Learning And Employee Engagement, The Perfect Relationship?

Tailored learning experiences foster autonomy, meet individual needs and drive career growth

Employee engagement is on the rocks. Less than a third of American employees feel engaged at work, which spells trouble for overall productivity, retention, recruiting costs, culture, and employer brands. It was not always like this. In fact, until this year, engagement was on the rise. But a combination of a lack of clarity around role expectations, fewer opportunities for development, and a feeling of not being able to voice opinions at work have led to the current decrease. 
 
Therein lies the solution for HR teams — partnering with L&D can provide the influence, development, and clarity that today’s employees are seeking. 

Learning Is Vital Across the Employee Lifecycle

Learning feeds into so many parts of the employee experience; from the moment they onboard with all of the critical company and role knowledge imparted during this process, to the key learning junctures at promotion, company and role changes, and outskilling. Offering the right learning opportunities to all employees ensures they not only gain role clarity, but the skills needed to succeed and grow in their roles too. Plus, investing in someone’s long-term skills and career journey is a tangible way to show care.

 

Boosting Autonomy via Personalized Learning

We are quid pro quo creatures. Therefore, offering learning as an individual way for someone to grow their skills, and ultimately their career prospects, can lead them to remain with your organization for longer thanks to the opportunities they are getting. If those learning opportunities align with their interests and personal goals, you also boost their overall sense of autonomy at work.
 
The personalized aspect of that is vital. Some of us have unfortunately experienced what it is like to sit through an irrelevant webinar or live training session. When learning is not linked to our needs in our current roles, or where we want to develop, it becomes disengaging and, in the worst case, demoralizing. 
 
A powerful way to ensure people are learning the skills they desire is to give everyone a personalized learning budget that they can spend on courses and resources of their choosing. It does not have to be without guidelines or boundaries. You can recommend learning content providers that your organization already has a relationship with. Or you can have a shortlist of skills that are ‘company critical’ and that will have a huge impact on someone’s career trajectory within your organization if they upskill in them. 
 
Personalizing learning in this way gives people a clear answer to “What’s In It For Me?” (WIIFM). We do not tend to do anything without a positive answer to this question, especially if it involves a lifelong commitment. 
 
Take SaaS employee background company Checkr, for example. As Linda Shaffer, Chief People & Operations Officer at Checkr explains, “Something we did differently this year is adopting a platform for employees to go and discover training without having to pay out-of-pocket. By taking away that friction for employees, participation in employee-driven development has skyrocketed to a 50 percent employee participation rate.”

Meeting People Where They’re at

Of course, people go through different seasons in their lives where learning can come to the forefront or take more of a backseat. Meeting people where they are currently at in their lives will create a more consistent learning habit throughout their lifetime. There are key moments when they will feel more engaged with learning. 
 
A recently promoted manager, for example, might seek out learning opportunities aligned with management and leadership tactics. A new graduate may need resources around building a healthy work/life balance and establishing a strong professional network. Consider the learning needs of people at different levels and life stages, because this will impact the kinds of skills they learn, the type of resources they need, and how much time they will likely dedicate to learning. 

An Active Process

The way this learning strategy is implemented is constantly refined over time. It is an active process that is tweaked based on engagement, learning, and performance data plus feedback from employees and managers. You do not build a strong learning culture (or company culture, for that matter) by investing in a learning tool, installing it, and then leaving it to run. The story and strategies you build around your learning investment matter as much as the technology and resources you invest in. 

Aligning with the Business

For learning to impact the employee experience, more than L&D needs to be bought in and involved in your learning strategy. HR is an obvious partner, but lines of business also play a vital role in influencing the skills (and, therefore, resources) you want to build. Close alignment with colleagues in other departments ensures that learning is core to everyone’s role, that time is set aside for employees to learn, and that it really has an impact on the business. 

Learning’s Greatest Asset

Managers deserve their own mention here. As they are the bridge between the company, team, and individual goals, managers are the key group you have to recruit as learning champions. It is only through them that you will get any kind of consistent learning practice in your workforce. 
 
They hold the key to accountability, time, and direction for their team members. Indeed, Degreed’s How the Workforce Learns report found that employees in strong learning cultures are 270% more likely to have a manager who supports their development. Those in poor learning cultures were 92% more likely to feel that their manager has not meaningfully supported their development over the past year. 
 
The final key to coupling learning with employee engagement is providing a consolidated (AKA coherent) learning experience. Giving individuals a personalized learning experience naturally means there will be a lot of resources available, both free and paid for. But that does not mean your learning experience needs to become something fragmented and hard-to-navigate. 
 
Putting everything in one place achieves several things.
 

1. It ‘trains’ people to go to one place to access all of their learning. From their everyday learning opportunities via content to deep learning engagements in an academy.
2. An intuitive and engaging interface (perhaps with some gamification elements) boosts the likelihood of someone actively choosing to learn.
3. It consolidates learning and skills data, which can then be used to influence future learning investments, talent management, workforce planning, and more. 

 
Or as Peter Manniche Riber, Head of Digital Learning at Novo Nordisk puts it, “Call it an LXP, HR Tech, Ecosystem connector… whatever you want. We needed a global solution, with an interface that people would actually find appealing to use and a machine focusing on connecting experiences and resources from both internal and external sources.”

Bringing This to Life in Your Organization

If I could summarize this learning approach in a single word, it would be “intention”. Getting your learning culture and technology to a place where it can actively contribute to your employee engagement takes thought-out and carefully considered actions. This includes thinking of what a personalized learning offering looks like for your unique workforce, the tools and resources you need to enable this, and the communication you put around it to get everyone excited and motivated to learn every day.

Jen Collins is Senior Director of Client Experience – at Academies, in Degreed. Jen is a learning strategist, consultant, speaker and facilitator with a passion for talent development, in particular, skill-specific learning programs and academies. She has consulted and facilitated learning experiences on a variety of topics for all levels of employees across B2B and B2C businesses, drawing on her combined experience in L&D and marketing to understand learner motivations and drive engagement. Jen has 20 years of marketing and business management experience, with a focus on talent development for the past five years.