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Ensuring your organization is future ready: Cornerstone Originals wins 6 Telly Awards

The results are in! Three Cornerstone Originals series — A Seat at the Table, DNA: Sustainability and The Glossary — recently received a combined six Telly Awards. This was the second consecutive year we’ve won Telly Awards. The Telly Awards, for the uninitiated, honor excellence in television and video across all screens. Telly Awards Executive Director Sabrina Dridje stated on their website, “Today, the quality of video work is measured using a new set of values that consider the impact on a global scale. As our community continues the important work of storytelling, it returns with a new perspective rooted in values of innovation, agility, equity, and tenacious creativity.” We joined other 2022 Telly Award winners, The Walt Disney Company, ViacomCBS, GLAAD, Sony Music, The Washington Post and more for excellence in learning content. Go us, but how do these awards help your organization? This year, the Cornerstone Originals series that won Telly Awards covered topics relevant to successful organizations, like Diversity & Inclusion, Workplace Culture, Sustainability and Corporate Training, in innovative and engaging ways. “We are set on breaking down barriers and pushing the envelope in how we deliver authentic, relevant and brief learning content to employees around the world,” said Cornerstone Vice President of Content Summer Salomonsen. The three award-winning series that Salomonsen and her team produced — A Seat at the Table, DNA: Sustainability and The Glossary — are each built to help your organization find success in unique ways. How to have real conversations about DEIB — A Seat at the Table The Cornerstone Original series A Seat at the Table won two gold and two silver Telly Awards this year. In this series, real professionals have honest and authentic discussions about DEIB topics like Asian stereotypes, BLM, ageism, transphobia, mental health, disability and more. To help produce the series, Cornerstone brought on Emmy award-winning producer David Grant as the head of production. Each episode of A Seat at the Table features four non-actors in unscripted, open conversations around sensitive yet critical topics within the workplace. “Nothing is more powerful than a person’s lived experience. Real people sharing their stories and experiences humanizes topics and issues related to diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging. The roundtable format created a safe space for our participants to engage in constructive conversations. For learners watching, we hope that A Seat at the Table will help build the skill of empathy,” said Cornerstone AVP of Original Content Doug Segers. You can bring the honest, perspective-shifting conversations of A Seat at the Table to your organization through Cornerstone Content Anytime. Building a greener organization – DNA: Sustainability Climate change is a dire situation and fighting it starts with learning and skills development. DNA: Sustainability address the actions organizations and their people can take to do their part directly and won a silver Telly Award for it. The series, part of the larger Digital Native Advancement (DNA) umbrella, can help you and your organization promote recycling in your office, work with people who have different views than yours, make sustainable choices while traveling for work and more. Per Segers, “DNA was our first original series built around teaching interpersonal skills to Gen Z, often referred to as a generation of digital natives. Shorter, episodic learning does become an easier ask than longer-form content when people’s lives are busy. It’s about meeting people where they’re at when competing for their time. It’s important for us to make a variety of types of learning available, taking into consideration which formats and genres are popular and how people are consuming content across devices.” Learn what your organization can do to fight the climate crisis with the DNA: Sustainability courses in Cornerstone Content Anytime. Creating a common language at your organization — The Glossary The Glossary, the Cornerstone Original series focused on defining and contextualizing common terms people hear in the workplace in less than 60 seconds, won one bronze Telly award. According to Segers, “The Glossary was born from conversations over the years with both employees and clients. It is essential for organizations to have a shared vocabulary around common words, helping employees understand their company’s broader strategy and better align with employee and corporate goals. This alignment helps prevent miscommunication and improve cross-functional understanding, leading to increased productivity.” The microlearning courses in The Glossary use memorable icons to contextualize common workplace terms. The combination of visual icons with definitions helps the words stick in learners’ memory and provide them with long-term retention. You can ensure that everyone at your organization knows all the same acronyms, initialisms and other business terms when you bring The Glossary to your Cornerstone’s Content Anytime library. More to come from Cornerstone Originals With new, innovative series coming soon, nothing is stopping Cornerstone Originals from releasing more award-winning caliber content throughout 2022. “Innovation in learning content, combined with our organization’s unique ability to connect learning back to skills, reinforces our fierce dedication to providing customers with resources for creating a more engaged, inclusive, future ready workforce,” said Salomonsen. Learn more about Cornerstone Content today.

How DEIB conversations are integral to a successful workplace

Amid the social and economic disruptions of the past 20-plus months, a key theme has surfaced — the importance of belonging in the workplace. Work is a major social structure for a lot of people. And many of them look to their careers for purpose, not just a paycheck. Through their work, they search for connection, community and belonging. Creating that sense of belonging at work is critically important to building a workplace that works for everyone. It encourages collaboration, mitigates exclusion and values individuality as a way to drive outcomes. Research shows that fostering belonging at work plays a fundamental role in employee engagement, which corresponds to greater on-the-job effort, more intent to stay and higher employee performance. But in order to make work a place that works for everyone, we need to recognize that our colleagues have life and work experiences that are different from our own. And that by working to understand the social issues that create the need for diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging (DEIB) strategies, education and commitment, we can engage in meaningful conversations that make work better for everyone. Communicating about DEIB isn't just a social skill; it's a professional skill. But there are barriers to engaging in DEIB conversations As important as DEIB conversation skills are, it can be difficult to engage in these discussions. It’s a challenge to understand when, where and how to do it because, if we’re being completely honest, we often hide parts of ourselves at work. We may even censor ourselves to avoid "rocking the boat" or saying the wrong thing. Some organizations may even institute policies to ban these conversations outside of formal employee education protocols. But ignoring or avoiding these conversations won’t change the fact that social and political change and uncertainty affect people across their lives and can introduce distraction, disruption and division into the workplace.  And while DEIB training can and does help, it’s often reactive and compliance-focused, lacking tactical approaches for engaging in these conversations and initiating change. There is no perfect playbook for engaging in DEIB conversations but providing a model to guide people can certainly help. And it’s what our latest Cornerstone Originals learning series, A Seat at the Table, is designed to do. Using authentic people and conversations to model uncomfortable DEIB conversations A Seat at the Table offers an innovative approach to DEIB training. Across eight courses, the series features unscripted, meaningful conversations about important DEIB topics, such as how to talk about pronouns, racial discrimination, depression, and more.  Here’s what makes A Seat at the Table different from the typical DEIB training experience: It uses an unscripted format with real people — not actors — sharing their experiences and perspectives It explicitly demonstrates how workplaces bring together people of different backgrounds and perspectives It shows both the telling and listening that's necessary to appreciate the diversity of experiences in the workplace Through watching onscreen conversations, learners can better understand these social issues and why they're present at work. And to help put their learning into practice, each episode is accompanied by supplemental materials for managers full of tips to lead these conversations and create more inclusive environments. Take a look at this trailer for the A Seat at the Table series: Framing DEIB learning around a conversation is empowering By learning what DEIB and topics related to it mean to real people, we can better understand the critical roles we play in fostering DEIB in our workplace. Yes, talking about these issues can often be uncomfortable and weighted with emotional associations, but they're necessary to ensure we're truly creating a work experience that works for everyone. It’s not about bringing people together to disagree. It’s about nurturing human connections that foster more inclusive behaviors. Engaging in these conversations is a professional skill. One that you can help your people develop. Let us know how we can help A Seat at the Table can demonstrate your actionable commitment to DEIB and to creating a safe space for employees to bring their true selves to work. Because this learning content centers on developing competency in holding these conversations, A Seat at the Table is most impactful when incorporated with other DEIB training, like our four Cornerstone Content Anytime subscriptions: Professional Skills Leadership & Management Compliance Diversity, Equity & Inclusion If you’re interested in learning more about A Seat at the Table and how our broader content offerings can support your people and organizational goals, reach out. We’d love to discuss how we can help.

The 2021 Cornerstone learning content that may be even more important in 2022

2021 may be behind us, but its learning trends won’t stop just because the calendar changed. And no team was more connected to learning trends than the Cornerstone Studios team. Throughout 2021, we focused on the three trending learning topics that people wanted and organizations needed — diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging (DEIB), leading in uncertain times and retaining employees. Whether from our in-house studios team or together with partners like SkillPill, TED, Madecraft, and more, we created content as applicable to a healthy, strong workforce in 2021 as it will be in 2022. Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Belonging Throughout 2021, many companies increased spending on diversity, equity, and inclusion training for their employees. We expect this trend to continue throughout 2022. First, employees are willing to pass over jobs at companies that don’t have a diverse workforce. And secondly, diverse and inclusive environments are directly related to a company’s success. So we at Cornerstone Studios produced two learning series in-house to address this trend — A Seat at the Table and DNA: Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. A Seat at the Table had people from diverse backgrounds having unscripted and honest conversations about how relevant social issues have impacted them in the workplace. And DNA: Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion is part of our DNA microlearning series built for Gen Z, and in it, we tackled topics related to diversity, equity, and inclusion, including gender, age, race, politics, and ability. Leading in Uncertain Times If there’s one lesson that the past two years have reinforced, it’s that change is constant. Most recently, companies have been planning a return to offices but COVID-19 variants continue to push these schedules. On top of that, employees are leaving their jobs and companies are restructuring, leading to a whirlpool of uncertainty. That’s why we added three new courses to help people adjust — The H-Files: Leading Through Uncertainty, Managing Change in the Workplace, and TedTalks: 5 Ways to Lead in an Era of Constant Change. With The H-Files: Leading Through Uncertainty, Cornerstone Studios aimed to explore successes and failures of the past to educate professionals of tomorrow on everyday topics with techniques for adapting, delegating, communicating, and taking care of yourself during uncertain times. And that was just our in-house effort. We partnered with Grovo to create Managing Change in the Workplace to help managers learn how to lead their teams through change with clear communication, support, and strategy. And we also partnered with organizational change expert Jim Hemerling for TedTalks: 5 Ways to Lead in an Era of Constant Change. He outlines five imperatives, centered around putting people first, for turning company reorganization into an empowering, energizing task for all. You can find those courses and more across many of our Content Anytime subscriptions. Retaining Employees The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics announced that 4.5 million Americans quit their jobs in Nov 2021. Dubbed “The Great Resignation,” this mass exodus shows no signs of slowing down. There are several reasons people are quitting, but some common motivations include a lack of support and development opportunities. Our partner, Masters of Scale, tried to address one way to keep employees engaged with their course, Every Employee Needs Their Own Story of Hero-dom. In this course, Reid Hoffman, former co-founder of LinkedIn, explains why you should recognize employees for their work and help them believe they matter at their organizations. We even addressed this in-house with the Cornerstone Originals series, The Glossary. The series contextualizes business terms employees hear at work every day. Each lesson is less than 60 seconds, meaning it’s easily bingeable for even the busiest employees. So far, the series has defined terms related to technology, finance, and sustainability. And as 2022 rolls along, we’ll for sure be adding more words to address the ways this year shapes how we work. Here’s to 2022 🥂 The trends that emerged in 2021 are sure to continue into 2022. And as we begin the new year and all the surprises it has in store, Cornerstone Studios and our partners will ensure you and your workforce will have the learning content needed to be future ready. To discover more content from Cornerstone, visit the Content Hub to learn all about our content subscriptions and Original Learning series.