There is a revolution taking place in professional development at all levels, driven from the top, writes David Plink
How do the world’s leading organisations continue to adapt and thrive, when all around them is changing? Today’s challenges of change are potentially bewildering
– for employer and employee alike.
The roles employees will perform in the years to come will look very different and the skills they need to develop for employers are in an endless state of flux. Learning – and the way it is delivered – has become the key driver in creating a ‘future-fit’ organisation.
Ramkumar Chandrasekaran, HR Director for Tata Consultancy Services
(TCS) UK and Ireland, is well placed to sum up the critical role that learning now plays within organisations. ‘Today’s change in skills is unprecedented,’ he says. ‘In three or four years’ time, many of the skills we have today will be redundant. We have gone through big changes in how we are learning new skills.’
One of the Top Employers Institute’s Certified Top Employers (see box out), TCS is far from alone in its evolutionary learning journey. Certified Top Employers is a global standard in people practices and the Top Employers Institute’s recent report HR Trends 2018: Priorities and Practices of the World’s Leading Employers, conducted among 1,300 organisations worldwide, highlights how organisations use learning to become as fit and ready as they possibly can be in an uncertain global business environment.
How learning is changing
Learning is integral to our purpose of accelerating the impact of people strategies to enrich the world of work. Our research found, for example, that three quarters (75%) of surveyed employers globally – and more than four fifths (82%) in North America – have now made social learning a major part of their people development approach.
Why is this important? Because social learning is key to creating a collaborative working culture. This, in turn, matters because deeper levels of collaboration have been shown to increase the engagement, creativity and innovation necessary to keep the world’s leading employers moving forward.
Engagement with learning is a two-way agreement, with employees beginning to have a greater say in formats and delivery. William Shorten, Director of Specialist Training and Head of HR in the UK and Ireland for the French construction multinational, Saint-Gobain (another Certified Top Employer) says: ‘The learning offer – and how it is accessed – will change. Learning has been a “push process” with organisations setting the agenda. In future, organisations will need to provide an offer that is more personalised to employees’ needs. At the same time employers will say: “This is the offer – it’s up to you to come and consume as you see fit”.’
This is affecting the shape and structure of all organisational learning, from senior leadership development down to training for the latest intake of graduate recruits. There is a revolution taking place in professional development at all levels, driven from the top.
According to our research, senior leaders at Certified Top Employer organisations are becoming involved in the design, development and even delivery of all learning – not just their own. Almost 80% of Certified Top Employers ensure that their senior leaders play an active role in shaping the learning agenda for others, with the trend strongest in the Asia-Pacific region, in which 89% of leaders are doing this.
Unleash the leaders of today (and tomorrow)
Unleashing the potential of those at the top is a critical priority for organisations. When it comes to leadership development, the content of learning is clearly being thought through to reinforce an organisation’s hunger for fresh ideas and build effective leadership teams. In our 2018 research,97% of Certified Top Employers said they define clear objectives for their leadership development activities, and 95% publish a framework for the behaviours and attitudes they expect of their leaders.
On these solid foundations, Certified Top Employers have found that transparency, in this new age of learning, and this is an essential ingredient for success. Almost three quarters (74%) of Certified Top Employers worldwide make information about their leadership development offer freely accessible to all employees.
However, there is still room for improvement here – organisations have some way to go to provide the level of transparency their employees would like to see. Europe and Africa are the least transparent regions, with seven out of 10 organisations in our research providing transparency on leadership development opportunities. Asia Pacific and North America lead the way in transparency, scoring 79% and 84%, respectively.
While leaders of Certified Top Employer organisations play a critical role in shaping learning for future-fit organisations, the opinions of those joining an organisation matter just as much. Our research shows a growing awareness of this: nearly two thirds (64%) of respondents now formally measure the impressions of joiners.
As part of the effort to engage new hires, mentoring programmes are spreading among Certified Top Employers, increasing by 15% globally over the past four years. Generally, these programmes are geared towards newly hired professionals or managers (70% and 90%, respectively).
Our data shows that a growing number of organisations are implementing online and/or virtual onboarding platforms. More than a third (36%) of survey respondents have introduced these, up from a quarter (26%) in 2016. The Asia-Pacific and North America regions are the fastest adopters in this area, with 50% and 60% of respondents, respectively, saying they have implemented these platforms.
The power of the middle manager
Of course, most people working in organisations are neither leaders nor new recruits, but those in the middle. This is where professional development can make a massive difference, with the power of great career and workforce planning coming to the fore.
More than three quarters (77%) of Certified Top Employers ensure their current employees’ aspirations are taken into account during their workforce-planning processes. With significant changes taking place in the labour market, they understand that everyone’s career path and aspirations are different.
To this end, the world’s leading companies are offering employees the opportunity to self-manage their careers. There is no magic formula for creating a culture in which employees are allowed to do this – the key, though, seems to be to find a way to connect individual aspirations with organisational realities, so that realistic and attainable careers can be mapped out.
Size is undoubtedly important for professional development – large, global organisations can offer a range of attractive development opportunities. But, in return, international mobility is an expectation, especially for those who want to make it to the top. As Dane Batt, Head of HR International for the UK, Ireland, Nordics and Benelux at Orange Business Services, a Certified Top Employer, puts it: ‘The willingness of leaders to be internationally mobile in the course of their development [is important] and this is very much part of what we do.’ At some Certified Top Employers, regular changes in role are welcomed with open arms as part of professional development. TCS’s Chandrasekaran explains: ‘[We] actively encourage employees to look for a change in their roles after 18 months to two years. We have many business units and technologies, and our employees can aspire for a career move across [them]. It’s important to record an employee’s aspirations and match these with demand across the business.’
Assessing performance
Finally, the way in which performance is assessed is crucial to an organisation’s own learning, its design and the future development of all its people – the leaders, new recruits and everyone in-between. Here too, there is an evolution taking place.
An overwhelming 99% of Certified Top Employers operate a global performance management process, while 92% have a formal procedure in place to ensure calibration of individual performance scores. Even so, a lot of focus in many organisations is around making performance management less rigid. The current trend is to make the whole process feel ‘lighter’ and to focus on continuous feedback throughout the year.
The need to evolve performance management is consistent with the holistic message of more flexibility and the positive message that ‘everyone has talent’ and to make talent and performance assessment feel less intimidating for employees. Assessment comes from more than one source: rather than simply relying on a managerial view, for example, seven out of 10 Certified Top Employers now use feedback from colleagues as input into performance management. Global organisations are complicated: they need good systems to work effectively, yet employees want to feel they are recognised as individuals with unique development needs. Certified Top Employers seem more able to reconcile the two than many others.
As Batt at Orange Business Services concludes: ‘We are a global business in which lots of people are managed in a matrix structure, so for us a twice-yearly formal appraisal works well. There’s no fear of it here because the culture we have embedded is open, collaborative and friendly. And we think that this is then reflected in the relationships we build with customers.’ This gets to the heart of what the learning, and the business it serves, are there to do. Learning may have become the key driver of the future-fit organisation, but organisations need to build on the leadership and management skills they develop to do what any top employer should do – serve the customer well.
David Plink is CEO of the Top Employers Institute.
