People Development Goes Virtual and More Feedback Focused

by Srikant Chellappa Mar 2,2021
Engagedly
PODCAST

The People Strategy Leaders Podcast

with Srikant Chellappa, CEO

2020 has taught us many things. But most importantly, it has made us realise the power of technological advancement and digitization. In our previous edition, we brought to you details on how Performance Management has Gone Virtual and More Progressive. In this edition, we will discuss people development and employee feedback in the post pandemic era. 

While technology and digitization has allowed us to continue working through the pandemic period, what about learning and reskilling? Your employees require learning and development too, especially in today’s day and age. So with the transition to remote work and organizations’ inability to conduct in-person training, we anticipated an increase in virtual and technology-driven learning and development

We decided to conduct a survey to understand the situation better and bring to you information that will help you enhance employee engagement and learning. 

To assess the extent of the changes COVID has brought upon us, we reached out to leaders and HR heads. They were asked to report the degree of change for different people development processes by reporting whether or not each of the development related processes was occurring more or less frequently during COVID. They responded on a five point scale (1= significantly less frequent and 5 = significantly more frequent)

We focused the questions on the following people development processes: 

  • Online Training from External Content Providers 
  • Online Training from Internal Content Providers 
  • Live Online Training from Internal Teams 
  • Live Online Training from External Content Providers 
  • Ongoing Feedback 
  • Developmental Assessment(s) (i.e. 360, Personality, etc.) 

Guess what we found?

The changes in people development was more pronounced than the changes in Performance Management Processes. Over 50% responses indicate that they took part in all 5 of the people development processes that were assessed in more frequency. Moreso, Online Training from Internal Content Providers, reported the largest change with 69.1% of leaders reporting that this was occurring more frequently now. 

This was followed by Live Online Training from Internal Teams, Online Training from External Content Providers, Ongoing Feedback, Live Online Training from External Content Providers, and Developmental Assessment(s) (i.e. 360, Personality, etc.), respectively. This explains the recent uptick in employee development training vendors growth across the entire spectrum. We then took to assess if the leaders are satisfied with these changes and expect these changes to continue.

Here is what we found: 

Answer to Research Paper survey

Key takeaways for you:

As learning and development technologies and approaches have evolved to take on more virtual and real time feedback (on the job development), COVID has acted as an accelerant to these changes as anticipated. While organizations are actively embracing learning technologies and more progressive approaches to development like Real Time Feedback and Coaching, it remains to be seen if this is here to stay. Given the level of satisfaction with remote work changes, the future work environment may embrace a hybrid model (remote and in office), so we anticipate many of these shifts will be permanent.

Want to view the detailed report? Click here.


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Author
Srikant Chellappa
CEO & Co-Founder of Engagedly

Srikant Chellappa is the Co-Founder and CEO at Engagedly and is a passionate entrepreneur and people leader. He is an author, producer/director of 6 feature films, a music album with his band Manchester Underground, and is the host of The People Strategy Leaders Podcast. He is currently working on his next book, Ikigai at the Workplace, which is slated for release in the fall of 2024.

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