There’s a fundamental shift in how companies are facilitating the performance management process. In our first installment on HRDive, we reviewed the reasons why human resource teams are moving away from the traditional, prescriptive performance management process. We know through several years of research that employees and the companies they work for no longer want to engage in a one-time event tied to merit increase. Instead, companies are shifting to an ongoing performance process that’s intimately tied to learning management and talent development initiatives.

For this article, we wanted to look at how HR & L&D teams can connect their performance and learning strategies in order to more effectively and efficiently measure employee performance, spot skills, and competency gaps, better manage talent strategy, and demonstrate impact on overall company goals.

Continuous Measurement Delivers More Valuable Insights

One of the most obvious benefits of continuous and connected performance and learning processes is the ongoing data captured at each point in the process - from goal-setting, evaluation, feedback, and learning plans - each moment serves up valuable information to L&D teams that HR can use to improve ongoing feedback and coaching, while supporting the development of a more informed talent strategy. 

This works best when the learning management, development, career planning, and performance processes are more intimately connected in a single platform.

How does that play out in the real world? Here’s a simple example: 

High-performing organizations use technology to embed performance and development activities into the flow of work. - Deloitte, 2018

Increase Transparency and Close the Perception Gap

Measurement and tracking of the performance process aren’t limited to managers and HR leaders only. As learning and development methods move to a continuous, on-demand, in-the-flow of work experience, employees want to see how their efforts impact their own performance and career growth trajectory. Tracking the perception gap between employees and their leaders, or supervisors or mentors in a transparent and objective way helps cut through the tension during more continuous feedback and coaching sessions. 

Individuals and teams drive high-impact performance management through effective feedback and in-the-flow development. - Deloitte, 2018

Enhance Team Collaboration & Boost Individual Performance

How does a business unit, division, or team function as a whole? What are the skills, competencies, and knowledge gaps? How do managers, leaders, and HR teams answer these questions in an objective and holistic way? My advice is to create a system of governance (which we outlined in our previous article on competency framework) that ties company goals and team objectives to skills and competencies for individual jobs, roles, or seniority levels. As team members respond to their individual feedback and coaching sessions, that information, as well as the assigned learning and development activities, can be tracked and tied to specific skills and competencies. With this kind of information at their fingertips, managers can assess their team’s long-term performance and spot succession opportunities or gaps.

Correlate Learning & Performance Data with other Business Insights

Measuring the impact of learning on business results is still a challenge for many HR & L&D teams. Although an important initiative - companies still find it challenging to measure beyond compliance reporting much less tie it to key performance indicators that executives care about. However, advances in reporting and integrations are allowing companies to correlate KPIs with learning and development metrics with the goal of uncovering relationships and dependencies between learning, performance, and metrics like customer satisfaction, sales productivity, or other productivity metrics that impact the bottom line.

About Matthew Brown

Matthew Brown is the VP of Learning and Brand Success at Schoox. Matthew’s has 15+ years in IT, HR, Learning & Development, and Talent Management, across multiple industries, with a majority of that time being focused on the hospitality and restaurant industry. Matthew brings his unique blend of technical skills to the world of HR and Training, allowing for an innovative approach to the integration of people, processes, and tools. Matthew has led numerous training initiatives, stood up complex HR and IT Enterprise SaaS Solutions and led countless program rollouts. His passion for Learning & Development combined with a unique blend of technical and business expertise allow him to bring a fresh take on the business of People Practices. In his spare time, Matthew enjoys volunteering at several community non-profit organizations and spending time with his family and pets.

About Schoox

Schoox is the only modern, cloud-based learning and talent development platform designed to unlock employee potential and accelerate business results for even the most complex company structures. Founded in 2012, the company’s six core solutions solve a combination of human capital management challenges by combining Learning Engagement, Content Curation, Social Collaboration, Performance Management & Succession, Career Development, and Business Impact into one unified platform. Today, SchooX empowers excellence in learning and talent development for 8.5 million users across 120 countries in companies like Subway, Kia, Phillips66, Red Lobster, Celebrity Cruises, First Watch, Hopdoddy, Flix Brewhouse, and more. To learn more, visit https://www.schoox.com/.