Blog Post

How HR Leaders Can Connect Processes and Facilitate Continuous Learning

Shawn Flynn

AVP of Global Thought Leadership & Advisory Services, Cornerstone OnDemand

2020 has continued to pose challenges for organizations. Lockdowns have caused decreased revenues, work from home orders have caused blind spots, and companies have been striving to stay connected. However, as things return to normal, businesses need to be ready to hit the ground running. In this, your employees need to be ready for whatever challenge presents itself.

To achieve this, your employees need the skills and knowledge to stay ahead of the new business landscape. How can you achieve this? How can you keep up to date with training needs and progress? Today, we’d like to explore the importance of upskilling in business resilience, how continuous learning makes business resilience possible, and how the Cornerstone integration in ServiceNow facilitates this.

Upskilling is Key

As discussed in a recent report from APQC, one of the most important facets of recovery and long-term resilience is upskilling and reskilling employees.

Flexibility, Innovation, and Change Management Skills Needed Now More Than Ever

In this, organizations are expecting more flexibility and are looking to encourage innovation, change, and communication at their workforce. The study notes:

"Though the pandemic stresses the necessity of these skillsets, they’ve actually been a growing focus over the last couple of years. The impacts of digital and organizational transformations and the pace of changes in business environments have driven the need for key skills in agility, change management, and technology fluency across functions."

Recovery Is a Growth Mindset

But as mentioned, this is nothing new. Companies have been looking to encourage these skills for years. After all, how much does recovery differ from growth? Think of it like this: Recovering from year-over-year revenue loss to neutral is not much different than accelerating revenue growth.

That said, companies need to encourage a growth mindset in their staff and strive to train them as efficiently and effectively as possible. Organizational leadership needs to stay ahead of training needs, mitigate skillset atrophy, and prepare employees for a new landscape.

Continuous Learning Can't Exist in Silos

For many HR leaders, the question isn’t "what?", but "how?" You’ve been in this business long enough to understand the value of training and development—but you’ve also been in this business long enough to know the challenges that go into employee development.

Employees have different learning styles, different levels of development, and different expectations. On the other hand, it’s your job to keep track of this, providing an intuitive learning experience and staying ahead of training needs. Harder yet, you have to balance learning with change. Too often, you’ll end up planning and refining a strategy—only for the market to shift.

Continuous learning can help address the challenges, but too often, HR professionals are trying to manage this process in a silo. Emails about required training get ignored, disconnected platforms leave you with training blind spots, and siloed technology is too often held together with strings and duct tape.

The Power of Consolidation: Connected Workflows Facilitate Continuous Learning

Empowering your staff to become more flexible, innovative, and ready for change requires connection. To do this, you need rapid access to accurate information, allowing you to track what matters and stay ahead of business needs.

With platform consolidation, you can set up workflows to work with a variety of applications and business processes. However, platform consolidation can’t create more work than it facilitates.

To achieve this, companies need a solution that can:

  • Simplify Integrations: Empower business users by connecting applications and give them the freedom to develop workflows without complex, costly integration tools.
  • Drive Speed and Increase Productivity: Take advantage of a scalable publish–discover–reuse framework to build productive time back into the business so your people can focus on what matters most.
  • Reduce the Workflow Workload: Continue to improve your training workflows with analytics, allowing you to build better employee development programs.

Introducing Cornerstone + ServiceNow

Organizations with a growth mindset need to facilitate a culture of continuous learning and development. But for many HR managers and business leaders, even the best programs fall by the wayside if you can’t keep up with the who, what, when, and why of your talent initiatives.

It’s why, as mentioned above, we recently announced a new integration with ServiceNow, a leading digital workflow technology provider, to immediately offer platform interoperability to our joint customers and promote cultures of continuous learning.

Organizations that rely on Cornerstone to train and new skill their employees can now directly integrate their Cornerstone Learning solution with their ServiceNow® HR Service Delivery solution. Whether you need an integration built to unify employee experiences or an always up-to-date employee training and certification platform, Cornerstone and ServiceNow help make it happen.

  • Assign learning tasks and to-do items from Cornerstone into ServiceNow
  • Enable employees to see and complete ServiceNow tasks, along with other tasks assigned to them, all in one place
  • Seamless navigation and completion of learning courses between Cornerstone and ServiceNow

With these connected workflows, organizations can remove barriers of switching back and forth between platforms to enable learning in the flow of work.

Learn more about the ServiceNow Partnership

To learn more about how you can optimize your learning workflows visit the ServiceNow HR Service Delivery integration with Cornerstone OnDemand listing, in the ServiceNow Store.

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