As regular listeners will know, I often collaborate with HR Technology Analyst Mervyn Dinnen to produce research reports on various aspects of talent technology.
Our latest report was published a few weeks ago with support from the learning and performance management platform Bridge. I wanted to bring some of the highlights of our findings to the podcast, so keep listening to hear what we discovered about how the landscape for learning and performance management has been changing during the pandemic.
In the episode, we discuss:
▪ Critical skills gaps
▪ The challenges of talent mobility
▪ The importance of specialist and fit for purpose technology
▪ Training to support remote management
▪ The employees perspective
▪ Peer to peer interaction
Download the Learning and Performance Management Report
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Transcript:
Matt Alder [00:00:12]:
Hi everyone, this is Matt Alder. Welcome to this special bonus episode of the Recruiting Future podcast. As regular listeners will know, I often collaborate with HR technology analyst Mervyn Dynan to produce research reports on various aspects of talent technology. Our latest report was published a few weeks back with support from learning and performance management platform Bridge. I wanted to bring some of the highlights of our findings to the podcast, so keep listening to hear what we discovered about how the landscape for learning and performance management has been changing during the pandemic. Hi Mervyn and welcome back to the show.
Mervyn Dinnen [00:01:01]:
Thank you, Matt. It’s a pleasure to be here again.
Matt Alder [00:01:03]:
Now there are quite a few new listeners to the show who’ve come on board in the last few weeks and it is a few weeks since we last spoke as part of one of the episodes. So just in case there is anyone listening who doesn’t know who you are, could you just introduce yourself and tell us what you do?
Mervyn Dinnen [00:01:21]:
Thank you, Matt. My name is Mervyn Dinnen. I am an analyst, writer, researcher around HR and recruitment trends. My long term background was very much in recruitment and HR. In recent years I’ve worked with primarily HR and recruitment technology businesses and other suppliers into that marketplace, researching the ongoing trends that are happening in terms of the employee life cycle and the talent life cycle. I’m co author with Matt, our host of the book Exceptional Talent and the forthcoming book Digital Talent. And this is a report that we worked on together.
Matt Alder [00:01:59]:
Absolutely. So it was pub or three weeks back. Tell everyone the title and what the report is about.
Mervyn Dinnen [00:02:05]:
The title of the report is the 2020 Learning and Performance Management Report. It’s a project on which we collaborated with Bridge, who are part of the Instructure Group, very much involved in learning and performance management technology. And we were trying to find out how the landscape for particularly learning and performance management was changing during 2020. What bits were adapting well, what bits weren’t adapting well, how employers were finding it, how employees were finding it, A bit of, if you like, a state of the nation report on learning and performance management during a time of accelerated digital transformation.
Matt Alder [00:02:47]:
And I think the really interesting thing about working on this report was the world and the landscape was literally changing around us as we were doing the research because we sort of started it in the middle of one of the lockdown, lockdowns and we just didn’t really know which way things were going so it was really interesting to talk to some of the L and D and HR managers and thinkers out there in terms of what was happening with their organizations and where they might go next. And from a learning, development and performance management perspective, we’re moving through a few phases. So when we first started writing it, everyone was very much in the crisis management phase, which you may have all forgotten now, but that was the time when lots and lots of offices shut, shut all around the world and large numbers of people had to work at home, didn’t necessarily have the right equipment or the right systems. And there was this kind of mass scramble and this mass panic to get to some kind of business as usual. But then it also became clear that some of the longer term implications of the pandemic started to become clear. And as you say, accelerated digital transformation is the absolute key here. So many companies having to change their business model, having to embrace and be much more digital or more digital at a speed that they were not expecting to be. And what this has created is this real issue with critical skills in the business. And one of the, one of the kind of sources that we looked at when we were researching was a report that Gartner had done, and they indicated that the pandemic had decoupled critical skills from critical roles. So what they mean by that is there are people who held critical roles within companies but didn’t actually, but no longer had the critical skills to meet the company’s changed strategic goals. So, so what you have is this scramble amongst employers to upskill people to be able to cope with all the changes that were happening. So you’ve got this huge problem of massive upskilling in everyone’s kind of in everyone’s workforce is needed, but at the same time dealing with very stressed employees working from home or having the stress of having to come into their workplace at a time where it didn’t feel necessarily safe to do so, might be working at home without proper office space, lots of things going on, childcare issues. So some really, really sort of serious challenges there. So part of the focus of this research was to really look at what employers were prioritizing. And I mean, what did we find when we, when we sort of looked at that part, Mervyn?
Mervyn Dinnen [00:05:32]:
Well, I suppose, unsurprisingly it was employee. So the importance to keeping these skills very much up to date. The critical skills you mentioned, I mean, this isn’t a surprise. A couple of years ago we did a research paper which coincidentally Bridge also sponsored, in which we found the number one reason that People will join and stay with an organization is if they believe they have the chance to grow, to learn and to develop new skills. And this is very much in the spotlight at the moment. We did some research in 2019 and found only 13% of organizations believed that they invested enough in employee development. So this is clearly at the top of the agenda, or at the top of HR’s agenda, as well as learning and development. So when we were asking them what they were focusing on for 2020, it was employee development, satisfying the ongoing need to keep relevant, ensure employees have the learning and skills they need for the future. Retention was kind of the second most important thing. I think with everything going on, with everything being uncertain, I think companies were looking to retain people and this was one way to do it. Performance management was, I suppose, the third main challenge. And in that, the way performance management was being conducted, which I’m sure we’ll touch on later, was changing. The way conversations were happening was changing, and organizations needed to get this right. Interestingly, the least important thing was internal mobility, talent mobility within the organization. Some companies said, look, it’s beginning to play an increasing role because we can’t really, or we’re not comfortable going out there recruiting. You know, we’re remote, we can’t actually meet people. We’d rather retain the people we’ve got by giving them different opportunities. So that was kind of beginning, but it wasn’t seen as the major source of investment and time, which is interesting because we found, I suppose, across a lot of the research that we’ve done over the last year, that internal mobility is gradually beginning to increase in importance to organizations. And that’s possibly one of the things that the pandemic over the last year or so, at the time we speak, over the last year or so, has. Has increased the need for companies to look at ways to keep people very much, I suppose, at the forefront of the skills and the knowledge they need and to keep them engaged within the organization.
Matt Alder [00:08:13]:
I think that’s really interesting because one of the sort of really clear narratives that was flying around events and on social media was the this massive emphasis on internal mobility with companies making redundancies and not hiring and all that sort of stuff. But. But when I sort of dug into that in a number of podcast interviews that I’ve done that I sort of did last year, what also came out was it was something that people talked about but really struggled with because they didn’t always have the right technology or the right view of the skills within their workforce to be able to do it. And I think that may well have a bearing on where it fitted in this particular piece of research. And that sort of brings us on to some of the stuff that we found round using fit for purpose technology. And this has been a massive theme in the, in the last six months. Companies went through this, this crisis phase and it’s like, you know, we need to use whatever we, whatever technology that we have, a video technology we’ve got or whatever we, whatever we already have to run the business and do recruitment and all this other stuff. But actually there is a real issue if you’re not using technology that’s, that’s fit for purpose. So on that note, what we, what we sort of found when we were, when we were writing this report were lots of companies were having issues with the technology that they were using for learning and performance management. Now on the learning side, maybe that’s not surprising, this massive increase in the need to upskill people and the desire for learning, unsurprisingly that perhaps, you know, some systems couldn’t cope with that. And also there was a, there was a kind of a digital divide. There were companies who already had sophisticated digital learning management systems that they could literally just turbocharge and give their employees access to more and more content and more and more learning. But then there were companies who had nothing in place, who suddenly found that they couldn’t do the sort of face to face things that they’d done, done in the past. So that was quite interesting from a performance management perspective. This is where people were having, or people are having the most issues with trying to do some of these things remotely. So using video conferences for things like formal one to ones scored quite highly. People, people were sort of being able to do that. But what was really missing were a lot of the sort of informal conversations around performance management and really trying to understand where people were and how they were feeling and what was, what was kind of, what was really going on. And all our sort of survey respondents and the people that we spoke to reported that that was a real issue that they were having. So I suppose there were three themes that came out of this is the technology sort of fit for purpose aspect of the report? I mean the first one clearly, and it’s not really to do with technology, was that continuous development is where we’re moving to companies who are still just, just doing annual appraisals. Is that really the best way to work in the, in the, in the environment? And, and actually the companies that were doing well were the ones who were Constantly checking in on their employees and having those conversations and really trying to sort of move things forward on an ongoing basis. The other theme is obviously the need to use specialist technology, specialist performance management technology, not just sort of standard video conferencing tools. And then the other thing that came out was the, the need for training. This is the new reality that we live in. Remote working and remote communications are going to continue, going to continue in some way, shape or form forever. And actually training people to, to be able to have difficult conversations using video and, and not having the advantage of, of, of being face to face is something that, that people indicated they really wanted, they really wanted more of. So in terms of the employees, I mean Mervyn, Mervyn will talk a bit more about how the employees are finding all of this.
Mervyn Dinnen [00:12:16]:
Yeah, it was interesting. One of the questions in the survey that we asked organizations is how successful they thought their digital learning resources had been in supporting the workforce to get the knowledge and the upskilling and everything they need, particularly whilst working remotely. And just over a quarter, about 28% said that they felt they’d been very successful according to employee feedback. So just over a quarter said, you know, employees have said this is great. The largest proportion, so just under 40% said that, you know, it’s been good but they’ve had some problems. And it was I suppose around a third that admitted, look, employers have been saying they can’t get the information they need, they’re having problems with it, it’s proving a problem. So that’s quite a significant I suppose number in terms of the effectiveness of the remote conversations. And if we like as we call it, performance management by zoom, it’s clearly in areas like ad hoc catch ups, ad hoc conversations and having difficult conversations that both companies and employees are finding it really difficult. And I suppose one of the interesting things was one of the interviewees said to me, look, if I have a difficult conversation with somebody and particularly if it’s not a conversation they’re expecting and I’m physically in an office and we’re in a room together, I can see facial expressions, how it’s landing and if I’m not sure how it’s landed, I’m going to bump into them, I’m going to walk past the desk, I’m going to see them getting a coffee, getting in the lift or I’m going to see them again and I could just say look, was everything okay? It probably wasn’t the conversation you’re expecting. I just want to check that it’s all ok. And you can check effectively how it’s landed with video conferencing. You can’t, you don’t see those kind of facial cues are very difficult to read and you’re not sure how it’s landed. And of course you’ve got no way of checking. You don’t have any of those casual catch ups by a coffee machine or something. You’ve got to actually email or message them and say listen, after this chat we’ve just had, can we have another one? And that’s going to effectively panic the employee even more. And it sets a very negative kind of frame around it. So I think employees feel that and kind of most employees always want to know where they stand and I think there’s some of it is how the employees themselves interpret what they hear and see. But I think organisations by their own admission have found it quite difficult to have those slightly more difficult conversations. What the employees really want are kind of seamless joined up interactions. They don’t want a series of processes that oh, okay, that’s not for me now, it’s kind of somebody else will be in touch with you next week about that. They expect everything to happen seamlessly and immediately. That’s one of the expectations from technology. And if they’re not getting a great experience then that’s quite important to them. One of the things that we did find interestingly, and this is one of the key findings for me, is that user experience didn’t seem to be that important to the organizations. It was like kind of how important is it to the business? When choosing learning and talent management tech, the employees have a good user experience and it was kind of like, you know, just over half said it’s one of the factors we take into account. Only just over a third said it’s the most important factor and others said it’s a consideration. But there are more important, important factors. And one of the things we asked was what input do line managers or employees have into the buying of learning and performance management tech. And only 22% said they’re very much part of the process as far as the rest were concerned. So just under 80%. It’s either they’re rarely consulted or it’s we get their input but the final decision is made by other people, primarily IT finance, senior leadership. So we’ve got this kind of conundrum where the user experience is crucial and will be for years to come because this kind of remote approach to employee development, to performance management isn’t going to suddenly disappear. And the people who we need to have the best experience from the technology. We’re not really factoring in the experience they have or need into the decisions we make. And I think that for me was one of the key takeaways.
Matt Alder [00:16:59]:
So there were some really interesting things that came out. Lots of challenges, lots of issues, lots of, lots of problems. So try to sum up the sort of the four key learnings to summarize the report and to give people some clear takeaways. Talk everyone through them Mervyn.
Mervyn Dinnen [00:17:13]:
Okay, I mean, in no particular order, because they are all vitally important. One of the things we identified was need for better peer to peer connection and interaction. It’s safe to assume that kind of working from home or working remotely will continue and that the future is probably some kind of hybrid model where people have a lot more flexibility to choose how and when they work. So it’s crucially important that the tech supports ways of working that enables employees to make the connections they need for social cohesion, for productivity, and for their own development. The second one, which I was referring to in my most recent points, was a much closer alignment between employee development and performance. They can’t happen side by side. They have to be integrated, they have to happen together. Both the employee development side and the performance management side have had issues being done remotely with employees having to access the information they need and also maybe not having the meaningful conversations they want. So this closer alignment is going to be hugely important. The third point that we found was that skill development is crucial. As things have developed, particularly over the last year, and with what’s being forecast over the next few years in terms of workplace tobo charging skill development. People need to be flexible, they need to adapt to changing situations. They need to be able to access the learning that they need at the time when they need it. And I think the fourth thing, which is a point I was making earlier, is this user experience. Tech is purchased for what it can do quite often for the reports it gives, the information that it can give the company that invests in it. User experience is important, but we found a bit of lip service being paid to that, you know, employees. User experience wasn’t really factored in that much and the importance of the user experience in actually making sure the tech is used and used properly so that work is done. Productivity is there. Employees get the information, particularly the skills and the knowledge they need in a way that they can actually access it and it can improve their performance. So I think it’s quite likely as we go through this time of, of what we’ve said is accelerated digital transformation that I think user experience will become probably one of the major factors that contributes to employee engagement and development. And so it’s something that I think organizations need to align with now.
Matt Alder [00:20:03]:
So if you want to read the full report, you can go to www.getbridge.com and you should be able to easily find it from there. We’ll also put a link to the exact location of the report in the show notes. So Mervyn, brilliant to work with you as ever and thank you very much for coming on the show.
Mervyn Dinnen [00:20:22]:
As always, it has been my pleasure, Matt.
Matt Alder [00:20:25]:
My thanks to Mervyn Dinnen and our thanks to Bridge for supporting the research report. You can subscribe to this podcast in Apple Podcasts, on Spotify or via your podcasting app of choice. Please also follow the show on Instagram. You can find us by searching for Recruiting Future. You can search all the past episodes@recruitingfuture.com on that site. You can also subscribe to the mailing list to get the inside track about everything that’s coming up on the show. Thanks very much for listening. I’ll be back next time and I hope you’ll join me.
