When employee disengagement sets in, it can have a detrimental impact on your business and its goals. But how do you recognize the signs of a disengaged employee? And more importantly, what can you do about it?

In this article, we’ll examine the core reasons why employees become disengaged in the workplace, share several examples of employee disengagement, and provide tried-and-tested strategies to improve employee engagement.

What is Employee Disengagement?

Employee disengagement is a lack of interest and commitment to a workplace. It shows up as minimal output, unproductive and inefficient results, prolonged distraction and time-wasting, and a lack of excitement and enthusiasm for the job and its requirements.

Disengaged employees often feel disconnected from their work, the business, and its goals. This results in minimal effort and a challenge to exceed in their role.

Employee disengagement can happen for lots of reasons, including poor leadership, lack of professional development and growth opportunities, excessive workload, poor work/life balance, and unclear expectations.

The Negative Impact of Employee Disengagement

When an employee becomes actively disengaged, this significantly impacts their ability to perform at the required level and fulfill the expectations and responsibilities of their role. 

This damages a business’s return on investment (ROI) because, ultimately, employees are there to drive results. 

Here are a few other ways employee disengagement can impact a workplace:

• Decrease in productivity: Employee disengagement can result in reduced efficiency and effectiveness, which impacts individual, team, and company performance.
• Increase in employee turnover: According to Gallup, disengaged employees are more likely to look for a new job, which impacts employee turnover.
• Increase in hiring costs: A knock-on effect of turnover from disengaged employees is hiring needs and recruitment costs will increase.
• Negative customer experience: Actively disengaged employees might provide a less-than-expected service, impacting customer satisfaction and company reputation.
• Decrease in employee morale: An employee who badmouths a business or actively shows dissatisfaction will negatively impact other employees’ engagement, impacting morale and teamwork.

7 Causes of Employee Disengagement

Employee disengagement stems from factors that reduce motivation, job satisfaction, and commitment.

Here are some of the primary causes of employee disengagement and dissatisfaction in the workplace:

1. Poor management and leadership

Ineffective leadership, including lack of clear direction, support, and unspecific or unclear feedback, will almost certainly lead to employee disengagement. 

Managers who lack effective communication skills, provide inconsistent or unfair treatment, display signs of favoritism, or fail to recognize and reward contributions can erode employee morale and cause deep levels of disengagement within a company.

2. Limited career development and growth opportunities

Employees who feel they don’t have a clear path to career advancement or opportunities to develop new skills may become disengaged. For example, a lack of professional development, performance reviews, or mentoring can make employees feel directionless, stuck, and undervalued.

3. Lack of recognition and appreciation

Employees need to feel that their work is valued and recognized. A lack of acknowledgment for achievements or contributions can lead to disengagement. Regular, meaningful recognition and appreciation through positive feedback, 1-on-1s, and open communication channels are essential for maintaining motivation and employee engagement.

Get 15Five’s 1-on-1 Template here and make your meetings more productive

4. Unclear expectations and roles

When employees aren’t clear about their roles and expectations, they lose direction and purpose. They need to understand how their work drives results and contributes to the organization’s success.

5. Unhealthy workplace culture

A negative or toxic work environment, characterized by poor communication, lack of trust, favoritism, or conflicts, can result in disengagement. And a workplace culture that doesn’t promote diversity, equity, and inclusion or lacks mutual respect and collaboration can quickly alienate well-intentioned employees.

6. No autonomy or empowerment

Employees who don’t feel empowered to make decisions or who are micromanaged may become disengaged. A lack of autonomy can stifle creativity and innovation, leading to frustration and disengagement.

Repetitive or unchallenging work can also lead to boredom, which creates a lack of engagement. Employees are more likely to be engaged when their work is stimulating, use their skills effectively, and are offered opportunities for problem-solving and creativity.

7. Work-Life imbalance

Excessive workloads, lack of flexibility, and poor work-life balance can lead to burnout and disengagement. Employees who are overwhelmed and unable to balance their work and personal lives may feel stressed and undervalued.

How to Recognize Employee Disengagement

According to Gallup’s 2023 State of the Global Workplace report, only 23% of employees are actively engaged in their workplace. This means that 77% of employees in your workplace are potentially not engaged or actively disengaged, which seriously impacts your company’s ability to achieve results.

Here’s how to recognize the signs of a disengaged employee:

• Decrease in productivity: A noticeable drop in the quality or quantity of work can be a sign of employee disengagement. For example, an employee might finish tasks efficiently or need help to meet deadlines.
• Decrease in quality: Disengaged employees often produce work that lacks attention to detail or creativity. They might meet only the bare minimum requirements or deliver incomplete or substandard work.
• Lack of initiative: Disengaged employees often show a lack of enthusiasm for their work. They avoid taking on new projects, resist change, or show little interest in improving processes or contributing ideas.
• Negative outlook: Disengaged employees may be openly critical of company decisions and show little interest in business outcomes. They may also disagree with policies, complain, and express dissatisfaction with management or other team members.
• Increase in absenteeism: Higher rates of absenteeism and frequent lateness can indicate a lack of employee engagement. However, absenteeism can also indicate employee burnout, illness, or increased caregiving responsibilities.
• Minimal participation: Actively disengaged employees often don’t participate in meetings or team discussions. They avoid conversation, don’t share opinions or ideas, or lack the enthusiasm to volunteer for additional responsibilities or tasks.
• Withdrawal from coworkers: A decrease in interaction with coworkers can be a sign of disengagement. For example, the employee might isolate themselves, collaborate less frequently, or detach themselves from their team.
• Lack of professional development: Employees who are actively disengaged may show little interest in professional growth. For example, they might avoid training opportunities, fail to seek feedback, or show no interest in career advancement.

How to Keep Employees Engaged in the Workplace

Focus on manager enablement

Manager enablement gives managers the right skills, tools, and resources they need to do their jobs and build a positive, healthy work environment. Enablement can provide leaders with training to improve communication, feedback, and conflict-resolution skills.

For example, use 15Five’s Transform tool to eliminate skill gaps, build tailored training, and drive high performance.

Enable your leadership team to succeed by creating clear company goals that can easily be shared and communicated effectively across the organization. Empower managers throughout the decision-making process and involve them where appropriate.

Download our Manager Enablement Playbook for HR Leaders

Conduct employee engagement surveys

Gather regular feedback from employees to identify improvement areas and measure engagement strategies’ effectiveness. 

Use an anonymous employee survey to encourage open, honest feedback. Include questions on job satisfaction, management, work environment, and professional development opportunities. Then, the results will be analyzed to uncover trends and areas that need attention and implement changes. 

Don’t forget to keep employees informed about progress with transparent updates that include the steps you’re taking to make change happen based on their feedback.

Schedule regular employee check-ins

Frequent one-on-one check-ins between managers and employees can help address concerns and provide support, which helps keep employees engaged. Use these meetings to discuss career goals, provide feedback, and address any issues or challenges the employee faces in the workplace. 

One-on-ones are the ideal setting to collaborate with your employees. Use the allotted time to set achievable goals, review their progress, and unblock any barriers to succeeding in their goal.

Show employee recognition

Recognize and appreciate employee efforts and achievements to help drive engagement. For example, implement formal recognition programs that reward employees for outstanding performance, innovation, and teamwork.

Acknowledge achievements publicly in meetings, company newsletters, or internal communication channels like email or Slack. 

Remember that not all employees want public recognition, so check in to ensure that it’s okay to acknowledge the achievement with the broader team or the public.

Invest in professional development

Provide opportunities for learning and growth. For example, hold regular training sessions or workshops that help employees develop new skills, upskill, or expand their knowledge related to their jobs and performance. 

Create personalized career development plans that outline potential career paths and how an employee can achieve that goal. Pair less experienced employees with seasoned professionals who can provide guidance, education, and additional support.

Start increasing engagement levels today

A disengaged employee is often a result of poor leadership, underdeveloped company goals, limited opportunities for professional development, and lack of autonomy. Equip your managers and teams with the right tools to create prepared leadership and engaged employees. Book a demo today.

The post How to Recognize Employee Disengagement in The Workplace (And What To Do About It) appeared first on 15Five.

An organization-wide upskilling strategy that makes learning available to employees to teach them new skills or improve existing ones can create a culture of ongoing learning that keeps you ready to face anything.

In this guide, you’ll learn everything there is to know about upskilling, including how to deploy your own upskilling strategy using tools like 15Five Transform.

Key takeaways

• Through upskilling, companies help employees build up their skills and learn new complementary ones.
• Providing upskilling opportunities helps with employee engagement and retention.
• Deploying an upskilling strategy means making learning resources available, supporting employees through their learning journey, and constantly improving your process.
• While leaders often cite budget and change as reasons to resist upskilling initiatives, the benefits vastly outweigh the risks.

Understanding upskilling

Upskilling is exactly what it says on the tin: upgrading your skills. From an employee perspective, it means improving existing skills and learning new ones to either get better at a current role or move up the career track. From the perspective of the organization, upskilling means training your existing workforce to meet skill gaps instead of hiring new talent.

While learning a new skill can be as simple as reading a book or taking a course, an organization-wide upskilling strategy goes a little further than that. It needs to proactively identify opportunities for upskilling and help employees rise to new challenges while seeing a return on investment (ROI) on the resources spent to train these skills.

It’s partly about having a more skilled workforce and partly about fostering career development for employees to make them feel more fulfilled at work.

Upskilling vs. reskilling

Upskilling is about building up your skill set to be better at your current job or take on more responsibility. Compare this to reskilling, which is about learning completely new skills to take on a new role.

A software developer learning a new programming language is upskilling. If that same developer learns how to manage software projects to aim for a role as a product or project manager, then they’re reskilling.

Upskilling is typically less resource-intensive and more valuable to your organization than reskilling. It takes a lot less time and effort to upgrade existing skills or learn similar ones than it does to learn a completely new role.

Next, let’s see why organizations should put significant resources into upskilling their employees.

The Benefits of Upskilling Employees

Employees might get a ton of benefits from your upskilling strategy, from career opportunities to a greater sense of belonging at work, but this strategy benefits your organization, too. Here’s how:

• Enhanced employee performance: Seems obvious, right? By putting resources into helping employees build up their skills, they’ll be better at their jobs. You won’t just see this in hard numbers either. More skilled employees can help you unlock new opportunities you’d never have found otherwise.
• Increased employee engagement: Data from Axonify shows that a vast majority of workers (92%) say that the right kind of training makes them feel more engaged with their work. If boosting engagement is a big priority for your organization, then upskilling should be, too.
• Talent retention: According to a survey of 1,600 professionals from edX, 77% of employees said they were more likely to stay with their employer longer with a better learning and development program. Considering how hard (and expensive) replacing an employee can be, your upskilling strategy can be a huge cost-saving initiative.
• Talent attraction: Having a robust upskilling strategy means you can offer new hires learning and development opportunities that help them stay current in their field. For many candidates, that’s a huge bonus.
• Business growth and adaptability: Having a more skilled workforce means you’ll be crushing more goals, finding new growth opportunities, and getting prepared for anything your industry might throw at you.

Upskilling is a win-win for organizations and employees that pays dividends for years. But many organizations still don’t have a robust strategy for implementing this, likely because at first glance the investment seems to outweigh the benefits.

It doesn’t have to be that way.

So let’s cover how it’s done, both at an employee and organizational level.

How to Upskill Employees

When you get into the nitty-gritty of upskilling employees, it boils down to just a few steps:

• Find learning opportunities.
• Provide the resources employees need to learn.
• Offer continuous feedback and support.
• Monitor their progress.
• Celebrate their achievements.
• Rinse and repeat.

Seems simple, right?

Find learning opportunities

The first step to helping employees level up their skills? Finding out which skills need the help. Prioritize opportunities that mesh with the organization’s goals, but leave room to listen to employees and learn what they’re interested in learning.

Provide the resources employees need to learn

Core to your upskilling efforts is making the whole process easier for your employees. For some organizations, that might just mean subsidizing learning by making industry-specific books and training available to them for free. For others, it’ll mean having a dedicated learning platform with pre-approved courses and content matching specific roles. The latter involves a more significant investment but offers more standardization across departments.

Offer continuous feedback and support

Managers have a big role to play in upskilling. By closely following an employee’s learning and giving them opportunities to put what they learn to the test, managers can make or break an upskilling journey. Feedback will keep employees headed in the right direction, while support will encourage them to push their limits.

Monitor progress

While a manager can support and guide someone on their team as they learn a new skill, you should have another method of tracking an employee’s progress toward their upskilling goals, too. Dedicated learning tools can usually allow you to track specific metrics to gauge how employees are doing. If you’re not using these, regular check-ins on a specific course or book can be enough.

Celebrate achievements

Don’t skip this step. It might seem like an afterthought, but celebrating employees when they hit their learning goals motivates them to keep learning while encouraging others to start their own learning journey. This can be as simple as having a dedicated Slack channel celebrating upskilling wins as they happen. You might even want to highlight these achievements in an all-hands meeting.

Rinse and repeat

Your upskilling process probably won’t be an all-star winner the first go-around. The first employees who take advantage of this new benefit can—and should—have a hand in helping you shape it. Ask them for their feedback as they learn. Is the content you’re providing clear? Is it actually helping them achieve their goals? What would they like to see the next time they need to learn something?

Implementing an Upskilling Strategy

Working with employees to level up their skills is one thing; rolling out an upskilling strategy across your entire organization is another. Here are some things to keep in mind as you’re working on your own strategy.

Set clear goals

Just like your employees, your strategy needs to have its own goals. Are you aiming to improve performance across the board? Do you have serious skill gaps in a specific department that need to be addressed?

Some upskilling strategies might only have short-term goals aimed at fixing a few glaring problems. Others are long-term investments meant to keep improving the entire workforce’s skills over time. Either way, it’s best to set these goals in stone before you build out the rest of your strategy.

Seek buy-in (and feedback) from stakeholders

Just like you need to set goals early, you need to get buy-in from relevant stakeholders early. If the HR team is already on board, you’ll next need to get the C-suite involved. They usually control the purse strings and can give the green light on these initiatives. To get the buy-in you need, you have to show how upskilling ties directly into business goals. Here are a few ideas:

• “Putting more effort into helping existing employees grow means less budget spent hiring replacements because they’re less likely to leave.”
• “Promoting internally for management means having managers with a deep understanding of our culture. Upskilling is essential for that.”
• “We currently have a few skill gaps keeping us from hitting our next goals. That’s why we need an upskilling strategy.”

Once you have buy-in, you can also rely on stakeholders to give you feedback as you work on your strategy. Executives, managers, and even individual employees are all great sources for this feedback.

Download The Executive Buy-in Playbook: Getting C-Suite Support For Your Strategic HR Initiatives

Try to tie learning goals with the organization’s goals

Baked into your strategy should be a framework for determining which learning goals deserve the most investment. Ideally, upskilling employees should serve both the employee and the organization equally by developing skills essential to its growth. This isn’t always possible, however, and in some cases you’ll have to allow employees to pursue less important learning goals to improve their overall engagement and help them make progress in their own careers.

Use the right tools

Simpler upskilling strategies might not need dedicated tools; it might be enough to allow employees to order relevant business books through your accounting department. But if you want an in-depth upskilling strategy with an impact that’s inherently measurable and provable, you need a tool like 15Five.

15Five is a performance management platform that also supports your upskilling initiatives with content, coaching, and metrics for measuring progress. Curious to see how it works? Book a demo with our team.

Find ways to encourage participation

Some employees will make the most of an upskilling opportunity without much encouragement. Others, not so much. For this latter group, you’ll have to work on ways to incentivize them. That could be by tying promotion opportunities with upskilling, giving small bonuses to people who complete more learning goals, or even just giving away gift cards when employees take on a new learning opportunity.

Keep track of progress

If you’re using a dedicated performance management platform like 15Five, you’ll have a range of metrics you can use to track progress as employees learn. If you’re not, you’ll still want to use KPIs (key performance indicators) to monitor how upskilling is improving things at your organization.

Make ongoing learning part of your culture

This requires more of a long-term investment, but making ongoing learning part of your company’s culture comes with some serious benefits:

• Reducing resistance to upskilling initiatives.
• Turning more employees into self-directed learners.
• Attracting top talent.
• Getting more buy-in for future upskilling initiatives.

So, how do you make ongoing learning part of your culture? Reward employees who seek out learning opportunities and encourage your C-suite to share their own learning journeys with the company. Reinforce the importance of learning as a solution to every potential problem, and people will start to catch on.

How to Overcome Common Challenges with Upskilling

Having a robust upskilling strategy comes with a ton of benefits, but it isn’t always the easiest thing to get off the ground. You’ll have to deal with challenges common with any new HR initiative.

Budget constraints

Even the simplest upskilling strategies require a significant investment, which can have budget-minded leaders hitting the kill switch early.

As an HR pro, you need to clearly outline the benefits of upskilling in ways your leadership team can understand. Statistics can show how other organizations like yours are seeing results from upskilling while showing the projected ROI of your strategy can help ease any budget concerns.

Resistance to change

Our brains love to stick with what they know even when a different strategy would serve them better. The best way to counter this? Lower the stakes. A pilot project lets you take your first steps in rolling out your upskilling strategy with a smaller team, meaning a smaller investment and a smaller change. Even the most change-resistant leader will have a hard time saying no.

Balancing work and learning

If you expect employees to do all of their upskilling work outside their 9-5, you’re probably not going to get a lot of takers. Provide a way for employees to contribute to their learning during work hours—even if just for a few minutes each day.

Making it a Priority

When you find skill gaps in your organization, it’s tempting to just throw a job posting out there and hope that fixes the problem. But with the costs involved in finding, training, and retaining new talent, you’ll often get better results when you look inward.

Not only will you plug the skill gaps, but you’ll also improve employee engagement and help with retention. Better yet, upskilling also allows existing employees to get more out of their jobs and feel like they’re making progress in their careers.

The post What is Upskilling? A Guide to Growing Your Employees Skillset appeared first on 15Five.

Some roles—like sales—are so naturally suited to performance-based compensation that it’s a no-brainer. But what about other roles? Does tying compensation with performance motivate them or artificially block their progress? Let’s find out.

Key takeaways:

• Compensation planning is how you figure out the best way to compensate employees for their work.
• When compensation has such a massive impact on retention, hiring, and engagement, getting it right becomes essential.
• Compensation planning involves a number of key stakeholders, from CEOs to the legal team.
• Any change in compensation has to be communicated organization-wide as clearly as possible.

Curious about how your performance management platform can help you implement performance-based compensation? Check out 15Five Compensation!

What is compensation planning?

Essentially, compensation planning is everything that goes into figuring out and building your company’s compensation plan. That includes creating salary bands (or pay scales), setting the actual numbers for salaries, defining benefit packages, and designing all the non-monetary components of employee compensation.

The responsibility for compensation planning sits squarely with HR, and they lead efforts to build, adjust, or completely revamp an organization’s compensation strategy. By putting effort into devising a well-structured compensation plan, HR teams (and the companies they work for) can get some serious benefits:

• Talent acquisition: If you want top talent, you’ll have to pay top dollar. Building a strategy covering exactly how you’ll make your compensation competitive is the first step to doing that.
• Employee retention: Organizations that pay below-market or market rates are vulnerable to poaching from companies that pay higher salaries or offer better benefits. To keep that top talent, you’ll need a robust compensation plan.
• Employee engagement: While a high salary is great for attracting and retaining talent, a more holistic compensation plan with flexible benefits and perks is essential for keeping people engaged.
• Greater institutional knowledge: Institutional knowledge refers to all the accumulated information about your industry, your product, and your company across all your employees. The longer the average tenure at your organization, the more institutional knowledge you can build up. A strong compensation plan is essential for this.

With that covered, let’s explore how performance can tie into compensation.

Understanding performance-based compensation

Many organizations tie performance into their compensation plan in one way or another. In some plans, this is done by having promotions tied explicitly to performance goals covered in performance reviews. In others, incentives like commissions and bonuses make up a large part of an employee’s overall compensation.

When analyzing the influence of an employee’s performance on their compensation, you’ll find three essential categories:

• Fixed pay: Employees receive a fixed yearly salary no matter how well they perform. They may get quarterly or yearly bonuses on top of their salary, but this isn’t a guarantee. A software developer who makes a $150,000-a-year salary is receiving fixed pay.
• Variable pay: While part of an employee’s income is fixed, a significant portion is made up of an amount that varies in one way or another. This variance can be tied to the employee’s own performance or other factors. A team lead who makes a $200,000-a-year salary and receives a portion of the company’s profits in stocks receives variable pay.
• Performance incentives: Employees of all stripes may receive performance-based incentives, from commissions to bonuses. A salesperson, for example, may get a fixed salary of $40,000 a year plus a 20% commission on anything they sell as a performance incentive.

While performance-based compensation is often limited to roles like sales and marketing or specific performance incentives, this isn’t always the case. Many companies make performance a core part of their compensation plan, determining where an employee ends up on the pay scale, when they get promoted, and even what perks they have access to.

Implemented correctly, performance-based compensation can create a fairer pay structure and help to undo historical inequities. To do this, you need to track the right performance metrics so your compensation plan can be as objective as possible. Examples of these metrics include:

• Goal attainment rate
• Demonstration of values
• Demonstration of competencies
• Number of vacation days used (to ensure work-life balance) 

Want to learn how to make performance part of your compensation planning? Check out 15Five’s Compensation Playbook.

Developing an effective compensation strategy

Whether you’re building a compensation plan from scratch, making adjustments year to year, or rolling out a fix for a major problem (like making your compensation fairer overall), you’ll follow these steps:

1. Assess the current state of compensation
2. Get input and feedback from key stakeholders
3. Draft updated compensation strategy
4. Share your draft with key stakeholders
5. Finalize updated compensation plan
6. (Optional) Define performance management process
7. Evaluate tools needed to execute
8. Define owners for compensation decisions

Let’s cover each one in detail.

Step 1: Assess the current state of compensation

Before making any big change, you need to know where you’re at. When it comes to your compensation plan, that means getting the answers to some crucial questions, like:

• How is your current compensation plan documented? Can this be improved?
• What is your current compensation philosophy?
• Are you offering market rates for all roles? Below? Above?
• Are there any legal implications to the compensation planning work you’re about to do?

While you might think you already know the answers to some of these questions, not digging into them could lead to you getting blindsided later in the process.

Step 2: Get input and feedback from key stakeholders

Making any changes to your organization’s compensation plan can have a huge impact throughout the organization, so you’ll have to get buy-in and input from several stakeholders before you start, including:

• The CEO
• The CFO
• The executive team
• Your board
• The legal team

Not only do you need buy-in from these stakeholders to start your work, but their perspectives can actually highlight potential issues before they become roadblocks that delay your entire efforts.

Sending simple surveys to each key stakeholder is usually the easiest way to get that feedback in a way you reference later.

Step 3: Draft an updated compensation strategy

From the input you’ve received, it’s now time to work on the updates to your compensation plan. You’ll want to start by breaking down your plan into individual components and identifying the ones that need the most work. Here are just a few examples to get you started:

• Benefits
• Correlation between pay and performance
• Merit cycle structure and scope
• Base salaries
• Total rewards
• Long-term incentives

How do you draft changes to these elements? You start by looking to the market to see what similar organizations are offering or look into trends in your industry. From there, make small changes to a section of your plan, give it some space to think it over, then move to the next one.

Working on this with a team is ideal; you’ll want more perspectives to craft the best plan you can. 

Step 4: Share your draft with key stakeholders

When you’ve finished the first draft of your company’s new compensation plan, it’s time to go back to relevant stakeholders to show them what you’ve come up with. Pointing out portions where you used their input to make specific changes can be especially powerful for engaging them and getting them more involved in the process.

Don’t be surprised if you get a significant amount of feedback at this stage. It can be tough for stakeholders to verbalize the changes they want to see when working with the old compensation plan, but these ideas will usually crystalize when they see your changes. Trust the process!

Step 5: Finalize the updated compensation plan

After receiving feedback from stakeholders, it’s time to roll it all out to work on a finalized draft. Expect to go back and forth a few times and keep track of any changes you made throughout the process.

You’ll also want to compare your finalized draft to any past documentation for your compensation plan. Are there improvements you can make beyond the compensation itself? For example, adding an FAQ (frequently asked questions) section is a great way to lighten the load on your HR team when people inevitably have questions about the new compensation plan.

Step 6: (Optional) Define the performance management process

If you decide to make performance goals a significant part of your new compensation plan, you’ll either need to define a new performance management process or refine an existing one.

The more important performance is for determining compensation, the more robust your process has to be. You might want to consider using dedicated tools for this, which automatically introduce checks and balances, calibrations, and data in your process.

Step 7: Evaluate tools needed to execute

Does your compensation plan begin and end on a spreadsheet? That might mean it’s the perfect time for an upgrade. Here’s a quick list of tools you might want to look into as you work on your compensation plan:

• Salary survey tool
• Compensation planning software
• HRIS or payroll system
• Performance management platform

Step 8: Define owners for compensation decisions

Finally, once you’ve built out your compensation plan, there’s one critical step left: clearly outline who makes decisions on compensation.

Say you have a top performer who’s looking to move up in your organization while also nurturing an offer from a competitor. Who decides if you’ll try and counter? How far is the company willing to go to retain this person?

These decisions are high-stakes, stressful, and high-impact. That doesn’t always mean they should be made by an executive, but the process for making that call should be crystal clear.

Want a checklist you can bring to your next HR meeting? Get 15Five’s Compensation Strategy Checklist.

How to leverage compensation planning software

Building a fair and rewarding compensation plan isn’t easy. There are lots of decisions to make, data to parse through, and places where things can go wrong. If the tools you’re using aren’t cutting it, they’re not just going to slow you down; they can get in the way.

Compensation planning software can guide teams through the 101 decisions involved in building a better plan. Not only that, but they can even make up for skill gaps in your team. Here’s what you can expect from these platforms, like 15Five Compensation:

• Compensation reviews with built-in performance data.
• Centralized storage, editing, and sharing of pay bands or pay scales.
• Real-time benchmarking with robust data.
• Employee-facing total rewards dashboard.

Compensation planning software shouldn’t just make it easier to build your plan. It should answer just about any question about compensation you or your employees might have.

Want to see what compensation planning software can do for you? Get a demo here.

Communicating the plan to your employees

Almost as important as how you adjust your compensation plan is how you communicate those changes to employees. Here are just a few best practices to get this right:

• Sequence communication at different stages of the company so leaders are prepared to answer questions before their teams get the info.
• Define (and share) a clear timeline for when changes will take place.
• Communicate changes in as many public channels as possible so no one’s left out of the loop.
• Book extra availability for the HR team so they can take questions.

Monitoring and adjusting the compensation plan

Your compensation plan isn’t a one-and-done sort of thing, and applying a one to two-percent salary increase across the board isn’t really going to cut it, either. HR teams and leaders have to regularly get together to evaluate the effect of the company’s compensation plan on employee engagement, turnover, and talent acquisition. That means evaluating the broader market, addressing feedback on compensation from employees, and making the right adjustments.

Employee feedback might come to you organically, but that’s usually only the case when your plan is particularly lacking. Usually, organizations have to be proactive about gathering feedback—usually through surveys—to gauge their compensation’s effectiveness.

Once you have that feedback in hand, you’ll want to remember the following as you make adjustments:

• Compensation isn’t one-size-fits-all: Some employees are nearly exclusively motivated by their salary, while others prefer other perks. Keep your plan flexible to reward everyone as equally as you can.
• Not all organizations can pay above-market rates: While every HR team might wish they could, it just doesn’t make sense for everyone. In some cases, giving stronger non-monetary benefits can make up the difference.
• Small changes, big impacts: Big sweeping changes shouldn’t be too frequent since employees need to feel like there’s some level of consistency in how they’re compensated. Instead, start with small changes that can have an outsized impact.
• Get the legal team involved: No matter how small a change might seem, you can bet there’s some obscure legislation somewhere that dictates whether it can actually be done or not. Consult the experts.

Plan ahead

Compensation planning based on performance might not be the most important part of the job for everyone, but it’s still up there. Building a robust compensation plan allows your company to stay competitive when attracting talent, improves employee engagement across the board, and helps retain top performers. That makes getting it right absolutely essential.

The post Compensation Planning Based On Performance appeared first on 15Five.

HR teams are facing increasing pressure to drive measurable business impact while building human-centered workplaces. Thrive gave them a place to explore how leading organizations are achieving both. 

Here’s a recap of the most memorable moments from the event.

1. The Rise of Predictive HR

Many HR teams face increasing pressure to tie their work directly to business outcomes while still building human-centered workplaces. 

The opening keynote addressed this head-on, with 15Five CEO Jim Morrisroe, Chief Product Officer Jeff Smith, and Staff Data Scientist Dr. Liz Pemberton sharing how predictive analytics now helps HR teams spot potential issues before they impact the bottom line.

“HR leaders today are not just solving problems—they’re predicting them,” Morrisroe said. 

Using 15Five’s Predictive Impact Model, Dr. Pemberton showed attendees how HR teams can pinpoint which specific statements most influence engagement scores. HR can shift from firefighting to proactive planning when focusing on these statements. 

Smith shared how the Predictive Impact Model helps teams anticipate everything from turnover risks to engagement challenges so that HR can move from reactive firefighting to strategic planning. 

Read More: Predictive Impact: The Science Behind 15Five’s AI-powered Predictive Impact Model

Instead of leaving HR teams to figure it out on their own, the model provides clear guidance on where to focus. Dr. Pemberton explained, “If one team struggles with feeling micromanaged, you’ll see that data and know to focus on increasing autonomy in their roles.”

The model answers how much specific statements push a group’s engagement score away from a base level of engagement, helping HR teams understand exactly where to focus their time and resources. 

“The goal is progress, not perfection,” Morrisroe noted, reinforcing that even incremental improvements can make a meaningful impact. 

These tools help leaders prioritize goals, like reducing turnover or improving team dynamics, with clear benchmarks for success. Sam Harris, Senior Product Manager at 15Five, also emphasized that AI doesn’t have to replace human judgment in engagement surveys. 

“Progress, not perfection, is the goal,” Morrisroe said.

2. Making Space for Managers to Lead

With managers stretched thinner than ever, organizations are rethinking how to support these team leaders. 

At Thrive 2024, Maya Vasser, Director of Culture and Engagement at Call Rail, talked about the power of data-driven manager enablement. “When we leaned into the data, particularly over this last year, we’ve seen a significant increase in employee satisfaction because we were on the pulse of it a lot sooner, and our managers were very attuned and excited about jumping in and doing the work.”

Stephanie Smith, Chief People Officer at Tagboard, highlighted how trust and clear expectations drive manager success. “We start off with a manager agreement – what are we expecting of our managers, and how are we continuously driving that impact.” 

Continuous communication and documented expectations help managers understand how their interactions affect business outcomes.

Watch: Lead Like a Human: Practical Steps to Building Highly Engaged Teams

Vasser emphasized the value of enabling managers with data. “With real-time insights, our managers are more attuned to what matters most to their teams, leading to higher satisfaction and better outcomes,” she said.

3. Building Creative, Safe Spaces at Work

Deanna Marsigliese, Animation Art Director at Pixar, brought a fresh perspective to workplace innovation. Drawing from her work designing characters for Pixar, she explained that creativity flourishes in environments where failure is not feared.

“One of our most successful creative teams came together because they were encouraged to experiment—even if it didn’t work out,” Marsigliese said. 

She advised HR leaders to build similar spaces by encouraging collaboration, minimizing judgment, and celebrating new ideas.

4. Moving Beyond Basic DEI

In a time when some companies are questioning their DEI commitments, CEO Risha Grant delivered a powerful keynote that tackled the challenges of advancing diversity, equity, and inclusion. Grant discussed the real barriers companies face, like fear of backlash, tokenism, and failure to follow through on commitments. 

“DEI is not a trend,” she said. “It is demonstrably the highest form of humanity in action.”

Diversity initiatives must evolve from performative actions to systemic change. She showed how bias affects workplace decisions and provided concrete steps for creating truly inclusive cultures, which is why organizations must move from being DEI-focused to DEI-infused. 

Read More: How To Create a Workplace Culture That Truly Embraces Diversity

She also emphasized the importance of curiosity and accountability. “It starts with asking the hard questions: Where are the gaps? Who’s being excluded? And what’s one step we can take today to address it?”

5. Making the Business Case for People Investment

Former CFO Sayle Hutchison provided practical advice for HR leaders looking to justify investments in people programs. She stressed the importance of understanding metrics and communicating them effectively to finance teams.

Download: The Guide to Balancing High Performance and High Care at Work

“If you want your CFO to support you, know your metrics better than they do,” Hutchison said. She also recommended tying HR initiatives to business challenges, such as using retention strategies to lower turnover costs or engagement programs to boost productivity.

“Your CFO is going to be on a spectrum of whether or not they’re really accountant-minded or whether they’re strategic-minded,” she explained. Leaders can build stronger partnerships and secure resources when they align HR initiatives with the CFO’s perspective.

Looking Forward

Thrive 2024 was our best one yet and highlighted how HR leaders can create workplaces where employees feel empowered, and businesses grow. 

As 15Five Lead People Partner Kylie Piper put it, “HR teams are more than a supporting function—we’re the lifeline that people turn to in times of crises, we guide the organization back to stability and strength, and we’re the strategic partners that our leadership teams depend on.”

Missed a session or just want to experience the magic of Thrive 2024 again? Stay tuned for Thrive Encore to watch the sessions on demand.

The post The Best Moments from Thrive 2024 appeared first on 15Five.

At 15Five we see a vision for HR that goes beyond just measuring things like engagement, performance, and retention – all the way to actually making an impact. Everything we build is helping our customers either accurately diagnose their problems, strategically plan how to solve them, and/or take action through their managers to make an impact.

Today we announced the brand new Predictive Impact Model, an AI-powered data model that helps HR teams confidently build strategic action plans to maximize employee engagement with the confidence of precise, predictive insights and recommendations.

The Problem with Employee Disengagement

The total global economic cost of disengaged employees exceeds $8.8 trillion annually, according to Gallup. Many organizations are spending billions to try and address engagement problems, but they often struggle to identify the most actionable causes first.

This leaves businesses no better off than they were decades ago. They measure → guess → hope. Repeat. The broken feedback loop continues, and disengagement only continues to spiral.

“Fixing engagement still feels like a guessing game for too many organizations, and they struggle to take action” – Jeff Smith, PhD, and 15Five’s Chief Product Officer.

It’s time for a new approach. We can do so much more than just look backward and vaguely describe the state of engagement, but struggle to take action. The new workplace expectations of employees, the new expectations of HR and new advances in AI are combining to create what we believe is an entirely new era for employee engagement: 

The Predictive Era

The Predictive Era of engagement is where HR teams look forward, and drive long-term improvement with total confidence.

“We now have over thirty years of science proving that engaged employees are an incredible strategic advantage, leading to higher profitability, productivity and employee retention. But fixing engagement still feels like a guessing game for too many organizations, and they struggle to take action,” said Jeff Smith, PhD, and 15Five’s Chief Product Officer. “With the launch of the Predictive Impact Model, we’re capitalizing on our rich dataset and new advances in AI to help every organization surgically diagnose and address specific pockets of disengagement with more confidence and precision than ever before.” 

15Five’s AI-Powered Predictive Impact Model

15Five’s Predictive Impact Model layers machine learning atop the company’s proprietary employee engagement dataset spanning over 6 years, 30 million responses and 600,000 surveys across thousands of organizations. 

The predictions provide a clear and accurate representation of how changes in specific statements from employee engagement surveys can improve engagement, giving HR teams extremely specific, actionable areas to improve. 

For example, 15Five’s Predictive Impact Model might indicate that employee engagement for high performers in an organization’s engineering department could be improved by 5.2 points if the HR team were to focus on limiting distractions in the workplace. These predictive insights are prioritized by their potential for impact, allowing HR leaders to focus only on the most critical areas for improvement.

15Five’s AI-powered data model developed in-house

“When we looked at the size, scope and completeness of our dataset on engagement alongside new advances in explanatory AI, we saw an incredible opportunity to help HR teams understand and act on pockets of disengagement in their organization like never before,” said Elizabeth Pemberton, PhD and 15Five’s Staff Data Scientist who led the development of the Predictive Impact Model. “We’re so excited to get this into the hands of every HR team. With a dynamic view of engagement across key demographics and employee groups, and more specificity than ever on what’s working and what’s not, every HR team can stop guessing and confidently take action.”

AI-Powered Assistance for Strategic Action Planning

15Five is also helping HR teams transition from diagnosis to strategic planning with the announcement of a new AI-powered assistant for HR, and new action planning capabilities.

Co-Planner is an AI assistant inside the 15Five platform that gives in-context guidance and recommendations during the strategic planning phase, making it easier to take action. HR teams can interact conversationally with Co-Planner, getting real-time answers to questions about how to interpret specific findings, and which strategic actions have the highest probability of yielding positive impact.

From there, customers can use 15Five’s strategic action planning tools to organize their employee engagement programs into coordinated campaigns focused on the needs of specific segments. Initially launched in June 2024 for HR teams, action plans can now be created and led by people managers to enable stronger collaboration with HR teams and a greater sense of accountability. 

Conclusion: Entering the Predictive Era of Employee Engagement with 15Five

The Predictive Impact Model signals a transformative shift for HR teams into what we believe will be the Predictive Era—a time when HR leaders don’t just measure engagement and performance but confidently create plans for improvement backed by predictive precision.

We believe that moving beyond the approach of “measure, guess, hope” is not just possible but necessary and with the AI-powered Predictive Impact Model, organizations can finally have the clarity they need to impact specific areas of disengagement and drive a measurable impact on their businesses.

For a demo or more information, visit www.15Five.com/demo.

The post Announcing: 15Five’s Predictive Impact Model appeared first on 15Five.

Summary

HR leaders can often sense when employee engagement is suffering across their organization or even in small pockets of departments, demographics, or teams. This disengagement can often lead to performance and retention issues, among other problems. It is important to connect anecdotal evidence with specific, systematic insights about engagement. 15Five’s Predictive Impact Model is a machine learning model that helps HR teams predict the impact that taking certain strategic actions for groups of employees will have on their engagement. It predicts how changes in specific engagement survey statement answers can influence overall engagement for specific employee groups.  The statements that a group has the lowest scores on numerically are not always the statements that are most negatively impacting their engagement. The Predictive Impact Scores provide a method of uncovering which survey statements and groups you should focus on, accurately predicting where to take action to make the biggest impact on engagement specifically. 

Our definition of engagement

Unlike employee turnover, where rigid numeric measurement is inherent, employee engagement is difficult to quantify because it is strongly related to human emotion and thought. 15Five defines employee engagement as the emotional commitment and passion that an employee has to their work, their organization, its goals, and its values. Engaged employees are motivated to contribute to the organization’s success, feel a sense of purpose and satisfaction in their work, and often go above and beyond in their roles. It is characterized by enthusiasm, dedication, and a willingness to invest effort in work activities. High levels of engagement typically result in increased productivity, better performance, and lower turnover rates. Encompassing both meaning and purpose, workplace engagement stretches beyond weaker measures such as employee satisfaction.

Why 15Five’s engagement score matters

Engagement vs. satisfaction

Workplace satisfaction is the most popular and most dangerous concept that is used as a measure of engagement. In reality, it does not incorporate the conceptual reality of engagement.  Whereas satisfaction measures an employee’s contentment with an employer, engagement corresponds to their passion and desire to help the employer. According to industrial and organizational (I-O) psychologists William Macey and Benjamin Schneider, “Engagement is above and beyond simple satisfaction with the employment arrangement or basic loyalty to the employer— characteristics that most companies have measured for many years. Engagement, in contrast, is about passion and commitment — the willingness to invest oneself and expand one’s discretionary effort to help the employer succeed.”^[3]

Engagement is a psychological state

Workplace engagement is a persistent, cognitive state rather than a personality trait or behavior. Psychological states tend to fluctuate in response to external inputs more rapidly than behaviors and personality traits. In accordance to leading I-O research, 15Five considers employee engagement to be a leading indicator of workplace behavior. It is a state of mind that can be influenced by an employee’s personality, but ultimately is most impacted by various organizational drivers. Examples of such drivers are knowing “why” a business exists, being able to connect daily work to this purpose, having clarity about what that work is, and having trust and respect in the working environment among team members. 

The engagement score

The Three F’s: the dimensions of engagement

An individual’s state of engagement consists of three dimensions – focus, feeling, and force. Focus is an expression of the individual’s ability to work intensely without distraction; it is a manner in which engagement is expressed and experienced. Feeling is an expression of what it feels like to work. Engagement is not painful. Thus, if an individual experiences a good feeling while working, it may be evidence of engagement. Lastly, force is an expression of the internal drive to work for the organization and contribute in positive ways. When a person is engaged, they feel an internal force to get work done and help their organization. This dimension builds on the concepts of motivation or inspiration.

Scoring engagement

To score an employee’s state of engagement, agreement with seven statements across each of these three dimensions is established on a 5-point agreement scale (strongly agree, agree, neither agree nor disagree, disagree, strongly disagree). In academic literature, work force is described as dedication, work feeling as vigor, and work focus as absorption.

These statements are:

1. [Work Force] The work that I do gives me a sense of pride. 
2. [Work Feeling] I feel a sense of happiness when I am working very hard.
3. [Work Focus] I find it very easy to stay focused on what is important for me to accomplish at work. 
4. [Work Force] I find my work to be full of meaning and purpose. 
5. [Work Feeling] When I wake up, I feel like going to work. 
6. [Work Focus] I am able to get into a state of complete focus while working. 
7. [Work Feeling] I love the feeling of working. 

Next, each response to these statements is converted into a value of 0-4 for the purpose of calculating the overall engagement score. All employee responses are weighted equally. Finally, the responses are summed per employee and scaled up to be between 0 and 100 to produce the Engagement Score.

Below, Table 1 summarizes all 15Five’s 17 engagement drivers. 15Five’s standard engagement survey contains 48 statements that encompass these drivers of engagement. Employees’ work experiences across these drivers, reflected in their level of agreement with the 48 statements, correlate with their engagement level.

Table 1: 17 drivers of engagement

NEW: Predictive impact scores

The Predictive Impact Model is a machine learning model that predicts how changes in specific engagement survey statement answers (across the 17 drivers shown in Table 1) can impact overall engagement for specific employee groups.

Benefits compared to our previous scoring

Previously, 15Five’s engagement reporting consisted of two explanatory scores –  the Driver Score and the Driver Influence Score. Three advantages of the new Predictive Impact Score are: 

1. It is dynamic with different groups of employees. 
2. It connects the drivers (and their statements!) directly to a group’s engagement level.
3. It enables specific, targeted actions based on statement-level insights.

The Predictive Impact Score is calculated at an individual employee level and thus can be aggregated up across any group of employees. There is one score per employee survey statement. Thus, the scores can also be obtained per engagement driver.

*Note – 15Five always ensures engagement survey participation is confidential, no individual survey responses are identified, written responses are always anonymous, and groupings of data are only available in groupings of at least 3-5 to ensure confidentiality. 

Driver Score

For a given group, a Driver Score measures how well it scored in a driver relative to other groups at other companies. A Driver Score answers the question: Which drivers are other, external groups doing better than us at? This is valuable but different than the Predictive Impact Score. Conversely, the impact score explains: Which drivers or statements are most negatively and positively impacting engagement for this group?. The drivers or statements that a group does the worst on are not always the ones most negatively impacting their engagement. The Impact Scores are targeted at engagement specifically. 

How does it work?

The Predictive Impact Model is a machine learning model trained on over 600K complete engagement surveys in the 15Five dataset. It is a correlational model that detects thousands of patterns in survey statement answers that tend to correlate with distinct engagement scores. It uses these well-established patterns to predict which specific statements are pushing engagement away from a base level of engagement. 

This base level of engagement is the average engagement of a person in the 15Five dataset: an engagement score of 75. It is essential that the model considers impact “from a base level of engagement” so that the impact scores are realistically possible to improve. Improving a group’s answers to a statement typically only requires improving it to the average answer across all companies rather than a perfect “Strongly Agree” answer. 

Moreover, the Predictive Impact Model outputs impact scores for a single employee per survey statement. These individual scores are then aggregated across all groupings within an organization. Examples of such groups include: hierarchies, teams, divisions, departments, pay levels, location, and etc. The statement Impact Scores can also be combined across drivers to produce driver level scores as well. 

The Predictive Impact Model contains two parts – a predictive, machine learning model and an explanatory layer. The predictive model consists of a decision tree-based regression model^[1] and the explanatory layer utilizes explainable AI to generate the Impact Scores. Unlike causation-based methods, this system can run in seconds rather than hours and scale from a per-employee-level to any group of employees or even an entire organization. 

Identifying pockets of disengagement

Suppose an organization is highly engaged with no large, negative Impact Scores at the company level. Even in this example, the organization could still contain pockets of disengagement with larger negative Impact Scores for specific groups of employees. Despite the high overall engagement for an organization, these pockets of disengagement could still benefit from strategic action focused around increasing the engagement of only certain employees.

Below, Table 2 illustrates such an example for departments at a fictional company across a selection of survey statements. For simplicity, only two statements and their corresponding Impact Scores are shown. In the product, Impact Scores will be shown for all statements. 

Table 2: Example of Impact Scores by department

In this example, despite the company’s high average engagement score of 79, two of the five departments are actually very disengaged on average. Here, a typical employee in the Engineering and Human Resources has a low engagement score. If the Impact Scores for the two statements are combined together they sum to -7 for the Engineering department and -18 for the Human Resources department. These impact scores can be interpreted as the following for both departments:

• Engineering: The Impact Model predicts that My job activities are personally meaningful to me and My job challenges me in a positive way have a combined -7 point impact on the engagement score. 
• Human Resources: The Impact Model predicts that My job activities are personally meaningful to me and My job challenges me in a positive way have a combined -18 point impact on the engagement score. 

Seeing this, an HR leader or department head may create an action plan targeted towards improving scores across these departments on those two specific statements. Similarly, for the other departments that have large positive Impact Scores, the leader may focus on maintaining the high statement responses for those particular employee groups.

This was a very simple example. Most companies have many more groupings, with a much greater potential for pockets of disengagement, in need of focused action across a greater variety of engagement drivers and statements. 

In this way, 15Five works as a strategic command center for HR – enabling our customers to diagnose problem areas with precise accuracy, create targeted action plans to address the pockets of disengagement, and then take action through managers.

Diagnosing, Planning, and Acting  to Improve Engagement

Measuring employee engagement is only the first step in driving meaningful change. Without a structured approach to acting on survey results, the insights gathered lose their potential to improve the employee experience. Action planning bridges the gap between data and outcomes, transforming insights into tangible steps that elevate engagement, performance, and retention.

The Predictive Impact Model empowers HR leaders and department heads by identifying the areas that have the greatest potential for improving engagement, and quantifying that potential improvement! With this data, organizations can prioritize actions that will have the greatest impact on engagement, avoiding guesswork and focusing on what matters most.

Creating targeted action plans ensures that survey findings are not just informative but actionable. Some of the key benefits of actions plans include: 

• A clear structure for ownership and timelines: Documented action plans ensure that efforts to improve engagement are intentional and measurable. Regular check-ins keep teams aligned and accountable.
  
• Alignment with organizational goals: Well-designed action plans align engagement initiatives with broader business objectives, helping to improve both employee well-being and business outcomes. Engaged employees are more productive, innovative, and committed to the organization’s success.
  
• Continuous improvement loop: Action plans create a feedback loop by measuring the effectiveness of each intervention. Leaders can adjust strategies over time based on what drives the most meaningful change, ensuring continuous progress.

By integrating action planning directly into the post-survey process, organizations move beyond passive reporting toward a culture of action and accountability. This approach, empowered by the data from the predictive impact model, ensures that engagement data leads to meaningful improvements, empowering HR leaders to make strategic decisions that foster long-term employee satisfaction and retention. 

Conclusion

Employee engagement is a critical driver of productivity, retention, and overall business success. However, engagement surveys alone are not enough—meaningful change requires action. 

The Predictive Impact Model leverages AI to provide leaders with precise insights, helping them identify the areas with the greatest potential for improving engagement.

By focusing efforts where they will have the most impact, targeted action plans ensure survey results translate into tangible outcomes. These plans create clear accountability, align with organizational goals, and foster continuous improvement through measurable progress.

15Five’s Predictive Impact Model has made this level of diagnosing, planning, and acting possible for every HR leader. 

See a demo of the Predictive Impact Model

References

1. Anghel, A., Papandreou, N., Parnell, T., De Palma, A., & Pozidis, H. (2018). Benchmarking and optimization of gradient boosting decision tree algorithms. arXiv preprint arXiv:1809.04559.
2. Bakker, A.B. & Demerouti, E. (2007). The Job Demands-Resources Model: State of the art. Journal of Managerial Psychology, 22(3), 309-328.
3. Macy, W.H. & Schneider, B.S. (2008). The Meaning of Employee Engagement. Industrial and Organizational Psychology. 1, 3-30.
4. Schaufeli, W.B. & Bakker, A.B. (2004). Utrecht Work Engagement Scale (UWES) Preliminary Manual.
5. Schaufeli, W.B., Bakker, A.B., & Salanova, M. (2006). The Measurement of Work Engagement with a Short Questionnaire: A Cross-National Study. Educational and Psychological Measurement, 66(4), 701-716.

The post Predictive Impact: The Science Behind 15Five’s AI-powered Predictive Impact Model appeared first on 15Five.

Here are 10 reasons why you won’t want to miss this year’s Thrive: 

1. No Travel Required: Attend from Anywhere
   No flights to book. No hotels to arrange. Thrive is coming directly to you. With just a WiFi connection, you’ll have full access to cutting-edge HR insights, thought provoking sessions, and top-tier speakers without leaving your home or office.
2. Exclusive Thrive Keynotes
   We have two exceptional keynote speakers lined up for Thrive.
   • Deanna Marsigliese, celebrated for her creative leadership and artistic talents at Pixar Animation Studios will share her insights into cultivating creativity and innovation. 
   • Risha Grant, an expert in diversity, equity, and inclusion will challenge you to think differently about building a workplace culture that thrives. 
     
     Both keynotes are a not-to-be missed experience that will inspire and provide actionable takeaways for you to implement.  
3. FlexibleAgenda
   Are you looking to deepen your mastery in strategic HR or become a wizard with our 15Five platform? We’ve designed the agenda to deliver value for everyone:
   • 15Five Mastery Track: Learn how to maximize your use of the 15Five platform to boost performance, engagement, and retention within your teams. 
   • Strategic HR Track: Stay ahead of the latest HR trends, learn how to create impactful people strategies that drive business success, and turn your HR team into a true strategic partner
4. Get Ahead and Inspired with 15Five’s Product Innovations
   Be in the [virtual] front seat to experience new product releases being announced at Thrive. We’re unveiling ways for you to revolutionize how you and your team approach employee engagement and performance management.
5. Unique Experiences
   Need a break before you catch the next session? Thrive offers more than just amazing opportunities for learning! Enjoy watching the talented Michael Breach from Barsitart create unbelievable coffee art coming to life in real time. It’s a moment to unwind and refresh before diving back into the content. 
6. Learn from Real Customer Success Stories
   We have a packed agenda with sessions featuring companies that are already creating incredible results with 15Five. Learn how these organizations are leveraging all that the 15Five platform has to offer and linking it to retention, engagement, and driving cultural transformation. It’s going to be an amazing experience for our attendees that you can apply to your own teams. 
7. Flexibility in Participation
   You get the choice in creating the best agenda that matches your strategic goals. Attend sessions that matter the most to you and your growth. Can’t make a live session? No problem – everything* will be recorded and available on-demand post Thrive. So make sure you register! 
8. SHRM and HRCI Credits
   Need more motivation? Thrive offers SHRM and HRCI credits for attending select sessions. You’ll be learning actionable strategies for your HR Mastery AND advancing your professional development. That’s a thriving win-win! 
9. Opportunities to Connect and Network
   Thrive may be virtual this year, but that doesn’t stop us from connecting with other HR professionals, thought leaders, and 15Five experts. Explore our dive deeper into our new product releases in Expo hall, meet a new leader in the networking hub, and participate in discussions during sessions via the chat to get the most out of your Thrive experience. 
10. Deep Dive into the 15Five Platform in the Expo
    In our virtual Expo hall, you have a chance to explore 15Five’s products and new releases up close and personal with our product experts. It does not matter if you’re new to 15Five or a long time customer, the Expo hall will give you direct access to discuss how you can optimize your experiences. 

Thrive is shaping up to be our best event yet, with more insights, more innovation, and more opportunities for connection. Whether you’re tuning in to hear industry leaders, see the latest product innovations, or learn from peers, you won’t want to miss this virtual experience. Register now to secure your spot. 

*Keynotes from Risha Grant and Deanna Marsigliese will not be available post Thrive, or recorded.

The post 10 Reasons Every HR Leader Must Attend 15Five’s 2024 Thrive Conference  appeared first on 15Five.

So how do you ensure employees aren’t failing to achieve their development goals? How do you build a strategy that works for everyone?

Here’s how.

Key takeaways:

• Employee development is a win-win. Employees are eager to learn and companies benefit from their growth.
• Specific, well-defined goals are at the core of any employee development efforts. Vague goals are harder to achieve.
• Misalignment between employee goals and company objectives is a serious challenge in building an employee development strategy.
• Analyzing your existing employee development strategy is crucial. This involves measuring metrics like employee retention as well as seeking out feedback.
• Strong employee development goals are specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-bound.

Understanding employee development goals

Through employee development, employees can build new skills and level up existing ones. This includes the initial on-the-job training that teaches the hard skills needed for a specific role as well as soft skills and a primer on institutional knowledge. But employee development doesn’t—and shouldn’t—stop there.

Giving employees opportunities to build up their skills over their tenure means they can take on more complex work and help uncover new opportunities for the company at large.

It’s not just a win for the company, though. 74% of employees are eager to learn new skills and 94% say development opportunities would make them stay in their role.

As long as employees are pursuing goals that combine their vision for their career development with the organization’s broader needs, then employee development is a win-win. These goals should also meet the following criteria:

• They’re clearly defined and communicated.
• They use at least one metric to gauge success.
• Employees can achieve them in the time they’re given.
• They track with broader team and/or organizational priorities.

So if employee development is such a win-win, why is it often such a struggle? And why do so many organizations fail to see results after investing in their employee development strategy?

Common pitfalls in achieving employee development goals

Grit and determination aren’t always enough to reach your goals. Sometimes, the goal itself is the issue; it was never particularly realistic or achievable. Sometimes, the methods used to chase that goal aren’t adequate.

Extrapolate this to a company-wide employee development strategy, and you can already start to see challenges emerge. Here are just a few of them.

Lack of clear objectives

One of the biggest reasons goals fail isn’t the amount of effort being put toward that goal; it’s the goal itself. You can put twice as much effort into a vague goal and get half as far as you would with a clearly defined objective.

Whether your strategy puts the responsibility of setting goals in the employee’s court or their manager’s, it should ensure those goals are clear and achievable.

Here are some examples of vague goals:

• Become a better salesperson: This goal has a few problems. It doesn’t define what makes a better salesperson, well, better. What specific skills do you need to attain? How will you know you’ve become “better?”
• Learn how to run a marketing campaign: This is a more specific skill than just being a better salesperson, but it’s still too vague. What kind of marketing campaign will you be running? Are you leading the project or executing specific tasks? What do you need to learn to reach this goal?
• Grow communication skills: While communication skills are crucial, this goal doesn’t really specify what skills will be learned or how success will be measured.

A vague goal can lead to an employee putting a ton of effort into their development while never achieving any measurable progress. That’s enough to frustrate anyone.

Inadequate employee development training

If your goals are specific and measurable, the next challenge you might run into is the training itself. What sort of training does your organization offer? Is it suited to the employee’s specific development goal? Are there regular check-ins to ensure employees are making progress toward their goal? 

You need a robust training plan to help employees achieve their development goals. A one-size-fits-all approach isn’t going to cut it, either, since training someone for their role in their first three months isn’t the same as helping a senior team member add new skills to their repertoire.

When working on a training plan, you should keep these common challenges in mind:

• Information overload: Too many training plans overwhelm employees with a ton of information and not much time to process it or integrate it into their existing skill set.
• Irrelevant training: While a training plan should have some flexibility, sometimes that flexibility is pushed beyond its limits, creating a plan that isn’t suited to an employee’s specific goal. That can lead to a lot of wasted time and resources as employees struggle to meet goals with inadequate training.
• Front-heavy training: You could have the best training in the industry, but without any follow-up, you won’t see much success. That’s because the majority of skills aren’t really learned in training sessions; they’re learned through practice and experimentation. A training program that doesn’t follow and support employees as they put new skills into practice isn’t going to have the best success rate.

Missing goal alignment

Helping employees achieve their goals is essential to your company’s growth. But unless those goals are aligned with the organization’s broader goals, a win-win strategy just becomes a win-lose at best.

Learning new skills and developing existing ones takes a significant amount of time and resources. Too often, though, those skills don’t contribute to an employee’s growth within the organization or to strategic objectives. That means a lot of those resources don’t bring any returns. An employee might have brand new skills that don’t really bring much value to their team, or they might find themselves unable to contribute to the company’s growth in a meaningful way.

Just because an employee is interested in a particular sort of training doesn’t mean they should always pursue it. Likewise, a team that’s convinced they need a certain skill set might not be aware of an impending organizational shift that will make those skills irrelevant. Your employee development strategy should have a built-in framework for keeping individual training goals, team goals, and organizational goals aligned.

Analyzing your current employee development strategy

How successful is your employee development strategy? Does it usually lead to progress? Can it determine how an employee’s stated development goal matches up with your company’s broader objectives? These are just a few of the questions you should be asking about your current strategy before you try to make any improvements.

Not sure where to start? Here are a few things you can measure to know where you stand.

• Employee engagement and satisfaction: Just like a software product might ask a user how satisfied they are, your training materials should have some built-in method for getting feedback. If you’re using slide decks and expert presenters, they might just ask trainees to answer a few questions either right there or through an emailed form. If you use dedicated training tools, they might do this automatically.
• Core competencies: Do you ask your employees to self-assess their skill level? If you do, how often do they review their skills? With this simple two-step process, you can easily track how successful your employee development efforts are. You can evaluate progress organization-wide or drill down on specific employees to see how their skills have evolved.
• Employee retention and turnover: Continuous development and internal mobility have an important impact on employee retention and turnover. When using this as a metric to evaluate the effectiveness of your employee development strategy, you’ll need to control for other factors, from overall morale to seasonality. But once you do, you can determine if your strategy has the positive impact on retention and turnover that it should have.
• Return on investment (ROI): If you get down to the pure monetary aspect of training employees, you can establish a direct link between the amount you put into employee development and how much revenue each employee brings in. After all, as you invest in employees and their skills, they should help the company generate more revenue. So if you see your revenue per employee increase by a greater margin than what you’ve invested in their development, you’re getting a return on your investment.
• Qualitative feedback and surveys: While quantitative metrics are great, they have their limits. The best way to find gaps in your employee development strategy isn’t to run to numbers; it’s to ask the people receiving your training. They can tell you if their training actually prepared them for the work they were taking on, if there’s a particularly glaring error in some of the training materials, or if there are any obvious improvements to make. Anonymous surveys can get you that feedback even when employees don’t feel comfortable attaching their names to it.

An important step in this analysis? Iteration and review. Making broad sweeping changes can be exciting, but they’re harder to measure (or revert) than small changes made over time. Treat your employee development strategy as something that needs to evolve and grow as your company’s needs change.

What are good workplace goals?

At the core of an employee development effort is a goal. If that goal is too vague, then any attempt at progressing toward it will be made unnecessarily difficult. A robust goal-setting methodology is essential here, like SMART goals, which ensure employees get the most out of their efforts. SMART goals are:

• Specific: “Getting better at sales” isn’t a specific goal. “Increasing the percentage of first contacts that turn into meetings” is.
• Measurable: Using specific metrics to track progress towards a goal helps gauge the effectiveness of methods used to make that progress.
• Attainable: There’s nothing more demoralizing than a goal that’s completely unrealistic. SMART goals have to be achievable.
• Relevant: Employee development goals have to be related to an employee’s role and contribute to the company’s overall needs.
• Time-bound: Open-ended goals are far less likely to be completed. Make them quarterly, bi-weekly, or monthly goals, and employees will be a lot more motivated to achieve them.

By setting SMART goals, employees can make sure they’re working towards something they can actually accomplish in the time they’re given and that they’re rowing in the same direction as the company at large.

So with appropriate goals set and the training in motion, what comes next? Two things. Communication and tracking.

Communicating goals is an essential part of employee development, for a few reasons:

• Keeps the team in the loop: Since employees often need to complete their training during work hours, team members might be a bit confused if they suddenly disappear with no explanation. A simple reminder at a stand-up meeting or two can be enough for this.
• Helps managers prepare: Ideally, managers should be informed well before someone on their team starts a new training initiative. That allows them to make up for any tasks that might be delayed.
• Motivates the rest of the organization: When you share people’s accomplishments, others start to see how they could achieve similar things. Sharing training goals and progress in company-wide channels can improve adoption of your employee development strategy.

And as far as tracking is concerned? You want something that’ll help track progress towards goals, track training activities and, ideally, track employee performance after the fact. While a project management tool can do the trick, a performance management tool like 15Five gives you the data you need to track how effective your employee development strategy is.

Ready to start?

The right employee development strategy can pay dividends across your entire organization. Employees can learn new skills and build up existing ones, take on new responsibilities, and unlock new opportunities as the company grows. It’s a win-win.

The post Are You Failing to Achieve Employee Development Goals? appeared first on 15Five.

Emotional intelligence is the soft skill equivalent of IQ; it’s about being more aware of your thoughts and emotions and moving through conflict and relationships with empathy and care.

While emotional intelligence is often discussed in the context of personal relationships, it can have a serious impact in the workplace—especially for managers.

Here’s why emotional intelligence is so important for managers and how you can help them build up this important skill.

Why does emotional intelligence matter in the workplace?

Emotional intelligence is a skill used to navigate relationships, handle emotions, and manage social situations.

While it’s such a common term you might be forgiven for thinking it’s always existed, emotional intelligence was popularized by psychologist and author Daniel Goleman in Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More Than IQ. First published in 1995, it breaks down emotional intelligence into these four essential components:

1. Self-awareness
2. Self-management
3. Social awareness
4. Relationship management

Self-awareness

Think of self-awareness a little bit like standing in front of a mirror. Only, instead of checking your hair or making sure you don’t have anything in your teeth, you’re examining your thoughts, your actions, your beliefs, and all the other things that make you, well, you. It’s about knowing your limits, your triggers, your patterns, and your behaviors.

In a way, self-awareness is where emotional intelligence begins. It’s the “knowledge” you need as a foundation to improve in its other aspects.

Self-management

If self-awareness is knowing more about yourself and why you do the things you do, self-management is how you use that knowledge to make those things more productive. Having a rise of anger during a conflict at work and being able to recognize that emotion is self-awareness. Having the ability to prevent that anger from spilling over until you lash out at a coworker is self-management.

Social awareness

At its core, social awareness means understanding how you—and everyone else—fit into specific social situations. Basic levels of social awareness keep us from blurting out every intrusive thought in important meetings. Get a bit more advanced and you can carefully navigate your workplace and make every social setting more positive.

Relationship management

Being able to build, maintain, and improve relationships is a crucial part of emotional intelligence. It means being receptive to the needs of others and knowing when you can meet them—and when you should draw your own boundaries. This is a crucial skill in the workplace since positive relationships help managers get more out of their teams.

Why is emotional intelligence necessary for managers and executives?

A manager who prioritizes IQ and hard skills over everything else will be great at figuring out solutions for your organization’s problems. Unfortunately, they’re not likely to find the right people to make it happen and they’ll have a hard time getting people to follow them.

Managers with robust emotional intelligence can build great teams, rally people around a common cause, and smoothly navigate conflicts when they arise. That makes this an essential skill for any manager or executive.

But what are the specific benefits of building this skill?

A review in the February 2008 issue of the Annual Review of Psychology identified the following:

• Better relationships: Emotional intelligence is essential for navigating relationships and making coworkers and direct reports feel like you care about their wellbeing.
• Better perception: People with high emotional intelligence are usually perceived more positively by their peers. Not too surprising right? If you’re not always flying off the handle and can make every social interaction a positive one, people are more likely to think highly of you.
• Stronger (academic) achievement: Since this was an academic review, it concentrated on academic performance, but it’s not much of a leap to assume this translates to career achievements as well.
• Improved social dynamics at work: If you have the skills to manage your emotions, examine your actions, and take criticism without getting upset, you’ll be a joy to work with. For managers, this leads to better team dynamics, too.
• Stronger negotiating ability: Being able to put yourself in someone else’s shoes is essential in a negotiation. But being self-aware enough to recognize weak points in your perspective can make a big difference, too.
• Better overall well-being: Emotional intelligence creates better relationships at work, leads to better self-management, and is essential to navigating conflict. Are we surprised that it benefits our well-being overall?

If we extrapolate from these benefits to workplace relationships, we can already see how strong emotional intelligence can make a difference:

• With team members: Managers with high emotional intelligence are better equipped to understand and solve the problems their teams run into. They’re also great at rallying people around a common cause.
• With other teams: A manager who relies exclusively on their authority to get things done might struggle and falter when collaborating with other teams. With emotional intelligence, you’ll have an easier time building mutually beneficial partnerships with these teams.
• With leaders: Whether it’s being better at receiving criticism from leaders or getting buy-in for your projects, managers can use emotional intelligence to get what they need while having stronger relationships with leadership.
• With anyone: Emotional intelligence makes you a more positive, engaging person to have around in just about any work environment. Managers with this skill will help foster a healthier work environment, meaning folks will go out of their way to be around them.

Essential elements of emotional intelligence training for managers

It is possible to learn to improve your emotional intelligence by reading books and studying guides. But since emotional intelligence is about how you interact with and situate yourself within a group, you need to work on what you learn with people.

Any program meant to improve emotional intelligence in managers needs to have the following elements:

• It’s thorough: Emotional intelligence is a multi-faceted skill, and building up just one aspect over the others won’t have the impact you’re looking for. Any training you give around emotional intelligence has to account for the full breadth of skills involved.
• It’s flexible: Having a universal training program for emotional intelligence sounds great on paper. It takes fewer resources to set up and you can expect a relatively similar experience across the organization. In practice, however, your emotional intelligence training needs to account for each manager’s strengths and weaknesses, as well as other elements that can affect its efficacy, like neurodivergence and cultural backgrounds.
• Its impact is measurable: As an HR professional looking to build and deploy emotional intelligence training, you’ll need buy-in from the right leaders. Getting that buy-in is a lot easier when you can share metrics that demonstrate that training’s potential impact. A platform like 15Five’s Transform for HR Professionals is perfect for this since it uses data from surveys and performance reviews to identify the managers who need help and track their progress.
• It’s iterative: The first version of your emotional intelligence training program isn’t going to be your last. You’ll want to take the time you need to develop a robust program but do so with the understanding that it’ll be worked on and improved over time.

With that in mind, here are some specific exercises and techniques for improving each aspect of emotional intelligence.

Building self-awareness

There are a few ways you can encourage managers to be more self-aware and promote learning in this area:

• Add self-evaluations for managers: Most organizations have a self-evaluation process for individual collaborators, but few do the same with managers. Having a manager regularly evaluate their strengths and weaknesses is a great way to build their self-awareness.
• Build feedback into what they do: Not all managers go out of their way to ask their team for feedback, and some aren’t really equipped to receive it. By offering a way for teams to give that feedback—anonymously if necessary—you can expose managers to more feedback, helping them find their blind spots.
• Offer training on mindfulness: Mindfulness is an essential part of emotional intelligence. Managers need the ability to pick up on what’s going on around them and how they’re contributing to every conversation.

Improving self-management

Self-management skills will allow managers to be their best selves in more interactions, preventing conflicts and helping tough projects go more smoothly. Here’s how you can help them build this skill:

• Teach them to recognize the influence of their emotions: This can be as simple as giving managers regular prompts for self-reflection asking about situations they feel they didn’t handle as well as they could have. By then diving into their actions and the things that might have motivated them, you give managers better tools for preventing these situations in the future.
• Help them find their “pause” button: Some situations can go beyond even the most emotionally intelligent person. When that happens, we tend to react emotionally when we should step away to collect ourselves. Teach managers how to put a pause on an interaction when needed so things don’t get out of hand.
• Get them to focus on what they can control: Situations we can’t control—and their emotional impact on us—challenge our self-management skills. By teaching managers how to recognize the situations that fall within their sphere of control and those that fall outside of it, you can help them recognize when they should let things go.

Growing social awareness

Social awareness is one of those skills that requires interactions with others to really build. Here are some ways you can facilitate this:

• Encourage more diverse interactions: Some managers can fall into very strict routines when delivering on crucial projects. While this makes them a great asset, it can also limit their social awareness. Hosting events or putting them in situations where they’re expected to interact with people from different teams and backgrounds can help broaden their horizons.
• Promote self-care: Often, a lack of social awareness can just be a sign that someone’s buckling under excessive pressure. Helping managers recognize when this is happening and find ways to take better care of themselves can go a long way.
• Help them become better listeners: Active listening is an important part of social awareness. You can improve listening skills by putting managers in more situations that involve negotiation, setting them up for conversations with leadership, or even running exercises promoting active listening.

Managing relationships more effectively

Relationship building and management is an essential part of being a manager. You can help them build up these skills when you:

• Get them to meet new people: When they’re deep in their day-to-day, managers might interact with the same five or 10 people constantly. After some time, managing these relationships is incredibly easy. Push them out of their comfort zone by making them collaborate with someone they’ve never met before.
• Help them understand personality: There are various ways we class people into different personality groups, from Myers-Briggs to the Big Five. Try having them run tests on this with their teams and working with them to analyze the results. This can help them find out what motivates people and how to build better relationships with them.
• Start with you: As an HR professional, building relationships is part and parcel of your job. So why not take a direct hand in teaching this important skill? Pairing managers with an HR pro for a while can be a great, low-effort way to help your managers learn.

Once more with feeling

Emotional intelligence is an essential skill for managers excited about leading teams of high-performers who feel safe bringing their whole selves to work. It’s part self-awareness and part self-management, with social awareness and relationship management skills playing an important role as well. HR professionals can build training programs that help all managers build this skill through learning, practice, and continuous development. It just takes a bit of work, buy-in from leadership, and an interactive approach. The benefits are more than worth it.

The post A Guide to Emotional Intelligence Training for Managers appeared first on 15Five.

With a talent development strategy in place, you can promote internally to fill more senior roles as they open up, empower team members to take on more complex tasks, and only dip into your hiring budget when it’s truly necessary.

By building up the talent you already have, you can get more out of your teams and shoot for bigger business goals. Not to mention that you’ll be having a direct hand in your people’s career development, helping them reach their full potential.

Here’s how.

What is talent development?

Talent development refers to continuous efforts organizations make to help employees upgrade existing skills, build new ones, and become stronger contributors to broader business goals. This involves training, coaching, mentorships, networking, and more. Not all of these things necessarily need to be provided by the organization internally, but they might be made available at a discounted rate or facilitated through the organization’s network.

A talent development strategy covers all the efforts an organization makes to build up its workforce’s skills. This involves making the right resources available to employees and matching up opportunities for development with the organization’s needs.

The value of long-term talent development

Training up your workforce has several advantages for both the organization and your team.

Benefits of a talent development strategy for employees

While not all employees might initially jump at the chance for extra training or other talent development resources, there’s a lot they stand to gain from it. Here’s what’s in it for them:

• Better productivity and efficiency: When employees are inherently motivated to be more productive, whether that’s through the satisfaction of accomplishing more complex work or just closing projects more quickly, your talent development strategy can help them achieve this.
• Professional fulfillment: Rare are the people in your workforce who can confidently say they’re not interested in any advancement. Talent development gives them a roadmap for building up the skills they need to grow into their role (and beyond it), meaning they don’t have to search for these resources elsewhere.
• Better morale and job satisfaction: Training and skill-building opportunities are a big part of job satisfaction for employees. Fewer than half of them feel like they have enough of these opportunities, according to the Pew Research Center. By deliberately building your talent development strategy, you’ll give people the opportunities they’re looking for, improving job satisfaction throughout your organization.

Benefits of a talent development strategy for your organization

Your employees will definitely benefit from a robust talent development strategy, but your organization will see serious advantages, too. Examples include:

• Employee retention: According to the Pew Research Center, 63% of employees who left a job in 2021 did so because they had no opportunities for advancement. While you can’t always offer advancement or promotion opportunities, a talent development strategy will help make employees feel like they’re always moving toward their next promotion.
• Better bang for your buck on hiring: Too many leaders look outward for most of their talent needs, meaning they’re going through every dollar in their hiring budget. But when 90% of new employees are ready to leave in the first month if things don’t go their way, those dollars often go to waste. A robust talent development strategy allows leaders to rely more heavily on existing employees (and their consistently growing skills) and make better decisions when looking for new hires.
• Stronger employee engagement: According to research from Gallup, only 29% of employees strongly agree that someone at their workplace encourages their development, and this absence can have a serious impact on employee engagement. With a proper talent development strategy, you’ll see improved engagement across the board.
• Internal leadership pipeline: Hiring for leadership roles is always a challenge. You have to find someone with the right skill set and bring them into a position where they need to start making serious decisions almost right away. When they don’t have the institutional knowledge the rest of your workforce does, it can take a serious amount of time for them to ramp up to a place where they can have a real impact. When you make talent development a priority, you can hire for more of these roles internally, meaning your new leader has years of knowledge an external hire could never match.

Now that you know the stakes, here’s how you can create your own talent development strategy.

Building your talent development strategy

At its core, talent development is about improving existing skills and learning new ones. But getting this exactly right involves a little more work than just asking employees what they want to learn and signing them up for a course.

Build a framework for deciding when to hire and when to build up internal talent

Your talent development strategy should build up internal talent to meet responsibilities and contribute to goals you’d otherwise need to hire for. That’s why you need to need a way to know when you should go through that effort and when you should hire. For example, you might decide to focus on the return on investment in certain types of training vs. the chance that a new hire stays with the team.

Match skill development goals to broader objectives

While you can offer educational opportunities across a wide range of topics, your talent development strategy will usually focus on training people in ways that mesh with your organization’s broader goals. For example, if you’re using a new type of project management technique to cut costs in important projects, you might want to offer training in these techniques to your employees, even if they’re not project managers themselves.

Find skill gaps

Sometimes, talent development is less about shooting for lofty goals than it is about plugging holes in a team’s existing skillset. As part of your talent development strategy, regularly evaluate each team’s skills to find growth opportunities. By doing this, you’re less likely to be blindsided when an important project or initiative depends on a skill that’s completely new to your organization.

Get stakeholders on your side

You won’t be able to build a robust strategy that encompasses the entire organization without getting buy-in from stakeholders like managers, leadership, and even individual collaborators. You’ll want to carefully plan how you pitch and roll out your strategy, taking feedback into account along the way. That’ll prevent any surprises and lead to a stronger strategy that’s a better fit for the organization at large.

Offer a range of training

When you start offering talent development opportunities to your workforce, it’s all too normal to begin with an excessively narrow focus. For example, you might spring for a specific learning tool that only offers courses on specific topics, leaving most of your organization without a solid way to train essential skills. You’ll want to offer a range of training options in various formats (e.g. digital courses, in-person sessions, guest speakers) for all sorts of skills. 

Set up employees with mentoring or coaching opportunities

You don’t have to carry the entire load of your talent development strategy. Network proactively and set up people in senior roles with junior collaborators in your organization looking to improve their skills. Sponsor these meetings—maybe by holding events at the office—to give employees access to resources they otherwise couldn’t find on their own. You get to develop internal talent without a significant investment of your own resources. It’s a win-win.

Adapt to different learning styles

One of the challenges of training up talent is that not everyone learns in the same way. Some employees want you to hand them a curriculum they can pursue on their own time while others prefer one-on-one coaching. And that’s not even mentioning how neurodiversity plays a role in talent development. By accommodating different learning styles, you can unlock more opportunities for growth throughout the organization and lower the risk of leaving important collaborators behind.

Use the right tools

There’s a host of e-learning tools out there built specifically for organizations looking to train up their workforce. But with the right performance management platform, you never need to get an extra tool; you can upskill your teams (and their managers) in the same platform you use for performance reviews and engagement surveys.

15Five is a performance management platform that turns data into real-time insights managers, HR pros, and other leaders can use to improve the way everyone works. It also has built-in learning resources that can help your entire workforce do more and do it better. You can learn more about these resources here.

Your organization’s got talent

You already know that acquiring and retaining top talent is key, but too few organizations have a defined talent development strategy in place. Often, the best talent is the talent you build up over time. By giving your workforce opportunities to build skills they’re passionate about while contributing to your organization’s broader goals, you create loyalty, improve employee engagement, and increase job satisfaction across all your teams. It takes an initial investment—and some trial and error—but you’ll be shocked by how much potential is hiding within your teams.

The post How to Create a Talent Development Strategy appeared first on 15Five.