Category: Learning & Development

Employees are valuing career development more than ever—it’s a sign that the company is willing to invest in their future. How are businesses approaching training today? What are their pain points, and what topics are being addressed in training?

 Maximizing MOOCs for Employee Development

Wouldn’t it be great if you could offer your employees the opportunity to take free, online courses from renowned universities like Harvard, MIT, Berkeley, and others? Courses on subjects ranging from negotiating contracts to high-performance computing–from marketing analytics to Ruby on Rails programming?

Should You Help Employees Make Friends in the Workplace?

The Gallup Q-12, a well-known employee engagement assessment tool, contains a question that has often given people pause: Question #10 asks, “Do you have a best friend at work”? While seemingly “odd,” the question is included for a good reason. Gallup research has correlated having a best friend in the workplace with higher rates of […]

Gender Bias and Inflexible Interview Schedules

Yesterday we explored how job descriptions and a reluctance to accept job gaps negatively influence female workers and can result in gender bias. Today we’ll look at how inflexible interview schedules can do the same thing. Most organizations strive to be gender-blind when hiring. The focus is on finding the best talent, regardless of sex. […]

How to Prevent Job Search Gender Bias

Most organizations strive to be gender blind when hiring. The focus is on finding the best talent regardless of gender. However, even the best intentions can go awry, leading to job search gender bias.

Benefits of Employee Mentorship Programs

Many companies have for years utilized employee mentorship programs. These programs pair employees with a more senior employee who acts as a mentor, helping with anything from finding the lunchroom and introductions to key staff to leadership training and providing insight into company culture and values. Is such a program right for your organization? Here […]

Should You Cross-Train? Here Are the Benefits

Cross-training is a technique employed by some organizations in which an employee spends some time doing—or at least trains to do—work in a different business function. For example, a marketing employee might spend some time working in the operations group. A finance employee might spend time with the sales unit. The same process can be […]

Pros and Cons of Prerecorded Training

Regardless of the industry or the employee, training is a key component of employee growth. And yet, training is something so many companies struggle with. It’s rarely the case that the most experienced and knowledgeable employees are the employees with the most time to spend giving live training sessions to employees. You need them doing […]

morale

Tips for Empowering Employees

Ensuring that your employees feel empowered can help them not only to be able to successfully handle everyday quandaries that arise, but also to feel they’re more trusted and valued in the workplace.

Key Traits of Effective Workplace Coaches

In an article for Entrepreneur, Chris Haddon and Jason Balin note that many of us have coaches, mentors, or tutors growing up. Whether we play sports, play an instrument, take an in-depth dive into a specific academic field or just need some additional assistance with schoolwork, we often have someone taking a dedicated and focused […]

How to Boost Workplace Performance with Gamification

Gamification has become a popular way to help boost employee productivity. Despite the name, gamification doesn’t mean putting fun ahead of work. Rather, gamification refers to the practice of using incentives, points, rewards, and other game concepts to incentivize and motivate employees.