Happy Labor Day
Have a wonderful long weekend and get some much deserved rest and relaxation! Monday, Sept 4th, our office will be closed in observance of the holiday. Best, The Brilliant HR Team
New Release! Talent Management 14.3.3
Your instance of Deltek Talent Management will be updated to version 14.3.3 on Friday, September 1, 2017, between the hours of 10:00 PM – 6:00 AM EDT Saturday, September 2, 2017. This update happens during an 8-hour window where you may experience an interruption of service. Please be sure all affected employees at your firm are aware of this update. As part of our ongoing commitment to address customer needs, we will be releasing next weekend our monthly update for Talent Management, Release 14.3.3. This release delivers numerous enhancements and fixes, several of which are highlighted below. Recruiting
- Revised I-9 has been made available. The use of the new I-9 form is required starting September 18th, 2017.
- When using the Add Resume feature, a new Additional Action ‘Route to Resume Dashboard’ selection has been added providing the user the ability to navigate to the Resume Dashboard for the newly added account.
Learning
- The issue when an eLearning course was updated and not reflected when a new course was launched has been corrected.
- The issue with courses requiring approval to enroll students but did not have the add/drop date has been fixed.
Career Planning Activities: What Drives The Need
What it comes to helping your employees plan their career, you have many options available to keep them engaged within your organization. These include career planning, development plans, learning, mentoring, and succession planning. Both employee engagement and retention are strong reasons to participate in these activities with your employees.
According to a Gallup poll, employee engagement differs between different segments of your employee population. Engagement is highest among managers (38.4%) and lowest among millennials (28.9%), and there is value in looking at these numbers and knowing if your workforce is simply not engaged or actively disengaged. There are many causes of this level of disengagement, and according to Forbes, the biggest cause of this is when companies fail to consider the employee’s life outside of work and don’t treat them as a person.
Some things to keep in mind when addressing employee engagement include:
- Engagement starts at the top.
- Mission and vision statements are a way of living.
- Create harmony between the “dual lives” of employees.
- Communication is key.
- Invest in your employees’ future careers.
Low engagement of employees can also have an impact on employee retention, and some other factors you can look at to assist with retention include:
- Compensation
- Job fit
- Career opportunities
- Work environment
With both employee engagement and retention, your investment in your employees’ careers and opportunities is important. So acknowledging your employee’s life outside of work is not only a benefit when keeping them engaged but also reaps benefits when creating their succession planning and career development. Catch our blog to see other ways to make sure that you turned disengaged employees to engaged employees.
Employee Disengagement – The causes, the risks, and the solutions
In the HR world, our job is people – their jobs, their income, and yes, even their engagement at work. We’d like to think that when people come to the office, they come to actually work, to contribute to their team and organizational goals, and ultimately just to “be engaged”. However, whether we like it or not, employees have a life outside of work, and chances are, they care about that life with their family and friends a whole lot more than the 8+ hours a day they spend at the office. That is the life where they are able to create their own goals, set their own priorities, and manage their own work load.
The mistake that many companies make is thinking of their employees simply as cogs in the great clock of overall organizational success, handing out orders and rules, tasks and projects, drowning employees in the miserable world of red tape and company policies. This “dual life” of employees, according to Mr. Jacob Morgan at Forbes, is the root cause of employee disengagement. The clash between being the master of one’s self in one life, to becoming a mindless replaceable cog in another life, taking orders from managers simply to collect a paycheck, can make anyone a disengaged employee. As Mr. Morgan says, “It’s no wonder that the majority of employees around the world don’t like their jobs and there is one key reason for that. Work practices, attitudes, values, strategies, technologies, and ways of working are evolving and changing at a rapid pace. whereas organizations remain stagnant when it comes to adapting to these changes.”
Organizations don’t think of their employees as living, breathing people – and it has to be the mission of HR to start this revolution of thinking, starting with the manager level, and working all the way to the top.
There are different levels of disengagement, and each comes with its own set of risks. There are those that are simply “not engaged”. In the U.S. and Canada, according to a survey by Gallup, a staggering 54% of employees are not engaged, with the numbers steadily rising. Employees who are not engaged are those that go through the motions but lack motivation and innovation. They make no effort to contribute to organizational goals, or improve their own contributions, and are essentially just leeches on the company’s profit and goals. Even more threatening are the “actively disengaged” employees. Luckily, they make up a smaller number, about 18% of the workforce, and the number has started to drop. The damage they can do, however, is not minimized. These employees harbor bitter feelings towards their company for one reason or another, and actively sabotage projects or undermine their coworkers.
Whether or not the statistics are true for every organization, it is clear that the problem needs be addressed immediately. The good news is that most companies are already fairly successful even with these disengaged employees… Imagine what they could accomplish if they could turn even half of those employees into engaged employees! So what can we do to start turning the tides?
- Engagement starts at the top. Employees need to see that their leaders are actively engaged so that they have someone to look up to and follow.
- Mission and vision statements are a way of living. They aren’t simply words to mindlessly spit out to clients or investors. Employees need to understand what they mean in the way they do their everyday jobs.
- Create harmony between the “dual lives” of the employees. If the babysitter isn’t able to pick up their children from school, they shouldn’t be punished for having to leave early for their family. They shouldn’t have to choose sides between work and family.
- Communication is key. Employees want to receive feedback and direction from their leaders. If not, they assume their work isn’t valuable to the company, and they will simply stop trying.
- Invest in your employees’ future careers. Employees not only want to know that their work is appreciated, but that they can grow in their position. Creating development plans, and actively working towards grooming each employee as a future leader will give them the motivation and vision of the future that they need to excel.
With all this in mind, HR is burdened with the task of turning these statistics around and creating a fully engaged workforce. It’s not going to happen overnight, but simply making it a priority is a huge step. Just one employee that is converted from being actively disengaged to engaged can make a world of difference.
9 Ways to Get the Most Out of Product Training
Let’s face it, technology is constantly evolving and before you think you’ve mastered a new product, platform, app or anything in between, there is a new release and you have to relearn or retrain all over again. That’s just how technology works, especially for business-to-business and business-to-government organizations who rely on cloud-based products and services to help their businesses run effectively and efficiently.
Building a team of product experts and power users can be challenging. From onboarding, to training, and change management, product knowledge and retention is constantly evolving so it’s important to have a way to access on-demand training, so that your teams or organization feel empowered to learn quickly and make an immediate impact. If you’ve ever felt like you have been in this position, it’s best to explore what learning and training options are available to you and your team and a subscription-based training approach may be best.
When weighing the pros and cons of what training options are available to you, I’ve put together my top list of nine ways to get the most out of a subscription-based product training platform. Read through each and hopefully you can come away with helpful ideas to consider when evaluating training options for your organization. Here’s what to look out for:
- Continuous learning over time – traditional approaches to learning and training generally mean signing up for a live or online class, with a continuous learning approach, you can start and stop on your own schedule. While there is always a time and place for onsite and customized training, long-gone are the weeklong, eight-hour days of non-stop training!
- Preferred learning styles – everyone learns and retains information differently. While some are visual, others may not, which is why a training platform that offers multi-modal learning options is so critical to users’ success. From live virtual classes, to on-demand recordings, infographics and more, you want a learning style that will suit everyone.
- Expert training from product experts – you wouldn’t trust a doctor to fly a plane, would you? While both are experts in their own field, you want to learn from experts who build the product or solution you are ultimately trying to become an expert on. A learning and training platform should have curriculum content developed right from the experts themselves, not second hand content that may not be as robust as you need.
- Hands-on workshops – don’t let the word “workshop” fool you. Workshops can be virtual and just as effective so that you can get hands-on and step-by-step training to get you closer to your learning goals.
- 24/7 access – sometimes everyday work can hinder your training schedule and productivity. It’s ok, we’ve all been and have felt like we’re racing against the clock to complete a training exercise critical to our job. Look for a platform that offers 24/7 access so you have the flexibility you need to meet your demanding schedule.
- Right-Sized Learning – it’s important to remember that training content should be easily consumed and put into practice quickly to ensure that you transfer the learning to your job. Right-Sized Learning allows you flexibility scheduling and consumption of learning assets in your busy schedule.
- Continuous content added – as product innovation continues, so should learning and training content. Just because you have mastered a module or other product add-on, doesn’t mean you have to stop there. A robust learning platform will always be innovating and iterating – just like you!
- Public classes – having class flexibility on an ongoing basis is essential to a user’s expertise. With a variety of courses and available times, there’s no excuse that you can’t find a class to fit your schedule. Jump into a class if your calendar frees up and check-out the public class calendar frequently – you never know when a new virtual class may be added.
- Learning paths by process flow – sometimes you just don’t even know where to start. A comprehensive learning and training platform will provide recommended and individualized training paths so you take the right courses and complete the required progress steps to ensure you’re learning course material, following the right steps.
If any of these product learning and training ideas have piqued your interest, I encourage you to check out the Deltek Learning Zone or as we like to call it, the DLZ. The DLZ offers a range of options to achieve your Deltek product learning objectives through multi-modal training so that you can learn at your own-pace, with the type of training medium that you learn best. There truly is something for everyone in your organization to become a Deltek product expert!