Events

Insights on learning content & content management

As part of our ongoing research on learning content, we recently gathered leaders for a research roundtable focused on the latest trends in learning content and content management. The key question in this research is:

How are orgs enabling employees to have the right learning experiences—including accessing the right content, at the right time, in the right format for their needs?

Some of the specific questions we discussed were:

• What makes a great learning content strategy?
• How are orgs deciding what content to prioritize?
• What’s most important to consider about content when choosing and implementing learning tech?
• What metrics should orgs use to evaluate their learning content?

As we'll see below, the key to these questions lies not in the detailed answers but in the overall mindset and approach that forward-thinking L&D orgs are taking toward learning: a mindset of enabling, not providing, learning.

Mindmap of Learning Content Roundtable

The mindmap below outlines the conversations that transpired as part of this roundtable.

Note: This is a live document. Click the window and use your cursor to explore.

Key Takeaways

We had an engaging, energizing conversation—both verbally and in Zoom chat!—that helped us better understand learning content trends, strategy, delivery, and evaluation. Here are the 5 key takeaways:

• L&D continues to move from providing content to enabling development
• Can learning content drive business outcomes and meet employee needs?
• “Pull” strategies can enable employees to access the content they need
• Orgs are using skills to guide content priorities
• Business outcomes should drive decisions about tech and delivery, but it’s often the other way around

L&D continues to move from providing content to enabling development

Looking back on the conversation, an underlying theme was the mindset shift from L&D providing learning to enabling it. This shift is one we’ve written and talked about extensively—and it came up again in this conversation about learning content.

An underlying theme was the mindset shift from L&D providing learning to enabling it.

Given the amount of content out there, the move toward personalization of development experiences, and the sheer variety of people in most orgs, it’s unlikely that L&D knows exactly what development opportunities each individual employee needs.

In this roundtable discussion on learning content, leaders recognized it’s almost impossible for L&D to push the right content to the right people at the right time, in the right format. Instead, they need to enable employees to access the right content at the right time and modality for them. Much of the discussion focused on the different ways leaders and their orgs are thinking about this shift.

Leaders recognized that in order for employees to access the right content at the right time and modality for them, L&D must enable, not provide, learning.

Can learning content drive business outcomes and meet employee needs?

When we asked, “What makes great learning content strategy,” leaders were very clear: Any learning content strategy worth its salt must help solve business challenges. It must drive the development of the capabilities and skills that’ll get the org where it needs to go.

Learning content strategy must drive the development of the capabilities and skills that’ll get the org where it needs to go.

As one leader noted:

“I regularly ask questions about the challenges we’re facing and the outcomes we’re trying to reach. Then I use coaching questions to help leaders and individuals identify their needs. Content is then 1 option or possible way to get to the outcomes.”

And content success must be measured by the things that matter to the business—key performance indicators (KPIs), objectives and key results (OKRs), or other indicators that business leaders care about. One leader in this roundtable highlighted that tracking learning content against business outcomes can be scary—because L&D can’t fully control the results.

That’s why many learning leaders are starting to look for correlations over time between learning content and business metrics, rather than direct causal relationships.

Learning leaders look for correlations over time between learning content and business metrics, rather than direct causal relationships.

Leaders noted that a great learning content strategy not only supports business outcomes, but also—equally—employee development needs. L&D can’t simply push content on topics that L&D or senior leaders have deemed critical—the content must be relevant and helpful to individual employees.

There was, therefore, a perceived tension between supporting business outcomes and employee needs. How can L&D enable employees to access content that drives business outcomes and that’s relevant to individual employees? One way leaders deal with this perceived tension is by helping employees pull the content they need. We explore this idea next.

Pull strategies can enable employees to access the content they need

Leaders largely agreed that one effective way to enable (rather than provide) employee development is to move from a push strategy for learning content to a pull one. Orgs are making content more widely available to more employees so that they can access whatever they need, when they need it.

Orgs are making content more widely available to more employees so they can access whatever they need, when they need it.

Many leaders said their orgs are broadening access to content by purchasing licenses to online content libraries for all (or many) employees. Others are experimenting with (or thinking about) giving individual employees learning budgets that they can draw on to access any content or other development opportunity, regardless of where it is.

However, moving to a model in which L&D enables learning means the org must provide the cultural supports—time, information, infrastructure—to employees so they can pull the learning and development they need. As one leader put it:

“Even if you give people a budget for learning, you have to give them time to invest in their development as well. It is a cultural issue.”

Leaders also linked the shift to a pull strategy to the democratization of learning—making learning and development opportunities available to more and more employees, not just a select few.

Orgs are using skills to guide content priorities

A number of leaders reported that their orgs are starting to use skills to inform employee development decisions at both the organizational and individual levels.

Skills support org-wide L&D planning

Leaders increasingly see skills as a way to inform L&D decisions. They want to know:

• What are the skills the business needs—at the org, team, or department, and individual levels?
• What skills does our workforce currently have?

The answers to these questions can help drive targeted decisions about where to dedicate development resources.

Indeed, many leaders noted that without information about skills, L&D efforts can often be off-target. As one leader put it:

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

Skills help democratize learning

As orgs make more development opportunities—including content—available to more employees, we previously mentioned that they must provide the support employees need to find and take advantage of those opportunities.

A key element of this support is information about skills:

• The skills individuals have
• The skills they need
• The skills the org needs
• Skills trends in the market (outside the org)

This information enables employees to make more informed decisions about their own development—thus, setting themselves up to be in-demand in the future. As one leader put it:

“We want to know what are the most in-demand skills by role in the market, then provide that information to employees on what skills are increasing in value and what skills are decreasing in value.”

Business outcomes should drive decisions about tech & delivery—but it’s often the other way around

Leaders agreed that, ideally, learning content development starts with business outcomes and goals, which then inform decisions about content, which inform decisions about tech and modalities. They emphasized that having learning tech doesn’t mean you have a well-targeted learning content strategy.

However, leaders noted this ideal flow is often hampered—even sidelined—for these 4 reasons:

1. Buzz. People—in L&D and the business—become focused on buzzwords and the next big tech when, in fact, that tech may not be the best solution for the business challenge at hand
2. Vendor marketing. State-of-the-art demos help obtain buy-in and funding for new tech, making it easier and more urgent to focus on tech than on outcomes
3. Lack of strategic advice. The literature covering new tech rarely addresses the questions:
   • When is this tech useful?
   • When should orgs use it?
   • And when not?
4. Real limitations on modalities. One leader (who works in healthcare) shared that most development opportunities happen during team huddles, during which learning must be delivered only on paper or—perhaps—on a smart phone. Such limitations can shape decisions about delivery through sheer necessity.

Leaders also discussed a related problem: The fact that people often conflate learning content—the information or knowledge itself—with the delivery modality. Some leaders posited that disconnecting the two may help L&D enable development experiences that are more helpful to employees and drive business outcomes. Others, however, see content and delivery modality as intricately and necessarily linked. We plan to explore this conflation question in upcoming interviews.

A Special Thanks

This session helped us more clearly understand what’s really important in learning content—particularly the need for L&D to focus on changing the behaviors that matter to the business and to employees.

Thank you again to those of you who attended and enriched our discussion. And, as always, we welcome your suggestions and feedback at [email protected].

As part of our ongoing research on skills and competencies, we recently gathered leaders for the second roundtable on skills. This session focused on the question of finding and using skills data. Some of the questions we discussed were:

• Why is skills data “hot” or important right now?
• How does skills data differ from competency data?
• What sources of skills data are orgs using?
• How are orgs using skills data?
• What do you imagine skills tech will enable orgs to do in the future?

Mindmap of Finding & Using Skills Data roundtable

The mindmap below outlines the conversations we heard as part of this roundtable.

Key takeaways

We had an engaging, energetic conversation that helped us better understand how skills data is being used in orgs, the challenges associated with skills data, and some possibilities for the future. Here are 5 key takeaways.

Skills connect work and talent

Leaders agreed there is an increasingly core connection between work and talent. Particularly since the pandemic began, orgs find themselves needing to pivot quickly to respond to rapidly evolving environments.

Agility has become a survival imperative, which means it’s critical for orgs to be able to put the right people in the right places…fast.

Skills are the way orgs can figure out who the “right people” are. With insight into who has what skills – and where those skills are needed – orgs can quickly move key resources to the places and projects they’re needed most. Some leaders noted that skills apply not only to individuals, but also to teams.

Skills data sources are everywhere

When we asked leaders to name some sources of skills data, the answers flooded in. We counted at least 15 types of skill data sources, including job descriptions, talent profiles, job histories, education history, certifications, social profiles like LinkedIn, collaboration sites like GitHub, productivity software like Asana and Jira, and even communications platforms like Microsoft Teams, Slack, or email.

One challenge is that most of these sources are currently not well integrated, making it difficult for orgs to identify all the potentially relevant skills an employee has. Skills data remains siloed or, in some cases, hidden. In one example, a leader pointed out that an employee might develop skills through volunteer experience – but those skills may never be reported in their skills profile at work.

Partly due to this fractioned information, leaders still struggle to understand what skills exist in their org. This makes evaluation and planning difficult. As one leader pointed out, “Without a baseline of where we are now, it’s hard to understand if upskilling efforts are effective.” It’s also hard to know what skills to develop.

Think carefully about use cases

There remains real confusion in orgs about skills vs. competencies. Leaders reported they sometimes struggle to clearly articulate the differences between the two to others in their orgs. This confusion can create resistance to change.

A few participants reported they tackle this challenge by identifying use cases for skills vs. competencies. They ask, "In what situations might skills be appropriate? In what situations might competencies be better?"

In response to these questions, many leaders agreed that competencies may be most appropriate in cases where it’s critical to understand proficiency – for example, in talent acquisition and performance management. By contrast, skills may be more appropriate when the goal is agility, mobility, or employee development.

Skills verification and proficiency rating remain difficult

Many skills platforms currently offer a skills tracking functionality that indicates whether a person has a skill or not. Often this data is self-reported, selected in the platform by the employee.

Some leaders want to complement this self-reported, yes/no data with more meaty, contextual information. They want to know whether the employee really has the reported skill (skill verification) and how well the employee can perform the skill (proficiency rating). They noted that self-reported data introduces the risk that individuals may under- or over-estimate their own skills. They also highlighted the potential diversity, equity, and inclusion implications of self-reporting, as some populations tend to consistently under- or over-report their skills. Skills verification and proficiency ratings could help reduce these reporting biases as well as give leaders better data for resource planning.

A few leaders voiced concern that current methods of skills verification may ask too much of employees. If too many requirements are put on users, they may stop reporting their skills altogether. They wondered: Can we find ways to verify skills, measure proficiency, and provide a simple, fun, and easy user experience for the average employee?

Tech can help make skills fun and easy

Leaders imagined that in the future, skills tech will be so fun and easy to use that it will become part of everyone’s job to be transparent about their skills and development goals.

Generational or tenure-related challenges may hinder widespread adoption of skills, however. Whereas younger or less experienced employees may be motivated to report their skills and to use skills platforms to build social communities, employees closer to retirement may see less incentive to do so. It will be important to make skills fun, easy, and clearly beneficial to all employees if skills tech is to be widely adopted.

Some orgs have successfully demonstrated the benefits of skills by pre-populating employees’ skill profiles, then asking employees to review and approve or update their profiles. With this approach, employees see an immediate and concrete benefit: the recommended learning opportunities the system generates based on the gaps in their profile.

Data integration, analytics, and reporting are other areas leaders highlighted for the future of skills tech. Currently, some platforms pull together data from a variety of disparate sources. Building on this capability, leaders would like to see all available data in one place, with robust reporting and analytics support. They also envision more adaptability to specific use cases, more tailored reporting in response to specific inquiries, and more efficient aggregation and sorting.

A special thanks

This session helped us more clearly understand the ways skills data is being identified and used in orgs, the challenges associated with using this data, and the hopes leaders have for the future of skills data in their orgs. Thank you again to those of you who attended and enriched our discussion. And as always, we welcome your suggestions and feedback at [email protected].

Continuing our collaborative exploration of the skills landscape, we recently gathered leaders together for the first skills roundtable. This session focused on skills and competencies. It included questions such as: 

• What’s the difference, in practice, between skills and competencies? 
• Under what conditions might organizations shift from competencies to skills? 
• How do competencies drive organizational results? How do skills drive organizational results? 
• How do you measure skills proficiency? 

Mindmap of Skills and Competencies Roundtable

The mindmap below outlines the conversations we heard as a part of this roundtable.

Key Takeaways

We had a rich, energizing, and informative discussion that helped us learn how skills and competencies are defined, perceived, and used in organizations. Here are 5 key takeaways. 

Skills = “what;” competencies = “how”

Leaders agreed that, in general, skills tend to describe what an individual or organization can do, while competencies outline expectations for how a job should be done or an individual should behave. 

There was less agreement about whether skills or competencies are job-agnostic. Some organizations use competencies to describe broad behaviors that any employee should exhibit in order to succeed. In these organizations, competencies apply to any job in the company and include the knowledge, skills, and abilities needed to get things done.  

In other organizations, skills are the job-agnostic ones. They are still more granular and specific than competencies, but they are not tied to specific jobs or roles. Rather, they are portable building blocks that an employee can apply to any role they might be in. 

Skills as currency

A number of leaders mentioned skills as currency: skills represent what an employee does for or offers to the organization.  

Treating skills as currency makes them portable. With a clear understanding of the skills they can offer, employees can move around an organization more easily. Internal mobility and gig work become easier to implement organization-wide. 

Leaders drew a distinction between the longevity of skills and competencies, citing the shorter shelf-life of skills as one reason they are a strong currency. Because many skills must be developed (and sometimes abandoned) much more quickly than competencies, they are more susceptible to supply-demand imbalances. This makes certain skills highly valuable when they are in high demand.  

This transactional concept applies best, however, only to non-durable skills.  

The struggle with “competencies”

Interestingly, many leaders in the roundtable said the word “competency” is viewed negatively in their organization. Because competencies tend to include proficiency ratings, they are perceived as a way to tell employees how they don’t measure up. By contrast, skills are perceived more positively and are associated with employee development. As one leader put it, “I have an opportunity to get better at a skill, as opposed to not having the competence to do a role.” 

As a result of the way competencies are perceived, some organizations have changed their messaging. One leader reported, “competencies are actually used more, but we call them skills because competency is associated negatively with performance.”  

The group noted this strategy will not work long-term unless skills stay simple, easy to understand and use, and focused on employee development. If skills become as burdensome as competencies are today, they will take on the same negative associations as well.  

Measuring skills proficiency is a challenge

Most leaders reported their organizations are not measuring skills proficiency at all, are just starting to measure proficiency, or are measuring in ways that will not scale. Current tech limitations are partly responsible for the fact that most organizations are not measuring skill proficiencies to the extent they want and need to. Most skills platforms currently treat skills as binary: I have a skill or I don’t. They do not yet offer ways to denote skill proficiency. 

Another challenge lies in the subjectivity of skill assignment. Leaders agreed it is not enough to simply ask employees whether they have a skill; there needs to be some kind of verification process. However, asking a manager to verify all their reports’ skills is burdensome and can introduce bias. Managers also may not be able to accurately assess skills or skill levels if they do not have the skill themselves.  

As burdensome as it can be to input and verify skills and skill levels, leaders noted most employees appreciate the conversation this exercise prompts. Employees find it helpful to understand from their manager how they are perceived and where they can improve. 

Orgs want to simplify

Leaders emphasized that they are trying not to simply replicate competency frameworks in the skills space. Instead, they are employing two main strategies to simplify their approach.  

1. Grassroots. Organizations are building skills databases from the ground up rather than creating unwieldy conceptual models to fit skills into. In this approach, employees input their skills into a database, then data analysis is applied to draw out skill groups, themes, and commonalities. 
2. Prioritization. They are prioritizing the key skills they would like people to work on. They are looking at the desired end state, identifying the strategically important skills, and focusing on only those skills rather than trying to map the universe of skills.  

A special thanks

This discussion helped us refine our understanding of the differences between skills and competencies, the value each brings to organizations, and the challenges associated with finding simple ways to understand “what we can do as an organization.” Thank you again to those of you who attended and made our conversation enriching. And as always, we welcome your suggestions and feedback at [email protected]. 

We all know managers have had additional responsibilities put on them over the last 6 months: They are no longer “just” managers who also coach. In many organizations, they have taken on the roles of dramatic reprioritizer of work, checker on mental health and well-being, and facilitator of social justice conversations. To say it’s been a hard period of time is an understatement.

Given the shifts in managers’ responsibilities, we held a roundtable to brainstorm and understand the answers to some critical questions:

• How, exactly, do managers need to evolve their approach to better support their employees?
• Given that, what is the role of organizations in enabling managers?
• How should organizations do this when budgets may be constricting?

During the roundtable, which was attended by more than 30 leaders, we divided the attendees into 4 groups in which each group discussed different questions around what responsive managers and organizations can do in the current times to enable employees. In the mindmap at the end of this article, we provide a detailed overview of the points discussed.

But, as you all know, we like to focus on what’s most interesting. Below are our key takeaways from the session.

Key Takeaways from the Discussion

• Keep personalizing: For years, we’ve seen a shift toward personalized employee experiences. The pandemic has put that into hyperdrive, as everyone is faced with their own set of unique and different challenges. Attendees called out the importance of managers understanding individual communication preferences, work schedules, work environments etc.. Additionally, some leaders suggested that managers need to bring about a mindset shift from managing a team to leading a team. People leaders should get to know their team on an individual level in order to understand their needs.
• Build a scaffolding to enable lower-risk decisions: This refers to having explicit margins of error in place when it comes to decisions (e.g., if sales drop by 15%, we will stop this experiment). This can help clarify decision making rights, normalize failure, and de-risk decision making. A real-life example shared by a company included implementing a DACI (driver, approver, contributor, informed) framework which helps clarify the decision making process, improve accountability, and allow them to track how decision making has transformed or shifted during times of change.
• Democratize information: While not a novel idea, it was promising to hear several participants share how their managers and leaders are increasingly being open to sharing more information and context around actions being taken. Frequent 1:1s, check-ins, feedbacks, and pulse surveys were mentioned as some of the common methods being leveraged to increase transparency and enable trust.
• Build trust not toadies: Managers that are trusted by their team and are thus successful in being responsive to their team’s needs share common characteristics such as humility, admitting mistakes, forgiving others, and just being more human overall. One of the best ideas shared was that managers should play the role similar to a can of WD-40 oil, helping their teams smooth over their mistakes and fix them, instead of holding grudges. These ideas clearly point to a shift towards a new management style, one that is empathetic and more human.

We are extremely grateful to the attendees who enriched the conversation by sharing their thoughtful ideas and experiences. As always, we welcome any feedback or suggestions from you at [email protected]

Mindmap of Responsive Managers Roundtable Conversation

Note: This is a live document. Click the window and use your cursor to explore. If you have additional thoughts, please share a comment with us at [email protected].

The second layer of our Model for Responsiveness is DISTRIBUTED AUTHORITY. Our research indicates that responsive organizations empower employees to make decisions affecting their work, which enables collaboration and effective responses to market needs.

In this roundtable, we gathered a diverse group of global leaders for a discussion around the second layer in the Responsive Organization model.

Figure 1: A Model for Responsivity | Source: RedThread Research, 2020.

Distributed Authority happens when organizations change the way their authority structures work. Instead of holding decision-making centrally (as most organization in the last 100 years are apt to do), authority to make decisions is spread throughout the organization, in all functions, and in all levels. Responsive organizations understand that, in order to respond to external pressures, people at the edges of the organization are often better equipped to make educated decisions about how to get things done.

3 areas of distributed authority

Figure 2: Behaviors for Building Distributed Authority | Source: RedThread Research, 2020.

Distributed authority mindmap

Distributed authority roundtable video recap

Roundtable summary & leader advice

In the following sections, we expound on these 3 areas and highlight the good advice we heard at the roundtable.

Decision-making rights

Decision-making rights is the control employees have about how they execute their role or their responsibilities. We found that decision-making rights vary greatly by organization, manager, level, and sometimes even industry.

Advice from leaders:

• Defer to expertise, not title. During crisis, there is often an unconscious “because I said so” attitude from managers. We get it. Lots of people feel powerless and are looking to salvage some sense of order. However, one of the best pieces of advice shared was that organizations should default to expertise, not title. Let the person with the most information make the decision on the thing.
• Implement decision-making logs. One leader said that her senior leaders (C-suite) had instituted a process wherein they published the decisions they made and the reasons for those decisions. We like this idea for a couple of reasons. First, it establishes a level of transparency that we think is healthy during a crisis and helps everyone become comfortable with those decisions. Secondly, it’s an excellent learning tool. Not only are the decisions public, but the reasons why those decisions were made are also public, teaching employees the subtle art of decision-making.
• Throw out the 9-5. We have mentioned this in previous roundtable readouts, but it bears repeating. The world has gone mad. Employees are dealing with children and/or parents, lack of schedule, feelings of isolation, and a host of other challenges. This is an excellent opportunity for organizations to determine what’s important and what is not. Is it important that an employee is sitting at their desk and available for 8 hours straight everyday? Are the processes that have been followed for years really necessary? Or is the fact that work is actually getting done and deadlines are being met more important?

Diverse & engaged teams

The power of diverse thinking and inclusivity has been well-documented over the years, and not surprisingly, our responsive organization research backs that up. We know that organizations with diverse thought and inclusive behaviors do better – from higher engagement scores to more innovation – than their less inclusive-minded counterparts. We also know that diverse thought and inclusive behavior leads to more responsive organizations – allow them to react more quickly to external threats and opportunities.

Advice from leaders:

• Take advantage of the sense of humanness happening right now. Leaders mentioned that there is now more inclusivity and shared responsibility to carry the load and help each other out. Some leaders mentioned they had seen teams pull in people who are relevant, but not central, to disperse feelings of isolation. They also mentioned the need of leaders to be open and vulnerable about what they didn’t know so that others felt safe to do so as well.
• Leaders, create opportunities for contribution. Leaders mentioned ideas to help employees feel included – particularly those who may be more introverted and less likely to speak up. Ideas included: sending detailed agendas, complete with challenges to be discussed and decisions to be made, so that everyone had an opportunity to think about how they could contribute; being aware of those not actively participating in discussions, and encouraging them, either with back channel communication, or gentle verbal prompts, to share their ideas; establishing that there are no bad ideas; emphasizing that we’re all in this together and working to solve the same challenges.
• Make decisions together. As fairly radical changes are being made to structure, work environment, communication patterns, and work itself, leaders in the roundtable encouraged other leaders to make as many decisions as possible together as teams. Things such as asking for agenda items, asking for input on meeting cadence, duration, ideas for getting the work done, and the like, can go a long way to build trust and buy in.
• Understand nuances in team engagement. With the large number of people working remotely, it’s worth paying attention to how teams are maintaining their engagement at this time. As such, it’s important that leaders maintain an open mind to varying levels of engagement that may point to different needs across teams. So in addition to providing resources to individual people, organizations should consider providing resources to teams like promoting frequent check-ins, managing collective anxiety, and showing empathy toward one another.
• Scale up tools. To keep a close pulse on engagement, leaders in our roundtable mentioned that organizations need to amplify and scale up tools, especially for middle-managers so they can understand team engagement real-time. We heard that this is a particular area of opportunity, especially for the healthcare industry because it tends to lag behind in engagement tools and resources at the mid-management level.

Collaboration

Organizations that distribute authority get more Collaboration (and should encourage it). More minds are better than one – and organizations are able to gather insights across different areas or business functions when authority is distributed.

Cross-functional teams are enabled to solve challenges or take advantage of opportunities at the edge of the organization rather than waiting for central decision-makers to either notice the challenge or prioritize it. Collaboration also builds employee networks, which in turn increases the flow of knowledge around the organization, allowing employees more ready access to expertise.

Advice from leaders:

• Be clear on expectations. Distributed authority does not mean that organizations operate in chaos. Organizations should be clear on expectations and desired outcomes. For teams, either formal or informal, expectations can act as a unifying force that help to foster communication and break down barriers
• Look for stumbling blocks. As organizations have focused on efficiency and productivity over the past 100 years, they’ve also standardized ways of doing things that often stand in the way of collaboration. To enable employees to exercise their authority, organizations should look for those things that may keep employees from sharing information with each other and helping each other on projects.
• Embrace self-driven teams. Allowing greater fluidity in how teams operate may help address some of the current engagement challenges people face today. For example, people in autonomous or self-driven teams can volunteer to combine different skills or talents to address a particular immediate need and maximize their impact. They can also exercise autonomy as a team by deciding priorities to work on each day and how they will divvy up tasks to accomplish them.
• Think in terms of MVP deliverables. A minimum viable product (MVP) or deliverable is a version of the deliverable that allows a team to collect the maximum amount of value with the least amount of effort. Particularly now, organizations can begin to think in terms of MVP and consistent iteration instead of holding a deliverable until it is nigh on perfect. This encourages innovation and collaboration, but also helps employees focus on what is value-add.
• Default to the strategy. In helping employees determine what’s important, consistently reiterate the end goal or strategy. Ask them to ask themselves, “how is what I’m doing related to the end goal or strategy?”
• Stand up meetings. While many teams are not currently collocated, one leader said that they still have a daily standup meeting. The meeting allows all members to check in with each other, to raise questions or concerns, and to state what they will be working on. This requires each team member to come to that meeting already having thought about the value-add activities they would be accomplishing during the day. It was also a nice opportunity to connect on a human level.
• Focus internally. A few leaders mentioned that they are using this time to actively work on their internal structures and norms. Employees and managers are finding internal projects that have been on the back burner for years, but once complete, will increase the abilities of the organization. Thus, not all value-add activities should be externally focused; sometimes the best thing employees can focus on are internal.

To sum up

Overall, our roundtable conversations acknowledged the important role that distributing decision-making has on enabling the organization to effectively and efficiently respond to external needs.  There was also a sense of urgency around the need for greater clarity, communication, and expectations around decisions, especially within the current remote working context.

A special thanks for all the leaders who joined our second roundtable. Thank you for your willingness to share ideas and insights – it makes our research that much better!

The foundational lens of our Model for Responsiveness? RESPECT. Our research shows that organizations that have any intention of effectively responding to their external environments must start with respect of their employees.

Figure 1: Model for Responsiveness | Source: RedThread Research, 2020.

 

This week, we took the opportunity to gather several leaders together in an interactive roundtable and brainstorming session around RESPECT for employees and the 3 features of employee respect, as shown in Figure 2 below.

3 Areas of Respect for Employees

Figure 2: 3 Areas of Respect for Employees | Source: RedThread Research, 2020.

 

This leader roundtable addressed each of these 3 areas in the context of two main questions: 1) What are your respective companies doing in these areas? and 2) What are your ideas for doing this better?

This discussion was particularly interesting given the current context: our organizations are faced with the need to radically change internal processes and norms to react to unprecedented change in their marketplaces. Most urgently, companies are ramping employees to work effectively from home; more long-term, companies are considering cashflow and product viability, and making people adjustments to accommodate. Below is a mindmap representing the roundtable discussions.

Responsive org roundtable #1: Respect mindmap

Source: RedThread Research, 2020

For a brief summary of the roundtable and the 3 aspects of a Respectful culture, watch the video below.

Respect roundtable recap

In the following sections, we expound on these 3 areas and highlight the good advice we heard at the roundtable.

Psychological safety

One of the most powerful themes, directly addressed in the psychological safety discussion but permeating all other discussions as well, was the need for organizations to create a psychologically safe place – to view employees as thinking, feeling humans and ensure their well-being.

In times such as these, mistakes will be made and failures will happen. A psychologically safe place acknowledges these mistakes and failures respectfully, without compromising employees’ self respect or jeopardizing their careers.

Advice from leaders:

• Personal huddles. Quick, concise, personal check ins – not about the work, but about the person. One leader suggested two questions leaders can ask: 1) How stressed are you? and 2) What help do you need?
• Increased leadership connection. Leaders should be connecting more with employees to understand needs and provide direction. Suggestions included more regular pulse engagement surveys (instead of the yearly, or bi-yearly versions), direct contact with employees that may be struggling, regular check-ins and communication with staff, and follow-up with support for information gathered through surveys and check ins.
• Leadership responsibility. Managers and leaders set the tone; if organizations are striving for an open, safe, place for employees, it is the managers and leaders who must model the behaviors they expect.

Autonomy

Autonomy & Respect from Leaders showed up in the data together. We think this is because they often go hand in hand: managers who allow more autonomy  among employees tend to respect them more, and vice versa.

Autonomy means that organizations give employees control over the day-to-day operations of their roles. They recognize and honor employees' abilities to use their unique skills and knowledge to problem-solve.

Advice from leaders:

• Address failure carefully. Employees are paying careful attention to how leaders react to failure. Will leaders continue to encourage intelligent risk-taking and learning from mistakes, or will they buckle down and discourage it? Our roundtable discussion encouraged leaders to share failure stories (including their own) and learn jointly from things that didn’t go quite as planned.
• Experimentation. Organizations can use the current chaos (nothing is working the same way it did) for experimentation because everything is up in the air. There may be antiquated systems, processes, technologies, or even products that need to be rethought. Now is the time. Organizations should use this time to develop an experimentation muscle to deal with uncertainty and change.
• Post-crisis team. One leader suggested the idea of putting together a team dedicated to identifying positive changes made during this time and finding ways to institutionalize them. While there is a strong desire to return to “normal,” now is a good time to determine what, if anything, about the “normal” wasn’t good, and retool it.
• Collaborate with employees. During this time when everything is up in the air, one leader said he noticed more collaboration between managers and employees. Instead of, “Do this!” it was, “What can we do in this circumstance?”
• Focus on well-being. Leaders also noted that more time was being spent on personal conversations. Managers were asking after employees and their families more, and carving out more time during the week to spend some time together as humans, not just coworkers. Managers were also more understanding (because we’re all in this together…) about screaming children, aging parents, barking dogs, and strange haircuts.
• Equip managers. One leader mentioned that he would like to see more help for managers – and not just traditional training. Coaching and mentoring, job helps, data, and feedback can both set expectations for what we expect from managers, but also alleviate some of the pressure they’re currently feeling. One leader also suggested creating networked leaders so that they can share information with each other and hold each other accountable for the types of leaders they want to be.

Bottoms up information

Finally, organizations show respect to employees by providing ways to get information to them, but probably more importantly, gather information from them. This shows up in two main ways.

First, through feedback loops. Feedback loops ensure that employees have the information they need to do their jobs as well as information about how they’re performing those jobs. Feedback loops ensure that everyone is on the same page and working in the same direction. One leader noted that organizations often default to being “nice,” or not sharing necessary information because it’s not polite, when in actuality, keeping that information from employees shows a lack of respect for them as humans and as employees.

Second, organizations also show respect to employees, their knowledge, and their skills by soliciting their perspectives. Employees at the edges of the organization, or with deep knowledge in certain areas often identify needed changes before those more centrally located. Established norms for gathering and sharing that information enables organizations to move more quickly as a whole.

Advice from leaders:

• Use OKRs and goals as feedback mechanisms. Organizations that have moved from yearly goal discussions to more frequent check-ins can and should leverage these discussions to make sure that everyone has the information they need. This ensures that goals don’t get lost at lower levels and established a process and norm for feedback that is often less threatening and more collaborative.
• Use tools such as retrospectives. Many leaders mentioned that feedback an/or perspective sharing doesn’t happen because there are not mechanisms in place. A retrospective is an exercise wherein a team gets together to discuss what went well, what didn’t go well, and what needs to change. This can be used at the end of a project, at certain milestones within a project, or even at regular intervals. A retrospectives normalizes feedback and perspectives and eliminates the need for blaming. It also promotes teamwork. (Incidentally, we used a retrospective at the end of our last roundtable to make the next one even better.)
• Model behaviors. This has been mentioned in previous areas we have discussed, but it bears mentioning again. Feedback and perspective-sharing often doesn’t happen unless it is modeled by leaders. Some suggestions for modeling from the roundtable included: clearly setting expectations and holding managers responsible for feedback / perspective sharing; inviting senior leaders (CEO) to be transparent on where the company is during a crisis and inviting questions / suggestions; and providing coaching job aids that give managers key information about how to give feedback.

To sum up

In all, roundtable conversations were much more optimistic than pessimistic. Yes, the current situation is throwing all that we know and are comfortable with out the window, and we are all feeling our way through this. But, as these leaders pointed out, this is a perfect opportunity to make changes that will positively affect the organization internally, as well as help it compete more effectively externally.

A special thanks to all of the leaders who participated in this interactive roundtable. Thank you for your willingness to share your experiences and insights – it makes the research that much better!

Talking about the crazy

As many of you know, we gathered folks together (in two concurrent sessions, due to level of interest!) to talk about how their organizations are addressing the massive disruptions resulting from the coronavirus. We believe our community has incredible insights within it, and wanted to provide an opportunity for as many as possible to connect and share.

The conversations were thoughtful, enlightening, and informative. Yet, the thing we took away the most was the level of hopefulness, which was expressed in many small ways. The best example was when one person mentioned:

“This is like our Independence Day (you know, the original movie, not the remake). Something is threatening our entire society, and we need to pull together and stop it. And we are!”

So how are we doing this, while at the same time trying to keep people sane, healthy, and productive (if possible)?

We framed the discussion in the context of our employee experience research, focusing on the 4 levers that drive a high-quality experience:

• A clear philosophy
• A supportive culture
• An articulated accountability
• An aligned measurement

We went through each of these levers and discussed what people are doing in different areas.

The mindmap: Results of our discussions

After the conversations, we summarized the suggestions mentioned in both sessions and have displayed them in this visual map below (use your mouse to move around within the map; you can also download it).

Some key takeaways

One of the suggestions that resonated the most with us was the idea of a coronavirus taskforce, which was shared by someone at a global consulting firm. This group aligns and coordinates efforts, leveraging medical doctors and other relevant experts to help structure and clarify the firm’s response to the crisis. However – and this is key – responsibility and accountability for taking actions is distributed throughout the organization. So, this is not a command and control structure, but rather an alignment and enablement approach.

Building on that, the concept of shared accountability was reinforced throughout the conversation. Organizations are providing people with significant autonomy and ability to get things done as and when it makes sense. If there ever was a time to trust employees and managers to do the right thing, it is now. Yet, as was mentioned several times, it's critical to support them during these times. Provide managers with suggestions on how to best support employees. Provide data when you can that will help everyone perform better.

As mentioned above, there's a lot of finding the good in this challenging moment. For example, one person mentioned because everyone is now remote, communication must be much more explicit. As a result, unexpectedly, this is making productivity skyrocket, because everyone is much clearer on what must get done. Another person mentioned that within organizations there can be subcultures that may have values not aligned to the organization’s larger cultural values. However, remote work was breaking up those subcultures and providing an opportunity to realign folks to the bigger culture. And yet another person mentioned how everyone is so much more open to experimentation, which is providing them with a lot of new ideas they did not have before.

Throughout the session, several resources were shared. We have added those – plus what we had before – to the end of this article (see Appendix 1).

For your viewing pleasure: The 2 sessions

If our summary in the mindmap and above wasn’t enough, you're welcome to listen to the recordings of the calls or review the slides (with hastily written notes) below:

• Session 1 (Moderated by Stacia Garr / Priyanka Mehrotra)
• Session 2 (Moderated by Dani Johnson / Karina Freitag)

Preserving Your Employee Experience During The Crazy from Stacia Sherman Garr

These sessions wouldn't have been possible without the active, thoughtful participation of the folks who joined. To each of you, THANK YOU. You both helped the folks on the call this morning, but also anyone who accesses these resources. Thank you for helping make our community smarter and stronger.

We would welcome the opportunity to continue to be of service to our community. What else can we do that would provide value to you and your organization? Let us know in the comments or via direct email at [email protected].

Appendix 1: Resources

Coronavirus support

• Harvard Business Publishing: Resources to Effectively Lead Amid COVID-19
• Qualtrics: Here to Help
• Limeade: Care in Crisis
• Pluralsight: The Remote Work Guide
• Lars Schmidt: Coronavirus HR Comms & Resources Guide
• Gartner: Respond, Manage and Prepare for the Impact of Coronavirus
• i4CP: The Coronavirus Employer Resource Center
• meQuilibrium: Coronavirus Uncertainty- Respond with Resilience
• Cornerstone: Cornerstone Cares
• Skillsoft / Sumtotal: Business Continuity Learning Center

Articles on coronavirus

• Impact of non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) to reduce COVID19 mortality and healthcare demand (Imperial College, London)
• Why Outbreaks like the coronavirus spread exponentially, and how to flatten the curve (Washington Post)
• Coronavirus: Why You Must Act Now (Medium)
• How Bad Is the Coronavirus? Let’s Run the Numbers (Bloomberg)

Articles on working remotely

• The Challenges of Managing a Remote Team (LinkedIn)
• Five Mistakes to Avoid When Managing Remote Teams (Forbes)
• How to Collaborate Effectively If Your Team is Remote (Harvard Business Review)
• Remote Team Building in the Age of Virtual Collaboration (Forbes)

We just had a wonderful preliminary meeting with members who will be joining us in Washington D.C. for our collectives on Building Skills for the Near Future. In all, around 40 leaders joined and participated in an open exchange of ideas.

Below is the mind map of that discussion. Click in the box to explore! As always, we'd love your comments or thoughts!

 

On July 31, 2019 we conducted the second roundtable in our Performance Management study. We sincerely appreciate the group of thoughtful leaders (you know who you are) that came together to review some of the initial numbers from our survey and provide their insights and experience

The highlights from that hour-long web-chat are succinctly outlined in the mind map below. Big branches represent main discussions, smaller branches represent some of the responses and detail.

Click in the graphic to make it bigger, move it around, etc.

 

We'd like to thank the learning leaders who took part in this discussion! We think collaboration makes the research better, and we learned a lot from this roundtable.
In July 2019 we conducted our second Learning Tech Ecosystems Roundtable. The turnout was excellent and we were able to have a great discussion regarding the strategy of thinking through a learning tech ecosystem.

The hour-long web-chat resulted in a really rich discussion, the highlights of which are shown on the mindmap below. Big branches represent the main topics.

Click the graphic to get a bigger view.

Learning Tech Ecosystem Roundtable #2 Mindmap

Source: RedThread Research, 2019