Education Company Turns Its Strength Inward To Develop Remote Workforce

Learn how an employee-led virtual conference provided personal and professional growth for employees

Additionally, an organization’s commitment to employee development is becoming increasingly important to many and has become a differentiator for employees making decisions on where to work.

For companies seeking learning and development strategies with limited resources, consider learning from an idea that we implemented at Kaplan.

The idea is to create opportunities in a forum for employees to share their expertise in a variety of areas with their colleagues, who would like to grow their knowledge and skillset in those areas.

When the pandemic hit, like many other companies, Kaplan shifted its workforce to fully remote. This shift took some time and adjustment for employees at all levels. As teams settled into new dynamics and new ways of collaborating, the search began in earnest to innovate to replicate in-person experiences in these new fully online environments, to create strategies for engagement, communication, networking, collaboration, and productivity of our talented and diverse workforce.

To support the transition, Kaplan’s Learning and Development (L&D) team began looking for ways to keep colleagues connected, engaged, and focused on their personal and professional growth. One idea was to recreate an in-person conference experience in this new virtual space and produce and host it entirely in-house to create an environment, where employees could focus on their professional development and find opportunities to collaborate and network.

Here is our description of how we implemented this concept with the hope that others can learn from our experience and benefit from our key takeaways after our first two years.

For conference topics, our L&D team solicited feedback from company leaders and gleaned data from an annual employee engagement survey to best meet the needs of the organization. Four common themes emerged: Leadership, Technology, Business Essentials, and Employee Well-Being. These became the four conference tracks for all the conference sessions.

The “big idea” was to tap into our talented employee pool, regardless of position, for our conference leaders to share their knowledge and expertise with their colleagues.  This would be a conference by Kaplan, for Kaplan, which would promote the interpersonal connection, engagement, and collaboration that a virtual workforce needs. So we sent a survey to all employees, inviting them to suggest a skill area for a session that they would volunteer to lead.

This offered employees at every level the opportunity to gain exposure in the company and give back to others by contributing to their professional and personal development. Employees responded with enthusiasm and we quickly filled our virtual conference with speakers.

To provide additional leadership and career development opportunities, we recruited other employees to serve as producers for each session. Their role would be to support the presenter during each session, providing the rules of engagement and instructions in the session, managing the chat, launching polls and breakout rooms, sharing links to resources, and managing the Q&A time at the end of each session.

This freed the presenters to focus on their content. In the lead-up to the conference, the L&D team hosted training sessions and answered questions from presenters and producers.

The Develop U Virtual Conference (DUVC), as it came to be called, was a great success in its first year. Conference sessions included Full Rewards Package: Beyond the Pay, Getting Stuff Done: The Art of Time Management in the Workplace, Data Analytics: Telling Your Story with Data, and Designing Your Digital Portfolio.

After our first year, we learned valuable lessons and key takeaways that we were able to use in our second year to help improve engagement and the attendance experience.

First, attendees told us that the speakers and their topics were much more engaging when they shared personal stories and experiences. This helped to humanize the leaders and build connections with their colleagues. Rather than a lecture, the sessions became more of a conversation. To help with that process, it was best to meet with the speakers to share best practices and help draw out their personal experiences to share in their sessions.

One of the unexpected benefits of the conference was that employees met others from different functions across the company, people with whom they did not interact in the normal course of business. In that sense, the sessions became a virtual water cooler, creating opportunities for remote employees to make connections with colleagues around the country.

We also discovered that in large virtual meetings, we needed to use the breakout rooms to encourage engagement. Once groups of six to eight people were split into assigned groups, they were more inclined to speak with one another and ask questions. The breakout sessions would ask employees to share how they would solve a problem, address a scenario, or share their thoughts on or experience with a given topic.

Speakers also strategically utilized poll questions to lead-off a session as an ice breaker and to gauge the level of familiarity that attendees had with their subject to help tailor their presentation. Polling also allowed speakers to pause and create breaks in the sessions to keep their peers engaged.

Additionally, closed captioning was added for all conference sessions. We promoted the conference more efficiently by utilizing internal corporate marketing channels such as video announcements. Quality control measures were instituted in partnership with our legal and compliance teams for session content. Links to the previous year’s recordings were provided as prework for sessions that were continuing on the same topic. Finally, an opening slide was created with instructions so that they could be shared on screen and less time was needed to explain the directions.

One of the most important distinctions we made this year was to align our DUVC conference topics with the competencies identified in our Individualized Development Plan (IDP) program. The IDP is a tool that fosters a two-way dialogue between leaders and employees to discuss strengths, opportunities, and career aspirations. This feedback is then used to document a plan for the employee to achieve their professional development goals.

Employees then can support their own career goals by improving their skills in the specific areas they identified. Our Develop U organization-wide engagement strategy focuses on providing employees the opportunity to plan their professional development using a competency framework for all role levels across the organization.

Aside from career development, we found that employees also were interested in self-improvement. Some of our most popular classes were in the Employee Well-Being category. Engagement level was high in sessions about cooking, yoga, mindfulness, managing anxiety, and portrait drawing.

The 2022 conference sessions included 42 different presenters and were organized into the same four topics as our first year with the addition of Keynote Sessions featuring company leaders. Most speakers delivered their sessions twice to accommodate different employee schedules and time zones. Sessions were recorded and added to the learning management system so that employees could access them at any time after the conference.

As a result, more than 800 employees enrolled this year, and based on the satisfaction rating from our surveys, they loved their sessions.  We received a combined aggregate of 4.72 out of 5 (94.4%) satisfaction rating in our post-session survey responses.

It is initiatives such as DUVC that set companies apart. When you invest in the development of your employees, they strengthen and broaden their skills, which in turn leads to a more engaged and productive workforce.
 

Author Bio

Rosa Finelli is Executive Director, Learning and Development, at Kaplan North America.