4 Trends That Are Transforming Performance Management and Organizational Learning
At its core, performance management is all about giving our people the information, resources and guidance they need to achieve specific goals. Sounds simple enough. Of course, the devil is in the details.
One reason performance management is so challenging—the business world isn’t static. Our organizations evolve. Our business goals and targets shift. Our customers’ needs change. Some of these changes occur swiftly while others take time. But there’s no stopping them.
It’s a good thing, then, that significant changes are occurring to the tools, technologies and techniques at our disposal for managing performance and developing our employees. In fact, here are four trends that are on their way to becoming standard operating procedure for improved performance management and corporate learning:
1. Bring your own device (BYOD) policies—Many companies are adopting these policies for a variety of reasons including their cost-effectiveness, their appeal to younger workers, and the 24/7 connectivity mobile devices provide to workers who travel frequently and work remotely. In addition, a growing cadre of talent management and learning/development providers are now delivering mobile solutions as part of their offerings, which enable companies to share powerful tools and resources with their people in exciting new ways. (See Gartner’s interesting research on BYOD here.)
2. Bite-size learning—This refers to the practice of breaking topics and lessons into smaller, more “digestible” pieces. The rationale: to enhance retention of information and to allow busy employees to consume a topic in a few minutes. It also makes learning incredibly more effective in the age of mobile, fluid, and multi-generational workforces.
3. Location-based learning—This is the kind of learning you see taking place in museums and tourist sites. The learner is presented information on the spot via sound, images or text—or a mix of these three. Sound is delivered through headphones or speakers while images and text are delivered to a variety of devices including smartphones, laptops, tablets or screen projectors. Smartphones, in particular, have dramatically increased the popularity of location-based learning.
4. Cloud computing—The “cloud” offers a convenient and inexpensive way to access an increasing selection of tools designed to help organizations track and improve employee performance, learning and development. Cloud-based solutions eliminate the need to update software manually, and they facilitate the easy sharing of information, resources and tools (especially those related to learning programs and knowledge sharing). Plus, cloud-based solutions are particularly attractive to enterprise organizations and companies with large, dispersed workforces.
Without question, those of us who want to improve all aspects of performance management—from assessments to learning and development programs to compensation management—need to take better advantage of these concepts and technologies.
For most of us, this means arming our companies with systems and solutions that enable us to do several key things well:
· Empower our learning leaders to easily create development goals and recommend specific learning activities based specifically on an employee’s performance appraisal ratings.
· Give employees easy access to a full external learning curriculum that supplements our internal training and development content.
· Provide our people with online access to a comprehensive learning management system.
· Provide our managers with real-time access to reporting analytics and transcripts of learning activities.
The more we embed these strategies into our business cultures, the better we’ll become at building workforces that deliver real competitive advantages.
Interested in reading further about the convergence of talent management and transformational technologies? Download our white paper, “Performance Assessments in an Increasingly Mobile World,” which is available here.