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Educate to EngageThe Powerful Link Between Learning & Employee Engagement

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Educate to Engage: The Powerful Link Between Learning and Employee Engagement Copyright © 2015 Published by Instructure6330 South 3000 East, Suite 700, Salt Lake City, UT 84121 All rights reserved. Except as permitted under U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher. Design by Instructure.

Visit our website at www.getbridge.com

About This Guide WHAT? A guide to improving employee engagement through learning and development. WHY? Employee disengagement is rampant. Highly engaged workforces can lead to higher productivity and profitability. Learning opportunities can lead to greater levels of engagement. This guide shows how.

WHO IS IT FOR? Learning and development and human resources professionals. WHO IS IT FROM? Bridge is created by Instructure, Inc. the software-as-a-service (SaaS) technology company that makes smart software that makes people smarter. HOW CAN INSTRUCTURE HELP? Bridge is a modern learning and engagement platform created to drive a compelling learning experience, while helping employees and companies grow.

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Table of Contents

Introduction · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · 4

Best Practice 1 · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · 8

— Focus on millennials and their learning style

Best Practice 2 · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · 11

— Give them room to stretch

Best Practice 3 · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · 14

— Build a culture of continuous learning

Best Practice 4 · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · 16

— Train your leaders

Your Engagement Action Plan · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · 18

Conclusion · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · 20

About Bridge · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · 20

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We believe there is a better way to engage your employees

It’s not about maintaining a morale level just high enough to avoid a mass exodus.

It’s not about spending a few days a year watching compliance videos that are forgotten as soon as they’re over.

It’s not about motivating employees with merely a small percentage of their annual salary in the form of a raise.

Take a walk with us through what’s changed in the workforce and learn how you can help drive positive change in your organization by nurturing your talent to its fullest and then some.

A lot can happen in a year, so the dialogue between managers and employees should be ongoing. That way, problems are solved instead of stewed upon, people get the tools needed to do their jobs better, and the company thrives.

Only when employees feel safe enough, valued enough, and empowered enough can innovation occur. Without employee engagement, you aren’t headed toward innovation, you’re headed for extinction.

EXIT

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What is employee engagement?According to Kevin Kruse, author of “Engagement 2.0: How to Motivate Your Team for High Performance,” employee engagement is the emotional commitment an employee has to an organization and its goals. Engagement does not equal happiness or satisfaction, according to Kruse. There are plenty of happy and satisfied, yet under-performing employees.

Engaged employees will go the extra mile (what many experts refer to as “discretionary effort”), resist the temptation of a competitor’s offer for higher pay, and work just as hard on a Friday afternoon as they do on a Monday morning. They are passionate about the company and take personal ownership for the quality of their work. They use “we” when speaking about the company, not “they.” They recommend their company as a great employer and service provider. They vigorously pursue their company’s goals.

Engaged employees are productive employees.Sounds pretty good, right? But does this really translate to profitability? The studies overwhelmingly say yes.

For example, a 2012 Gallup study, “Engagement at Work: Its Effect on Performance Continues in Tough Economic Times,” measured the difference in employee engagement between the top 25 percent of employees and the bottom 25 percent at nearly 50,000 businesses or work units and roughly 1.4 million employees in 192 organizations across 49 industries and in 34 countries. The study found a significantly positive correlation between engagement and productivity, absenteeism, turnover, shrinkage (a loss of inventory), safety incidents, quality incidents, and productivity.

“To win in the marketplace you must first win in the workplace.”Doug Conant, former Campbell Soup CEO

Yes, it’s called work for a reason. But the system must be broken, because employee engagement among American workers is at an all-time low.

“Paychecks can’t buy passion.”

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Another study...2010 Hewitt Associates Survey on Employee Engagement, linked employee engagement with stock market performance. The research found that organizations with engagement scores above 65 percent outperformed the total stock market index – even in volatile times. While those with scores below 40 percent saw shareholder returns 44 percent lower than average.

According to the consulting firm Allegiance, when employees believe in the direction of their company’s products or services, a spillover effect occurs. Their engagement spills over to customers, who in turn help promote the company to their friends.

The state of engagementAnd while this may sound like a pretty good state for America’s employees to be in, the majority of them are far from it. According to a 2012 Dale Carnegie white paper, “What Drives Employee Engagement and Why It Matters,” 45 percent of employees are only partially engaged, and a dismaying 26 percent are disengaged. Many other studies mirror those results.

45%Of Employees

Are Only Partially Engaged

Engagement Shareholder Value Chain by Kevin Kruse

EngagedEmployees

Work Harder, Longer, With More Focus

Increases Productivity,

Increases Service, Increases Quality

More Satisfied Customers

More Sales, More Profit

Higher Stock Share Price

Higher Total Shareholder Value

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Why is engagement so low?According to Daniel Pink, author of the bestselling book “Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us,” there’s a gap between what science knows about motivation and what business knows. Currently, most businesses are using “carrot and stick motivators” (rewards and punishments), which don’t work and often do harm. Pink says that science points to three motivating factors that many businesses ignore to their detriment.

› Autonomy: the deeply human need to direct our own lives

› Mastery: the need to learn and create new things

› Purpose: the need to do better by ourselves and our world

Pink argues that making progress in one’s work can be the single most motivating aspect of many jobs. Pink reviewed a study of 11,000 U.S. industrial scientists and engineers, which found that the desire for intellectual challenge – or the urge to master something new and engaging – was the best predictor of productivity, more so than securing patents or making more money.

And while there are other drivers of employee engagement – from recognition and communication to corporate brand – learning opportunities and professional development are rising in importance. As workforce demographics shift overwhelmingly to millennials (those born between the 1980s and the early 2000s), this trend will only accelerate. As evidence, according to Quantum Workplace’s “2014 Employee Recognition Trends Report,” employees under age 25 rate professional development as their number one driver of engagement.

How do learning and development managers and HR leaders respond to this complex and systemic challenge? We propose four best practices: first, focus on millennials and their unique learning style. Second, borrowing from Google’s “20 percent time” concept, we propose allowing employees some creative license and giving them some room to stretch. Third, build a culture of continuous learning. Fourth, train your leaders. We expand on each of these practices below.

Learning and development rises in importance

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BEST PRACTICE 1

Focus on millennials and their learning style

Millennials are taking over the world. Kidding – but they are taking over the workforce. By 2025, millennials are expected to make up 75 percent of the global workforce. Some companies, like Ernst & Young, already have a workforce consisting of 60 percent millennials.

Used to hearing groans when you mention training and development? You’re far less likely to hear it from the millennials. They want to earn their achievements. According to a study by PricewaterhouseCoopers, millennials rated training and development as the most highly valued employee benefit. Employees who actually want to be part of your training and development program? That’s refreshing, right? Now you need to ensure you’re engaging them with training and development that meets their needs and expectations.

This whole “entitlement” rap may not be true after all Colleen Lauria, a talent, human resources, and organizational development consultant with Talent Distinctions, explains that the incentive for learning used to be seen as the way you could advance within an organization.

“The way it’s different than 20 years ago, is that now it’s not all about the carrot. It’s about growing as a person, and how this organization supports me holistically. Lifelong employment doesn’t exist anymore, so employees are more about the experience they’re having than just how are you helping me get to the next level.”

Like it or not, this generation is special. And here’s what you need to know about them in order to engage.

weLead In Learning, an e-journal of organizational learning and leadership, reviewed multiple studies on millennial learning styles. The article identified six key characteristics.

› Ability to multitask

› Desire for structure

› Achievement-focused

› Technologically savvy

› Team oriented

› Seeking attention and feedback

By 2025, millennials are expected to make

up 75 percent of the global workforce.

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BEST PRACTICE 1

CONTINUED

Focus on millennials and their learning style

Old-school tech won’t cut itWere your millennial employees still in diapers when each of your various systems and programs were created? If so, you’d better step your tech game up, because 56 percent of lower millennials and 67 percent of upper millennials said state-of-the-art equipment is vital in their employer selection, according to a study by Accenture.

As an HR professional or learning and development leader or other type of manager, you may be cognizant of the connection between millennials and technology, but perhaps you haven’t considered the role millennials expect technology to play in their professional lives.

“There’s been no other generation where technology has been so ingrained in everything they do,” said Lauria of Talent Distinctions. “It’s how they engage with their parents and all of their friends – in the social network sphere. It impacts how they want to and are used to engaging with their employers.”

Are your learning and engagement platforms easy to use with a responsive design? Can they be accessed via smartphones and tablets? These are important questions when it comes to engaging millennials.

As you consider your investments in new applications and programs, consider the vital need for mobile access. As of early 2013, 18 percent of all millennials were mobile-only users according to comScore, meaning they do everything on a smartphone or tablet and likely don’t own a laptop or desktop computer. And millennial or not, mobile usage has taken over as the primary means of accessing the Internet.

The research makes it clear: your training needs to be delivered on a platform compatible with the technology millennials are using, from tablets to smartphones. Beyond that, the content itself needs to be delivered in a format that engages millennials.

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BEST PRACTICE 1

CONTINUED

Focus on millennials and their learning style

Your content must speak “TwitChatGramTube” (aka millennial)Still making employees watch that two hour video on sexual harassment or safety compliance? Millennials will check out before you even press “play.”

“If you can’t deliver a training course in short, bite-sized segments, you won’t engage the millennials coming into the workforce,” explained Jeff Weber, vice president of people and places at Instructure. Engage them the way they live, work, and interact.

Make it bite-sized

Millennials are accustomed to 140 character limits, 10 second disappearing videos, and the ability to fast forward through commercials.

Make it visual

Over 65 percent of millennials prefer to learn visually. Beyond millennials, visual content still rules the day. Ninety percent of the information our brains process is visual, and our brain is able to process visuals 60,000 times faster than text.

Make it social

Eighty-four percent of millennials are social media users.

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BEST PRACTICE 2

Give them room to stretch

Can you imagine if Google Earth was never developed? What about Google AdWords or Google Mail (more commonly known as “Gmail”)? They might not have been if Google hadn’t adopted what it calls “20 percent time,” an allotment of 20 percent of each worker’s time for what other companies often call “stretch assignments.” While the highly celebrated practice has been the topic of hot debate ever since a 2013 Quartz article declared that Google had effectively killed it (although Google maintains the practice still exists), the idea continues to flourish.

Provisional, an employment firm in Spokane, Wash., defines stretch assignments as “a project or task you take on that falls outside your typical duties and requires you to step outside your comfort zone and learn new skills.” Google’s program has been described as time to be spent by employees “working on a Google-related passion project of their own choosing or of their own creation.”

Shun stretch assignments at your own risk Although the idea of dedicating 20 percent of an employee’s time to these projects might be more typical in the tech industry – Facebook, LinkedIn, and Apple are all said to have similar policies – many companies allow employees to spend some fraction of their time on stretch assignments. And they’re smart to do so.

According to a study by BlessingWhite, one of the greatest drivers of engagement for 7,000 survey respondents was “more opportunities to do what I do best.” In other words, employees want more work – but they want it to be tailored to their interests and skills.

“To stay vigorous, a company needs to provide a stimulating and challenging environment for all these types: the dreamer, the entrepreneur, the professional manager, and the leader. If it doesn’t, it risks becoming yet another mediocre corporation.”

Howard Schultz, Chairman and CEO of Starbucks

20%

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BEST PRACTICE 2

CONTINUED

Give them roomto stretch

That response tied “career development opportunities and training,” for the top spot and far outranked other options such as “more flexible job conditions” and “a better relationship with my manager.”

Colleen Lauria and Michelle Winkley, human resources and organizational development consultants at Talent Distinctions, stress the importance of stretch assignments for all organizations, big and small, regardless of industry. Even in a professional services firm where everyone is 100-percent billable, Lauria suggests at least 5 percent of that should be dedicated to stretch activities that promote creativity.

Lauria says “hackathons” have become increasingly popular. The idea is to get employees in a room for 24 hours of development where they’re encouraged to simply throw ideas around. Fueled by pizza and beer, employees become more engaged and feel supported in their ability to be creative.

Winkley says she works with smaller clients who struggle with how to juggle stretch assignments with the work that must be done to maintain the business. Their implementation might be something small like providing a bonus if you create the idea for the next product. She also believes social platforms within the workplace can boost creativity as employees post ideas and give feedback to one another.

A recent Fast Company article highlighted ideas from two companies: ad agency Huge and product design firm Adaptive Path. At Huge, employees pitch ideas to a panel of judges for the chance to receive funding and office space for their project. The CEO applauded the program for encouraging new ideas that can be implemented for current clients.

The Adaptive Path model incentivizes product development by giving employees contractual ownership over any idea they create while on the job. A risky move, perhaps, but the company’s chief creative officer believes the program encourages employees to use their full creative energy to solve client problems.

How do you incorporate stretch assignments?

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BEST PRACTICE 2

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Give them roomto stretch

The goal of a stretch assignment program doesn’t have to be the creation of groundbreaking innovations like Google Earth. Instead, these programs can focus more on professional development, such as developing leadership skills in a professional who has the potential to rise up the company ladder.

Jeff Weber, Instructure’s vice president of people and places, explains how the process works at his company:

Stretch assignments for professional development

› Managing a volunteer or intern

› Executing a new or important

company project

› Participating in the company’s

strategic planning process

“During the talent review process all employees have a talent card that lists their background and experience, accomplishments, and future goals. We create a list of key competencies they want to work on, and once we have three or four areas they need to work on, we link them with a course or content providers in our learning and engagement system that can help them grow in those areas.”

Employment firm Provisional gives some examples of common stretch assignments that fit companies of all sizes.

› Turning around a failing project,

department, or operation

› Organizing and leading an

important company event

or meeting

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BEST PRACTICE 3

Build a culture of continuous learning

Once upon a time, you went to school, learned a set of skills, and were prepared for a career. Sure, you improved upon your knowledge throughout your career, but the basic skills you learned in school served as the foundation for your lifelong profession.

This fairy tale no longer exists. Information that university students learn today often becomes obsolete while they’re learning it. In the age of technology, change happens fast and we must continue to learn throughout our careers to stay

These organizations also have retention rates 30 to 50 percent higher than their peers.

92%more likely to develop novel

products and processes

56%more likely to be the first

to go to market with their

products and services

17%more profitable than

their peers

52%more productive

Enable informal learning

Josh Bersin, principal and founder of Bersin by Deloitte, says companies that adopt “formalized informal learning” programs (such as coaching, on-demand training, and performance support tools) outperform those that focus on formal training by three to one. In those companies, learning and development managers are creating content and using technology to help employees quickly and easily learn on the job.

competitive and relevant. What you know today might not be what you need to know tomorrow to succeed. Thus it’s critical for companies to foster continuous learning cultures to ensure their employees master new skills and techniques needed to compete in today’s marketplace.

In its report, “High-Impact Learning Culture: The 40 Best Practices for Creating an Empowered Enterprise,” Bersin by Deloitte found that organizations with strong learning cultures are:

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BEST PRACTICE 3

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Build a culture of continuous learning

Share internal knowledgeYou have a lot of expertise that probably isn’t being shared widely enough among your teams. Make your experts available. For example, Bersin recommends building an internal directory of experts that promotes their skills and experience. Instructure’s Weber says this is where having a learning and engagement platform that is intuitive and easy to use is imperative. “You want to empower your subject-matter experts to create content and share their knowledge and they’re not going to do that if your learning and engagement platform is clunky, outdated, and difficult to use,” Weber says.

Bersin shared an example of an innovative knowledge-sharing initiative by The Cheesecake Factory: “The head of corporate training for this fast-growing food chain put in place a YouTube-like learning portal which lets any employee upload a video of themselves doing their job well. Employees can share ‘how to make a hamburger’ or ‘how to best clean the floor’ and share it in any way they wish. Within only a few weeks of building this system people rapidly started using their cell phones to create instructional videos and share hilarious stories about how they solve problems on the job. The system went viral in a few weeks.”

Allow (and perhaps even celebrate) mistakesWe all make them. Allowing mistakes doesn’t mean giving rise to an anything-goes attitude. It means giving people the intellectual freedom to take risks. To innovative. To explore. To quickly analyze what worked and what didn’t. Then adapt and improve.

James Dyson once said: “I made 5,127 prototypes of my vacuum before I got it right. There were 5,126 failures. But I learned from each one. That’s how I came up with a solution. So I don’t mind failure.... We’re taught to do things the right way. But if you want to discover something that other people haven’t, you need to do things the wrong way. Initiate a failure by doing something that’s very silly, unthinkable, naughty, dangerous. Watching why that fails can take you on a completely different path. It’s exciting, actually.”

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BEST PRACTICE 4

Train your leaders

It’s often said that people join companies, but they leave managers. Because leaders set the tone for engagement in the workplace, they must have the tools and resources necessary to set the right example, which then trickles down to the rest of the workplace.

Be sure your leaders are exactly thatThe American Society for Talent Development’s study, “Learning’s Role in Employee Engagement,” found a clear link between learning and training opportunities and highly engaged workforces. However, the study found a stronger link between organizations that train their leaders in how to engage employees and highly engaged workforces.

In a 2012 cross-industry study by Dale Carnegie Training, “Enhancing Employee Engagement: the Role of the Immediate Supervisor,” 1,500 employees were asked to rate their satisfaction with their immediate supervisor. Forty-nine percent who were very satisfied with their direct manager were engaged, and 80 percent who were very dissatisfied with their immediate supervisor were disengaged. The

research found that senior leaders establish engagement by “providing a clear career path, ensuring employees receive helpful feedback and initiating training programs throughout the organization.”

According to Bersin by Deloitte’s “Leadership Development Factbook 2014,” organizations with high levels of employee engagement spend one and a half to three times more on management development than their peers. The company says it’s important for companies to remember that management’s job is:

“not to manage work but rather to develop, coach, and help people.”

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BEST PRACTICE 4

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Train your leaders

Choose the right leadersOf course, your leaders have to want to learn. According to Gallup’s study of 32 companies with exemplary employee engagement, having “involved and curious leaders who want to improve” is often the deciding factor between an engaged workforce and a bland and uninspired one. Says Gallup: “Leaders of great workplaces don’t just talk about what they want to see in the management ranks – they model it and keep practicing to get better at it every day with their own teams. By displaying a little vulnerability and visibly working on improving themselves, they signal that such engagement is how one gets ahead.”

Training shouldn’t feel like tortureToday’s leaders are busy and old-style training won’t fit their busy schedules says Instructure’s Weber. To address this challenge, Instructure has created a “Manager 101” series, available via the company’s own learning and engagement platform, Bridge, which allows its managers to take 30-minute courses on their own time and learn the tips and tricks to being a more effective leader. “Instead of quarterly day-long sessions that they have to attend in person, we broke up the training into more digestible chunks that they can consume on any device,” Weber says.

“We’ve found that our managers are much more enthusiastic about the training and embrace the material more readily.”

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Evaluate your learning and engagement platform. If you don’t have a clear idea of your current system features, talk to your provider. Create a list of key features you need, whether it’s the ability for employees to access courses on their own mobile devices or the ability to quickly create courses as the need arises. If you find your current system can’t meet your needs, prepare a list of questions to ask other providers, including how easily you can move your existing content to the new platform, which will make the transition more palatable to your boss and an easier task for you as you make the switch.

By now, hopefully you understand a little more about what an engaged employee looks like and how to implement some learning and development best practices that get you those engaged employees. We want you to walk away with more than just knowledge, however. While you’re still excited about employee engagement, you can develop an action plan you can begin implementing today.

What about your job makes you want jump out of bed?

What opportunities for self-improvement would you like to have that go beyond your current role?

If you changed your role completely, what would you miss the most?

What makes for a great day at work?

What talents, interests, or skills do you have that we haven’t made the most of?

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Your engagement action plan

Spring cleaning. Go into your current learning and engagement platform and remove any outdated content that can’t or shouldn’t be updated. For content that could use an update, contact the original author or someone else with the same expertise who can take the time to update the course.

Conduct “stay” interviews. Forget exit interviews, you want stay interviews so you can address issues before one of your high performers is out the door. Stay away from questions that can be answered with a “yes” or “no,” as that won’t get you the feedback you need. Here are some sample questions from lists developed by Insperity, a human resources consulting firm, and job search website Monster:

What kind of feedback would you like about your performance that you aren’t currently receiving?

What did you love in your last position that you’re not doing now?

What about your job makes you want to hit the snooze button?

If you had a magic wand, what would be the one thing you would change about your work, your role, and your responsibilities?

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CONTINUED

Obtain engagement profiles of your employees. According to Kevin Kruse, best-selling author of “Employee Engagement for Everyone,” there are four primary drivers of engagement for all employees: communication, growth, recognition, and trust. However, no two employees are motivated by the exact same set of circumstances. Having profiles on hand for each of your employees, and sharing those with employees’ supervisors, can allow you to tailor learning and development and other opportunities to their individual needs. It’s also great for employees to be self-aware about their motivators. There’s no need to reinvent the wheel; we recommend this profile tool from Kruse.

Track your investment. Devise a way to track your organization’s investment in its employees. For example, you can track training investment as a percentage of payroll. Top companies generally budget 3 percent to 5 percent of payroll for training. This gives you a well-reasoned number if you need to make the case for your training needs next budget cycle.

Train your managers on engagement. All your work will be for naught if you’re the only one who understands employee engagement and your plan to improve it for your company. Meet with your managers in a group to discuss the subject in broad strokes, and then meet with them individually to discuss the specific needs of each team or department. Consider including courses on various aspects of employee engagement within your learning and engagement program for managers and supervisors to access for their own learning and development. Remember, employees don’t leave companies, they leave managers.

Your engagement action plan

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ConclusionAt the end of the day, your senior executives are probably most concerned with the performance of employees. They probably figure an employee who is receiving good reviews, promotions, and pay raises, is an engaged employee. As you’ve seen from the studies, it’s not true – and here’s one more.

A study in The Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology tracked the performance of bank employees over three years. Among other things, the study found that the level of an employee’s engagement was more directly correlated to good performance than good performance was to higher engagement.

Add that to your arsenal the next time you have to sell your boss on caring about and investing in employee engagement. In the meantime, work through the action plan. Increased engagement comes as a result of intentional planning. It’s a marathon, not a race.

About BridgeBridge is a modern learning and engagement platform created to drive a compelling learning experience, while helping employees and companies grow.

Learn more at www.GetBridge.com.