How to Deliver Personalized Talent Development at Scale — Even When Your Team Is Remote

With companies like Google, Twitter, Facebook, and others announcing that they intend to let their employees work from home indefinitely, it’s becoming clearer and clearer that remote work is likely to become more than just a pandemic-induced trend. In fact Global Workplace Analytics has recently found that 77 percent of the workforce says they want to keep working from home at least a day or two per week once the pandemic is over.

As employees scattered from their workplaces to their home offices in March, many businesses went into a sort of “emergency mode,” doubling down just to keep the gears turning. But now that we’ve all had some time to acclimate to this “new normal” and uncover best practices for general business operations, it’s time to reintroduce a critical activity that may have gotten lost in the initial shuffle: learning and development.

The Case for Learning and Development

We already know that learning and development is a powerful tool to boost employee engagement and retention and, in turn, the business’s bottom line. Here are some of the key research findings in that regard:

• Deloitte reports that 70 percent of the millennials planning to leave their jobs in the next two years cite a lack of leadership development opportunities as their primary reason.
• Gallup estimates that turnover among millennials alone costs the US economy more than $300 billion per year.
• Harvard Business Publishing finds that 66 percent of organizations that see L&D as critical to success achieve a stronger market position than their competitors.
• LinkedIn reports that 90 percent of business leaders believe L&D programs are key to closing skills gaps.

Over and over again, research has shown the importance of learning and development. And that doesn’t change when the workforce is remote. (In fact, L&D will become even more important as businesses and employees grow accustomed to working remotely most of the time — after all, leaders and their teams will need to hone new skill sets to communicate and collaborate effectively online.)

But being remote does introduce some new challenges in terms of how effective learning and development is designed and delivered.

 

Digital Learning & Development

As schools across the world learned this spring, remote learning isn’t as easy as simply replicating the in-person experience online. And this is equally true for grade school, grad school, and the “real world.” The consequence is that we lose the personalization and depth of insight that make those in-person learning experiences so effective.

Instead, it’s up to L&D leaders to identify and adopt programs and platforms that were designed to be experienced online — that can meet the organization’s new needs and circumstances to deliver powerful content, nuanced insight, and high-quality results, no matter where users are located.

The Quantified Communications platform was designed with online learning in mind. Our cloud-based, video-based learning experience platform offer customizable, on-demand leadership communication training opportunities. The platform captures video and audio of users’ everyday communication activities as well as critical events like keynote presentations, investor meetings, and more, and provides detailed, data-driven feedback and improvement plans based on each user’s individual communication goals and skills. These programs make it easy for individual learners to make measurable progress toward their goals, while learning and development teams can analyze trends in team member skills and correlate communication performance to business outcomes.

And what’s more, the platform is designed to integrate seamlessly into users’ workdays. Josh Bersin wrote recently that the biggest thing holding people back from learning and development is time. Even before employees moved into their home offices, they felt too pressed for time to add any commitments that weren’t obviously business critical, and that often meant L&D opportunities didn’t make the cut. Now, as people juggle childcare, home life, and work from their remote offices, those demands on time have only increased. But the Quantified platform — and especially our new Zoom integration — is designed to provide users with feedback right in the flow of work.

In short, we’re dedicated to providing businesses and their employees with on-demand, digital access to the world-class resources and coaching they need to hone the most critical leadership skill in our new, digital world. As our professional and personal landscapes continue to evolve as we navigate the pandemic, easy access to high-quality learning and development opportunities — especially as they relate to the communication skills teams and their leaders need to navigate all this uncertainty — is becoming more important than ever.

To learn more about the value of investing in communication skills for the virtual world, we invite you to download our complimentary whitepaper. And when you’re ready to talk about how Quantified can help your leaders, high performers, and new recruits become world-class communicators, request a demo, and one of our experts will be happy to walk you through our platform and process.