaching from any distance. Additionally, coaching tech platforms continue to make it easier to find, vet, hire, and engage with coaches, and to improve the coaching experience overall.

From exclusive to inclusive

Because of high cost and low scalability, most orgs have reserved coaching for specific audiences—generally leadership—which gave it an air of exclusivity. In recent years, however, movements such as #metoo and #blm have made orgs take a hard look at how opportunity is distributed and rethink how and what they’re offering in terms of development.

This has caused many orgs to look for ways to offer coaching more broadly and evenly. Orgs that value coaching are finding ways to make it more available to more individuals—causing them to throw out traditional definitions in favor of more inclusive, broader coaching configurations (more on this later).

From narrow scope to broad scope

When we asked leaders why they were investing in coaching, their answers varied much more than we expected. Coaching now has larger goals than simply improving the behavior of one person. Some of the most common goals we heard included:

• Connection and engagement. As workforces have moved to either hybrid or remote situations, the need for human connection has become increasingly pronounced. Medical research tells us that the quality and quantity of individuals’ social relationships has been linked not only to mental health, but also to morbidity and mortality.² Coaching likely appeals to orgs right now because most coaching activities are about connection between humans. As such, we’re also seeing coaching being used by several organizations as a way to engage employees.
• Personalized development. While personalized development has long been the pipe dream of learning leaders and academics, the pandemic forced the issue: employees not only couldn’t gather to learn the same stuff, they actually needed different stuff. Coaching, at least in some of its more scalable forms, can meet the diverse development needs of many employees without breaking the bank.
• Change management. As orgs face an unprecedented rate of change, they are grappling with issues such as hybrid work, wellness and burnout, and diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging (DEIB), among others, and are looking for ways to reach large portions of the employee population. New coaching methods enable individual behavior changes at scale.
• As coaching becomes easier, less expensive, more applicable, and more scalable, more orgs are experimenting by offering it to more people. Coaching tech has likely also played a role in amplifying the discussion about coaching. These solutions run the gamut, from simplifying administration of traditional coaching initiatives to delivering coaching by way of tech. These solutions are causing some noise, curiosity, and experimentation (for more on coaching tech, see our sister report, Coaching Tech Landscape: The Humans and the Machines.)

Coaching is being used to engage employees, personalize development, manage change, even experiment.

From stand-alone to integrated

As coaching becomes more mainstream, it is also becoming more streamlined through integration with other activities. While it used to be a stand-alone, one-off development opportunity rarely tied to anything else, coaching efforts are now being coordinated more broadly.

Coaching is now being integrated into career and development discussions and activities (mobility and career), performance improvement actions and independent development plans (performance management), and leadership development initiatives and skills discussions (learning and development). As such, coaching no longer belongs to just one vertical—it is, and should be, a shared initiative.

From one definition to many

Finally, the very nature of coaching is changing. In its most traditional sense, coaching is defined as a 1-on-1 relationship between a professional coach and a coachee, which extends over a period of time to improve the behavior, knowledge, and skills of the coachee. The goal is to improve the individual—the one person receiving the coaching.

That is changing. While some leaders we spoke with still use this traditional definition, the boundaries of coaching are being pushed. The lines between coaching, mentoring, educating, championing, and any number of similar roles are blurring, which has led to several new flavors of coaching.

For the purposes of this paper, we’re not going to clearly define what “coaching” is. We have found that semantics discussions rarely benefit anyone. Instead, we will focus on the broader definitions offered by the leaders we spoke with and the literature we read.

Boundaries around how coaching is defined and executed are expanding.

Which is what we’ll do next.

Coaching Methods: All the Choices

As we outlined in the first section of this paper, there are now fewer rules surrounding both the definition and application of coaching. As with any area that experiences a lot of growth and invention, there is also a lot of confusion around coaching.

What used to be a fairly straightforward proposition has morphed into something impressively more complicated: leaders aren’t just choosing who gets access to coaching anymore; they’re also choosing what kinds of coaching they’ll invest in and who gets access to which kinds of coaching. This was the most common question we got: Which one should I be implementing?

There is no "right" answer to how coaching should be implemented; but there are lots of choices.

While a “right” answer would be nirvana, we unfortunately didn’t come up with one. What we did find, however, was that there are many choices when it comes to coaching, and depending on your goal, there may be better choices than others.

We identified 9 methods that orgs are utilizing to coach employees, as shown in Figure 1 below.

While the chart above provides a nice summary of options leaders have for coaching, it does a bit more than that: It provides a way to think about those options.

To this point, org leaders may have assumed that coaching is for the individual. Earlier, we mentioned that coaching has traditionally been utilized to influence one individual at a time. However, many of the methods we identified do not fit that mold: they’re increasing their scalability and impact by focusing on group or org effectiveness as well.

Individual effectiveness

Orgs interested in affecting the effectiveness of just 1 individual tended to stick to methods that focus on helping individual employees reach their potential. These tend to rely on the traditional coaching 1-on-1 relationship, although we did see variations on that theme.

Group or team effectiveness

Orgs interested in affecting the effectiveness of a group focused on coaching methods that help managers and teams work better together. This often included equipping managers with coaching skills or bringing in an outside coach or tech to work with an entire team.

Org effectiveness

Orgs interested in developing a culture of coaching or large culture changes tended to use methods that help orgs build coaching cultures, increase feedback and learning from each other, and focus on large-scale org initiatives. Some of the more revolutionary types of coaching methods fell here, including things like coaching circles, tech-led coaching, and initiative-driven coaching (DEIB and wellness).

Coaching can affect a single individual, a team, or an entire org.

The balance of this report will address these 3 major targets or goals and their respective coaching methods. We’ll provide more information on the goals, respective methods, and leading practices. We’ll also highlight examples of how organizations are using these methods and provide a list of questions that leaders should ask themselves as they consider the methods that may be best for their orgs.

Coaching for individual effectiveness

We’re big fans of using coaching to improve individual effectiveness. We think 1-on-1 interactions and guidance are a fantastic way to develop employees. And we’re not alone. In fact, the majority of leaders we spoke with are focusing a large part of their coaching initiatives on improving individual effectiveness.

Coaching methods that focus on improving individual effectiveness generally have a few things in common.

• Professional or trained coaches. These methods generally involve either a professional coach or at least coaches that have some training. We were both surprised and delighted that most leaders we spoke with take the idea of coaching seriously and ensure that the coaches have the skills they need. (This point obviously varies slightly when talking about self-coaching.)
• One way. Coaching methods in this group are not mutually beneficial—meaning that the coach is in place to help the coachee achieve something. Some of the other methods we will discuss have a different dynamic, but in the case of coaching for individual effectiveness, coaches help coachees.
• Coaching methods for individual effectiveness are just that: individual. These methods leverage a 1-on-1 relationship between coach and coachee and the work is individualized to the coachee’s specific needs.

We identified 3 coaching methods associated with individual effectiveness, each leveraging 1-on-1 interactions. These methods include:

• Traditional, professional coaching
• Drop-in coaching
• Self-coaching

For each of the methods in this section and throughout this paper, we’ll provide a description, information about how the method is most commonly used, including its audience, outline some leading practices, and give leaders some questions to think about.

Method 1: Traditional, professional coaching

What is it?

Traditional professional coaching is exactly what it sounds like: a professional coach works with a coachee to identify and work on development areas. These engagements are generally longer term. Usually, orgs identify professional coaches they can trust and then assign them as necessary to individuals within the organization. Of all the methods we came across in the research, this method was by far the most well-known and the most commonly implemented.

Traditional professional coaching is also the most expensive, the least scalable, and the least inclusive of all of the methods we ran across, so it isn’t surprising that this method is often reserved for leaders or those likely to become leaders (high potential employees).

Traditional professional coaching involves a professional coach working with a coachee to identify and work on development areas. These engagements are generally longer term.

How is it applied?

Most orgs utilizing traditional professional coaching had specific ideas about how it should be applied. Some of the ways we saw it applied are listed below.

Building leadership skills

Because traditional coaching is often reserved for leaders or potential reasons, it makes sense that building leadership skills is one of its main objectives. Coaches and coachees determine which skills need to be developed and work through a process for developing them.

Often, 360s or other assessments are utilized to determine areas of focus. Assessments can align to the org’s particular brand of leadership if they have one, or they can leverage one of many leadership assessments available on the market. Coaches are often certified in one or more of these models.

Increasing engagement

Interestingly, many organizations use traditional professional coaching as a way to engage employees. In this case, the fact that it is both expensive and exclusive works in its favor: traditional professional coaching sends a message to coachees that they are valuable to the organization and worth the investment.

Bringing the outside perspective in

Experienced leaders building their strategic chops may also be assigned a coach with significant leadership or industry experience. The coach may act as a sounding board or outside perspective for leaders making important strategic decisions.

Correcting unacceptable behavior

While most leaders we spoke with said that coaching has a positive connotation within their orgs, a few are still using traditional professional coaching to help leaders work through behaviors that put their careers or the company at risk.

Method 2: Drop-in coaching

What is it?

Drop-in or coaching refers to a specific type of 1-on-1 coaching that focuses on in-the-moment needs. Drop-in coaching is characterized by both its specificity and its “quick hit” nature.

Employees taking advantage of this coaching method generally seek out coaches with expertise in certain areas, and the coaching relationship is generally short-lived: it doesn’t require, or necessarily encourage, a long-term relationship. Drop-in coaching can utilize either internal subject matter experts or external professional coaches.

Interestingly, we heard about drop-in coaching from both org leaders and coaching tech providers. Both groups see tremendous value in providing 1-on-1 human interaction to develop skills or knowledge, but also understand that it can be cost prohibitive to provide coaching broadly, to all employees.

Drop-in coaching refers to a specific type of 1-on-1 coaching focusing on in-the-moment needs. It is characterized by both its specificity and it’s “quick hit” nature.

How is it applied?

Orgs utilizing this coaching method are generally interested in scaling coaching to include more employees in the hopes of engaging them. We also identified a couple of other, more specific, applications.

Working through immediate, time-sensitive challenges

A few orgs we spoke with used drop-in coaching to meet immediate needs of employees. While traditional coaching focuses on long-term behavior change, drop-in coaching focuses on the here and now. Orgs provided access to coaches for employees looking for help with specific issues right this minute. For example, employees may schedule half an hour with a drop-in coach if they are looking for feedback on a presentation, are planning a tough conversation with their employee or manager or need an outside perspective on a touchy business decision.

Interestingly, several tech vendors we interviewed offer an option to utilize professional coaches in this capacity.

Subject matter expertise

Orgs can also use drop-in coaching to take advantage of subject matter expertise existing in the company. Employees needing a particular expertise can schedule time to work with more experienced employees.

Career coaching

Internal mobility is becoming more of a focus for orgs as well as their employees. One org we spoke with uses a simplified drop-in coaching approach as a way to leverage employees willing to talk about their own careers and help others make decisions about theirs. Another org utilized drop-in coaching as a way to make the career coaches in their HR department more visible and accessible to employees looking for help.

Coaching as a benefit

Vendors and thought leaders alike are touting coaching as a benefit,³ or providing coaching services for employees looking for guidance on profession, health, wellness, financials, and even sleep. Coaching as a benefit has the advantage of engaging with employees on issues that they care about.

Because there is so much noise about it, we were surprised and a little disappointed that not one of the leaders participating in this research is using coaching in this way. But it is available, and being touted by several coaching tech vendors.

Method 3: Self-coaching

What is it?

In self-coaching, individuals are provided the tools and frameworks that can help them guide their own growth and development. Self-coaching is a popular method for guiding individuals through transitions in their professional lives. Orgs are leveraging the idea of self-coaching by providing employees tools that help them explore potential development areas and resources to help them self-correct.

Tools can be either analog or digital. Good examples of tools for self-coaching include both the GROW model⁴> and the ABC model.⁵ Both models provide logical ways for individuals to think through their goals, assess where they are now, and plan steps to move forward. Orgs can create internal sites and job aids to make models like this widely available. Communication about the org’s use of such models also helps.

Digital tools often take it a step further by creating awareness of behavior in certain situations. They can be as simple as nudges or prompts to remind you to reflect on something, or they can be more complex, such as data-driven dashboards.

Often, these tools use technologies such as natural language processing (NLP), AI, or text analysis to capture and share information within the workflow. One example we saw monitors email and helps managers understand their own patterns, such as sending emails after work hours, or using a different tone with certain people; it then provides both data and content to encourage change.

For self-coaching, employees use tools and frameworks to guide their own growth and development.

How is it applied?

Self-coaching can be leveraged in several ways across the org.

Onboarding

Orgs will often introduce self-coaching models when employees onboard and provide them with some tools to help them navigate their new environment.

Remote or hybrid work

Orgs undergoing changes in the way employees work—either remote or hybrid—are also facing the challenge of establishing new norms and breaking old habits. Self-coaching, particularly some of the digital tools, are being utilized to draw attention to current behaviors and provide some guidance on how to change those that may be troublesome.

Leadership training

As with most of the coaching methods introduced in this paper, self-coaching can be heavily leveraged during leadership training initiatives to provide both frameworks for problem-solving and self-awareness, and data and feedback that prompt change.

The second primary reason that orgs are investing in coaching is to increase group or team effectiveness. By this, we mean ensuring that groups or teams are led more effectively and work together more effectively.

The pandemic has drawn attention to the importance of cohesion among groups, and orgs have realized that while they focus on skills and knowledge for the individual, often there isn’t enough focus or support for better functioning groups.

Group and team effectiveness, and org and culture effectiveness, which we’ll discuss in the next section, is where we started to hear quite a bit about creating a coaching culture. Orgs attempting to create a coaching culture want to leverage some of the best aspects of coaching (candidness, open feedback, sharing information, seeking information, etc.) and embed them deeply into the way work gets done. They’re beginning with coaching methods that affect groups.

Orgs looking to build a coaching culture often start with the coaching methods that affect group or team effectiveness.

We identified 3 methods orgs are using to coach better teams or groups:

• Manager as coach
• Integrated coaching
• Group or team coaching

We discuss each below.

Method 4: Manager as coach

What is it?

As many orgs are figuring out how to function in this new world (with remote teams, back to office plans, and hybrid work arrangements. to name a few), they view managers, and particularly managers taking part in coaching efforts, as a means of ensuring more human connection and smoother transitions.

Manager as coach was identified as one way to provide coaching to more employees within the organization. Manager as coach is exactly what it sounds like: giving managers the skills they need and then leveraging them as coaches to their direct reports.

During our roundtable on coaching, leaders made 2 points we think are important to pass on. First, manager as coach is not a command: it’s a system. Just telling a manager to coach does not provide them with either the impetus or the skills necessary to do so. Three things leaders mentioned that can help:

• Help managers build skills. Don’t assume that asking managers to coach is enough. Provide them the skills necessary to do it.
• Give managers tools. Support managers by offering them nudges, prompts, dashboards, and reports that can give them more information about their own and their employees’ behavior.
• Create the impetus. Communicate, encourage, and even compensate managers to act as coaches—don’t just assume that coaching will happen.

The second point leaders made in the roundtable was that a manager, by nature, is directive. Managers have a dual responsibility of meeting business goals and developing employees. Coaching is a good development tool for that second responsibility, but orgs need to help managers understand when to utilize it and when the situation calls for something more directive.

Managers armed with coaching skills are often leveraged to provide connection and coaching to their teams.

How is it applied?

Orgs are leveraging manager as coach in several ways. We discuss some of the most common below.

Scaling coaching

Interestingly, manager as coach was one of the first things we heard when we asked leaders how they were planning to scale coaching. Leaders identified managers as the first line of defense for both skill building and engagement, and were working to ensure managers and leaders had the skills they needed in order to act as coaches for their direct reports.

Navigating careers

Managers are also often the first line of defense when it comes to helping employees navigate their careers. Along with regular conversations with employees about their aspirations, managers also coach employees on what skills they should develop, what resources are available to them, and what stretch assignments can be taken on.

Improving performance

Increasingly, coaching conversations are being integrated into performance management processes. Hybrid work and remote work have encouraged more, not less, checking in with employees, and many of those conversations revolve around how employees can meet their performance objectives.

Method 5: Embedded coaching

What is it?

Embedded coaching surfaced, not through our conversations with leaders, but through our briefings with coaching tech vendors. Still, leaders gave interesting examples of embedded coaching as they talked about skilling up their workforces.

Embedded coaching is coaching that is integrated into some other learning method—generally formal programs, and usually those requiring specific skills, such as leadership, although we’d like to see it used much more broadly. Embedded coaching gives participants in a program access to a coach. In some instances, coaches coach the group together; in others, employees can sign up for individual sessions with the coach.

Embedding coaching into other programs accomplishes a few good things. First, it provides a way to scale coaching to more employees in a fairly cost-effective way. Second, it pairs coaching with other types of learning, allowing employees to learn, practice, and receive feedback, all in context.

Coaching is often embedded or integrated into development programs and other learning initiatives, allowing employees to practice and receive feedback in context.

How is it applied?

Some of the more common ways that orgs are using embedded coaching are discussed below.

Leadership development

Including a coaching element in a leadership development program was the most common example of embedded coaching. Many leaders shared examples of providing coaching to participants to develop their coaching chops and ensure that they had the skills to coach. Embedding coaching in leadership development initiatives gives participants the opportunity to get 1-on-1 attention and feedback, an element often missing in group learning.

Follow on to programs

Embedded coaching sometimes also takes place after the fact. Some leaders mentioned follow-on coaching offered as a complement to the main learning initiative. Participants were encouraged to reach out to receive extra guidance, either by participating in group coaching sessions, or by scheduling a 1-on-1 feedback session. Because the follow on is largely optional and as-needed, orgs are able to use fewer resources while still meeting the needs of their employees.

Method 6: Team coaching

What is it?

The 6th coaching method we came across as a part of this project is team coaching. Team coaching generally involves a single coach—either a skilled outsider, or in some instances a team leader—working with a group to increase their effectiveness. Coaching can include both 1-on-1 sessions to help team members understand their role and the dynamics they help create, and sessions with the entire group to find solutions to some of their team’s challenges.

Team coaching has increased in popularity in recent years as orgs have moved toward team-based work.

The way people work increasingly involves other people. In fact, people spend about 50% more time collaborating than they did 10 years ago.⁶ As employees find themselves relying more and more on teammates to get work done, this coaching method has found its footing.

For coaching to have a positive effect on team performance, it needs to focus on the most salient team performance processes for a given task.⁷ Team coaching is not about simply improving interpersonal relationships; it is focused primarily on helping the team meet specific goals.

How is it applied?

Because team coaching has a fairly specific use case, applications are much narrower than with some of the other coaching methods in this study: they revolve around helping a team function better. Three situations were specifically addressed in the literature.

Team formation

Team coaching may be used upon team formation to set the right tone for how work gets done. A team coach may help a team set up a charter, work structure and procedures, and communication norms to ensure the bones of solid working relationships are in place. They may also set expectations for how conflicts should be resolved.

Team health

Orgs can leverage team coaching throughout the lifecycle of a team, checking in with members and the group as a whole to ensure that the team is working together to accomplish their goals. In cases where orgs are using team coaching to continuously ensure team health, the role of team coach is often taken on by the team leader. Orgs should ensure that leaders acting as team coaches are equipped with the skills needed to do the job effectively.

Team conflict

Conflict can keep teams from performing at their best. While conflict is not the primary application of team coaching, team coaches can be brought in to help with alignment, interpersonal skills, expectation setting, and communication.

Coaching for org and culture effectiveness

During this study, the term “coaching culture” came up a lot—describing everything from managers having the ability to coach their teams to developing a culture of feedback. Orgs are looking for ways to infuse the benefits of coaching into the culture. Methods in this group focus on not only increasing access to coaching, but also building coaching skills within individuals.

Additionally, these methods can and are being used to address specific large-scale changes, such as burnout, wellness, and DEIB. These methods are scalable, inexpensive, and inclusive, making them good ways to affect large swaths of the employee population.

Coaching for org or culture effectiveness includes coaching methods that require less oversight and sustenance from the org. They most often don’t require professional coaches, or even extensive coaching training. In many cases, these methods are more systemic: orgs support the initiative with guides and tools rather than human coaches.

Three coaching methods were identified in this category:

• Coaching circles
• Peer coaching
• Culture change programs

We discuss each in more depth below.

Method 7: Coaching circles

What is it?

In its purest form, a coaching circle is a group of 5 or 6 individuals coming together and “synchronizing” their coaching to support a colleague.⁹ Coaching circles take advantage of the collective knowledge of a group and focus it to help individuals one at a time with challenges or situations they are facing.

Coaching circles can have many benefits over traditional 1-on-1 coaching for the individual:

• Leaders mentioned that accountability is often a challenge with many coaching initiatives. Coaching circles have built-in accountability, which can help with follow-through.
• Diverse perspectives. Coaching circles can offer diverse perspectives rather than the perspective of a single coach.
• Coaching circles build networks that often outlast the coaching circle itself. Participants develop trust, and can call on each other throughout their careers.¹⁰

Coaching circles also appeal to orgs because they can be quite cost effective and reach a large number of employees. Resources that would otherwise be directed toward finding or developing coaches for a select few can be used to establish systems and guides to help employees coach each other.

Coaching circles are smaller groups of employees coming together and “synchronizing” their coaching to support a colleague.

How is it applied?

Coaching circles can be used as a way to help any group connect around common challenges. Some of the ways we saw them applied are discussed below.

Augment ERGs

A few orgs we talked to are utilizing coaching circles to augment Employee Resource Groups (ERGs). Offering coaching circles within an ERG can mobilize an already interested population to help each other problem-solve challenges they may be experiencing in the workplace.

Leadership support

The literature mentions coaching circles as a good way to help leaders, particularly newer ones, navigate their roles. One org we spoke with reduced the length of their standard leadership programs by providing leaders with better data about their teams and clarity on their goals, and then augmenting the data with a coaching circle. Their thought was that people on the ground doing the job were likely to offer better guidance than any practice scenario a leadership training program might offer.

Career development

As talent mobility and career development get more attention, orgs are using coaching circles to provide needed support. While a lot of career development will naturally occur within coaching circles organized for other purposes, org leaders can also design coaching circles specifically for roles or career paths they see as key to future business success (e.g., data scientists).

Method 8: Peer coaching

What is it?

Peer coaching generally involves pairing up 2 individuals at a similar leadership level to coach one another. While some peer coaching happens naturally in most professional settings, more orgs are providing slightly more formalized relationships to get the most out of it.

To make the most of peer coaching, most orgs provide at least 2 things to peer coaches. First, they provide tools and ground rules to guide peer coaches through coaching sessions, including questions to ask each other and follow-up items. Second, they provide some guidance or training on how to give and receive feedback.

Peer coaching involves pairing up 2 individuals at a similar leadership level to coach one another. Orgs often provide structure and guidance for sessions.

How is it applied?

In our search of the literature and our interviews and roundtables, we only really saw two applications for peer coaching, discussed below.

Professional development

Interestingly, much of the literature was written with the education or nursing professions in mind. Peer coaching has been used by teachers for at least 3 decades.¹¹ Teachers observe each other teach and provide each other feedback, observations, support, and problem-solving. While the term “peer coaching” is newer to other professions, we see it as a valuable tool in any situation where feedback and support could be helpful—which describes basically all situations.

Leadership development

As with many of the coaching methods we’ve reviewed, in this study, we saw peer coaching used heavily in the leadership development space. Some orgs are including peer coaching in leadership training programs. Participants are paired up and utilize new coaching and management skills to coach each other after the program has been completed. Others are using peer coaching as a substitute for traditional professional coaching.

Method 9: Large-scale coaching

What is it?

Large-scale coaching is an umbrella term for large-scale initiatives, often involving tech, that support large-scale culture change initiatives such as DEIB or wellness. This type of coaching is often quite programmatic, ensuring that all employees receive the same access to information that can help with the org change.

Large-scale coaching can happen manually (paper and pencil), but usually involve tech. During our sister study on coaching tech, several vendors introduced us to “coaching” solutions that address these large-scale culture change initiatives. These solutions generally had an AI or machine learning component to provide the right information at the right time to participants.

This method is probably the least “coachy” of all the methods we discuss. In fact, there are naysayers that would not even describe this as “coaching,” as it doesn’t necessarily involved humans. But we include it because it has many of the characteristics we associate with coaching:

• Personalized development. These initiatives differ from courses or knowledge-sharing in that they are interactive and personalized. Technology or programs adapt to specific areas of study depending on the individual.
• Personalized data. Often tools or programs come with self-assessments and / or dashboards. Data acts as a mirror, much as a real coach would, to give direct and personalized feedback to help participants understand how they are performing or reacting.
• Self-reflection. Initiatives often have built-in opportunities to reflect and apply new information over a period of time. Nudges and other tools are often incorporated to help employees apply new knowledge and skills during work.

Because large-scale coaching is usually applied to fairly important topics, they are often part of larger org initiatives and include significant communications. For example, an org wouldn’t apply large-scale coaching to a DEIB initiative without significant communication about what the organization expects, what it’s doing, and how it will affect everyone.

Large scale coaching, often quite programmatic and often involving tech, supports culture change initiatives, such as DEIB or wellness.

How is it applied?

Important org Initiatives

Large-scale coaching is often used when an initiative is important enough that everyone needs to know and apply the new information. Examples include initiatives on such issues as DEIB, wellness, and burnout.

Change management

In the current environment, large-scale coaching is also being used for initiatives like “return-to-work.” Orgs put together a guided coaching process to help employees understand what is expected and coach them through the steps necessary to a smooth transition.

Starting

So far, we have told you why you should probably care about coaching, identified some for the major trends we’re seeing, and introduced you to 9 coaching methods we came across in our research. In the last meaty section of this report, we want to provide you with some guidance on how to get started with coaching or evaluate it as a development method.

For a solid coaching initiative, all leaders should understand 3 things: the need, the constraints, and what success looks like.

We suggest that any leaders charged with coaching initiatives understand the following 3 aspects:

1. The need
2. The constraints
3. What success looks like

Let’s discuss each.

Articulating the need

Most leaders we spoke with addressed their coaching initiatives as a foregone conclusion: they have senior leadership, ergo, they have a coaching program. Interestingly, however, not many were able to clearly articulate why they were investing in coaching specifically.

We strongly recommend being able to clearly articulate the need a coaching initiative fills. Without a solid reason for an investment in coaching, it is difficult to justify and impossible to measure (which we’ll talk about a little later). To get a clear picture of your need, ask yourself the following 4 questions:

What exactly are you solving for?

Understanding exactly what outcome you want and expect is key to ensuring that your resources are being used well. In the first section, we mentioned 4 reasons, in addition to development, that orgs are investing in coaching, including engagement, personalized development, change management, and engagement. All are valid reasons to invest.

What makes coaching the best option for solving it?

Although it is a sexy and seemingly straightforward option, coaching isn’t always the best solution. It is often, however, one of the most expensive. Leaders should understand what other options are available to them to ensure coaching is the right option.

Who is the initiative for?

What may be appropriate for a particular audience (or audience size) may not be appropriate for another. Being clear on who the audience is, as well as the criteria for determining that audience, is important to articulating the need.

For example, it is not enough to specify the audience as “senior leaders.” What level of senior leader? Senior leaders in all regions? Senior leaders on the front line and in the plants? Senior leaders in a hybrid environment? A more specific response to any of those questions may lead to different coaching methods.

What will this coaching initiative interact with?

As we mentioned when discussing each of the 9 coaching methods, coaching is very often not a stand-alone development tool: it is often combined with other initiatives. When deciding what to solve for, it’s important to understand not only whether coaching is the best option, but what coaching will be interacting with. Integrating coaching into other initiatives (or on some occasions, vice-versa) ensures that participants are receiving consistent information, but also allows orgs to leverage them together.

Coaching doesn't exist in a bubble – it interacts (and should therefore align) with other initiatives.

A few of the leaders we spoke with were thoughtful about tailoring the coaching initiative to the different initiative. The 9 coaching methods we introduced provide more options to org leaders when designing initiatives. Being clear on what you’re solving for, what makes coaching the best solution, what audience it’s serving, and how coaching will interact with other aspects of the initiative can help leaders make more sound decisions.

Working within the constraints

One question we asked in every interview in this study was, “What are your biggest challenges with coaching?” Without fail, leaders mentioned the resources necessary to run a coaching program. It turns out that development budgets are not bottomless, and lack of resources kept leaders from using coaching as much as they’d like.

Part of this is because many of the leaders we spoke with hadn’t read this report yet and were thinking about coaching only in the most traditional way – which is expensive, hard to scale, and very exclusive.

All coaching methods have constraints – understand them to choose the method that will work best for your org.

Which brings us to constraints. All development methods have constraints and the 9 coaching methods we introduced earlier are no different. Constraints can motivate (and even force) leaders to choose one over the other. Understanding the constraints early on can lead to better decisions. For coaching, we identified 3 common constraints, discussed below.

Scalability

When seen in its most traditional light, coaching is not that scalable: talent leaders to keep a binder of coaching resumes on hand, and then assign them as the need arises. Lots of work can go into managing the coaching relationships, getting through procurement processes, and ensuring that coach quality is maintained. Many of the newer methods, however, solve for scalability by changing the coach / coachee relationship, utilizing tech, or introducing coaching in different formats.

Scalability was the second most common constraint we heard from leaders (after cost), and many are actively looking for ways to provide more coaching to more employees. Three of the coaching methods we identified are reasonably scalable.

Inclusivity

Coaching has long been seen as a developmental opportunity for senior leaders or high-potential employees. It has been reserved for those deemed as “special” and those the organization wanted to invest in. The exclusivity can be rankling to employees in orgs taking a more inclusive approach to employee development, and some leaders see the cost as particularly high when it only affects a small group of employees.

In most orgs, coaching is seen as a positive thing. There was the odd leader we spoke with that was actively trying to change the perception from negative to positive, but the majority actively use it as a development as well as an engagement tool, particularly given recent social movements, such as #BLM and #MeToo. Many coaching efforts scaled up to address specific audiences.

We’re now seeing leaders take it a step further by looking for inclusive solutions, not just expanding the exclusive solutions. Four of the 9 coaching methods we identified in this research have the potential to be fairly inclusive.

Affordability

As we’ve mentioned, traditional coaching is not the cheapest option for employee development. This is partly because it cannot be scaled, and partly because coaching often leverages external resources, and cost per hour is often between $200 and $600 per hour, depending on the level and experience of the coach.¹³ One org we recently spoke with is spending well over $15M on executive coaching alone.

Affordability continues to be a challenge, but as with scalability, leaders and vendors are finding ways to stretch the coaching budget. Four of the coaching methods discussed in this research fairly cost-effective, either because they rely on internal resources or because they leverage resources already in place.

Figure 2 provides a brief summary of these 3 constraints and how scalable, inclusive, and affordable they are. We use a common red, yellow, green rating to give you a sense for how each stacks up.

Even so, in the 4 months we have been conducting this research, we’ve already seen changes; if you have noticed or are using methods we’re not discussing, or if you have found ways to make them more scalable, inclusive, and affordable, we’d love to hear from you.

Defining success

Finally, leaders implementing coaching initiatives should decide in advance how they will define success. Leaders should understand what criteria they will utilize to determine if they should continue investing, and they should understand the metrics associated with that criteria.

Measuring the success of coaching is immature – both because it has been seen as a confidential relationship and because there has been no central system to gather data.

One thing was clear from the research: coaching measurement is in its infancy. And there are a couple of reasons for that.

First, traditional coaching relies on a confidential relationship between coach and coachee. Professional coaches we talked to held that relationship as almost sacred. What goes on in coaching discussions is akin to therapy sessions. Information is not shared beyond the participants. This desire for confidentiality has kept many orgs from collecting data beyond completion rates and coach evaluations. This is changing.

As orgs standardize their coaching processes, many find it advantageous to also standardize the models used during coaching engagements. Sometimes models are wrapped around 360s or other assessments, and sometimes they’re wrapped around leadership or other frameworks. But the standardization allows orgs to collect information on things like general themes and progress in certain areas. This data at least provides administrators with general information about how coaching is going.

The second reason coaching measurement isn’t super mature is that, until recently, there was no central access point, and therefore no central repository for data about coaching engagements. This is also changing.

As orgs take a more standardized approach to coaching, utilizing similar models, similar metrics, and tech that helps track both, more data is available about general themes, whether or not similar models are used; completion rates can be tracked without surveys or follow up; and coach evaluations can help to maintain a cadre of the most effective coaches. The data is helping to both scale and improve the coaching experience.

All of that said, good data relies on a tenacious employee development team and good feedback mechanisms. It also relies on the desire to actually obtain and analyze the data. Many leaders we spoke with felt no impetus for this final step because it was universally assumed that coaching is a valuable development opportunity, worth the effort and money invested in it.

We asked of every interviewee, “How do you measure the success of the coaching initiative?” Answers varied widely. But some of the most common responses fell into 3 categories:

• Participation / satisfaction
• General coaching themes
• Correlations

Participation / satisfaction

By far, the most common ways coaching is currently being measured is by gauging participation and satisfaction. That is, orgs are measuring how effective coaching is by how many people participated and liked their coaching sessions.

“I know we do everything from the basic level, like how many coaching sessions have there been. And then we have a scale of when somebody has finished a coaching session, for each coaching session, they get a quick assessment that pops up in the tool and says, how was your session?”

– Head of People Development, large software company

This is by no means a bad thing. It gives leaders a sense of how much coaching is being utilized and if adjustments need to be made. It is also understandable, considering the challenges orgs have faced to this point when measuring coaching.

But it should only be a place to start. As more tech is utilized to guide coaching initiatives, more data is available, which can provide richer and more useful data.

General coaching themes

Some of the more data-savvy (and data-rich) org leaders we spoke with are also looking at consolidated data on general coaching themes. General coaching themes help leaders understand what challenges employees face, but they can also help the L&D function (or other talent function) understand where their development initiatives may be missing the mark. For leaders utilizing internal coaches in their initiatives, data that specifies the areas where individual coaches feel confident enough to coach on is also available.

"I actually can see the goals and skills that people are most seeking on, and what goals and skills people are most willing to offer on. And that can translate into the skills that we should think about potentially supporting from a central learning perspective."

– Leadership Coach, Hospitality Company

This data may also be key to the larger skills discussion happening in most orgs. Coaching themes can help leaders understand both the skills they have (from the coaches), and skills they need (from the coachees).

Correlations with business results

Finally, there were a few valiant leaders looking at correlations between their coaching numbers and KPIs important to the rest of the organization. Specifically, leaders told us they were looking at 3 major areas.

Forward-thinking orgs are correlating coaching data against engagement scores, retention, and even performance.

Engagement

Most orgs nowadays conduct an employee engagement survey that includes questions about engagement, development, and other important human matters. Some leaders we spoke to utilized the information from those surveys to correlate against coaching data, particularly where the manager was acting as coach, to understand how the most effective managers addressed these concerns.

"We do an annual employee insight survey, so we do look for clues through the questions that we ask in that survey and they may not be directly called out to coaching, but a subset of those questions give us indication—particularly when you talk about diversity and inclusion, building trust with your supervisor—those kinds of questions help us to understand where we have made an impact and where we have a missed opportunity."

– Director of Global Coaching, Assessments, and Facilitation, (another) tech company

Retention

In light of recent social disruptions, including movements like #BLM and #Metoo, coaching has become an even more important tool for engaging with certain populations. Some orgs are paying more attention to both the coaching initiatives associated with these groups and their retention numbers, to understand how better to meet their needs.

Performance

Finally, some org leaders mentioned that they were actually looking for a change in performance. How this was measured varied. Some orgs track performance scores year over year, looking specifically at those who have received coaching. Others provide 360s or other assessments at the beginning, midway through, and at the end of a coaching engagement to determine performance improvement. Still others rely on manager observation to understand if changes were being made.

"What we actually look for is, has your thinking changed, the way you think, the way you feel, the way you act—are those things changing."

– Global Head of Coaching Center of Expertise at a large healthcare company.

Measurement is unsexy, we understand. But as talent leaders have increasingly more choices for employee development, it’ll become more important to understand which of those are actually impacting the org. Understanding – from the outset – what success looks like and how you’ll measure it can help talent leaders get out ahead of the ask surely to come from senior leadership.

Wrapping Up

At the beginning of this report, we mentioned that coaching is going mainstream. We’ve introduced a lot of ways that is happening: more flexibility in what we mean by coaching, more coaching configurations, more reasons for coaching, and more experimentation.

It’s that last point, the experimentation, that we think has driven a lot of the progress we’ve seen. Leaders have recognized the value that coaching can bring and they have, sometimes through brute force, found ways to make it available to more people. We think this resonates particularly well right now because the world is uncertain. We’re all looking for ways to connect with each other and we’re all looking for direction. Coaching helps us do both.

While we have no crystal ball, we’d bet that we’ll continue to see new iterations and configurations of coaching, and that leaders will continue to push the boundaries of what coaching is. We are excited to see what’s next.

Appendix 1: Research Methodology

We launched our study in the summer of 2021. This report gathers and synthesizes findings from our research efforts, which include:

• A literature review of 60+ articles from business, trade, and popular literature sources
• 1 roundtable with a total of 27 participants
• 16 in-depth interviews with leaders on their experiences and thoughts on coaching

For those looking for specific information that came out of those efforts, you’re in luck: We have a policy of sharing as much information as possible throughout the research process. Please see:

• Coaching Premise: https://redthreadresearch.com/coaching-the-newest-old-way-to-develop-people/
• Coaching Literature Review: https://redthreadresearch.com/coaching-lit-review/
• Coaching Roundtable 1 Readout: https://redthreadresearch.com/coaching-roundtable-readout/
• Coaching Infographic:

And please read our sister report on coaching tech: https://redthreadresearch.com/coaching-tech-landscape-humans-and-robots/

Agendas for boards and CEOs have never been so crowded with talent-related topics—workforce strategies and wellbeing; diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging (DEIB); culture; and, corporate purpose.

Traditionally, many leaders made people decisions based on anecdotal conversations with employees and their guts. The COVID-19 pandemic has shown that this kind of approach can no longer work.

People data-based insights will help C-suite leaders manage their companies more effectively. The question, though, is: What is the role of C-suite leaders in enabling and using those insights? And what can CHROs and PA leaders do to help C-suite leaders leverage people analytics to make better decisions?

With this report, we explore:

• What types of behaviors, approaches, and questions should C-suite leaders use to get better people-related insights?
• What types of behaviors, approaches, and insights should CHROs and people analytics use to support C-suite leaders?
• What types of results might leaders expect of effectively integrating people insights into critical business decisions?

The report includes a wealth of examples, useful insights from practitioners, and lists of do's and don'ts for C-suite, CHRO, and people analytics leaders.

This study is a culmination of 6 months of qualitative research which involved a literature review of more than 60 articles, interviews and conversations with more than 30 people.

Click image below for download.

 

People data-based insights can help C-suite leaders manage their companies more effectively. The question, though, is: What is the role of C-suite leaders in enabling and using those insights? And what can CHROs and PA leaders do to help C-suite leaders leverage people analytics to make better decisions? We have tried to answer these questions, and more, through our recent study on people analytics and the C-suite.

This infographic (click on the image below to get the full version) highlights key insights from our report Unlocking the Hidden C-Suite Superpower: People Analytics.

As always, we’d love your feedback at [email protected]!

Download Research

Why this report, and why now?

We started paying attention to coaching technology well over 2 years ago. At first, it was out of curiosity: we were seeing vendors developing new ways to address a very old learning technique. Earlier this year, we took a look at our vendor database and realized that we had over 45 vendors claiming to provide some sort of coaching functionality.

Coaching technology has exploded. As orgs have developed a larger appetite for coaching, vendors have begun to think through what coaching actually entails and how some or all of those steps can be simplified.

Interestingly, as vendors have thought through what coaching entails, the definition of coaching has also morphed: it is no longer defined only as a 1-to-1 relationship where the coach utilizes tools and a methodology to help the coachee gain actionable insights that can help them perform better. It has expanded in ways that we didn’t imagine when we started this research.

To that end, it’s important to clarify that, in this report at least, we are making no judgments on what coaching actually means. Vendors sell what they believe the market needs; in our conversations with orgs, we also found varied definitions of coaching, as well as varied needs for coaching. So, when a vendor tells us they have coaching functionality, we take them at their word.¹

This report was written to help us, and hopefully you, get a clearer understanding of the vast range of coaching technologies. As such, it answers the following questions:

1. What are the major trends in coaching tech?
2. What does the landscape look like, and what sense can be made of it?
3. Who is playing in this space, and what are common and unique functionalities?
4. How can orgs choose? What criteria should they use to find something that will work for them?

Let’s get started.

Major trends in coaching tech

Indeed, things have changed when it comes to the coaching world. In the last section, we mentioned that the definition of coaching has morphed, and that it is no longer defined solely as a 1-to-1 relationship between 2 humans. Technology is playing a bigger role.

And, as in other industries where tech begins to play a role (e.g., transportation: taxis, Uber and Lyft, self-driving cars, teleporting), things accelerate quickly. In the case of coaching, several things helped with that acceleration, including the pandemic, a greater focus on the employee experience, fear of the Great Resignation, and the promise of the ability to scale something that used to be just for top leaders, so it’s available to more people in the org.

What, exactly has changed when it comes to coaching tech? Our data and briefings with vendors pointed to a few attributes.

More coaching tech

First, there’s just more coaching tech, both in terms of players in the space and revenue being earned. We mentioned that our own vendor database has grown to over 45 vendors saying they have coaching functionality. We are seeing that growth in stand-alone tools as well as in add-on functionality in learning and performance tools.

Additionally, when we asked vendors about their revenue growth in the past 3 years, the majority of them, or 63%, said that their revenue has grown steadily (see Figure 1).

A broader definition of coaching

More organizations are offering more coaching to more employees. Whereas coaching was once reserved for top leadership (or those with severe behavioral challenges), orgs now understand that there are benefits to coaching more broadly.

To accommodate the uptick in demand, coaching tech vendors are thinking about coaching differently. Our briefings and surveys surfaced several flavors of coaching, including:

• Coaching on demand: Employees leverage expertise of an external or internal coach to work on a specific challenge at a specific time
• Managers as coaches: Managers are trained and supported with platforms that can create accountability and discipline around coaching conversations
• Peers as coaches: Peers utilize tech to pair up and participate in guided coaching sessions designed to bring clarity to challenges they may be facing
• Reverse mentoring and coaching: Younger employees are matched with more experienced employees to share viewpoints and insights that can help them lead better
• Coaching circles: Tech helps employees with similar challenges to meet to talk through issues and receive feedback and advice from the group
• AI or machine-delivered coaching: Technology takes the place of a coach, helping employees become aware of certain behaviors and providing insights and data to help correct those behaviors

The coaching tech vendors we examined support a variety of these different coaching configurations. The tech they offer can help orgs to scale coaching, making it more cost-effective and helping leaders make a business case for increased coaching.

Coaching in more areas

Another trend we’re seeing in the coaching space is a broader range of topics offered by coaches and coaching tech. Whereas coaching used to only include performance or business coaching, new subjects are becoming more common. Figure 2 illustrates the topics that coaching tech vendors are currently focusing on.

 

Not surprisingly, coaching follows some of the trends we’re seeing in the people space in general. Business and leadership coaching remain predominant, but wellbeing has crept in, as has Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Belonging (DEIB), both spurred by the pandemic and by the social justice movement.

Coaching on DEIB and wellbeing have both grown, spurred by the pandemic and by the social justice movement.

These new topics also speak to the fact that coaching is being provided as a benefit to individual employees. Health & fitness and financial in particular do not necessarily improve org performance; rather they are being offered to engage employees and help them eliminate stress and avoid burnout.

New things tech can do

Finally, there is more functionality. While earlier coaching tech focused on streamlining tasks associated with coaching (finding and paying coaches, facilitating conversations between coaches and coachees, and matching coaches to coachees), newer tech goes beyond those traditional functions to include aspects of AI, coaching without humans (machine delivery), integrations with work tech, nudges, and absorption of work tech data to make coaching algorithms better. We’ll talk a lot more about functionality in subsequent sections of this report.

AI, machine deliver, integrations with work tech, nudges, and more are changing the way orgs are offering “coaching” to their employees.

A model for thinking about coaching tech

Classifying coaching tech has been one of the most difficult HR tech projects we have ever taken on. Because coaching now has a much broader definition and because we are seeing a lot of new functionality, coming up with a picture that adequately describes what is going on has been a challenge.

That said, in looking at the tech and characterizing how orgs are making decisions about coaching tech, there appear to be 2 major factors driving decisions about coaching.

1. Resources: Are resources available internally to support a coaching effort?
2. Philosophy: Does the org believe that humans are necessary to deliver coaching?

There are many, many other questions that define what type of coaching tech orgs are looking for, which we’ll address in the final section of this report, but the above 2 factors seem to be the primary drivers. If orgs develop clarity about those 2 things, they can narrow down their coaching tech options significantly.

When we plot those 2 factors against each other, we get the 4-square shown in Figure 3 below, which gives us a helpful way of classifying coaching tech solutions.

 

This model divides the coaching tech landscape into 4 distinct quadrants:

1. Quadrant 1: Human coaches, external resources. Coaching tech vendors in this quadrant match external (usually professional) coaches with internal coachees and provide tools and a platform to support the coaching relationship.
2. Quadrant 2: Human coaches, internal resources. Coaching tech vendors in this quadrant match internal coaches with internal coachees and provide tools to support the coaching relationship.
3. Quadrant 3: Machine coaches, internal resources. Coaching tech vendors in this quadrant leverage org-supplied data (often from other work systems) or provide tools to help coachees self-guide to receive insights, nudges, and other aids, often without the involvement of a human coach.
4. Quadrant 4: Machine coaches, external resources. Vendors in this quadrant provide machine-delivered coaching based on their own frameworks or programs and offer up insights, nudges, and other aids as needed.

Obviously, not all vendors fit neatly within one quadrant. Most fall somewhere along each of the axes in the model. Figure3 places them roughly where we think they fall on both axes.

So, for example, CoachHub provides external coaches, and focuses exclusively on delivering coaching through humans. As a result, this vendor falls squarely into the upper right-hand quadrant of the model. Cultivate, on the other hand, uses internal data to drive its algorithms and includes no humans in its coaching, so the company is placed to the far left and bottom of the model.

The next sections are organized around each of these 4 quadrants. For each quadrant, we’ll share some of its characteristics and some of the common functionality. We’ll also share some of the more interesting functionality some of the coaching tech vendors provide. Finally, we’ll look at some of the best use cases for coaching tech in each quadrant.

A caveat: while we classified and identified many, many vendors, we’re sure that we missed some. The next sections highlight what some particular vendors are doing, but are written broadly enough to give you enough information to make good choices about solutions that are not included in our assessment.

Quadrant 1: Human coaches, external resources

The first quadrant (upper right) includes coaching tech that matches external (usually professional) coaches with internal employees and provides a platform for continued interaction between coach and coachee.

 

This, undoubtedly, is the most traditional way to think about coaching—and consequently the tech that supports it. When most people think about tech to help with coaching, they think in terms of external coaches being matched with internal employees. It’s the way coaching has been done for centuries. And it’s probably the simplest and most straightforward of the 4 quadrants.

Common functionality

Coaching tech orgs in this quadrant share a lot of the same functionality. Of course, there are differences, and those differences could make a big difference in how the tech may function in a given company. But understanding what is common to vendors can help you make better purchasing decisions. We discuss some of these points of commonality below.

Platform for communication

One of the main functionalities in almost all coaching tech solutions in this quadrant is provision of a platform—that is, a place for coaching to happen. Platforms offer a place for the coach and employee to meet and a way to document agenda, goals, and topics to be worked on.

Coach matching

The majority of coaching tech solutions in this quadrant also offer a way to match coaches and employees. Solutions falling in this quadrant generally believe that the coach/employee relationship is critical to success; thus, matching is an important functionality. In the solutions we looked at, matching primarily happens in 2 ways:

• Artificial Intelligence (AI). Many coaching tech solutions tout AI matching—utilizing algorithms to find the best coaches based on the employee’s needs and the coach’s expertise. Note: While we didn’t dive too deeply into the AI algorithms of individual coaching tech solutions, we do know that AI is a very buzzy word and apt to be used in many ways. Those looking for solutions should ask some pointed questions about the algorithms and how exactly they function.
• Matching Assessments. Many solution vendors take a more tried-and-true approach to assigning coaches by asking employees exactly what they’re looking for through short assessments, and then matching coaches to them accordingly. As with AI, we encourage additional questions about matching, as well as ability to personalize the questions on which employees and coaches will be mapped.

Competency assessments

One of the beauties of coaching tech is that it can standardize coaching practices across the organization. Many of the solution vendors in this quadrant accomplish that by way of assessments. Assessments run the gamut—from asking a few questions about what you want to focus on to asking for a complete 360° assessment by the coachee, to get a sense of what their development areas are. This information is available to the coach and the coachee so that they can work together to strengthen those areas.

From the org’s perspective, standard assessments and a common development model can unify coaching initiatives and provide a consistent vocabulary, particularly if coaching is being used to get a group of employees (leaders, say) to have similar behaviors. It also provides the possibility of analyzing rolled-up coaching data for all participants.

Coaching tech vendors in this space tended to utilize their own models and data to create these competency assessments.

Data

One of the big promises of coaching tech, which is not unique to this quadrant, is the availability of valuable data that can be used to evaluate the success of the coaching and the progress of the coachee. Until coaching tech was born, most orgs were reliant on self-assessments, satisfaction surveys, or their faith that the coach was doing a bang-up job. Now, almost all coaching vendors offer some sort of metrics for this purpose (although they can be sparse in some areas).

At the very least, orgs are now able to understand coachees’ level of engagement with the coaching initiative and a general sense of how coaches are performing. For many orgs, this is enough, both because it’s likely more than they have had in the past, and because of their concerns about privacy and confidentiality in the coach / coachee relationship. Orgs choosing this kind of tech tend to be less worried about the granularity of the data than in some of the other quadrants we explored.

That said, with some coaching tech solutions, particularly those utilizing standardized models across all orgs, data about topics being worked on could be rolled up to the manager, department, and org levels to give orgs more information about the types of things that were being coached.

Coaching quality

Many of the vendors in this space are also concerned about the quality of their coaches, and have therefore put interventions in place. This usually takes the form of a consistent coach onboarding process, vetting (many mentioned ICF-certified coaches), ongoing training, and quality checks. Because coaching tech keeps tabs on satisfaction data with respect to coaches, it is easier to intervene earlier when things are not going well.

Common coaching tech functionality for Quadrant 1 includes platforms for communication, coach matching, competency assessments, data, and ensured coaching quality.

Things we saw and liked

We found it interesting that coaching tech solutions in this quadrant understand the market and some of the threats to more traditional coaching. Coaching tech solutions that leverage external coaches understand that it is an expensive solution that most orgs are going to reserve for high-potential employees (HiPos) and present and future leaders.

Even so, one of the strengths of coaching tech is its ability to offer coaching to more people in the org. Within this particular quadrant, coaching tech solutions are facing constraints to their ability to attract and retain well-qualified, external coaches; in response, many are creating functionality that helps orgs to scale or show value beyond simplifying the administrative aspects of running a coaching initiative. Some of the features we liked are outlined below.

Alignment with existing leadership initiatives

Pluma (recently acquired by Skillsoft), among others, offers the flexibility to upload an org’s leadership model and customized 360, and provide coaching to leaders with respect to that model. This could be particularly useful in situations where orgs have well-established leadership development programs and frameworks, and want to ensure that any coaching initiative is aligned with them.

Human coaching for specific topics

Many of the coaching tech vendors in this space appear to have recognized new needs in the marketplace and created particular “programs” to address those needs. In an earlier section, we identified several coaching subjects. While the majority of orgs still seek coaching to help with the classic topics of leadership and business growth, many are interested in several new coaching areas.

These new areas, including wellbeing and DEIB, can be slightly more programmatic than the more traditional areas, and can therefore be more easily standardized. This has allowed coaching tech solutions to provide consistent coaching topics and additional resources to help orgs struggling with how to address some of these topics.

For example, CoachHub saw a need for leaders with better Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Belonging (DEIB) skills; it created a framework that can be used to build those skills throughout the org.

Another example is Betterup’s recent foray into wellness and mental health (in fact, if you check out their website, coaching is now de-emphasized as they move into these new topics). Their coaches now include therapists and peak performance experts, with the goal of ensuring that employees receive the individual care they need to be at their best.

Just-in-time or drop-in coaching

Torch.io has worked with clients to create drop-in coaching—opportunities for employees beyond traditional HiPos and leaders to schedule time with professional coaches on an as-needed basis. This time can be used to role play an upcoming situation, discuss career moves, or talk through business challenges.

 

 

Early career coaching

One of the newer applications for coaching is serving those early in their careers. From an individual perspective, an external perspective can be valuable as younger employees consider their first big career decisions. From an org point of view, coaching is increasingly being used as an engagement tool.

One coaching tech solution focusing specifically on early career is The Lighthouse. Lighthouse is a small company that leverages grads from top MBA programs to provide one-off coaching sessions with early-career coachees.

Best used for

In our initial conversations with org leaders, we found that many are looking at several different technologies for different types of initiatives. Based on those conversations, our assessment of the best uses for technology in Quadrant 1, which uses human, external coaches, are:

Ensuring higher-quality coaches with credentials

Many of the tech vendors in this category tout the quality of their coaches; many refer to ICF (International Coaching Federation) certifications and/or years of service. These vendors place a very high value, not only on tech and scaling, but also on ensuring a quality experience.

A human touch

With the pandemic has come a push by many organizations to provide more, not fewer, points of human contact. Vendors within this quadrant also highly prize human interaction (some going so far as to claim that unless coaching involves humans, it’s not actually coaching). For orgs looking for more human touch, vendors in this quadrant may offer the best solution.

Offloading administrative tasks

Before this type of coaching tech existed, many orgs relied either on a binder full of bios of trusted coaches that they then assigned manually, or on programs run by outside consultancies or training firms. This type of coaching tech takes some of the administrative burden out of providing coaching by automating tasks such as matching coach to coachee, or ensuring continued interaction.

Quadrant 2: Human coaches, internal resources

Given that coaching is becoming an increasingly hot topic, it comes as no surprise that organizations are trying to provide the opportunity to as many people as possible. One of the obvious challenges is cost and scalability: offering coaching to everyone can put a fairly hefty dent in development budgets.

Coaching tech in Quadrant 2 addresses this issue by leveraging internal resources. In most cases, this takes the form of leveraging human coaches from among the employee population. Coaching tech solutions in this quadrant also tend to leverage internal or proprietary data, models, and content as well, rather than utilizing standard models provided by coaching tech.

In this quadrant, we also heard more about creating a “coaching culture” or teaching coaching skills more broadly, particularly to managers, rather than relying on traditional coaching relationships.

Interestingly, one of the challenges associated with creating a coaching tech landscape was the breadth of ways that vendors describe internal coaching. True, many stick to the traditional description of coaching: discussions between 2 individuals. However, we saw the most diversity in both offerings and users in this quadrant. This quadrant was also where most mentoring vendors make their appearance.²

Technology that falls within this quadrant is geared mainly toward either setting up an internal coaching program (without the use of external coaches), or creating a learning culture—usually by encouraging manager / employee development discussions. In our investigation of these vendors, we found they had 3 major flavors:

• Coaching platforms, many of the same that offered external coaching services, configured to utilize internal resources instead of external coaches
• Mentoring platforms that provide a way for continuous feedback and direction from mentors to be leveraged for coaching as well
• Dashboards in skills, mobility, and learning platforms that provide information to managers about how employees are performing so that they can better coach them

 

You may have noticed that our Coaching Tech Landscape shows several coaching tech solutions that hover between Quadrant 1 and Quadrant 2. These solutions have platforms that are configurable enough to be used to access either external coaches or internal coaches.

Common functionality

Defining common functionality in this quadrant is difficult because of the broad definitions of coaching used by the quadrant’s vendors. Aside from traditional coaching relationship (1-to-1 conversations where a formal coach asks exploratory and discovery questions of the coachee), we also observed several other types of coaching relationships, including peer coaching, manager coaching, coaching circles, drop-in coaching or just-in-time coaching, and reverse mentoring.

Several functionalities appear to be fairly standard across a number of the coaching tech solutions.

Matching internal coaches with internal coachees

For coaching tech solutions that focus on the 1-to-1 relationship between coaches and coachees, we saw the same sorts of functionality that we found in Quadrant 1. This is not surprising, since many of the players from Quadrant 1 can configure their solution to work for internal coaching pools, which can be helpful to orgs that want to move between external and internal coaches.

Coaching tech solutions in this quadrant generally match internal coaches and coachees in 2 ways: AI and matching assessments. We saw little difference in matching functionality as it was applied to either internal or external coaches; the only difference appears to be the coaching pool.

Platform for ongoing engagement

As in Quadrant 1, most vendors focusing on the 1-to-1 relationship between coaches and coachees also provide a platform for continued communication and discussion.

More integration, more nudges

Because of the internal focus and their broader definition of coaching, vendors playing in this quadrant are more likely to integrate with existing systems. Many identify integrations with work technologies (mainly Slack and Teams) to help coachees stay on track and check in regularly.

There are also vendors in this quadrant that provide more than just coaching tech (i.e., they’re a learning or performance tech that also does some coaching), and so more integrations to additional resources, assessments, learning platforms, and the like are also more common.

Access to additional resources

Many of the vendors in this quadrant provide access to additional resources or micro-learnings in order to enhance the coachee experience. This is not surprising, given that many of these are learning platforms with a coaching component; we do however, like the idea of extending the learning beyond the in-person engagement.

Several vendors also have onboard coaching resources as well, to provide training or help to amateur or manager coaches

Common functionality for many of the coaching tech vendors in Quadrant 2 includes matching internal coaches with internal coachees, platform for ongoing engagement, more integration, more nudges, and access to additional, usually internal, resources.

Things we saw and liked

Coaching built into other initiatives / Asynchronous coaching

Both Novoed and Intrepid offer coaching as a part of their cohort learning platforms. Both coaching tech solutions include video exercises with offline feedback, scheduling, and group coaching in their platforms.

Novoed provides a Coach’s Dashboard so that coaches can understand where each of the coachees in the cohort are and identify needs.

Figure 7: Novoed’s Coach dashboard | Source: Novoed, 2021

Depending on the program and need, Intrepid enables coaches to provide feedback throughout and are available to schedule 1-to-1 engagements with employees who want a little extra help or advice.

Figure 8: Intrepid's Rubric page | Source: Intrepid, 2021

Asynchronous coaching is used quite a bit in sales or other industries where the practice and delivery of certain skills is important. This technology allows employees to record themselves performing a task (a sales pitch, for example) and then receive video feedback based on a predetermined rubric.

Rehearsal offers an asynchronous coaching tool as its main functionality. It allows orgs to set exercises (sales is a big use case), then allow people to practice as many times as they would like with video, submit the video, and receive feedback from a coach who refers to a rubric. If orgs want, they can also allow other coachees to view, judge, and even upvote video practices.

Bongo (which, incidentally, doesn’t sell to end customers but is instead incorporated into other coaching tech solutions), also enables asynchronous coaching through video and rubrics.

Manager-as-coach dashboards

There are also a number of products that focus on providing information to managers so that they can better support their employees.

Degreed’s Skills Coach, for example, provides a manager dashboard that summarizes a team’s skills, as well as providing data on each individual, so that managers can plan the coaching for both the team as a whole and individuals.

 

Axonify and Qstream, both of which focus on front line workers, are considered learning tech but offer dashboards to give managers a sense of what employees are focusing on and where they may need individual coaching.

And Bridge, recently separated from parent company  Instructure, is considered both a learning and performance tool. It was also built with manager-as-coach in mind. It offers data visible to managers to help them provide better feedback and guidance about development and performance, and a platform for ongoing discussions. Bridge also offers a timeline of activity and a space for weekly check-ins to enable managers to act as coaches.

 

We are big fans of providing managers as much information as possible when they’re coaching employees. These dashboards provide employee development and skills data to managers, which can help them tailor feedback and guidance for further development or better performance.

Focus on DEIB

Many vendors spoke of the ability of orgs to use their tools to further DEIB efforts; many had stories about utilizing their platforms to further coaching and mentoring efforts among specific populations. Chronus was one vendor that stood out here—they pay specific attention to their matching algorithm to encourage more inclusive matching; they also provide a dashboard geared toward increasing diversity in mentoring relationships and are beginning to offer insights associated with industry DEIB benchmarks to help orgs make better decisions.

Peer coaching functionality

With the broader definition of coaching comes additional functionality. Imperative’s coaching tool, for example, provides a platform and guided discussions to help managers coach each other peer-to-peer. The platform and structure ensure that managers adhere to coaching principles (open-ended questions, for example) and that there is a place and prompts to continue conversations. Pairing managers together helps them reflect on how they perform and what they can do better.

Figure 11: Imperative’s manager peer-to-peer coaching tool | Source: Imperative, 2021

Best used for

Orgs utilizing coaching tech vendors in this quadrant generally have 1 of 3 goals for their engagement.

Scaling coaching to more people

Orgs that use the coaching tech solutions in this quadrant are interested in providing a human coaching experience to their employees, but want to leverage internal coaches in order to do that. The solutions in this space are enhancing the skills of existing resources and providing guardrails or guidance so there is more structure and consistency across the coaching experience.

Creating a coaching culture

This type of technology is also being used to help orgs build a coaching culture. In the wake of the pandemic, many orgs have realized (again) that their managers are not as strong as they could be. Many of these solutions have been implemented to give managers support and guidance around career coaching and difficult conversations.

Upskilling and supporting managers

The pandemic and related moves to hybrid and remote work settings have caused orgs to reevaluate the quality of interactions between employees and their managers. In many cases, managers are falling short. Fortunately, orgs are also recognizing that the shortfall isn’t due to lack of trying or desire, but rather a lack of skills and support. Many coaching tech solutions in this space are geared toward answering this need.

Quadrant 3: Machine coaches, internal resources

The bottom half of the coaching tech landscape focuses on solutions that mainly rely on technology or machines to deliver coaching. These tech solutions use information to drive prompts and help coachees think through how they’re doing and what they can do to improve.

The promise of AI or machine coaches is generally 3-fold:

• It offers a fairly inexpensive and unlimited way to scale coaching to more employees
• It solves one of the major challenges of coaching – consistent check in and feedback – that is difficult if relying only on the humans.
• It offers a means of standardizing data – currently one very big hole in the world of coaching tech

In this quadrant, we start to see a departure from what is considered traditional coaching. Not only do we see more automated coaching systems that don’t rely on the humans (or augment what the humans are doing), but we also see more integration and interaction with performance and learning tech.

In fact, as we look across our HR tech research over the past 5 years we’re seeing much more overlap between performance, learning, and engagement platforms. Many offer consistent follow up, spreading learning over time, identifying ways to personalize experiences, and nudges for regular conversations with managers. These functionalities do overlap with what coaching has come to mean, so they likely have a legitimate claim to the therm “coaching tech”.

This does mean, however, that leaders need to be extra vigilant and ask lots of questions about the nature of the “coaching” offered. We mention this in the section dedicated to Quadrant 3, but this is also an important point for Quadrant 4. Do your homework. Ask lots of follow up questions (see the final section of this paper). We’re in new territory here.

We also think the use of machines that feed off internal data and provide valuable insights to employees will continue to grow as data gets better and it becomes more acceptable to use coaching data as employee development data.

 

Coaching tech solutions in this quadrant rely heavily on internal data and resources. They often absorb information from other work tech to generate insights that are delivered directly to employees. They also often point to internal resources (via a learning platform, for example) that can augment feedback or insights.

Delivering this information directly to employees—sans manager or human coach—can sometimes take the sting out of feedback and provide data in a way that can be more easily absorbed by the individual.

As with Quadrant 2, we ran across several learning tech solutions that are also targeting coaching clients. As several of them do have coaching functionalities, we have included those that tell us they’re coaching tech, even if their main functionality is L&D tech.

Common functionality

Common functionality in this quadrant was a little harder to identify. From the survey filled out by coaching tech solutions, however, 3 common areas surfaced.

Digital or AI coach – nudges

Common to this group of technologies was that all of them have a digital component and do not require a human. Some vendors call this functionality a “coach on the shoulder” that provides information when it is most likely to be absorbed and used.

Most tech solutions provide this information through nudges—small insights or reminders to coachees, based on their desired behavior changes.

Integration with work tech

Most of the vendors in this group integrate in some way with work technology. This is used for both pushing and nudging, and to gather data on performance to help the tool get smarter, which makes for better insights. Common integrations are Slack, Teams, email clients (Google, Outlook, etc.).

Data and Information pushed down

Tech solutions in this quadrant tend to push information down to the individual rather than delivering it through a manager or coach. We saw a lot of dashboards and insights summaries as a part of these solutions, making the individual—the person most motivated and able to act—responsible and empowered to do so.

The majority of coaching vendors in this quadrant say their solution:

• Provides data and information to coachees to help them understand their own progress
• Rolls up data to manager, function, organization levels, etc. to help the org better understand challenges and areas of focus

Because it is integrated with existing work and HR tech, data associated with these types of coaching tools tends to be better and slightly more granular. We observed that these tools have a greater ability to roll up results and provide individuals with progress data than solutions in either Quadrant 1 or Quadrant 2.

Common functionality in Quadrant 3 includes digital or AI coaches and nudges, more integration with work tech, and data being pushed down and provided to employees (rather than their managers).

Things we saw and liked

As we mentioned earlier, the bottom half of the coaching landscape is pretty new. As AI, machine learning, data, and comfort with sharing data about coaching gets better, we expect a lot of growth. Some of the differentiators that showed up in this quadrant include the following.

Team coaching

In most learning tech we have seen in the past few years, nudging has been used mainly as a way to help employees follow up on learning initiatives. Within this quadrant, nudging is being used in a much more sophisticated manner.

Humu, for example, uses nudges to help teams improve. After understanding the goals of the team and how they’re working toward them, Humu utilizes a series of actionable nudges that promote continuous improvement. Nudges are personalized to the individual team member, but take into account the team and goals, so that teams can help each other execute.

Because nudges happen regularly, teams have opportunities to reflect and respond, allowing the tool to gather and integrate more data to better target nudges.

Digital coaching to optimize live coaching sessions

We also ran across tools that utilized machine delivery and AI to simplify the human coaching element. Sparkus, for example, has an onboarding and self-coaching component that requires those interested in having a coach to think through what they want to accomplish and what help they need in advance. This prework has a couple of benefits.

First, it helps orgs understand the level of commitment of coachees; since they are not assigned a coach until they finish the self-coaching component, orgs can quickly understand who is serious about the experience and who isn’t. Second, it helps to minimize the amount of live coaching needed. One challenge many orgs have is understanding when a coaching engagement is finished.

The self-coaching component helps the coachee and the org to bookend the human coaching engagement, optimizing the number of sessions with a live coach. This helps organizations scale because they are able to offer a finite number of coaching sessions to more individuals.

 

AR/VR

While there aren’t many, we also ran across a couple of vendors that leverage augmented / virtual reality to help with coaching. Mursion, likely the most well-known tool in this space, provides an immersive coaching experience. Coachees complete a simulation where they need to handle a difficult conversation (our demo experience was about creating a safe place for employees with very different opinions to discuss whether a woman should be promoted).

 

Mursion utilizes a combination of technology and real players (actors) on the back end to give an accurate simulation. While the experience from the user side is slightly animated, coachees have the opportunity to read body language, respond to tone, and evaluate all players in the scenario. It also provides a deeper experience than coachees can get with a static, linear role play, and accounts for some of the current shortfalls associated with tech simulations and AI.

Coaches on the shoulder

Cultivate is a great example of a tool that absorbs data from other systems—in this case, email—and provides feedback to managers about how they are communicating with their team members. It uses a combination of data and insights to make managers aware of behaviors and suggest ways to change them. For example, a manager may get a prompt telling her that she is sending less than 5% of emails to her team after work hours—which is good—but that prompt may also identify the individuals to whom she is sending after-hours emails.

Cultivate also offers ideas that can be tried immediately; in this case, onboard learning snippets can give the manager information on improving communication habits, adjusting priorities, or simply delaying sending messages until business hours.

 

Because the tool is integrated with a particular manager’s communication tech, the insights as well as the feedback are personalized. Because the coaching is integrated into the flow of work, managers are more likely to be able to use that feedback immediately.

Emplay is another coach-on-the-shoulder type tool. While its current strength is in sales, it is also branching into manager training. Emplay has the philosophy that successful coaching is a combination of sharing the right information and instilling discipline.

 

Emplay provides coaching in 4 areas: First, it can surface experts within the organization based on the experts’ assignment and data recommendations. It can also use conversational tech to ask questions that prompt coachees to reflect and find answers to their own questions. Third, Emplay surfaces behavior patterns in salespeople that can provide insights that can help them close deals faster; finally, Emplay can absorb long-form content and then utilize it to respond to queries via Teams and Slack. Emplay also creates dashboards and provides access to both manager and coachee for more insightful discussions.

Best used for

Because the tech falling in this quadrant is not traditional, utilizing this type of tech requires a non-traditional mindset. While coaching of this type will likely never fully replace human-delivered coaching, it does provide some unique opportunities that have yet to be solved by human coaches. We see 3 major use cases.

In-the-moment awareness for creating new behaviors

One of the promises of machine-delivered coaching tech is the ability to insert coaching opportunities into the work itself. Many of the tools in this quadrant operate on of the assumption that making people aware of their behaviors is the first step in helping them to modify their own behaviors.

Support of other initiatives

Because of its ability to provide in-the-moment data and insights, this type of technology may be very well suited to reinforce other types of learning, performance, or change initiatives. For example, once information about behavior has been shared explicitly (manager shortcomings, for example), a tool from this quadrant may be very helpful in drawing attention to unconscious behaviors in the work flow.

This type of coaching tech may also be helpful in providing common language and expectations for initiatives such as DEIB and extending the useful life of initiatives; regular reminders or opportunities to practice can reinforce principles learned earlier and build skills for using that new knowledge in the context of work.

Scalability

Finally, as with every other quadrant, one of the primary purposes of these tools is to scale. Machine-delivered coaching, while not as personal as human-delivered coaching, is infinitely scalable and fairly inexpensive. Organizations looking to provide something may be able to start here.

That said, machine-based coaching, particularly in this quadrant, does not provide the human touch and may not elicit the positive reactions or engagement of employees whose org invests in a real live coach.

Quadrant 4: Machine coaches, external resources

As with the vendors in Quadrant 3, those in Quadrant 4 rely heavily on machines for delivery of coaching. However, they also utilize external resources—meaning coaching insights are based on external data, models, usually proprietary, and additional content that can be used by coachees for extra growth.

 

Orgs taking advantage of coaching tech solutions in this quadrant are generally looking for a solution that scales very easily and has some programmatic aspect. As this type of coaching tech generally uses proprietary models and resources, it can be seen as more of a turnkey solution than coaching tech in some of the other quadrants.

Common functionalities

The common functionalities in this quadrant are not surprising: machine delivery, and the provision and consumption of data for the purposes of creating insights. We detail some of them below.

Digital or AI coach

Most of the technologies in this section pride themselves on providing insights to coachees with little or no involvement of a human. Digital or AI coaches work with existing data in organizations to provide those insights in ways and at times that can be most impactful to coachees. They may come via Slack, Teams, email, or other systems that are already used for work.

This quadrant distinguishes itself from the other quadrants by the fact that almost all of the tech in this quadrant uses humans to augment the tech, not the other way around.

Roll up data

As we mentioned above, one of the benefits of utilizing the same models and having access to more automated data is that it is easier to roll data up. A characteristic of many of these vendors was the ability to roll up data to the manager, function, and organization level, to help the org better understand the challenges and areas of focus.

Integration with HR systems

Vendors in this quadrant also integrate more readily with the HR systems that are already being used in an org. Because they are often using standardized models and data to drive insights, it may be easier for these coaching tech vendors to also standardize their integrations. In some cases, they may also be key to the functioning of their solution. We think this may be in its infancy as well – and there are privacy and ethics concerns that must be addressed – but linking coaching in with other HR systems, such as performance management, can help orgs tie coaching to broader goals.

Things we saw and liked

As with the other quadrants, there were several ideas or functionality provided by vendors that we found interesting.

Focus on wellbeing

meQuillibrium was one of the few vendors we spoke to whose solution provides coaching on well-being. meQuillibrium’s tool starts with an assessment based on their internal research. From there, coachees receive a personalized resilience program based on their assessment of how they deal with stress.

meQuillibrium provides data, feedback, nudges, activities, and content to help coachees understand what they need and then take care of themselves.

 

Listening – AI speech coaching

Orai is one example of a AI speech coach that listens to the coachee as they speak and then provides feedback on pace, tone, and filler words. It has prompts for the coachee to practice extemporaneous speaking, a prepared speech, or a presentation. While it’s not perfect, we had fun trying this out. We found that it gave some great feedback on filler words and speed (2 of our biggest challenges).

Orai is a good example of where we see this quadrant going: humans were nowhere in sight; the tech leveraged natural language processing (NLP) and AI to provide actionable feedback and insights, and there were daily prompts over a period of time for continued improvement.

 

Programmatic coaching augmented by group coaching

Pilot is a perfect example of a tech that utilizes humans to augment the machine coaching. Pilot focuses on managers and has utilized research and years of experience to identify the biggest challenges to managers. Its program walks managers through information, nudges, and activities to help them practice using new knowledge and skills online. It then augments this learning with planned group coaching events, where all coachees in a cohort join a call to receive extra instruction and get their questions answered.

Best used for

Coaching tech in this quadrant is probably the most experimental; several of the tools acted more like guided learning for the time being, but we see a lot of potential in this space. As AI and natural language processing (NLP) get better, we see the current coaching tech—and the possibilities for new coaching tech—getting better.

Orgs experimenting with some of these tools likely do so for 1 of 3 reasons.

Scalability

Because few, if any, humans are involved, tools in this space are usually infinitely scalable. It generally costs just a few dollars to add another user to this type of tool, compared to the hundreds or thousands of dollars it would take to add a user to a tech that uses human coaches.

Orgs looking for something that will meet immediate needs, or even act as a stopgap, may have success using some of the tools we’ve discussed.

Standardization

Orgs looking for standard off-the-shelf models for leadership, wellness, or other subject-matter coaching may find what they need in coaching tech within this quadrant.

Additionally, because vendors in this quadrant leverage the same model and the same resources across all users, data can be standardized and leveraged. With standardized data, these vendors will likely have an easier time improving the tool, its nudges, and its AI than those vendors that rely on human input.

Experimentation

Coaching tech in this quadrant is generally low risk. Because of that low risk, orgs that want to experiment with coaching, or more particularly machine coaching, might want to start here. Since the majority of tech here use their own models and there is not much on- or off-boarding cost, orgs may want to give a few technologies a try as they firm up their philosophy on coaching in general.

Choosing the right coaching tech for your organization

As with all of our tech reports, we try very hard not to make decisions for orgs or guide orgs toward particular solutions. We don’t give top 10 lists or indicate that one tech is better than another because, in all honesty, it entirely depends. Context matters. Culture matters. Goals of the initiative matter. What works for one org may not work at all for another. You can’t cheat off your neighbor.

In this final section, we provide some help to those looking for the right coaching tech for their orgs. We are hopeful that the 4-square model introduced earlier can help narrow down the choices at a high level. However, as we explored the tech, we found ourselves asking deeper questions to completely understand the solution, what it could offer orgs, and in what context it would be most appropriate. Even with the 4-square chart, orgs will need to be thoughtful about their own unique needs and their choice of a vendor to meet them.

The following sections outline 3 fairly general steps to take when looking for coaching tech.

1.     Define your purpose

The very first step in deciding which tech is going to work best for your org is to consider the goals of the coaching initiative. Different goals may require different tech.

For example, consider the following vignettes:

1. You are trying to simplify the process of finding and assigning coaches. Right now, your org has to continuously vet coaches and then add them to a binder (yes, one of those things that holds papers), and then contract with each one separately. Coaching tech will help you to simplify the system you already have in place and ensure a level of quality you don’t have right now.
2. Coaching in your org is seen as a coveted developmental experience. Since COVID, there have been fewer opportunities to provide rich, “special” employee development to HiPos and future leaders. You’re looking for a coaching tech that can help you scale. Your goal is to ensure that coaching is still seen as a premier experience, but with a lower cost point and wider availability.
3. Your org has recently been acquired and you find yourself working with the org development team from the acquiring company to build common ground and standardize management practices. You need to offer some sort of education / change management support / coaching to all employees who are manager level and above. You want to provide a low-cost, yet somewhat personalized experience that can provide insights to those managers and help them develop a shared vocabulary and understanding of management practice.
4. You’re trying to create a coaching culture. Rather than looking at coaching as something that only certain individuals get, you want to create a culture where peers can coach peers and managers can coach employees. You know that consistency and discipline are the keys to making this happen, so you’re looking for a tech that can help provide the necessary structure.

Tech appropriate for one of these scenarios may very likely not be appropriate for one of the others. The goal matters. Coaching tech, just like any other learning tech, has to fit the situation and the ultimate desired outcome.

It’s important for leaders to understand the purpose for their coaching initiative – it can greatly affect the type of coaching tech solution they should choose.

Orgs may also find themselves in situations where they have more than one purpose at any given time. Unfortunately, we found no single coaching tech that can meet all of the different coaching needs an org may have. Orgs may need to choose 2 or 3 to serve the needs of different coaching initiatives.

2.     Choose a quadrant

We hope that the major themes with coaching tech that we’ve described so far will help you narrow down the search for your particular initiative. To determine which quadrant you may want to consider exploring further, ask yourself a few questions:

• Human vs. machine?
• Internal vs. external resources?
• Scalability?
• Control?

Figure 20 provides the bones of the Coaching Tech Landscape. The double-ended arrows represent the 4 questions posed above and can guide you toward the quadrant you should be considering, depending on where you fall on each line, and we provide more detail about each question below.

Human vs. machine?

Do you understand your org’s tolerance (or acceptance) of tech? In some organizations, coaching is seen as ONLY a human activity, while in others, scaling with tech is viable and jives well with the culture. Understanding where your org lies on that spectrum can help to determine which quadrant you should be looking at. Vendors in the upper part of the Coaching Tech Landscape model rely more on human coaches, while those in lower part rely on machine-delivery coaches.

Internal vs. external resources?

Do you have the resources to launch the coaching initiative internally, or will you need external resources? When you consider resources, think not only about humans, but about models, data or benchmarks, and content as well. Vendors on the left-hand side of the Coaching Tech Landscape tend to use internal resources, while those on the right rely on external ones.

Scalability?

How broad is the reach of the coaching initiative? Will it affect only a small cohort of employees, or is your goal to make coaching widely available? Machine-delivery coaching tools are much more scalable than human coaches.

Control?

Does your coaching initiative require that all coachees are coached using the same model or adhere to the same leadership traits? Do you want to determine what data and content is used, or are you looking for a vendor that will provide data and benchmarks, coaches, and models? Vendors on the left-hand side of the Coaching Tech Landscape tend to offer more control to the org.

3.     Vet, vet, vet

News flash: Vendors can’t or don’t always do what they say they can do. Many of the orgs we have talked to about their use of coaching tech have been disenchanted by the difference between what they thought (or were told) the tech could do and how it actually worked in the context of their orgs.

While there is absolutely no guarantee ever, and while there is much to do inside the organization as well to make sure the tech integrates well with other systems and processes, we’re very big proponents of vetting vendors to get the one(s) that make success the easiest. We spend a good one-third of our professional lives talking to vendors, and almost all of them will tell you that we ask an obnoxious number of questions. So should you.

The best advice we have for you? Ask lots and lots and lots of questions.

The following table identifies several questions that you may want to ask coaching tech vendors. While the list is clearly not exhaustive, we provide a set of questions that apply to any vendor, and then include several questions more specific to each quadrant. This list is by no means exhaustive. Understanding your goals for coaching tech will help you to identify others.

In addition to quadrant-specific questions, those looking for coaching tech should also be concerned about the health of the companies they’re vetting. As a part of our Learning Tech Ecosystem research, leaders identified 5 things they look at when determining viability of vendors.

1. Similar challenges. Vendors can refer potential customers to clients who have solved similar challenges using the vendor’s technology.
2. Confidence of investors. While not always completely accurate, several leaders told us that they used the market to help them vet vendors. Understanding where startups were in the funding process gave them hints about the long-term viability of those vendors.
3. Robust & innovative roadmap. Vendors should be able to speak confidently to their roadmap, and learning leaders should ask for it. Understanding the roadmap helps learning leaders to understand if the technology is moving in parallel with their organizational needs and enables them to assess the vendor’s innovation and ability to respond to the market.
4. Longevity in the market. Leaders we spoke to were wary of very young vendors, worrying about their long-term viability. That said, some of the more forward-thinking leaders were also wary of vendors who have been in the market too long—worrying about their ability to react and be innovative.
5. Evidence of partnering. Many leaders also mentioned using vendors as an extension of their team and a way to push forward and adopt new ideas. They look for evidence of partnering and problem-solving, not just providing software or content. As organizations continue to adopt an ecosystem point of view, it is getting more important to not just vet the tech, but also vet the vendors. Learning leaders should look for those who go beyond just providing services and can proactively help to solve problems.³

Wrapping it up

Exploring coaching tech and identifying a model to help leaders make sense of the space has been a pretty wild ride. We started out with some assumptions, all of which were blown to hell by the 3rd briefing. That said, however, we’re excited about this space.

Why? As with other areas on HR tech, the coaching tech space seems to be reinventing itself – which is remarkable given that the coaching tech space isn’t very old to begin with. We like that many of these vendors are experimenting – not just with what tech can automate from old models, but what new tech can do that has never been done before. They are, in essence, rethinking the very idea of what coaching is and how it can affect the largest numbe of people in the org.

In fact, as we have interviewed leaders for our sister report on coaching initiatives, we can safely say that coaching is one area where the tech vendors are ahead of orgs in how they’re thinking and innovating. We imagine that coaching tech vendors will continue to push orgs to think differently about coaching and we’re looking forward to seeing how that plays out.

In 2020, due to the COVID-19 pandemic and the social justice movements, people analytics had an unexpected opportunity to shine. Technology played a more important role than before as people analytics team looked for ways to scale and provide deeper insights to leaders on their workforce, the majority of whom were working remotely. Our goal is to help people analytics leaders succeed in that endeavor and prepare for 2021.

Through this research, we wanted to understand:

• How did the people analytics tech vendor market change in 2020?
• What are the newest capabilities leaders need to know about?
• What should leaders be thinking about when making (or expanding) a people analytics tech investment?

This study is a culmination of nearly a year of qualitative and quantitative research, that included an online poll, a vendor survey, a customer poll, and over 40 vendor briefings and demos. This flipbook highlights the changes and trends from this year, the different capabilities offered by the vendors, and the questions potential technology buyers should consider before making or expanding their tech investments. We also suggest readers check our interactive, evergreen people analytics tech tool, for current vendor information.

Key Takeaways

1. Forward-thinking L&D functions make the chaos of learning content work for their orgs. Being overwhelmed by the surging quantities, types, and sources of learning content is yesterday’s news—but still today’s problem. Learning leaders are embracing the chaos and moving from providing content to enabling it, with an eye toward making more content available to all employees.
2. Learning leaders should ask 2 questions about learning content: 1) Is it specific to the org? 2) How long is its shelf life (How durable is it)? Thinking in these 2 dimensions—specificity and durability—can help L&D functions clarify their learning content strategy and priorities.
3. We developed a new model for learning content. From our conversations with forward-thinking learning leaders, we identified a model that breaks learning content into 4 categories (defined by the 2 dimensions of specificity and durability). This model can form the foundation of a learning content strategy that’s clear on priorities, roles & responsibilities, and areas of focus.
4. There are distinct actions L&D functions can and should take to improve their learning content strategies—and those actions change based on the 4-category model of learning content introduced in this report. We provide some suggestions for immediate and longer-term actions to take, as well as examples of real orgs implementing these ideas, to help learning leaders organize the chaos and better manage learning content overall.

Why Talk About Learning Content Now?

We’ve been witnessing rapid growth in the amount of learning content available to employees. This growth started decades ago, but it’s recently turned from a trickle to a flood. There’s more learning content everywhere—inside and outside orgs; online and offline; on desktops and mobile devices; and in learning systems, shared folders, browsers, email, and chat platforms. Is it any wonder that employees are overwhelmed and exhausted by the sheer volume of all that’s available?¹

Employees are overwhelmed and exhausted by the amount of learning content.

Employees feel like they’re drowning—and it’s L&D’s job to help them find and consume the content that builds skills and drives outcomes that matter to the business . To do this, L&D functions need well-crafted learning content strategies that support org learning and business strategies.

A learning content strategy should help L&D functions answer questions like:

• How will we decide what learning content to bring into the org?
• How will we identify—and help employees identify—learning content that’ll support our business and learning strategies?
• How and when will learning content be updated? By whom?
• How will we make the right learning content easily available to employees?
• What can we do immediately and in the longer term to improve employees’ ability to find and consume the learning content they need?

In this study—which included a lit review, roundtable, and interviews—we explored these questions. Through this research, we sought to identify the leading practices that orgs are using to help employees sift through the volume of learning content to find what’s right for them, when they need it.

L&D functions need well-crafted learning content strategies that support org learning and business strategies.

In the next section, we introduce the trends we uncovered as part of this study.

What’s Happening in Learning Content?

In the course of this research, we identified 4 trends in learning content that are helping shape the learning content strategies of forward-thinking orgs:

1. More types and sources of learning content
2. More enabling, less pushing of learning content by L&D functions
3. More (and better) use of skills data to inform learning content priorities
4. More access for all employees

In the following sections, we take a brief look at these 4 trends.

More types & sources of learning content

Not only is there more learning content in more places—but there are more types of content created by a wider variety of authors. Learning content used to be primarily created and controlled by L&D functions. Now, however, employees have access to:

• L&D function-created content
• Learning content created by subject-matter experts (SMEs)
• Company reports, policies, strategy docs, etc.
• Vendor-created learning content (custom or off the shelf)
• YouTube and other social media content
• Podcasts
• Conference notes, presentations, and videos
• Trade- or industry-specific content
• Learning content libraries (LinkedIn Learning, Udemy for Business, etc.)
• Subscriptions to learning content aggregators
• The entire internet

There’s not only more volume of content—there’s more types of content, in more places, created by a wider variety of authors.

And we know that’s not an exhaustive list.

The incredible volume, variety, and breadth of the learning content that’s available—over much of which L&D functions have limited control—complicate things for learning leaders and for employees.

Through our research, though, we found that learning leaders who’ve given this some thought don’t try to control the chaos. Instead, they embrace it—or, at least, they try to work with the reality that learning content is already complicated, and it’s only going to get bigger and more complex over time.

L&D functions can create systems, processes, and policies that help employees navigate the chaos of learning content.

Savvy learning leaders think about how to create systems, processes, and policies that help orgs and employees navigate through the chaos—rather than trying to tame the chaos itself (because that’s not gonna happen).

One learning leader noted:

“Learning functions need to recognize we never owned learning content in the first place, and we certainly don’t now. We need to embrace the chaos.”

Nick Halder, Senior Director of Talent, Snow Software

More enabling, less pushing by L&D functions

Given the increasing amount and variety of learning content out there, the move toward personalized development experiences, and the sheer variety of people in most orgs, it’s almost impossible for L&D functions to push the right content to the right people at the right time in the right format—all the time. There’s also a growing recognition that often the employee knows best—or at least has a good sense of—what they need to learn.

Learning leaders are thinking about how to enable employees to navigate to the right content themselves, rather than pushing content to employees.

Instead of trying to push learning content, L&D functions are thinking about how to enable employees to navigate to the right content themselves—by giving guidance and context about, for example, the org’s strategy and direction, skills that may be needed in the future, and how learning content is organized in the company. This guidance and context can create conditions that enable employees to find and consume learning content when and how they like, in ways that align with their needs and org goals.

More (& better) use of skills data to inform learning content priorities

Learning leaders we talked to noted that, in the past, L&D functions have sometimes pushed out learning content that wasn’t relevant or helpful to employees. These learning leaders see information about the skills employees and orgs need as a potential solution:

“Without insight into what skills are in demand and what skills people have, L&D tends to focus on the learning content we think people need. That’s rarely an effective approach.”

Participant, “New Trends in Learning Content & Content Management” Roundtable

Forward-thinking orgs are using information about the skills their workforce has and the skills it’ll need in the future to decide what learning content to prioritize. Learning leaders are making investments in learning content that can help close critical skills gaps.

Skills info can help orgs better understand what learning content to prioritize and invest in.

More access for all employees

In the last year or so, learning leaders have started taking a much closer look at how accessible learning content really is in their orgs: They’re recognizing the importance of making learning content more widely available to close skills gaps—and to help the business stay agile, responsive, and competitive.²

Three ways learning leaders can improve access include:

• Removing artificial barriers. Sometimes orgs give employees access to learning content on a “need-to-know” basis. But this logic creates unnecessary boundaries that could be removed unless they’re strategically justified—for example, intellectual property, safety / security, cost, or some other significant reason.
• Making learning content more discoverable. Sometimes great learning content is hidden in pockets or silos within the company. Orgs can find ways of making learning content easier to discover by implementing organization standards and really good search capabilities. They can also create a culture of discovery by removing unnecessary passwords and encouraging employees to poke around.
• Making learning content accessible on mobile. Learning content doesn’t just live on desktops anymore. Employees, particularly frontline workers, need access on their phones. This often means rethinking accessibility to LMSs or LXPs, as well as thinking mobile-first when creating new learning content.

Forward-thinking orgs are exploring ways to make learning content transparent, accessible, and appealing to all employees.

In brief

These 4 trends are currently shaping the learning content environment. In this research, we sought to understand how learning leaders are navigating these trends—and how these trends affect their goals, focus areas, challenges, and strategies for learning content.

We developed a learning content model that can help orgs think through their learning content strategies.

This inquiry resulted in a model that can help orgs think through their learning content strategies and make better decisions about where L&D functions should focus their time and resources. The next section introduces and explores this learning content model.

A Model for Thinking About Learning Content

We looked for similarities and differences between learning leaders’ approaches to learning content—and noticed that the learning leaders we spoke with take very different approaches to learning content based on 2 factors (or dimensions) of the learning content they’re working with:

• How unique the learning content is to their org (specificity). Are leaders dealing with learning content that applies specifically to their company or content that applies across orgs?
• The shelf life of the learning content (durability). Are leaders thinking mostly about learning content that needs to be updated rarely, or learning content that’s continually changing and regularly in jeopardy of being out of date? (Note: Long vs. short shelf life may differ from industry to industry and company to company. But, in general, we consider durable learning content to last 1 or more years without needing to be updated.)

If we plot learning content against these 2 dimensions (specificity and durability), then the content generally falls within 1 of the following 4 categories:

1. Specific & Durable. Learning content that’s specific to 1 org and has a long shelf life
2. Specific & Perishable. Learning content that’s specific to 1 org but changes often
3. Generic & Perishable. Learning content that applies to many orgs and changes often
4. Generic & Durable. Learning content that applies to many orgs and has a long shelf life

The learning content model, introduced in Figure 1, outlines these 4 categories and provides examples of some common topics that each category tends to cover.

Learning leaders might consider using this model to clarify the L&D function’s (and other stakeholders’) focus areas and roles regarding learning content. When we gave one learning leader—who happens to sit in a central L&D team within a federated system—a sneak peek at this model, he said:

“I like this model because it can help our L&D teams think about who owns what content. L&D sometimes tries to be all things to all people, but that’s not possible. In my company, we’re starting to be much more intentional about where each of our respective L&D teams are best-suited to play.”

John Z., Head of Digital Learning & Design, Global Medical Devices Company

Let’s look at each of these 4 categories in more detail. For each category, we discuss:

• The focus L&D functions should have for each learning content category
• Challenges specific to each learning content category
• How L&D functions can address those challenges in the immediate and longer terms

Specific & Durable

The Specific & Durable learning content category generally applies only to 1 org and has a relatively long shelf life. It tends to include:

• Introductions to the org’s values, mission, philosophy, and how the org expects employees to act
• Info about strategic initiatives that define the org’s direction
• Onboarding training and materials
• “Crown jewels”—intellectual property that’s critical to success / competitive advantage as a company

The purpose of Specific & Durable learning content is often to shape organizational culture—helping employees understand “this is who we are” and “this is how we act.” Accordingly, the learning leaders we spoke with talked about Specific & Durable learning content most often in conjunction with organizational initiatives, such as organizational culture or change efforts; diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging (DEIB); and strategic pivots (e.g., adapting to industry upheaval).

Specific & Durable learning content often helps shape org culture—by helping employees understand “this is who we are” and “this is how we act.”

L&D’s focus should be: Drive organizational initiatives

Forward-thinking orgs conceptualize the L&D function’s role—and related goals—differently, depending on the category of learning content at hand: They have a different focus for each of the 4 categories of learning content. As the nature of the learning content and its associated challenges change, so does the way the org thinks about where L&D functions should spend the most effort.

L&D should think about how Specific & Durable learning content can help move the needle in areas that are priorities for the business.

For Specific & Durable learning content, L&D functions should focus on driving organizational initiatives. Specifically, they should think about how Specific & Durable learning content can help move the needle in areas that are priorities for the business.

As one learning leader said:

“What’s the strategic change that’s happening? Is your learning content relevant to get to those organizational outcomes?”

Participant, “New Trends in Learning Content & Content Management” Roundtable

Importantly, learning leaders aren’t thinking about how L&D functions can drive org initiatives alone—far from it. Almost every learning leader we spoke with about Specific & Durable learning content described how they’re reaching outside of the L&D function—to other parts of HR and to leaders of other functions—to stay in sync with org priorities and use learning content to support the cultural and strategic initiatives important to the business.

Biggest challenges we heard

Because Specific & Durable learning content often links directly to key business initiatives, L&D functions typically face challenges like:

• Staying aligned with business goals. How do we stay agile and aligned with business goals in an ever-flexible environment?
• Driving change. How do we use learning content to move the org toward its goals?
• Measuring impact. How do we know if the learning content is, in fact, driving the change, creating the culture, or moving the needle in ways that align with the org’s priorities?

Intentionally linking learning content to org priorities is a critical component in addressing these challenges, particularly around measuring impact.

Forward-thinking L&D functions measure success against metrics used by the entire org, not just the L&D function.

In our research on measuring learning impact, we found that average L&D functions tend to triage based on the squeakiest wheel or easiest fix. Conversely, more forward-thinking L&D functions develop strategies and relationships to continually align and adjust learning content to support org goals—and to measure success against metrics used by the entire org, not just the L&D function.³

What L&D can do

In Figure 2, we include some ways L&D functions can start addressing these challenges. The ideas here (and in subsequent Figures 3-5) are divided into 2 sections:

• Do Now. Actions L&D functions can start on right away
• Work On. Actions requiring some time and coordination to implement

Each idea is paired with an example of how an org is implementing it.

Figure 2: Ways L&D Can Help Address Challenges—Specific & Durable Learning Content | Source: RedThread Research, 2021.

Specific & Perishable

Specific & Perishable learning content is unique to the org and changes / needs updating relatively often. Examples of this type of learning content include:

• Customer training (e.g., on the org’s products)
• Org-specific policies and processes
• Instructions and updates on internally built software / tools

A defining characteristic of Specific & Perishable learning content: The sources of the learning content exist all over the org—in policy and process documents, product release notes, wikis, etc. This truth, combined with the fact that the content changes often, means it’s exceedingly difficult (if not impossible) for L&D functions to create and update all Specific & Perishable learning content needed by the org.

L&D’s focus should be: Enable content creation

In contrast to orgs in which the L&D function tries to control learning content, orgs that deputize all employees and focus on enabling the creation of learning content—no matter who does the creating—tend to have much more success ensuring that updated learning content is available when needed.

The L&D function’s focus for Specific & Perishable learning content should be to enable the creation and curation of learning content within the org—not to create or control that learning content.

The most forward-thinking learning leaders we encountered approach learning content almost as a free-market economy problem: In their minds, L&D functions should facilitate the supply and demand of learning content. Their job is to make those supply / demand exchanges as frictionless as possible, both for the consumers of the learning content as well as the suppliers, no matter where they sit in the org.

Biggest challenges we heard

Challenges with Specific & Perishable learning content tend to stem from the fact that it needs to be updated frequently and only internal people (for the most part) can do the updating. Challenges include:

• Learning content becomes stale and is hard to keep updated
• The best learning content exists in lots of different places in the org
• Quality and consistency of learning content can vary, since a lot of the learning content isn’t created by the L&D function

We talked with several learning leaders who said their L&D teams struggle either to keep tons of content updated themselves or to incentivize SMEs across the business to keep their learning content updated.

L&D functions should provide processes, templates, and guidance to enable anyone in the org to create or curate learning content with relative ease, consistency, and quality.

To address these challenges, the learning leaders we spoke with focus on putting in place processes, templates, and guidance that enable anyone in the org to create or curate learning content with relative ease, consistency, and quality.

For example, these forward-thinking learning leaders:

• Implement basic instructional design templates and norms across the org
• Put in place tech that offers standard templates, design principles, and formatting
• Track learning content usage and communicate regularly with learning content authors about updates
• Make themselves available as consultants—answering questions and providing advice on how to create effective learning content that meets the standards they’ve set

What L&D can do

In Figure 3, we include some ways L&D functions can start addressing these challenges. Each idea also outlines how an org is implementing that idea.

Figure 3: Ways L&D Can Help Address Challenges—Specific & Perishable Learning Content | Source: RedThread Research, 2021.⁴

Generic & Perishable

Generic & Perishable learning content can apply to many orgs but has a short shelf life. Examples of Generic & Perishable learning content include:

• Training / updates on fast-changing tech skills
• How-to tutorials on common processes (e.g., how to create a QR code, how to use a function in Excel)
• Info on current events and industry / market updates

Generic & Perishable learning content is defined by its sheer volume—and the fact that it’s everywhere.

The defining characteristic of this learning content category is sheer volume: There’s so much of it, everywhere! Much Generic & Perishable learning content is available for free online, although Google and YouTube are certainly not the only ways to find it. Other sources of Generic & Perishable learning content are, for example:

• Learning content libraries like PluralSight and LinkedIn Learning
• Professional or trade publications and websites
• Tech vendors offering learning content on how to use their software

Generic & Perishable learning content also changes frequently, meaning the great video someone found last year might be 3 releases out of date this year.

L&D’s focus should be: Help employees filter to the right learning content

The nature of Generic & Perishable learning content means L&D functions’ focus should be to help employees filter. It would be incredibly difficult to provide just the right info to each employee when they need it. Rather, learning leaders’ job is to create conditions that enable employees to cut through the noise and find what they need.

L&D functions should create conditions that enable employees to cut through the noise and volume of learning content to find what they need.

In most orgs, helping employees “filter” means using some kind of tech, most commonly an LXP. We’ve yet to see an org set up a completely manual process that enables filtering at the scale most orgs need: Most orgs leverage both tech and humans to get the job done. For example, teams may share the best or most helpful learning content with one another via Teams or Slack; they may set up queries in content aggregators like Feedly and other apps.

Biggest challenges we heard

We heard 2 main challenges related to Generic & Perishable learning content, both stemming from the volume and turnover common to this learning content category:

• There’s too much noise. For Generic & Perishable learning content, the “signal-to-noise” ratio is extremely low: There’s a lot of learning content in this category, but quality and relevance vary. Although it may be easy to find some learning content on a particular topic or question, it’s hard to know whether it’s the best learning content—or what the org would want an employee to rely on.
• Finding the latest and greatest. There’s regularly more and better learning content somewhere out there. Employees have a hard time finding the most updated, most relevant stuff.

Implementing effective search, curation, and recommendation engines can help give employees direction and a place to start.

Implementing effective search, curation, and recommendation engines can help address these challenges by giving employees direction and a place to start. We explore these ideas next.

What L&D can do

In Figure 4, we include some ways L&D functions can start addressing these challenges. Each idea also outlines how an org is implementing that idea.

Figure 4: Ways L&D Can Help Address Challenges—Generic & Perishable Learning Content | Source: RedThread Research, 2021.^5,6

Generic & Durable

Generic & Durable learning content changes relatively infrequently and applies to many orgs. It includes learning content such as:

• Education and refreshers on safety, security, and ethics
• Leadership development training and programs
• Industry-specific background / context (e.g., how the banking system works)
• Learning content to develop sales skills
• Support for employee wellbeing, mindfulness, and personal growth

Because Generic & Durable learning content can apply to many orgs and likely isn’t changing at a breakneck pace, quite a few learning content vendors play in this space. These vendors offer high-quality learning content on specialty topics that an in-house L&D team may not have the expertise or bandwidth to create.

Many Generic & Durable learning content vendors offer high-quality learning content on specialty topics that an in-house L&D team may not have the expertise or bandwidth to create.

L&D’s focus should be: Facilitate consistency & quality

L&D functions’ focus for Generic & Durable learning content should be facilitating consistency and quality—setting standards for what quality learning content looks like across the org. Because so many vendors offer different learning content at varying levels of quality, L&D functions can create value by helping the org define standards that outline, for example:

• The “go-to” vendors to work with on cross-functional topics like leadership, industry context, or wellbeing
• Criteria for selecting vendors not on the “go-to” list
• What high-quality learning content looks like and where it’s coming from
• Ways to measure / understand what learning content is working and what’s not

L&D functions should define standards that outline, for example, go-to vendors, vendor selection criteria, and what “high-quality” learning content looks like for the org.

With these standards (and / or others) in place, L&D functions can provide a consistent, org-wide point of view on cross-cutting topics, like “the way we lead,” “the way we think about safety,” and so on.

Biggest challenges we heard

Consistency and quality are the primary challenges for Generic & Durable learning content because much of the learning content can apply to many different functions (think leadership development or safety / security) and so many commercial sources of this category of learning content exist.

This breadth and variety give rise to potential differences—within the same org—in:

• The content that’s used for learning on a particular subject
• The quality or efficacy of that learning content
• How that learning content is delivered or supported
• Who gets access to the learning content
• The processes used to evaluate the learning content

As an example, we’ve seen orgs that use a dozen or more different leadership models because different functions / teams brought in different leadership vendors / consultants at different times.

Forward-thinking L&D functions consider how they can foster relationships—with vendors and other functions—to ensure consistency and quality of learning content across the org.

In the lit review we did as part of this research, we read several articles on creating consistent learning content. In an org, consistent course design and visual cues across as much learning content as possible can go a long way toward helping employees understand and navigate learning content easily. However, this kind of consistency is sometimes difficult to achieve with externally created content.

In addition to these instructional design elements, forward-thinking L&D functions are also considering how they can foster relationships—with vendors and with other functions—to bring people together across silos in order to ensure consistency and quality of learning content throughout the org. This sometimes means convening cross-functional groups to align on needs, pool resources, or negotiate org-level (rather than function- or team-level) contracts with vendors.

What L&D can do

In Figure 5, we include some ways L&D functions can start addressing these challenges. Each idea also outlines how an org is implementing that idea.

 

Figure 5: Ways L&D Can Help Address Challenges—Generic & Durable Learning Content | Source: RedThread Research, 2021.

Wrap-Up

We’ve given you a snapshot of recent trends in learning content, including how the explosion in volume and variety of learning content is affecting orgs and employees alike. We’ve also introduced a model for thinking about learning content in 4 categories, based on 2 key factors:

• The specificity of the learning content to the org
• The durability (or shelf life) of the learning content

Our biggest takeaway from this study is how the 4 different categories of learning content give rise to very different focuses for L&D functions—different conceptions of what L&D functions should do with regard to that learning content—and have very different associated challenges. (Unsurprisingly, there’s no one-size-fits-all learning content strategy.)

We are grateful to those learning leaders who shared their experiences and examples with us, and are excited to share so many concrete examples in this report.

As always, we welcome feedback and discussion! Please feel free to reach out to RedThread Research at [email protected] or www.redthreadresearch.com. We’d love to hear about your experiences.

Appendix 1: Research Methodology

We launched our study in Spring 2021. This report gathers and synthesizes findings from our research efforts, which include:

• A literature review of 51 articles from business, trade, and popular lit sources
• 1 roundtable with a total of 33 participants
• 15 in-depth interviews with learning leaders about their experiences and thoughts on learning content

For those looking for specific information that came out of those efforts, you’re in luck: We’ve a policy of sharing as much information as possible throughout the research process. Please see:

• Premise: “Content in the 2020s: Enabling Learning”
• Lit review: “Learning Content in the 2020s: What the Literature Says”
• Roundtable readout: “Trends in Learning Content & Content Management”
• Q&A call: "Learning Content"

Appendix 2: Contributors

Thank you so much to those of you who participated in our roundtable and interviews. We couldn’t have done this research without you! In addition to the leaders listed below, there are many others we can’t name publicly. We extend our gratitude nonetheless: You know who you are.

Angel Rodriguez
Ann Boldt
Brett Rose
Bria Dimke
Brian Richardson
Catherine Marchand
Chris Casement
Chris Olson
Clark Shah-Nelson
Eddie Garcia
Emily Crockett
Erik Soerhaug
Gordon O’Reilly
Greg Williams
Heather Bahorich
Ian Bolderstone
Jihyun Jeong
Jim Maddock
John Z.
Laurence D. Banner
Leah Holmgren
Marc Ramos
Martin Tanguay
Melissa Lamkin
Mitchel M.
Nick Halder
Nicole Leret
Robert Young
Sarah Foster
Shaun Rozyn
Stephanie Fritz
Stephen T.
Tania Tiippana
Tone Reierselmoen
Zachary Pfau

In addition, we thank Catherine Coughlin for editing the report, Jennifer Hines for graphics, Jenny Barandich for the layout, and Sana Lall-Trail for research and project management.

Key Takeaways

1. Forward-thinking L&D functions make the chaos of learning content work for their orgs. Being overwhelmed by the surging quantities, types, and sources of learning content is yesterday’s news—but still today’s problem. Learning leaders are embracing the chaos and moving from providing content to enabling it, with an eye toward making more content available to all employees.
2. Learning leaders should ask 2 questions about learning content: 1) Is it specific to the org? 2) How long is its shelf life (How durable is it)? Thinking in these 2 dimensions—specificity and durability—can help L&D functions clarify their learning content strategy and priorities.
3. We developed a new model for learning content. From our conversations with forward-thinking learning leaders, we identified a model that breaks learning content into 4 categories (defined by the 2 dimensions of specificity and durability). This model can form the foundation of a learning content strategy that’s clear on priorities, roles & responsibilities, and areas of focus.
4. There are distinct actions L&D functions can and should take to improve their learning content strategies—and those actions change based on the 4-category model of learning content introduced in this report. We provide some suggestions for immediate and longer-term actions to take, as well as examples of real orgs implementing these ideas, to help learning leaders organize the chaos and better manage learning content overall.

Why Talk About Learning Content Now?

We’ve been witnessing rapid growth in the amount of learning content available to employees. This growth started decades ago, but it’s recently turned from a trickle to a flood. There’s more learning content everywhere—inside and outside orgs; online and offline; on desktops and mobile devices; and in learning systems, shared folders, browsers, email, and chat platforms. Is it any wonder that employees are overwhelmed and exhausted by the sheer volume of all that’s available?¹

Employees are overwhelmed and exhausted by the amount of learning content.

Employees feel like they’re drowning—and it’s L&D’s job to help them find and consume the content that builds skills and drives outcomes that matter to the business. To do this, L&D functions need well-crafted learning content strategies that support org learning and business strategies.

A learning content strategy should help L&D functions answer questions like:

• How will we decide what learning content to bring into the org?
• How will we identify—and help employees identify—learning content that’ll support our business and learning strategies?
• How and when will learning content be updated? By whom?
• How will we make the right learning content easily available to employees?
• What can we do immediately and in the longer term to improve employees’ ability to find and consume the learning content they need?

In this study—which included a lit review, roundtable, and interviews—we explored these questions. Through this research, we sought to identify the leading practices that orgs are using to help employees sift through the volume of learning content to find what’s right for them, when they need it.

L&D functions need well-crafted learning content strategies that support org learning and business strategies.

In the next section, we introduce the trends we uncovered as part of this study.

What’s Happening in Learning Content?

In the course of this research, we identified 4 trends in learning content that are helping shape the learning content strategies of forward-thinking orgs:

1. More types and sources of learning content
2. More enabling, less pushing of learning content by L&D functions
3. More (and better) use of skills data to inform learning content priorities
4. More access for all employees

In the following sections, we take a brief look at these 4 trends.

More types & sources of learning content

Not only is there more learning content in more places—but there are more types of content created by a wider variety of authors. Learning content used to be primarily created and controlled by L&D functions. Now, however, employees have access to:

• L&D function-created content
• Learning content created by subject-matter experts (SMEs)
• Company reports, policies, strategy docs, etc.
• Vendor-created learning content (custom or off the shelf)
• YouTube and other social media content
• Podcasts
• Conference notes, presentations, and videos
• Trade- or industry-specific content
• Learning content libraries (LinkedIn Learning, Udemy for Business, etc.)
• Subscriptions to learning content aggregators
• The entire internet

There’s not only more volume of content—there’s more types of content, in more places, created by a wider variety of authors.

And we know that’s not an exhaustive list.

The incredible volume, variety, and breadth of the learning content that’s available—over much of which L&D functions have limited control—complicate things for learning leaders and for employees.

Through our research, though, we found that learning leaders who’ve given this some thought don’t try to control the chaos. Instead, they embrace it—or, at least, they try to work with the reality that learning content is already complicated, and it’s only going to get bigger and more complex over time.

L&D functions can create systems, processes, and policies that help employees navigate the chaos of learning content.

Savvy learning leaders think about how to create systems, processes, and policies that help orgs and employees navigate through the chaos—rather than trying to tame the chaos itself (because that’s not gonna happen).

One learning leader noted:

“Learning functions need to recognize we never owned learning content in the first place, and we certainly don’t now. We need to embrace the chaos.”

Nick Halder, Senior Director of Talent, Snow Software

More enabling, less pushing by L&D functions

Given the increasing amount and variety of learning content out there, the move toward personalized development experiences, and the sheer variety of people in most orgs, it’s almost impossible for L&D functions to push the right content to the right people at the right time in the right format—all the time. There’s also a growing recognition that often the employee knows best—or at least has a good sense of—what they need to learn.

Learning leaders are thinking about how to enable employees to navigate to the right content themselves, rather than pushing content to employees.

Instead of trying to push learning content, L&D functions are thinking about how to enable employees to navigate to the right content themselves—by giving guidance and context about, for example, the org’s strategy and direction, skills that may be needed in the future, and how learning content is organized in the company. This guidance and context can create conditions that enable employees to find and consume learning content when and how they like, in ways that align with their needs and org goals.

More (& better) use of skills data to inform learning content priorities

Learning leaders we talked to noted that, in the past, L&D functions have sometimes pushed out learning content that wasn’t relevant or helpful to employees. These learning leaders see information about the skills employees and orgs need as a potential solution:

“Without insight into what skills are in demand and what skills people have, L&D tends to focus on the learning content we think people need. That’s rarely an effective approach.”

Participant, “New Trends in Learning Content & Content Management” Roundtable

Forward-thinking orgs are using information about the skills their workforce has and the skills it’ll need in the future to decide what learning content to prioritize. Learning leaders are making investments in learning content that can help close critical skills gaps.

Skills info can help orgs better understand what learning content to prioritize and invest in.

More access for all employees

In the last year or so, learning leaders have started taking a much closer look at how accessible learning content really is in their orgs: They’re recognizing the importance of making learning content more widely available to close skills gaps—and to help the business stay agile, responsive, and competitive.²

Three ways learning leaders can improve access include:

• Removing artificial barriers. Sometimes orgs give employees access to learning content on a “need-to-know” basis. But this logic creates unnecessary boundaries that could be removed unless they’re strategically justified—for example, intellectual property, safety / security, cost, or some other significant reason.
• Making learning content more discoverable. Sometimes great learning content is hidden in pockets or silos within the company. Orgs can find ways of making learning content easier to discover by implementing organization standards and really good search capabilities. They can also create a culture of discovery by removing unnecessary passwords and encouraging employees to poke around.
• Making learning content accessible on mobile. Learning content doesn’t just live on desktops anymore. Employees, particularly frontline workers, need access on their phones. This often means rethinking accessibility to LMSs or LXPs, as well as thinking mobile-first when creating new learning content.

Forward-thinking orgs are exploring ways to make learning content transparent, accessible, and appealing to all employees.

In brief

These 4 trends are currently shaping the learning content environment. In this research, we sought to understand how learning leaders are navigating these trends—and how these trends affect their goals, focus areas, challenges, and strategies for learning content.

We developed a learning content model that can help orgs think through their learning content strategies.

This inquiry resulted in a model that can help orgs think through their learning content strategies and make better decisions about where L&D functions should focus their time and resources. The next section introduces and explores this learning content model.

A Model for Thinking About Learning Content

We looked for similarities and differences between learning leaders’ approaches to learning content—and noticed that the learning leaders we spoke with take very different approaches to learning content based on 2 factors (or dimensions) of the learning content they’re working with:

• How unique the learning content is to their org (specificity). Are leaders dealing with learning content that applies specifically to their company or content that applies across orgs?
• The shelf life of the learning content (durability). Are leaders thinking mostly about learning content that needs to be updated rarely, or learning content that’s continually changing and regularly in jeopardy of being out of date? (Note: Long vs. short shelf life may differ from industry to industry and company to company. But, in general, we consider durable learning content to last 1 or more years without needing to be updated.)

If we plot learning content against these 2 dimensions (specificity and durability), then the content generally falls within 1 of the following 4 categories:

1. Specific & Durable. Learning content that’s specific to 1 org and has a long shelf life
2. Specific & Perishable. Learning content that’s specific to 1 org but changes often
3. Generic & Perishable. Learning content that applies to many orgs and changes often
4. Generic & Durable. Learning content that applies to many orgs and has a long shelf life

The learning content model, introduced in Figure 1, outlines these 4 categories and provides examples of some common topics that each category tends to cover.

Learning leaders might consider using this model to clarify the L&D function’s (and other stakeholders’) focus areas and roles regarding learning content. When we gave one learning leader—who happens to sit in a central L&D team within a federated system—a sneak peek at this model, he said:

“I like this model because it can help our L&D teams think about who owns what content. L&D sometimes tries to be all things to all people, but that’s not possible. In my company, we’re starting to be much more intentional about where each of our respective L&D teams are best-suited to play.”

John Z., Head of Digital Learning & Design, Global Medical Devices Company

Let’s look at each of these 4 categories in more detail. For each category, we discuss:

• The focus L&D functions should have for each learning content category
• Challenges specific to each learning content category
• How L&D functions can address those challenges in the immediate and longer terms

Specific & Durable

The Specific & Durable learning content category generally applies only to 1 org and has a relatively long shelf life. It tends to include:

• Introductions to the org’s values, mission, philosophy, and how the org expects employees to act
• Info about strategic initiatives that define the org’s direction
• Onboarding training and materials
• “Crown jewels”—intellectual property that’s critical to success / competitive advantage as a company

The purpose of Specific & Durable learning content is often to shape organizational culture—helping employees understand “this is who we are” and “this is how we act.” Accordingly, the learning leaders we spoke with talked about Specific & Durable learning content most often in conjunction with organizational initiatives, such as organizational culture or change efforts; diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging (DEIB); and strategic pivots (e.g., adapting to industry upheaval).

Specific & Durable learning content often helps shape org culture—by helping employees understand “this is who we are” and “this is how we act.”

L&D’s focus should be: Drive organizational initiatives

Forward-thinking orgs conceptualize the L&D function’s role—and related goals—differently, depending on the category of learning content at hand: They have a different focus for each of the 4 categories of learning content. As the nature of the learning content and its associated challenges change, so does the way the org thinks about where L&D functions should spend the most effort.

L&D should think about how Specific & Durable learning content can help move the needle in areas that are priorities for the business.

For Specific & Durable learning content, L&D functions should focus on driving organizational initiatives. Specifically, they should think about how Specific & Durable learning content can help move the needle in areas that are priorities for the business.

As one learning leader said:

“What’s the strategic change that’s happening? Is your learning content relevant to get to those organizational outcomes?”

Participant, “New Trends in Learning Content & Content Management” Roundtable

Importantly, learning leaders aren’t thinking about how L&D functions can drive org initiatives alone—far from it. Almost every learning leader we spoke with about Specific & Durable learning content described how they’re reaching outside of the L&D function—to other parts of HR and to leaders of other functions—to stay in sync with org priorities and use learning content to support the cultural and strategic initiatives important to the business.

Biggest challenges we heard

Because Specific & Durable learning content often links directly to key business initiatives, L&D functions typically face challenges like:

• Staying aligned with business goals. How do we stay agile and aligned with business goals in an ever-flexible environment?
• Driving change. How do we use learning content to move the org toward its goals?
• Measuring impact. How do we know if the learning content is, in fact, driving the change, creating the culture, or moving the needle in ways that align with the org’s priorities?

Intentionally linking learning content to org priorities is a critical component in addressing these challenges, particularly around measuring impact.

Forward-thinking L&D functions measure success against metrics used by the entire org, not just the L&D function.

In our research on measuring learning impact, we found that average L&D functions tend to triage based on the squeakiest wheel or easiest fix. Conversely, more forward-thinking L&D functions develop strategies and relationships to continually align and adjust learning content to support org goals—and to measure success against metrics used by the entire org, not just the L&D function.³

What L&D can do

In Figure 2, we include some ways L&D functions can start addressing these challenges. The ideas here (and in subsequent Figures 3-5) are divided into 2 sections:

• Do Now. Actions L&D functions can start on right away
• Work On. Actions requiring some time and coordination to implement

Each idea is paired with an example of how an org is implementing it.

Figure 2: Ways L&D Can Help Address Challenges—Specific & Durable Learning Content | Source: RedThread Research, 2021.

Specific & Perishable

Specific & Perishable learning content is unique to the org and changes / needs updating relatively often. Examples of this type of learning content include:

• Customer training (e.g., on the org’s products)
• Org-specific policies and processes
• Instructions and updates on internally built software / tools

A defining characteristic of Specific & Perishable learning content: The sources of the learning content exist all over the org—in policy and process documents, product release notes, wikis, etc. This truth, combined with the fact that the content changes often, means it’s exceedingly difficult (if not impossible) for L&D functions to create and update all Specific & Perishable learning content needed by the org.

L&D’s focus should be: Enable content creation

In contrast to orgs in which the L&D function tries to control learning content, orgs that deputize all employees and focus on enabling the creation of learning content—no matter who does the creating—tend to have much more success ensuring that updated learning content is available when needed.

The L&D function’s focus for Specific & Perishable learning content should be to enable the creation and curation of learning content within the org—not to create or control that learning content.

The most forward-thinking learning leaders we encountered approach learning content almost as a free-market economy problem: In their minds, L&D functions should facilitate the supply and demand of learning content. Their job is to make those supply / demand exchanges as frictionless as possible, both for the consumers of the learning content as well as the suppliers, no matter where they sit in the org.

Biggest challenges we heard

Challenges with Specific & Perishable learning content tend to stem from the fact that it needs to be updated frequently and only internal people (for the most part) can do the updating. Challenges include:

• Learning content becomes stale and is hard to keep updated
• The best learning content exists in lots of different places in the org
• Quality and consistency of learning content can vary, since a lot of the learning content isn’t created by the L&D function

We talked with several learning leaders who said their L&D teams struggle either to keep tons of content updated themselves or to incentivize SMEs across the business to keep their learning content updated.

L&D functions should provide processes, templates, and guidance to enable anyone in the org to create or curate learning content with relative ease, consistency, and quality.

To address these challenges, the learning leaders we spoke with focus on putting in place processes, templates, and guidance that enable anyone in the org to create or curate learning content with relative ease, consistency, and quality.

For example, these forward-thinking learning leaders:

• Implement basic instructional design templates and norms across the org
• Put in place tech that offers standard templates, design principles, and formatting
• Track learning content usage and communicate regularly with learning content authors about updates
• Make themselves available as consultants—answering questions and providing advice on how to create effective learning content that meets the standards they’ve set

What L&D can do

In Figure 3, we include some ways L&D functions can start addressing these challenges. Each idea also outlines how an org is implementing that idea.

Figure 3: Ways L&D Can Help Address Challenges—Specific & Perishable Learning Content | Source: RedThread Research, 2021.⁴

Generic & Perishable

Generic & Perishable learning content can apply to many orgs but has a short shelf life. Examples of Generic & Perishable learning content include:

• Training / updates on fast-changing tech skills
• How-to tutorials on common processes (e.g., how to create a QR code, how to use a function in Excel)
• Info on current events and industry / market updates

Generic & Perishable learning content is defined by its sheer volume—and the fact that it’s everywhere.

The defining characteristic of this learning content category is sheer volume: There’s so much of it, everywhere! Much Generic & Perishable learning content is available for free online, although Google and YouTube are certainly not the only ways to find it. Other sources of Generic & Perishable learning content are, for example:

• Learning content libraries like PluralSight and LinkedIn Learning
• Professional or trade publications and websites
• Tech vendors offering learning content on how to use their software

Generic & Perishable learning content also changes frequently, meaning the great video someone found last year might be 3 releases out of date this year.

L&D’s focus should be: Help employees filter to the right learning content

The nature of Generic & Perishable learning content means L&D functions’ focus should be to help employees filter. It would be incredibly difficult to provide just the right info to each employee when they need it. Rather, learning leaders’ job is to create conditions that enable employees to cut through the noise and find what they need.

L&D functions should create conditions that enable employees to cut through the noise and volume of learning content to find what they need.

In most orgs, helping employees “filter” means using some kind of tech, most commonly an LXP. We’ve yet to see an org set up a completely manual process that enables filtering at the scale most orgs need: Most orgs leverage both tech and humans to get the job done. For example, teams may share the best or most helpful learning content with one another via Teams or Slack; they may set up queries in content aggregators like Feedly and other apps.

Biggest challenges we heard

We heard 2 main challenges related to Generic & Perishable learning content, both stemming from the volume and turnover common to this learning content category:

• There’s too much noise. For Generic & Perishable learning content, the “signal-to-noise” ratio is extremely low: There’s a lot of learning content in this category, but quality and relevance vary. Although it may be easy to find some learning content on a particular topic or question, it’s hard to know whether it’s the best learning content—or what the org would want an employee to rely on.
• Finding the latest and greatest. There’s regularly more and better learning content somewhere out there. Employees have a hard time finding the most updated, most relevant stuff.

Implementing effective search, curation, and recommendation engines can help give employees direction and a place to start.

Implementing effective search, curation, and recommendation engines can help address these challenges by giving employees direction and a place to start. We explore these ideas next.

What L&D can do

In Figure 4, we include some ways L&D functions can start addressing these challenges. Each idea also outlines how an org is implementing that idea.

Figure 4: Ways L&D Can Help Address Challenges—Generic & Perishable Learning Content | Source: RedThread Research, 2021.^5,6

Generic & Durable

Generic & Durable learning content changes relatively infrequently and applies to many orgs. It includes learning content such as:

• Education and refreshers on safety, security, and ethics
• Leadership development training and programs
• Industry-specific background / context (e.g., how the banking system works)
• Learning content to develop sales skills
• Support for employee wellbeing, mindfulness, and personal growth

Because Generic & Durable learning content can apply to many orgs and likely isn’t changing at a breakneck pace, quite a few learning content vendors play in this space. These vendors offer high-quality learning content on specialty topics that an in-house L&D team may not have the expertise or bandwidth to create.

Many Generic & Durable learning content vendors offer high-quality learning content on specialty topics that an in-house L&D team may not have the expertise or bandwidth to create.

L&D’s focus should be: Facilitate consistency & quality

L&D functions’ focus for Generic & Durable learning content should be facilitating consistency and quality—setting standards for what quality learning content looks like across the org. Because so many vendors offer different learning content at varying levels of quality, L&D functions can create value by helping the org define standards that outline, for example:

• The “go-to” vendors to work with on cross-functional topics like leadership, industry context, or wellbeing
• Criteria for selecting vendors not on the “go-to” list
• What high-quality learning content looks like and where it’s coming from
• Ways to measure / understand what learning content is working and what’s not

L&D functions should define standards that outline, for example, go-to vendors, vendor selection criteria, and what “high-quality” learning content looks like for the org.

With these standards (and / or others) in place, L&D functions can provide a consistent, org-wide point of view on cross-cutting topics, like “the way we lead,” “the way we think about safety,” and so on.

Biggest challenges we heard

Consistency and quality are the primary challenges for Generic & Durable learning content because much of the learning content can apply to many different functions (think leadership development or safety / security) and so many commercial sources of this category of learning content exist.

This breadth and variety give rise to potential differences—within the same org—in:

• The content that’s used for learning on a particular subject
• The quality or efficacy of that learning content
• How that learning content is delivered or supported
• Who gets access to the learning content
• The processes used to evaluate the learning content

As an example, we’ve seen orgs that use a dozen or more different leadership models because different functions / teams brought in different leadership vendors / consultants at different times.

Forward-thinking L&D functions consider how they can foster relationships—with vendors and other functions—to ensure consistency and quality of learning content across the org.

In the lit review we did as part of this research, we read several articles on creating consistent learning content. In an org, consistent course design and visual cues across as much learning content as possible can go a long way toward helping employees understand and navigate learning content easily. However, this kind of consistency is sometimes difficult to achieve with externally created content.

In addition to these instructional design elements, forward-thinking L&D functions are also considering how they can foster relationships—with vendors and with other functions—to bring people together across silos in order to ensure consistency and quality of learning content throughout the org. This sometimes means convening cross-functional groups to align on needs, pool resources, or negotiate org-level (rather than function- or team-level) contracts with vendors.

What L&D can do

In Figure 5, we include some ways L&D functions can start addressing these challenges. Each idea also outlines how an org is implementing that idea.

 

Figure 5: Ways L&D Can Help Address Challenges—Generic & Durable Learning Content | Source: RedThread Research, 2021.

Wrap-Up

We’ve given you a snapshot of recent trends in learning content, including how the explosion in volume and variety of learning content is affecting orgs and employees alike. We’ve also introduced a model for thinking about learning content in 4 categories, based on 2 key factors:

• The specificity of the learning content to the org
• The durability (or shelf life) of the learning content

Our biggest takeaway from this study is how the 4 different categories of learning content give rise to very different focuses for L&D functions—different conceptions of what L&D functions should do with regard to that learning content—and have very different associated challenges. (Unsurprisingly, there’s no one-size-fits-all learning content strategy.)

We are grateful to those learning leaders who shared their experiences and examples with us, and are excited to share so many concrete examples in this report.

As always, we welcome feedback and discussion! Please feel free to reach out to RedThread Research at [email protected] or www.redthreadresearch.com. We’d love to hear about your experiences.

Appendix 1: Research Methodology

We launched our study in Spring 2021. This report gathers and synthesizes findings from our research efforts, which include:

• A literature review of 51 articles from business, trade, and popular lit sources
• 1 roundtable with a total of 33 participants
• 15 in-depth interviews with learning leaders about their experiences and thoughts on learning content

For those looking for specific information that came out of those efforts, you’re in luck: We’ve a policy of sharing as much information as possible throughout the research process. Please see:

• Premise: “Content in the 2020s: Enabling Learning”
• Lit review: “Learning Content in the 2020s: What the Literature Says”
• Roundtable readout: “Trends in Learning Content & Content Management”
• Q&A call: "Learning Content"

Appendix 2: Contributors

Thank you so much to those of you who participated in our roundtable and interviews. We couldn’t have done this research without you! In addition to the leaders listed below, there are many others we can’t name publicly. We extend our gratitude nonetheless: You know who you are.

Angel Rodriguez
Ann Boldt
Brett Rose
Bria Dimke
Brian Richardson
Catherine Marchand
Chris Casement
Chris Olson
Clark Shah-Nelson
Eddie Garcia
Emily Crockett
Erik Soerhaug
Gordon O’Reilly
Greg Williams
Heather Bahorich
Ian Bolderstone
Jihyun Jeong
Jim Maddock
John Z.
Laurence D. Banner
Leah Holmgren
Marc Ramos
Martin Tanguay
Melissa Lamkin
Mitchel M.
Nick Halder
Nicole Leret
Robert Young
Sarah Foster
Shaun Rozyn
Stephanie Fritz
Stephen T.
Tania Tiippana
Tone Reierselmoen
Zachary Pfau

In addition, we thank Catherine Coughlin for editing the report, Jennifer Hines for graphics, Jenny Barandich for the layout, and Sana Lall-Trail for research and project management.

 

Introduction

In December 2020, we wrapped up our year-long study on the people analytics technology (PAT) market. One of our key findings from the study: PAT vendors responded quickly to customers’ needs that arose from the twin pandemics of 2020 (COVID-19 and racial injustice).

Practically speaking, this meant vendors focused much more heavily on employee engagement and experience than before. As Figure 1 shows, 67% of PAT vendors from our study reported employee engagement as a primary area of focus in 2020, compared to 60% a year earlier. Similarly, 58% of vendors stated employee experience as a primary area of focus in 2020, versus 43% in 2019.¹ (Readers can access important details on the vendors in this space, including our assessment of them, via our interactive tool.)

PAT Critical to Staying in Touch with Employees

People analytics tech has enabled leaders to keep a check on employee pulse throughout the year, especially as fatigue from the pandemic began to set in. For example, 75% of employees in the U.S. reported symptoms of burnout toward the last quarter of 2020.² Further, findings from a survey by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported 41% of American adults struggled with mental-health issues stemming from the pandemic.³

People analytics tech that focused on employee engagement and experience helped business leaders understand what was happening with their people—both with data and at scale.

For example, orgs that leveraged this tech to boost their existing (or to design new) listening strategies were better able to support their employees as they faced rapid and unexpected changes.⁴

Today, as COVID vaccinations roll out worldwide, a sense of hope is starting to emerge. Leaders are looking to reshape the future and redesign new ways of working. To do this effectively, they must understand how employees are feeling and how their needs are changing.

Once again, people analytics tech is poised to play a crucial role.

From measuring how employees feel about returning to offices, to making recommendations to managers on how they can communicate effectively to keep employees engaged, PAT can be pivotal in helping employers redesign their workplace strategies.

PAT Market Evolving Quickly

Given how rapidly business needs have changed, it’s no surprise that the PAT market has continued to grow and evolve in 2021. In the first 3 months of this year, we’ve witnessed some big players make important moves that reflect the growth and evolution of this market.

• Workday announced its acquisition of Peakon, an employee engagement solution
• The IPO of Qualtrics, an experience management platform
• The launch of Microsoft’s Viva, an employee experience solution

A Closer Look

The employee engagement and experience market is critical and changing rapidly, and it deserves a deeper study than we gave it in 2020. The purpose of this research is to provide those responsible for employee engagement and experience (HR leaders, people analytics practitioners and managers) with greater insights on this technology, specifically around:

• The role of people analytics in employee engagement and experience
• The different vendors in this space and how best to understand their offerings

Before we dive into the specifics, we want to take a moment to define the 2 terms “employee engagement” and “employee experience”—and how they connect to each other.

Understanding Employee Engagement & Experience

Let’s start with first clarifying the definitions for both of these terms.

Employee engagement: A measure of energy, involvement, and concentration that is exhibited in work attitudes and behaviors. It is a measure of how an employee feels and behaves at a particular point in time.

Employee experience: Employees' collective perceptions of their ongoing interactions with the org. It encapsulates the ongoing perceptions of an employee’s interactions with the org through their entire journey

Given these definitions, it is clear that employee experience has a much broader scope than employee engagement. Figure 2 below highlights a few other main differences between these 2 terms.

So how should we understand the relationship between these 2 terms?

Employee engagement is an outcome of employee experience.

Basically, how an employee behaves is a direct result of their perceptions based on all their interactions with the org throughout their lifecycle. So, employees will be more engaged with their work if they have an overall positive experience with the org.

How Tech Can Help

Tech plays a critical role in helping orgs with both employee engagement and experience. Such solutions can:

• Offer tools for leaders to check-in and connect with their employees to improve their interactions with people
• Provide an internal platform for employees to communicate and share information to improve interactions with the overall org
• Enable orgs to listen to their employees in a continuous manner to understand how they feel

So, how has PAT leveraged these capabilities to help leaders with their challenges around employee engagement and experience? We take a closer look at this in the next section.

Employee Engagement and Experience Vendors' Capabilities

Before we venture any further, let’s define an employee engagement or experience people analytics tech vendor.

Employee engagement or experience technology vendor: A vendor that uses people data to understand employee engagement or experience.

In our 2020 people analytics study,⁵ we grouped all participating vendors under 9 categories, based on their tech and analysis (organizational network analysis, text analysis, workforce planning, or multisource analysis) or the talent areas they focus on (labor market analysis, learning, employee engagement and experience, employee coaching, or HCM / integrated talent management).

Employee engagement and experience was the biggest category in our study, with 36% of all vendors. PAT providers in this space offer capabilities that enable customers to do four things, as outlined in Figure 4:

Specific to current times, vendors have leveraged these capabilities in several ways to help their customers. Figure 5 provides details on each of the roles identified in Figure 4.

Customers Are Happy with Their Engagement and Experience Vendors

Our people analytics study of 2020 included a poll of 72 customers, which revealed that customers of these PAT solutions are generally satisfied with them. Specifically, customers gave an average NPS score of 61 for employee engagement and experience vendors (see Figure 6), as compared with the average score of 67 for all vendors in the study. To put that into a bit more context, the average NPS for SaaS companies in 2020 is a score of 40,⁶ making 61 a great score for PAT vendors in this category.

Some of the quotes from the most satisfied customers in this category include:

“An innovative vendor, constantly improving the product and providing excellent customer support and flexibility.”

Large healthcare company for an employee experience / engagement analysis solution

 

"Comprehensive surveying and reporting tool with good support."

Large retailer for an employee experience / engagement solution

 

"High flexibility can be used for multiple purposes."

Large pharmaceutical company for an employee experience / engagement solution

 

PAT will continue to play a crucial role in helping customers as they prepare themselves to face a new set of challenges related to employee engagement and experience in 2021 and beyond.

Employee Engagement and Experience Vendors

Let's turn to the specific employee engagement and experience vendors, which we divide into 3 categories:

1. Employee engagement (EE) vendors
2. Employee experience (EX) vendors
3. “Passive primary” vendors

In the content that follows, for each category, we provide a framework that is based on the heritage of the vendors, such as founder or acquisition history.

The origins and backgrounds of the vendors, as well as if they’ve been acquired or have acquired others, influences the capabilities they offer and how they go to market.

Each framework provides a list of all the vendors in that category, their backgrounds, details on whether they collect perception data, passive data or both, acquisition history, and a customer NPS score, if available. At the end of each category, we provide a set of checklists to help both customers and vendors think about some key questions when selecting or selling tech (respectively).

We also provide our RedThread assessment for each vendor included in this space which can be accessed through our interactive tool. Readers can use the tool to click on the logo of a vendor and read our assessment for them.

Employee Engagement Vendors

For vendors in the employee engagement (EE) category, we created a framework with the following groups:

• Professional services background. Vendors in this group were founded by people with a strong background and experience in professional services, such as consulting. Their offerings come tightly coupled with professional services (although the tech can also be purchased on its own).
• Employee engagement native. These vendors started out as engagement survey providers, and their primary bread and butter continues to be engagement surveys.
• Employee engagement via other talent areas. Vendors in this group are known for their other products, such as performance management, along with employee engagement. A number of vendors in this group have either acquired other talent solutions in the past or have been acquired themselves—which influences their approach to the market and areas of focus.

A clear distinction among these different groups is difficult due to areas of overlap and, thus, some vendors fall into more than 1 group. All vendors included in this category:

• Have a very strong focus and background in developing employee engagement and pulse surveys
• Go to market as an employee engagement platform and have traditionally focused on engagement as a primary talent area
• Have customer success stories that primarily feature examples of understanding employee feedback and improving engagement

Figure 7 below shows our framework for this category and provides key points on each vendor. (Click on the image below to enlarge it.)

Putting the framework into action

In the following checklists, we offer some key questions for potential customers and vendors to help them better understand the tech and their needs, respectively.

Employee Experience Vendors

For vendors in the employee experience (EX) category, we created a framework with the following 2 groups:

• Focused on employee engagement and experience. Vendors in this group focus on engagement and experience, and provide insights that are primarily focused on creating and improving personalized experiences for employees throughout their lifecycle
• Focused on customer experience. Vendors in this group provide capabilities to capture and analyze customer experience data, and connect that to other types of data

Given our focus on employee experience vendors, we don't include vendors that only focus on customer experience. Instead, we included vendors that focus on customer experience in addition to the other two areas of employee engagement and employee experience.

All employee experience solutions included here also focus on engagement, and provide engagement and pulse surveys. However, we included these vendors in this category instead of engagement because:

• Several vendors have a strong focus and background in customer experience, and can help users connect those insights with employee experience
• Several vendors provide capabilities that collect data from the digital exhaust and connect active data with passive data—thus, providing a more continuous listening approach
• They go to market as an enterprise experience platform

Figure 8 shows our framework for this category, and provides key points on each vendor. (Click on the image below to enlarge it.)

Putting the framework into action

In the following checklists, we offer some key questions for potential customers and vendors to help them better understand the tech and their customers’ needs, respectively.

“Passive Primary” Vendors

Recently, we’ve come across a few vendors that have traditionally swum in slightly different lanes of talent areas, but which are starting to market themselves in the engagement space. These vendors are not survey providers. They do not collect employee perception data directly from employees, and thus, do not measure employee engagement in the traditional manner.

These vendors collect passive data—created by employees through digital communications, emails, and collaboration tools—to provide insights on employee attitudes and work behaviors, and, thus, understand engagement levels. Others apply their services—such as text analysis—to feedback data already collected by the customer to identify patterns and themes that can be used to understand employee engagement.

“Passive primary” vendors are PAT solution providers that use passive data to produce insights for the purpose of understanding and improving employee engagement and experience.

For vendors in this category, we created a framework with the following 2 groups:

• Text analysis. Vendors in this group use sophisticated text analysis to understand how employees feel
• Organizational network analysis (ONA). Vendors in this group collect employee communication and network data, and apply collaboration analytics to understand employee engagement levels

This framework is helpful in introducing consumers to instances in which employee engagement can be understood through approaches that don’t involve any surveys. These vendors provide a new way of measuring and understanding employee engagement.

A big challenge that these solutions are able to overcome is self-reported high engagement levels in employee surveys. The flipside to this are the obvious legal, privacy, and security risks that such data collection methods bring along with them.

Figure 10 shows our framework for these vendors, and features key points on each vendor that include their approach to data collection and a customer NPS score, if available. (Click on the image below to enlarge it.)

Putting the framework into action

In the following checklists, we offer some key questions for potential customers and vendors to help them better understand the tech and their needs, respectively.

Looking Forward

We expect to see the PAT employee engagement and experience space change and evolve in the near future in the following ways:

• Increasing number of new players. The market is poised to keep growing for the foreseeable future for the following reasons:
  • Everybody wants more data. As companies look to reopen their offices or adopt a hybrid approach, deeper and regular insights from perception and passive data will continue to be critical for leaders and managers.
  • The personal now impacts the professional. Areas that were once considered separate from the workplace and owned by individuals—such as physical and mental wellbeing, and work-life balance—became crucial drivers for employee engagement and experience during remote work. Employers now see themselves as more responsible for these areas as they impact an employee’s overall experience with the org and drive engagement. Tech solutions in this space can help.
• Rise of nontraditional engagement and experience vendors. Users will increasingly see the value of applying PAT solutions—that use nontraditional methods of data collection, and don’t go to market as either engagement or experience solutions—to impact these areas. Similar to DEIB tech, we foresee more tech vendors offering capabilities for the purpose of engagement and experience. For example, with collaboration and wellbeing seen as crucial drivers for engagement and experience, ONA can offer useful insights to users. We’re already starting to see this growing shift with vendors as mentioned in our “passive primary” vendors section.

• Enabling action. PAT vendors within this space will do more than just collect and analyze data: They’ll increasingly provide specific and targeted recommended actions as part of their solution offerings. Additionally, they’ll also offer users more and more resources within their platforms that’ll enable them to act on those recommendations.

Conclusion

Employee listening became a strategic priority for leaders in 2020 and will continue to be critical in 2021. Efforts to understand and drive employee engagement and experience enabled companies to weather the storms, so to speak. While the pandemic will eventually come to an end and social unrest will be addressed (we hope!), lessons learned during these turbulent times will stick with us far into the foreseeable future.

Leaders must continue investing in these areas if they want to successfully survive and work through future disruptions. People analytics tech, that focuses on these areas, can help orgs care for their employees and be better prepared for the future.

DEIB Tech: Its Time Has Come

Global pandemic. Protests. Elections. Riots. (And whatever else happens between when we publish this article and you read it.) Needless to say, the last year has been rough. It laid bare our differences in stark relief. Shown how events impact diverse people differently. Perhaps it caused you some measure of disgust, despair, or even depression. At a minimum, it likely contributed to exhaustion.

But, at the same time, the last year has also revealed our underlying humanity. The extent to which we care about other people. The depth at which we hold our beliefs about our country. The potential we have when we work together (hello, COVID-19 vaccine!).

Given all this, there has never been a greater need for a focus on diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging (DEIB) – both in our society and in our organizations. We have a need to understand each other and to work together, more than ever before.

Organizations throughout the world have recognized this, from top leaders to DEIB leaders to managers and employees. It’s for this reason companies are talking about DEIB more in their earnings reports than ever before and why the number of DEIB job openings has skyrocketed. The thing is this: organizations cannot just talk about DEIB and hire people to lead it. That is a good start, but it’s not enough. Organizations need to change their systems, practices, and behaviors. The change cannot just rely on individuals – it has to be baked into how the organization operates.

This is where DEIB technology can help, as it has the potential to build in practices, behaviors, insights, and recommendations that address bias. It can also provide insights about what is actually happening with people (versus relying on anecdote-based understanding) at the moment of critical decision-making about talent.

Tripping down memory lane

When we first began studying the D&I tech market in 2018, the #MeToo movement had thrust diversity and inclusion in the workspace under a spotlight. Stories and accounts of workplace discrimination, harassment, and unethical behaviors toward women in the workplace led numerous businesses to pledge to change their policies and take action.¹ As a result, organizations began to feel a greater need for systemwide solutions.

In 2018, we launched our first research study on this topic, and we published a comprehensive report, Diversity & Inclusion Technology: The Rise of a Transformative Market, in February 2019. The study included a list of all the D&I vendors we identified and was accompanied by a detailed vendor landscape tool (with 2 updates since). As we shared in our initial report, tech can play a transformative role.

Fast forward to today

We (still) find ourselves in the midst of health, social, and economic crises. 2020 was not an easy year for anyone, but it especially impacted diverse people in many significant ways, including:

• Women left the workforce in record numbers
• Lower-income earners saw their jobs evaporate
• The murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and others disproportionately impacted the Black community

Many companies have responded by making pledges or promises in support of the #BLM movement.² A large number of them have focused on increasing diversity levels within the companies, both at the employee and leadership levels (for examples of such corporate pledges, see Diversity, Equity, Inclusion & Belonging: Creating a Holistic Approach for 2021).

As the pressure to follow through on these promises increases, leaders must develop strategies to achieve them––and we believe that DEIB tech represents one of the critical components of the process (see Figure 2 further down). Sophisticated tech––such as artificial intelligence (AI), deep machine learning, natural language processing (NLP), and organizational network analysis (ONA)––can help leaders manage DEIB better and more easily and are increasingly becoming more accepted as essential tools for people practices.³

Through this report, we aim to achieve 4 things:

1. Help leaders understand the role of DEIB tech
2. Provide insights on the state of the DEIB tech market
3. Highlight the talent areas focused by vendors
4. Guide leaders who may be looking to make tech investments

Key Findings

The study covers three major areas and how they have changed since 2019: the DEIB tech market, talent areas vendors focus on, and what buyers should consider before investing. We also address what we see coming next. Some of the key findings from the study include the following:

1. Three major shifts punctuate the current DEIB tech market
   • In previous years, leaders were especially focused on gender; in 2020-21, the emphasis has evolved to include a focus on race and ethnicity.
   • Social justice movements and conversations around discriminatory workplace practices and behaviors have led to greater attention to inclusion than ever before.
   • The role of AI in mitigating bias to enhance DEIB has come front and center, and more approaches have been introduced to address this issue.
2. The DEIB tech market is hotter than ever
   • The global market size is estimated to be $313 million and growing, up from $100 million in 2019.
   • The number of HR tech vendors offering features or functionalities that cater to DEIB as part of their solutions has increased by 136% since 2019.
   • The total number of DEIB tech vendors increased by 87%, with a total of 196 vendors in the market for 2021, compared with 105 in 2019.
3. People analytics for DEIB has arrived
   • Lack of analytics and insights on DEIB is the primary challenge the majority of vendors help their customers solve, hence the growing number of solutions. providing DEIB analytics in 2021 compared to 2019 (28% vs 26%, respectively).
4. Small-sized organizations and knowledge industries remain the main customers of DEIB tech
   • The largest customer category is small-sized organizations (those with less than 1000 employees), who represent almost 30% of all DEIB vendor customers.
   • However, these small organizations represent a smaller percentage of DEIB vendor customers in 2021 than in 2019, and there was an increase in the percentage of customer organizations in the 10,000-50,000 range.
   • The industries most likely to be DEIB tech customers are concentrated in knowledge industries, namely technology, financial, banking, and insurance.

Check Out the Full Study and Tool

The full study (available to members) has lots more information than what we’ve detailed here, including many more details on the market, customer quotes and feedback, and checklists for leaders interested in DEIB tech.

In addition, we encourage you to check out the brand new, fully redesigned DEIB Tech tool, which is available both to members and non-members. You can look at the 196 vendors in each of the four talent areas and their relevant sub-categories. RedThread members can click through and see details on individual vendors.

 

 

RedThread members can see the areas of talent vendors focus on, the top industries served, vendor capabilities, strengths, challenges addressed, and customer feedback (see Figure 3). We provide the maximum amount of information we can, based on what vendors shared with us or what we were able to find publicly available. This tool is designed to be evergreen, so it will be updated continuously as we conduct briefings throughout the year.

 

A Thank You

This study involves a significant time investment from everyone who participated in its development. We want to thank all of the vendors and customers who gave their time, energy, and expertise to make this such a robust study and tool.

If you have any questions about this research or about becoming a RedThread member, please contact us at [email protected].

 

 

Key Takeaways

1. Mobility is a mindset, not just upward or between-role movement. Many orgs said mobility has more to do with fluidity than with a specific form. The simplest definition of mobility is “… Enabling employees to participate in opportunities that benefit both the org and the employee.” Several orgs from our study are implementing career mobility initiatives that don’t focus on roles, but rather on exploring assignments that may be:
   • Part-time
   • Alongside current responsibilities
   • Short-term, full-time gigs
2. Mobility’s changed substantially—and will change more in the future. We’re seeing orgs do more of the following:
   • Exploring more, in terms of what mobility looks like
   • Providing more transparency to make opportunities open to everyone
   • Offering more freedom and ownership to employees, with respect to their careers
   • Using data and technology to enable mobility initiatives
   • As quickly as mobility has been changing, we expect it’ll continue to evolve for the better as orgs are more intentional with their approaches.
3. We’ve identified 5 approaches to career mobility. No one approach is preferable to another—each has its strengths and challenges.
   • Ladder. Employees move from one role to the next, generally up, and generally within a given silo or function
   • Lattice. Employees move up, around, and sometimes down inside the org
   • Agency. Employees move around the org, based on their skills, knowledge, and preferences
   • Outside In. Workers with specific skills are brought into the org to accomplish certain projects or pieces of work
   • Reset. Employees are reskilled and redeployed into new roles, based on the org’s needs and strategy
4. Choose the right mobility approach for your org. We’ve isolated 3 key questions to ask in determining what approach (or approaches) can work best for your org:
   • Does your org lean toward roles or skills?
   • How much does your org enable employee ownership of their own careers?
   • What are the ultimate goals for mobility within your org?
5. Align certain cultural influences to the type of mobility approach being used. When implementing an approach, orgs should consider these questions:
   • How is career planning enabled?
   • What messaging is offered about mobility (implicit and explicit)?
   • What role does leadership play in enabling mobility?
   • How do technology and data support the mobility approach?

Mobility: The Near Future

Not to blame everything on 2020, but recent events have shed light on shortfalls associated with some of HR’s biggest people challenges. As orgs reconfigure strategies, they’re also reevaluating the structures that support those strategies, as well as how employees move through those structures. And with that, leaders have begun to understand the power of mobility.

As orgs reconfigure strategies, they’re also reevaluating the structures that support those strategies, as well as how employees move through those structures.

Indeed, some of our most sought-after roundtables in the past year addressed the topic of mobility. What questions have we heard from leaders? Many. Turns out, it’s a broad topic that mostly boils down to the following 3 key concerns:

1. Leaders want to know where to start. Options for thinking about mobility have multiplied as ideas, such as “the new world of work” and skills, are now present in the HR arena. While some approaches have been introduced (think Ladder, Lattice), there’s little written on how to implement them.
2. Leaders want to understand how to lead the charge. We asked interviewees: Who owns career mobility? Not surprisingly, few had concrete answers, as it’s often a shared responsibility across many functions with differing ideas and agendas.
3. Leaders want to know how to balance employee and org needs. One thing we heard more than once is that “… Everyone deserves the opportunity to grow and own their career.” Many leaders, however, struggle with making sure it can happen while taking care of the org.

Different approaches and stories can help leaders figure out where best to start.

We’ve spent the last 5 months talking with leaders, reading the literature, conducting roundtables about mobility, and just plain thinking about this. We’ve concluded that it’s a complicated topic with several possible answers. The research of others and our conversations with those on the cutting edge have led us to this: Different approaches and stories can help leaders figure out where best to start.

What is mobility nowadays?

Several aspects of career mobility have morphed over the years. Whereas it used to be a well-understood idea with fairly straightforward practices, recent events have acted as catalysts for newer and better ways to implement career mobility strategies. So, how has it changed? It’s:

• Not just “upward” anymore
• Taking on new meaning
• A mindset

Not just “upward” anymore

In the past, mobility was only associated with moving employees from one role to another within an org. Originally, it was almost exclusively tied to moving up through an org’s hierarchical structure, thus the term “upwardly mobile.”

In more recent years, however, career mobility has come to mean, in its simplest definition,

“… Enabling employees to participate in work and opportunities in ways that benefit both the org and the employee.”

Leaders and employees have embraced the idea that this movement isn’t just upward—it’s also across, down, full-time, part-time, or gig work as well.¹

Mobility takes on new meaning

This research gave us the opportunity to investigate how different orgs are enabling career mobility for their employees. One thing we uncovered: Some orgs are implementing mobility initiatives that have very little to do with actual movement at all.

Some orgs are implementing mobility initiatives that have very little to do with actual movement at all.

In these instances, mobility doesn’t mean changing roles—or considering long-term “roles” at all. Instead, it can mean exploring new roles or assignments on a part-time basis, alongside a current role, or full-time for short periods of time.

Mobility as a mindset

The term “career mobility” has also taken on a more psychological aspect by enabling employees to feel that their career choices are “fluid.” This way of thinking about mobility encourages exploration and movement, regardless of the form it takes.

Bottom line: The traditional purpose of mobility—to move people upward through a series of roles with increasing responsibility—has given way to more of a mindset (than an activity). These orgs tend to be more transparent about opportunities for employees and where they can take their careers. As such, it’s made clear that not everyone will be CEO and employees may not stay with the org forever—and so the relationship between employer and employee will change.

Career mobility now encompasses the fluidity that employees feel when it comes to career choices—encouraging exploration and movement regardless of what form it takes.

Instead of promising upward movement, orgs are offering freedom and opportunities for learning and growth. This simply means that orgs and employees are becoming more realistic about what can be offered and what should be expected.

Along with these changes in how mobility is perceived, we noted several new trends since we last studied this topic 5 years ago.

5 new mobility trends

We’ve seen tremendous growth in the area of career mobility—both in how it shows up on the agendas of leaders, as well as the tech solutions being offered in the market. Let’s briefly take a look at 5 current trends.

1. More experimentation. Orgs have come a long way from defaulting to traditional approaches, regardless of their needs. They’re now embracing other ways of doing things—or are at least “dipping in their toes.”
2. Talk of leveling the playing field. Probably because of its roots, orgs have traditionally reserved career mobility for high-potential (HiPo) employees and / or those seen as future leaders. Many leaders spoke of utilizing career mobility as a way to address concerns about diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging (DEIB)² to make opportunities open to more people.
3. More opportunities for employees. As orgs step away from rigid career paths that serve only the org, opportunities for employees are opening up—allowing them to create the career they want, even if it looks completely different than anyone else’s.
4. More data, better decisions. It’s difficult for us to have discussions about career mobility without also addressing skills.³ Orgs are thinking through how to better understand the capabilities of employees because of their experience and skills—and how to use that information to make better talent and mobility decisions.
5. Tech enablement. While, in the past, mobility was largely manual—relying on manager impressions and employee proactivity—tech is making mobility easier. We’ve seen an uptick in the number and sophistication of technologies that:
   • Make opportunities more transparent
   • Help employees plan their careers
   • Combine data and information to help leaders make better decisions
   • Offer part-time or gig work to employees internally

Mobility is evolving to offer more and more—exploration, freedom, opportunities, and tech.

We spoke with leaders to understand their goals, their current efforts, and changes in the way mobility is being utilized. Through these discussions, we outlined how those efforts are manifesting within different orgs.

The following section introduces the approaches that we identified, how they’re being implemented, and the reasoning behind each.

Approaches To Career Mobility

Lest leaders look for a silver bullet, there’s no “right way” to do career mobility. In all, we talked with 17 different companies about their mobility strategies and philosophies; more than 70 leaders participated in our roundtables on this hot topic. And while we found similarities between approaches, no 2 orgs are handling career mobility in exactly the same way—or for the same reasons.

There’s no “right way” to do career mobility.

Luckily, patterns exist. In this section, we introduce some broad frameworks and approaches that can help leaders understand their options when it comes to mobility—and what may be most appropriate for their org.

Summary of approaches

Let’s start with the approaches themselves. From the existing literature and our extensive conversations with leaders, we identified 5 approaches, as shown in Figure 1.

Later in this report, we dive into each of these approaches—providing their characteristics, what they’re good for, and what leaders should think about when implementing them.

Approaches & their relationships to each other

While we view these 5 approaches as distinct career mobility strategies with unique goals that work in different environments, we didn’t run across any orgs that are exclusively using only 1 approach.

Most often, orgs identify an approach that’s used more broadly across the company, and then employ other mobility approaches for particular audiences or needs.

Generally, orgs identify an approach that’s used more broadly across the company, and then employ other approaches for particular audiences or needs. For example: If an org’s main strategy is based on deep subject-matter expertise and its industry is stable, then a Ladder approach may be appropriate. However, that same company may have a consulting arm that needs to flex, based on the projects coming in. For that 1 department, an Agency approach may work better.

We looked for similarities between the approaches by plotting the 5 approaches along 2 axes, based on our conversations and research, representing roles vs skills (horizontally) and high vs low employee ownership (vertically), as shown in Figure 2.

Whenever a framework like Figure 2 is introduced, the tendency is to think that “up and to the right” is the way to go. Keep in mind that doesn’t apply here.

The 5 approaches fit nicely within the quadrants created by these 2 axes—and give us a sense of the similarities and differences between them. In short, synergies can be found between approaches that reside on similar places on the axes. For example:

• Ladder works best in environments for which permanent roles are the primary way that companies organize people, and in cultures in which employee ownership of their careers is low—meaning that career paths are well-defined and not too flexible.
• Lattice works best in orgs for which permanent roles are the primary way people are organized, but employees have considerable ownership of their careers—meaning the org has adopted a mindset of movement, allowing people to try out different roles in different functions / business units.
• Agency works best in situations with high employee ownership (in fact, this model requires high employee ownership), and in which the people come together in project teams or other flexible arrangements to get work done (i.e., think of an ad agency completing a contract).
• Outside In relies on understanding the skills employees have and leveraging those skills to get work done, but it doesn’t allow for much employee ownership to define a career in the context of the org—mainly because employees work with more than one org at a time (i.e., gig economy).
• Reset (in the middle of the other 4 quadrants—halfway between roles and skills, and halfway between high and low employee ownership) relies on reskilling employees for new jobs, but in most orgs they must also be identified for new roles, giving employees the freedom to accept or reject an opportunity, while not necessarily choosing a different one.

Whenever a framework like this is introduced, the tendency is to think that “up and to the right” is the way to go. Keep in mind that doesn’t apply here. Figure 2 should be seen as descriptive rather than prescriptive: It describes how these approaches are used, instead of identifying where an org wants to progress to.

Our mobility approach framework should be seen as descriptive rather than prescriptive.

That said, most orgs do tend to move up and / or to the right of this framework. As leaders determine what’s right for their orgs, it’s important to understand the approach(es) currently being used (and how) and what their environment looks like.

(As an aside: It’s challenging, but not impossible, to move from, say, a Ladder to Agency approach because this change requires movement along both axes. It’s easier to tackle them 1 at a time, which is what we’re seeing today. Two more examples: Orgs that offer more employee ownership move from a Ladder to Lattice approach; employees who want to use skills more move from a Lattice to Agency approach.)

Determining The Right Approach

Determining which approaches may work best for your org depends on a few things:

• Does your org lean toward roles or skills?
• How much does your org enable employee ownership of their own careers?
• What are the ultimate goals for mobility within your org?

Does your org lean toward roles or skills?

Many of the leaders we spoke with identified ways to utilize skills differently—not just to define job descriptions for roles, but to truly change the way work is done. While most have a long way to go, it’s the mindset shift that’s interesting to us, particularly in how it changes the way orgs think about mobility.

As orgs embrace skills, the goals of mobility change from moving people along career paths to helping employees identify where they can best use those skills.

Orgs are (slowly) moving away from only thinking about roles (which organize work around rigid structures of people and tasks) to skills (which provide flexibility by allowing teams to form with the exact capabilities needed to get a project or piece of work accomplished). With this shift come changes in mobility strategies. As orgs embrace skills, the goals of career mobility change from moving people along well-developed career paths to helping employees identify where they can best utilize those skills.

Some orgs that move toward a skills mindset also tend to adopt both Agency and Outside In approaches: These orgs embrace the need to break out skills from role definitions. They use tools, like internal talent marketplaces, to help employees identify short-term or project work to which they can apply their unique skills—benefitting the employee as well as the org.

The near-frenzied discussion about skills—and the tech and data that support it—has made it much easier to pinpoint the skills orgs need to bring in, either to fill existing gaps or to help orgs pivot more smoothly.

Likewise, orgs are more likely to look beyond their borders to take advantage of the available skills of independent workers. While this is definitely not a new strategy, the near-frenzied discussion about skills—and the tech and data that support it—has made it much easier to pinpoint the skills orgs need to bring in, either to fill existing gaps or to help orgs pivot more smoothly.

Further, some orgs are going beyond their own walls to take advantage of the available skills of independent workers. These orgs offer gig or contract work to bring in the expertise, skills, and knowledge as needed for specific pieces of work.

How much does your org enable employee ownership?

When determining what approach(es) is / are most appropriate, leaders need to know the level of ownership that employees have over their careers. While almost all orgs we spoke with insist their employees own their careers, this turns out to mean different things in different contexts.

The level of employee ownership of their careers turns out to mean different things in different contexts.

For some orgs, employees can work as hard as they want to move up the corporate ladder. In others, more flexible career paths are embraced: They encourage and enable employees to find roles and projects best-suited to their career goals.

Employee ownership isn’t just about the tagline or sales pitch to people about their opportunities: It encompasses the whole of what orgs do to enable employees to choose the career path they want—not the one identified for them by leadership. (More on this later.)

What are the goals for mobility within your org?

We found that few leaders had given much thought to this question, which led us to wonder: If leaders aren’t clear on their expectations for mobility, why are they investing in it?

Orgs that can’t clearly define what their goals are often struggle to put a cohesive initiative into place, let alone measure its effectiveness.

Any leader will tell you that career mobility initiatives don’t spontaneously appear: They take quite a bit of work and coordination to make happen. Orgs that can’t clearly define what their goals are often struggle to put a cohesive initiative into place, let alone measure its effectiveness.

While answers to our questions about career mobility goals varied in our interviews and roundtables, they almost always fell within 1 of the following 5 categories:

• Retention and engagement. For most, retention and engagement of current employees is top of mind: Not surprising, given the attention this topic has received in the past few years. Mobility can help employees find the right types of experiences to keep them engaged.
• Development and skills-building. Orgs also saw the benefit of offering employees varied experiences that developed needed skills, whether for subject-matter depth or for breadth of knowledge, in preparation for leadership opportunities.
• Moving skills to where they’re needed. As industries continue to be disrupted, moving skills around the org instead of developing those skills in place is an imperative for many.
• Succession. Particularly in more traditional companies, we continue to hear about the importance of succession, especially for org leadership.
• Reinvention / adaptation. Orgs, particularly in the midst of disruptions from COVID-19 and other events, find themselves in need of ramping down complete business units or functions while ramping up others. Mobility allows them to move employees from one area to another.

Interestingly, different approaches lend themselves better to some of these mobility goals than others. We evaluated our 5 approaches against these career mobility goals (see Figure 3).

While this isn’t scientific, it does, however, give leaders an idea of how well-suited certain approaches may be for their career mobility goals.

Of all these goals, retention and engagement was mentioned most often in our interviews. It shouldn’t be surprising, then, that the most common approach (whether the primary or secondary) orgs implement is a Lattice approach.

The answers to these questions can enable more robust discussions about the right approaches for your org. Next step: applying the approaches.

In the next section, we look at each of the 5 approaches and offer guidance to help leaders implement the most appropriate approach for their situation.

Applying Different Approaches

Understanding which approach is most appropriate for an org is only half the battle: The other half is figuring out how to implement that approach in a way to “make it stick.” From our research, we learned that this generally involves 3 things:

• Understanding the approach and how it’s applied. More information about the approaches can help orgs understand how they’ve historically been applied and what benefits they can expect.
• Overcoming challenges associated with the approach. Each approach has a series of challenges that orgs should be aware of as they consider how to implement a mobility initiative. Some challenges have ready-made solutions; others may be things that orgs need to be willing to live with.
• Aligning cultural influencers with the approach. Career mobility strategies don’t automatically succeed and they definitely can’t operate within a bubble. Several aspects of an org’s culture can aid or hinder its adoption and success. Our research identified 4 such aspects (or influencers) that we discuss for each approach.

Career mobility strategies don’t automatically succeed and they definitely can’t operate within a bubble.

In the next sections, we review each of the mobility approaches with these 3 things in mind.

Ladder

In a Ladder approach, employees move from one role to the next, generally up, and generally within a given silo or function. This approach is most commonly used to ensure succession, and for employee development and skills-building.

Ladder is likely the most familiar approach since it’s also the most common. This approach to career mobility has a long history of serving hierarchical orgs, as it often mirrors the traditional structure and focuses on bringing up employees through the ranks. The main purpose is to ensure that the defined people structure remains staffed and skilled.

The most common of the 5 approaches, Ladder mirrors the traditional structure and focuses on bringing up employees through the ranks.

Given the goal of a staffed and skilled people structure, this is where most orgs often start with career mobility—also making it the default approach. Orgs often use the Ladder approach when they haven’t yet thought through why they want to implement mobility strategies.

Career paths in a Ladder approach are generally very well-developed and, more often than not, follow the structure of the org. As such, it’s easier for employees to understand the skills and knowledge necessary to move through that type of career path. This also allows leadership to more simply identify who’s ready for the next move and helps employees understand the expectations for their career development.

Biggest benefit we heard: Alignment

A Ladder approach is closely aligned with the people structure in orgs. Many of the challenges for other approaches aren’t present here. In fact, a Ladder is the perfect approach—if your environment and strategy are relatively stable, and your employees are okay with your outlined career paths.

Orgs using a Ladder approach don’t struggle to align their mobility approach with other systems (i.e., think about how you determine headcount, financial accounting when moving people around, tech systems, performance, and more) because most have been designed to support a Ladder approach.

Very few orgs use a pure Ladder approach: Changing external environments and employee expectations make it difficult to establish and pristinely maintain it.

All that said, few orgs use a pure Ladder approach, even if it’s their official approach. Changing external environments and employee expectations make it difficult to establish and pristinely maintain this approach.

Biggest challenge we heard: Flexibility

Disruptions have caused most orgs to rethink at least part of their strategies: Ladder approaches are often disrupted as well. What works well in stable, unchanging environments becomes more problematic as change is introduced.

For example: A technology suddenly becomes obsolete—and an org has dedicated business lines focused on that tech, building depth of knowledge in that category and identifying a succession plan to staff that part of the business. Here, a Ladder approach doesn’t make it easy to pivot quickly and without significant hassle.

What works well in stable, unchanging environments becomes more problematic as change is introduced.

Many leaders also pointed out that, while a Ladder approach can support a robust succession plan and build deep expertise, it doesn’t necessarily serve all employees (i.e., those who haven’t been identified as HiPos or future leaders, or who want a different career path than the one outlined). A Ladder approach generally doesn’t include swift contingencies for change.

While a Ladder approach can support a robust succession plan and build deep expertise, it doesn’t necessarily serve all employees.

That said, many orgs overcome Ladder’s lack of flexibility in 3 ways:

• Focus on depth. Dow, a materials science company, uses a combination of approaches, including Ladder. Most Dow employees remain within a particular function throughout their tenure in order to develop deep technical expertise. In fact, it’s not unusual for employees to stay in a role for 4 to 6 years, or longer, before making the decision to move to a new role—a commitment that parallels a return on investment from the company’s training and on-the-job peer coaching. After all,

“… You can’t microwave deep technical knowledge.”

Mitchel MacNair, Global Learning & Career Growth Consultant, Dow Chemical

• Typically, these employees make upward moves within the same domain or function. By contrast, HiPos and those interested in managerial roles are encouraged to gain cross-functional experience using a Lattice model (more on the Lattice model below).

• Using rotations, tours of duty, and special assignments. Many of the orgs that identified Ladder as their main approach also use opportunities, like rotations and special assignments, to provide employees with more flexibility and help them build skills.

• Fusing more than 1 approach. Other approaches can work well alongside Ladder to fit an org’s needs. One global org uses a Lattice approach at lower levels of the org and a Ladder approach at higher levels (thus, the higher an employee climbs, the more specialized roles become). With a goal of a 70% internal-build ratio, a focus on “upskilling” prepares those in the lower levels to find and qualify for good opportunities as they explore and the org prepares employees to lead.

Lattice

The Lattice approach has gained in popularity over the last 10 years, particularly as orgs have begun to pay much more attention to the employee experience. With the Lattice approach, orgs enable employees to move up, around, and sometimes down—figuring out a career path that works for them.

Lattice allows employees to jump from one role to another, thus building a breadth of experience and experimenting with their skills in other settings.

This approach is interesting because it still takes advantage of more traditional people structures (meaning roles), but allows employees to jump from one role to another, thus building a breadth of experience and experimenting with their skills in other settings.

Lattice also offers quite a bit of employee ownership for individuals, encouraging them to take charge of their careers. More recently, transparency and guidance—offered either by managers or by technology—have become hallmarks of a functional Lattice approach. This helps employees understand their career options.

In asking leaders for their main purpose for implementing a Lattice approach, the top answer turns out to be retention and engagement. In most orgs, mobility is seen as an engagement tool, particularly for those identified as future leaders and HiPo employees.

In most orgs, mobility is seen as an engagement tool, particularly for those identified as future leaders and HiPo employees—and as critical to ensuring flexibility for the org.

However, we also ran across orgs using Lattice to ensure all employees have opportunities for growth and the freedom to define their own careers. They see a Lattice approach as key to ensuring that the company has flexibility—both in terms of skills and mindset—to adjust to whatever external pressures their org may face.

Biggest benefit we heard: Flexibility

Most orgs we spoke with adopted a Lattice approach to provide flexibility and a better employee experience—focusing on the goal of retention and engagement. The Lattice approach takes advantage of traditional people structures that focus on roles, while still encouraging employees to own their careers and choose roles that are most in-line with their career goals.

Many orgs firmly using Lattice are also experimenting with an Agency approach since Lattice establishes a more flexible mindset.

We found that many orgs firmly using Lattice are also experimenting with an Agency approach. They’re able to do this since a Lattice approach helps to establish a more flexible mindset that generally rolls down to thinking through some of the obstacles which Ladder presents (i.e., accounting for headcount, moving people across org barriers, etc.).

Biggest challenge we heard: Ownership

A Lattice approach naturally lends itself to employee ownership: However, while many orgs are quick to say their employees own their careers, it’s often more lip service than actual enablement. Lattice requires orgs to actively enable employees to find opportunities that suit them, which usually takes a combination of systems and processes, messaging, manager support, and, more often than not, technology.

Lattice requires orgs to actively enable employees to find opportunities that suit them—usually combining systems and processes, messaging, manager support, and tech.

While this is a big challenge for the Lattice approach, it’s not insurmountable. Leaders we spoke with offered a few ideas:

• Build it into the culture and support with messaging. Ericsson, a global Swedish-based telecom company, uses a Lattice approach as part of its enterprisewide Open Talent Market. According to the CLO, Vidya Krishnan, the company believes in building business value by helping its people to be “On the Move” (the name for Ericsson’s culture and leadership transformation framework). This means:
  • Putting people with the right skills in the right roles
  • Upskilling and reskilling people into new roles through project-based learning
  • Building the critical skills they need to meet evolving business demands with scale, speed, and accountability
• By working to make skills clearer and more visible when it comes to job descriptions, people profiles, and opportunity / demand management, the company seeks to give employees greater insight to design their future in the direction of Ericsson’s growth. This makes it easier for people to see where critical skills and roles are under- or over-represented, and continually equip themselves to pivot to opportunities through which they can create even more value and fulfillment.
• Redefine expectations. One org we spoke with put significant effort into redefining its relationship with employees. The company began by emphasizing that, with 10,000 employees, not everyone could be CEO. It then touted the benefits of a Lattice approach—including opportunities for employees to:
  • Do interesting work
  • Build networks
  • Develop new knowledge and skills that would be useful regardless of employees’ career paths

  This org made it clear to employees: The company is invested in its employees, will help them grow and develop through opportunities, and wants them to stay as long as it’s mutually beneficial, for which, at any time, the company and employees could part ways and remain friends.

Agency

An Agency approach is defined as one that enables employees to move around the org based on their skills, knowledge, and preferences. The primary goal of this approach is generally to move skills to where they’re needed.

Agency embraces a move from roles to skills and features employee ownership of their careers—and enables companies to organize people around projects or pieces of work.

A fairly big departure from more traditional approaches, Agency most notably embraces both a move from roles to skills and employee ownership of their careers. While more traditional approaches identify a people structure and move pieces of work through that structure, an Agency approach enables companies to organize people around projects or pieces of work.

This gives orgs much more freedom to configure and reconfigure teams to meet the ever-changing needs of the market. At the same time, it also offers employees a lot of flexibility to develop desired skills and shape their careers.

Orgs that embrace an Agency approach are often set up very differently than those with traditional structures: They’re flatter and have fewer management levels. Such orgs use teams to organize people around the work: Employees are seen more as free agents, each responsible for ensuring both that they’re staffed on a project, and that the org is aware of their skills and knowledge.

Orgs with an Agency approach are often flatter and have fewer management levels—orgs use teams to organize people around the work and employees are seen more as free agents.

With an Agency approach, employees rarely belong to long-term roles, and are often on projects for short periods of time with each project having its own leadership and financial accounting. More traditionally structured orgs have struggled with making a leap to Agency because, without completely thinking through the entire process in advance, there usually are obstacles and repercussions to deal with.

Most orgs primarily using an Agency approach do so because it best fits their business model, one that requires skills to be moved where they’re needed to complete the work. That said, the idea of Agency appeals to lots of orgs (particularly in the wake of COVID-19) and many are testing the waters, so to speak. Right now, this most often comes in the form of internal talent marketplaces and gig economies.

Agency makes it possible for employees to take short assignments between roles or part-time assignments alongside their current roles.

These initiatives, enabled by tech, make it possible for employees to take short assignments between roles or part-time assignments alongside their current roles. This approach allows orgs to take advantage of employee skills and knowledge to complete small bits of work, while employees explore other options, build skills or apply skills in a different context, and develop their networks as they maintain their more traditional career paths.

Biggest benefit we heard: Moving skills & knowledge around

An Agency approach makes it easiest to seamlessly move skills and knowledge around the org, providing a tremendous amount of flexibility to the org to reconfigure as necessary.

This approach works really well in orgs which require that flexibility, and in industries such as tech, business services, and increasingly medicine.

Biggest challenge we heard: Different mindset

To make it work well, Agency requires a different mindset by managers and employees alike. In most companies (and in most org cultures), the goals and rewards set forth are to climb the ladder, get promoted, and gain power.

Employees need clarity about how they may be a team member in one situation, subject-matter expert in another situation, and a team lead in yet another.

For orgs using an Agency approach, this mindset is slightly modified. Orgs should be transparent that success doesn’t necessarily mean moving upward. Employees need clarity around the fact that they may be a team member in one situation, subject-matter expert in another situation, and a team lead in yet another, depending on the need.

Success looks very different in an Agency approach and is generally characterized by the fact that employees get to do interesting work, build networks and reputation, and prepare for more interesting work in the future. How are orgs creating this mindset? We offer 2 real-world examples:

• Dip your toes into talent marketplaces. A multinational energy company used multiple mobility approaches—including Ladder, Lattice, and Outside In. The company was prompted to experiment with adopting an Agency approach on top of its other existing approaches. The HR digital transformation team and talent management team partnered together to introduce a talent marketplace pilot last summer, scaling this internal mobility tool last fall. The Open Talent Marketplace (OTM) allows workers to access project-based work and offers employees greater visibility into full-time roles across the company. This is slowly acclimating the workforce to think differently about work and prepare them for future moves.

A shift in mindset about what a “day job” looks like means that every person has some form of gig project going on—an arrangement that's seen as normative and is encouraged.

• Cultural shift in the meaning of “day job.” A multinational tech company also recently introduced a talent marketplace to its workforce as a way of exposing individuals to other parts of the org. The company described a shift in mindset that's allowed employees to rethink what their “day job” looks like. Every person has some form of gig project going on—an arrangement that's seen as normative and is encouraged. This shift encourages individuals to explore beyond their roles, increasing both employee development and engagement. HR leaders stated the purpose behind this mobility is twofold:
  • Ensure employees are energized and engaged in their work
  • Promote individual career ownership

Outside In

An Outside In approach enables workers with specific skills to be brought into the org to accomplish certain projects or pieces of work. The primary goal for this approach is to move skills where they’re needed; it’s also used to help orgs reinvent and adapt.

The main purpose of an Outside In approach is to augment existing workforces with skills and knowledge not yet available internally.

While not strictly about internal or career talent, the main purpose of an Outside In approach is to augment existing workforces with skills and knowledge not yet available internally. Identifying workers with these skills and knowledge, and leveraging them helps orgs move faster by hiring them on a contingent basis for a certain bit of work. Independent workers can include alumni networks, consultants, contractors, gig workers, and others.

To date, we’ve seen exactly 0 large orgs use only an Outside In approach. Instead, Outside In augments other mobility approaches orgs already have in place. That said, more and more orgs are leveraging independent workers as a part of their workforce—and we only expect this to grow. In fact, the “future of work” literature touts independent workers as the wave of the future.

Granted, we still have a long way to go. Current government and healthcare systems aren’t set up to fully leverage independent workers as yet—but we increasingly see more accommodations being made for them.

Some orgs leverage independent workers to do small projects that no one in-house has time for. Others, like RedThread Research, leverage the expertise that independent workers can bring to the org—both to fill gaps, but also to teach existing employees crucial skills the org may not have, particularly in times of disruption and change.

Biggest benefit we heard: Ability to flex capacity

Orgs in the study recognize the Outside In approach as a way to augment teams that have no capacity. We’ve talked with orgs that use independent workers for everything from sound editing and graphic design for a particular project all the way up to specialized strategy work.

Outside In can be applied to one-off tasks, as well as helping orgs staff entirely new business functions when disruptions occur or strategy changes.

Outside In can be applied to one-off tasks that need to be accomplished, but may also help orgs staff entirely new business functions in the case of large disruptions or strategy changes.

Biggest challenge we heard: Navigating laws & regulations

An Outside In approach isn’t without its challenges—the largest of which are laws and regulations. Employment laws protect employees from unfair treatment; they’re often based on traditional, Ladder-type structures and employment approaches. Some of the most notable lawsuits include Uber and Lyft drivers,⁴ and involve determining whether they’re independent contractors vs employees, and what the difference is.

An Outside In approach isn’t without its challenges—the largest of which are laws and regulations.

For this reason, many orgs are tentative about incorporating independent workers into their employee population, thus creating a divide. Specifically, orgs often hesitate to provide (among others):

• Perks such as L&D opportunities (some going so far as to block independent workers from accessing the LMS and other learning technologies)
• Access to key meetings and other org information
• Inclusion in project marketplaces

Some orgs are successfully implementing Outside In approaches by:

• Outsourcing internationally. Bristol Myers Squibb (BMS), a global biopharmaceutical company, outsources its production to specialized firms. The company first started its outsourcing model in 1997 with Biocon, the largest biopharmaceutical company in India. BMS has continued this working relationship in India, where it’s conducting clinical trials for liver disease and diabetes, among other medical conditions. It’s also moved part of its R&D functions to other countries: For instance, in China, BMS has developed an ongoing partnership that has expanded from 30 to 120 employees over the years.⁵ In 2008, it joined a 10-year long and $550 million agreement with Accenture to handle the finance and accounting operations of the company.⁶ Through these partnerships, BMS has been able to outsource much of its work globally, allowing external companies to do the work they know best.
• Outsourcing locally. AirBnB, a global vacation rental and travel company, began leveraging local talent by encouraging hosts to take on photographers in the area to capture their rentals in the best light.⁷ Photographers are prescreened by the company and selected based on location—as this is a function available in some cities across the U.S. By incentivizing their clients with a 40% increase in improved earnings and a 24% increase in bookings, hosts are more likely to seek out these photographers for their own benefit.

Reset

Reset approaches are used when employees are reskilled and redeployed into new roles based on org need and strategy. The primary goal of this approach is to move skills where they’re needed to help the org adapt and reinvent itself. It has the added benefits of retention, engagement, and skills-building.

Many orgs have recently faced massive changes to their operating approaches and strategies, sometimes forcing them to jettison entire functions or business units. This has prompted many to think through how to use their workforces differently and more effectively.

The purpose of the Reset approach is to move employees with skills they’ve used in one part of the org to another.

The Reset approach helps with that challenge: Those using this approach do so to move employees with skills they’ve used in one part of the org to another part of the org where those (or similar) skills are relevant and needed.

Orgs utilizing the Reset approach find themselves paying attention to both roles and skills. Most still rely on roles for organizing people and work, but are increasingly looking at skills as a way to identify candidates for those roles. Specifically, they’re looking at the constellations of skills employees have—sets of related skills, as well as skills applied on different jobs and in different contexts—to determine which employees might effectively apply their skills (and in some cases develop needed skills) in a different part of the org.

Likewise, orgs utilizing this approach also provide a measured level of ownership to employees regarding their careers. We say “measured” because, to this point, we’ve seen a Reset approach applied to lower-level positions—those that often don’t have much freedom to define a new career path. That said, orgs using this approach rely on employees to show initiative and the desire to own their careers in order to move.

Biggest benefit we heard: Utilizing the current workforce

Even before the pandemic and the havoc it wreaked on operating approaches, orgs had begun to notice significant cost-savings when developing and redeploying employees, rather than hiring from the outside.

In fact, based on the median salary in the United States, reskilling is about half the cost of recruiting someone from outside the business. Additionally, external hires cost 18%-20% more and perform worse for the first 2 years on the job.⁸

Reskilling is about half the cost of recruiting from outside the business, while external hires cost 18%-20% more and perform worse for the first 2 years on the job.

Reset also creates goodwill and trust with employees, and creates the onus for specific initiatives to upskill / reskill large swaths of an org’s workforce, keeping skills and knowledge fresh and relevant.

Biggest challenge we heard: Identifying & matching employees with tangential⁹ skills & knowledge to new opportunities

It’s been nearly impossible to conduct a study on mobility without cross-pollinating into a discussion on skills¹⁰—they seem to be inevitably linked. Increasingly, skills and skills data are the enabling factor for a lot of initiatives across HR. We think that’s particularly true for career mobility, and even more so for a Reset approach.

For Reset to work, orgs must understand the skills it needs now (and in the near future) and the skills that it has now (and what it’ll need to develop).

In order for a Reset approach to work, an org must have an understanding of the skills it needs now (and in the near future) and the skills that it has access to now (and what it’ll need to develop). As orgs get better at understanding what they have and forecasting what they need, they’re in a better position to use mobility, as well as employee development, to close those gaps.

As orgs look to take advantage of a Reset approach, many of them find they lack this information. This leaves many of them scrambling and making assumptions about the skills that can be found broadly in one area of the org, rather than identifying the skills that individuals actually have.

More detailed skills data will help orgs make much better decisions about skills, tangential skills, and fitness to roles than they can currently make.

While this is a fine start (think retail employees being switched to customer service—as they share many of the same skills), more detailed skills data will help orgs make much better decisions about skills, tangential skills, and fitness to roles than they can currently make. The following examples illustrate this point.

• Reset as a means of survival. One multinational telecom company’s story actually describes a number of activities that the company has used as part of a Reset approach to mobility. Before the COVID-19 pandemic, this company had around 10,000 employees at call centers and another 15,000 people working at its retail stores nationwide. Once facing the crisis, the company transitioned call center employees to work from home—requiring them to learn new skills. After 7 days, these workers were able to answer a high volume of calls from customers.

• The company also reskilled some of its in-store employees to sales, as some of the stores were no longer open. A training program that leveraged virtual reality (VR) at the time also had to switch gears since the whole set of VR headsets were grounded. Programmers on the VR development team then moved to building apps instead of VR.

• With these shifts, this company retained some of its talent and equipped them in a changing environment. While the HC leaders of the company describe this as “forced mobility” or mobility out of survival, these changes equipped the workforce to be more agile.

• Learning pathways to identify tangential skills. Bell, Canada’s largest communications company, recently launched Bell U, its virtual university. Bell U is an “academic technical pathways program” that encourages skills-building and developing internal talent—in line with the most recent CEO’s focus on a strong people strategy. To identify individuals for the program, the leadership team selects top candidates through an application process.

Employees working in business intelligence already had the foundational skills required to move into AI-related roles—enabling movement between 2 seemingly different roles within the company.

• With a duration of 8 months, this program consists of part-time virtual online training and an 8-week on-the-job full-time work experience. The program leverages many partners to create visual and trackable “academic pathways.” Bell U has 4 main branches: business intelligence (BI), AI, cybersecurity, and software development. Notably, in the process of identifying skills relevant to roles, the company realized that those working in BI already had the foundational skills required to move into AI-related roles. Finding this overlap in skills made possible the movement between 2 seemingly different roles within the company.

Wrapping Up

So there it is: Our take on the ins and outs of career mobility. We’ve given you a snapshot of how mobility has changed in the past several years, including how it’s currently being defined and applied, along with some of the major trends we’re seeing in orgs today.

Our biggest takeaway from this study centers on the untapped potential that well-defined career mobility approaches have for orgs.

Our biggest takeaway from this study centers on the untapped potential that well-defined career mobility approaches have for orgs. While most orgs have focused on retention, engagement, and development as the main reasons for their efforts, we’re excited about the opportunities better mobility models can provide for challenges like DEIB; ensuring access to all employees, not just HiPos or those leadership-bound; and being able to meet org needs in a more tailored way.

While we hope you have found this discussion useful, please keep in mind that this research looks at career mobility at a moment of time: early 2021. Based on the changes we’ve seen, even in the last year, we expect that mobility practices will continue to evolve and, hopefully, get even better. We fully expect that this research will need a refresh in the next few years, if not sooner.

As always, we welcome discussion! Please feel free to reach out to RedThread Research at [email protected] or www.redthreadresearch.com and tell us your experiences.

Appendix 1: Research Methodology

We launched our study in the fall of 2020. This report gathers and synthesizes findings from our research efforts, which include:

• A literature review of 57 articles from business, trade, and popular literature sources
• 3 roundtables, with a total of 57 participants
• 18 in-depth interviews with leaders on their experiences and thoughts on career mobility

For those looking for specific information that came out of those efforts, you’re in luck: We’ve a policy of sharing as much information as possible throughout the research process. Please see:

• Mobility Literature Review: The Changing Perspective on Mobility
• Mobility Roundtable 1 Readout: Mobility: Talent Sources & Employee Preferences
• Mobility Roundtable 2 Readout: Mobility and Learning & Skills
• Mobility Roundtable 3 Readout: Mobility: Leadership, Messaging, Tech, and Processes