Drive Your Business Forward With Unified, Collaborative Learning and Performance Management

White Paper Drive Your Business Forward With Unified, Collaborative Learning and Performance Management Many organizations are in the process of choosing a “Talent Management” solution to help ensure they retain and engage the people they need to meet their business objectives. What criteria will your organization use to determine which processes are critical for success and truly require full unification with other people systems in your organization? Learn why the combination of motivation, know-how and connection is critical to the success of your people initiatives. Executive Summary performance, productivity and engagement to the next level. Many organizations are in the process of choosing a “Talent Saba calls this the “people multiplier effect.” When motivation, Management” solution to help ensure they retain and engage know-how and connection come together to ensure each the people they need to meet their business objectives. The employee has the skills and the environment and connections majority of these initiatives center around solutions such as needed to succeed, the business results delivered are performance management to ensure a focus on corporate multiplied several-fold. objectives and employee productivity. But the path to success Learning and Performance Unification Delivers is less than clear. Each analyst and vendor active in the talent Motivation and Knowhow management market has a slightly different definition of what is included in a “complete” talent management solution, and very Primary research, conducted by organizations such as Bersin few organizations are able or willing to make a single purchase & Associates, highlights the impact the combination of learning from a vendor that meets all of their people systems needs. and performance has on delivering business benefits. In their 2009 Talent Management Factbook, Bersin & Associates At the same time, it’s not unusual for organizations to have describe the key drivers of effectiveness and impact: already made significant investments in solutions such as ƒ Maturity of talent management strategy learning management and recruiting. Should these solutions be replaced or leveraged? If you are a learning professional, ƒ Consistent, enterprise-wide performance management how will these decisions affect the learning programs you’ve ƒ High quality employee development plans put in place? Will you have a role in the decision process? ƒ Formalized, enterprise-wide succession management What criteria will your organization use to determine which ƒ Strategic leadership development processes are critical for success and truly require full unification with other people systems in your organization? ƒ Strategic workforce planning From Saba’s perspective, it all comes back to the business ƒ Supporting infrastructure results you are trying to achieve with your people initiatives. High quality development planning especially emerged Results such as: as one of the drivers with the most measurable impact ƒ Lower costs due to higher retention rates amongst your best on results. Those organizations with highly or somewhat people effective development planning showed significantly ƒ Increased revenues and higher customer satisfaction due to lower turnover and more than twice the revenue per higher employee productivity employee versus organizations that did little development planning. Also, those organizations with “integrated” talent ƒ Better employee engagement making your corporate culture a more innovative, collaborative and exciting place to work management processes, including learning and performance, showed the following results: All of the people processes typically part of talent management ƒ 40% lower turnover among high performers can help deliver these results, but research has found that two processes in particular, when part of a strategic and unified ƒ 17% lower overall voluntary turnover talent management process, must be very tightly linked. ƒ 26% higher revenue per employee Those processes are consistent, enterprise-wide performance ƒ 28% fewer companies downsized during 2008-2009 management and learning and development. Without this ƒ 87% greater ability to “hire the best people” linkage, it is exceedingly difficult to provide the opportunities for promotion, mobility and growth that ensure retention. There ƒ 156% greater ability to “develop great leaders” is a third element – collaboration and social feedback – that ƒ 92% greater ability to “respond to economic conditions” when added to the learning/performance combination, takes ƒ 144% greater ability to “plan for future talent needs” 3 White Paper n Drive Your Business Forward With Unified, Collaborative Learning and Performance Management collaborative and social capabilities. Firstly, instead of the skill gap being identified post-review, the social performance feedback process (active throughout the year) made note of the gap nine months earlier, and the individuals affected starting reaching out on their own to try and find resources that would help them close the gap. After perusing the information and resources available in the knowledge base, the individuals began reaching out to our group of experts for more insight. The experts themselves compared notes, and collaborated to create informal content that they then posted back to the knowledge base, making it immediately available without L&D’s direct intervention. This new piece of content proved popular, and garnered strong ratings from the community, so very quickly it was on L&D’s radar as a Source: Bersin & Associates, “Talent Management Factbook”, 2009 strong candidate for addition to the standard curriculum for the critical role. With the core content already in place, the Why these strong results? Saba believes that two process to formalize this content into the curriculum was much components of the “people multiplier effect” equation – easier. This whole process happened in a matter of weeks, not motivation (dependent upon clear goals and objectives, fair months. Thus, the potential impact on business results was compensation, and access to career opportunities) and accelerated, while reducing the overall workload for our HR knowhow (dependent upon a clear recognition of where gaps and L&D professionals. exist, and access to formal learning as well as informal sources Thus, when considering the question of whether to replace or of knowledge and expertise to close them) – require both leverage the investments you may have already made in learning learning and performance management to be present AND or performance management systems, consider the solution’s tightly interconnected to achieve results. capabilities to support social learning and real-time performance feedback.