How to keep your employees from jumping ship

Using Compliance and Skills Training to Increase Retention

Catch the replay of our webinar and hear how a Cornerstone client reduced new hire turnover by 28% within their first year of using a learning management system (LMS). While compliance training is a must, learning & development has a direct business impact on employee engagement. Today’s demands for learning from the multi-generational workforce presents an opportunity to build a strong workplace culture that promotes employee learning. In this webinar, you’ll learn: why learning matters, the business impact of learning, and a real-life success story of a unified learning strategy.

Workology Podcast: Balancing High Growth with Employee Engagement, featuring Chirag Shah

Cornerstone's own Chirag Shah, Senior Vice President and General Manager of Growth Markets, joined the Workology podcast as a featured guest. Host, Jessica Miller-Merrell, and Shah discuss the pressure small & medium businesses face to grow at a rapid pace and the challenges that come with it. According to Shah, the biggest challenge SMBs encounter with growing their business is finding and retaining top talent. As the business grows, the talent scope and job responsibilities become more focused and specific, which makes finding the right talent a true scavenger hunt. Miller-Merrell and Shah also dive into specific examples of how Cornerstone "walks the walk" in terms of employee retention and development efforts, including "Development Day" where employees across the company teach courses on any and every topic (arts and crafts, anyone?). Listen to the podcast now and get expert insights on why employee development and engagement is more than a "nice to have" for every growing business. Click here to LISTEN NOW

Strategies to Improve Employee Learning Retention

Learning programs are often costly and may not always bring about the change in behavior that organizational leaders hope to see. And every so often, learning programs actually take employees away from the very work they were hired to do, which can be costly for the company and stressful for the employee. What if a simple process could help dramatically improve employee learning retention? Just two key steps—one before the learning event, and one after—can open learners' minds to new concepts and enable them to reflect on how fresh knowledge or insight might help them in their job. To improve learning retention, it's key to zero in on the knowledge that needs to be acquired, ensure that the learner understands why it needs to be acquired and set one or two simple goals for learners to work towards immediately after the learning experience. Set Up Learning Moments Understanding the "why" is a critical step to create interest, communicate relevance, and make learning stick. Otherwise, the content may not be meaningful, causing boredom and a wandering mind. Plus, if you don't frame learning experiences in the right way, employees might not even know they're happening. Consider this example from one of my clients. The CEO of a manufacturing company was puzzled when his employees asked for training. After reviewing the results of a learning needs assessment, he was even more confused because he felt that the company was already doing much of the training that his employees requested. Still, his employees clearly didn't realize when learning took place. As a small organization, he didn't have the budget or the time for external training that didn't contribute to "real" work, so we helped them create an informal learning program. With specific learning needs identified, managers put on their teaching hats and created templates that broke concepts up into small chunks. They then identified a subject matter expert within the organization that would lead the learning experiences, which we called "learning moments." To get started, the subject matter expert prefaced the first learning moment by explaining the "what and why" of the content, and setting the stage for what was about to take place. The subject matter expert then led learners through the content in a structured way over a span of about 15 minutes. It didn't take long for employees to realize that learning was happening—by talking about learning before it took place, the expert prepared the employees to better absorb material. Nail Down Takeaways When employees return from learning sessions, it's vital for employees to bring new knowledge back to their managers and their teams. It's then up to managers to coach them on how to practice what they have just learned. This process reinforces what employees have absorbed, and helps open their eyes to how new concepts can be put to action. In the case of my manufacturing company client, for example, the subject matter expert met with a manager to debrief after the learning moment. Not only did the subject matter expert feel that employees learned a lot during the session, but she also found that she improved her own personal expertise as well. The manager then followed up with the employees that participated in the learning experience and suggested that they find one or two ways to incorporate new concepts into practice quickly. Closing the loop on learning and discussing takeaways helped seal the deal with regard to retention. I have always followed the advice I got early in my career: "If you are going to present something, always tell the audience what you are going to present, present it, and then recap what you just presented." Sometimes, understanding is just a matter of connecting the dots between learning and doing. Being very intentional and clear about your organization's approach to learning will put you on the journey towards becoming a learning organization. Photo: Creative Commons