You don’t want to be paddling the storm with a teaspoon. Do you? 

Seventy-nine percent of CEOs believe that the persistent skill-gap is hurting their organization’s future. Learning and development (L&D) leaders say that their organizations don’t value learning, and L&D barely receives any direction from the top. 

However, there’s no magic solution to turn all that around. But a solid plan with a right amount of work in the right direction can: 

• Turn learning into a strategic function of the business, driven by top management. 

• Get people invested in learning and make it work. 

• Develop learning as an integral work function across the organization.  

• Measure and judge learning’s contributions based on the impact it creates in your business.  

The solution lies within the learning governance framework.  

Governance  

The whole universe and everything in it possess a tendency to drift towards chaos. And that tendency is called entropy. Any effort that we (or any heavenly body) put into controlling the chaos has a price in energy.  

It’s the same with organizations, too. Without governance, organizations of any size trend towards chaos as each person in it reacts "in the moment" and does whatever they think is necessary to solve problems and get things done.  

The primary function or duty of the Board of Directors is to govern or control the organization to make sure everything runs smoothly. The board governs:  

• policies and objectives of the organization,  

• annual budgets,  

• financial resources,  

• salary packages for the company's management team,  

• declaring dividends to shareholders during the required annual general meetings,  

• compliance with legal requirements, tax regulations, and compliance regulations, and  

• ensuring prompt and regular payment of salaries and wages.  

Learning Governance  

Just like learning function requires a governing body to help it run smoothly:  

• managing learning as a strategic business process, ensuring that the learning function meets the needs and priorities of the organization's business goals;  

• building a shared vision for workforce development, enabling employees to fulfill the organization's promises to its customers; and  

• establishing governance of learning processes, procedures, and the tools used to create programs linked to strategic objectives.  

To put it in simple terms, good governance will:  

• Assign accountability  

• Define priorities  

• Allocate budget and resources 

• Drive actionable decision-making  

• Facilitate transformation   

The CEO invests the authority and responsibility for the learning mission in a learning governance board or council. You can call it anything you like.  

Learning Governance Structure and Development  

How you structure your learning governance function will be unique to your organization. It will depend on your organization's culture, maturity, and how learning gets done in your organization. The structure will grow as your learning organization develops its governance capability.  

Start Where You Are  

If your organization has not yet matured to transform learning into a strategic business function, operates as an independent service provider, or gets little or no direction from top management, your organization is not ready for a Learning Governance Council. You may want to start with a less formal structure led by HR.  

Your learning governance program's objectives may be different from those of a mature governance function. Your mission will be to build readiness to collaborate in learning and prove the value of that collaboration.  

• Assemble a team. You will have pockets of learning excellence and good ideas across the organization. The people who drive that excellence will be excellent candidates for your learning council.  

• Identify Common Learning Practices. You will most likely have fragmented learning efforts hidden in silos across the organization. Find out what these efforts have in common and bring them together for better efficiency and results.  

• Drive Efficiency. Identify and eliminate duplication of effort and inefficiencies across the organization. Measure and report on the results of your efforts.  

• Organizational Readiness. Build the organizational capability for cross-functional collaboration on learning.  

• Drive Value. Leverage the relationships you build to focus the organization on the value of learning, not its cost.  

Identify and Satisfy Learning Objectives  

Every unit and sub-unit in your organization will have its unique learning needs and objectives. Form them into steering committees that will drive the execution of learning in their business functions.   

Bring the people who lead those units into your governance program and show them how, as stakeholders, they have a voice in how learning happens, and that you aim to support them in achieving their goals.  

The broader your organization perspective and the more involvement you have, the more your efforts will align themselves with your business strategy.  

By this stage of your development, you will have seated steering committees and learning leaders throughout your organization that understand the value of learning and how it drives business results.  

Connect to the Enterprise  

The third part of the development is the discussions with your top executives about aligning learning to business strategy. Co-opt the CEO into leading learning and development for the company.  

How you do that will depend on your relationship with the CEO. You could introduce the idea of entropy and explain no matter how well you organize it; any program will devolve unless you pay the energy price.  

The Executive Learning Council must establish and publish objectives for workforce development so that steering committees can align their efforts to it.  

The Council should measure the strategic value of learning and its impact on organizational growth, productivity, and transformation to the Board of Directors.  

The CEO should communicate support for workforce learning and take part in learning events.  

Keep the Energy Flowing  

The price for all the excellence you will create is ongoing vigilance. Keep the energy going with ongoing communications about recent developments in learning and how they can affect your organization. Keep learning top of mind and report on learning successes to everyone in the organization.  

If you are diligent about the development of your governance, learning will become a strategic function of the organization embedded in work functions across the organization, with a far-reaching impact on organizational performance.

Chasma Place, is an independent source for solutions that will help you keep pace with changes in the way your people work without ripping and replacing your existing systems.

So, how do you know you made the right decision? 

By measuring business impact. 

But the problem is, only a few learning and development (L&D) leaders know what and how to measure. Majority of them lack in-house data skills and resources, so their tools go unused. 

79% of CEOs believe that this skill-gap may threaten the future growth of organizations. CEOs want results and assurance to show the impact of learning and development (L&D) in preparing their workforces for future, but barriers exist. The problem isn’t learning measurement—it’s their perception of L&D’s worth in the business. 

Today, learning and development (L&D) is at the crossroads in an enterprise. It will either go extinct or become an integral part of the business. We saw this happen to a few during the 2008 economic recession. 

Sometimes, we witnessed training departments turn into “order takers.” The business ordered what it wanted, and the training departments produced. If they didn’t, businesses found another resource. When it’s time to cut budgets, Training received an ax. 

So right now, learning and development (L&D) must work collaboratively across the organization and do business, working “socially in the digital world.” Collaboration is the foundation for building the skills and models to develop learning and measure its impact. 

That’s why setting up a cross-functional team becomes the first step in building delivery models in L&D projects. Learning and development shouldn’t limit itself to back-office services. It must team up with leaders from other functions to make create impact. The first liaison should be with Marketing. 

L&D Partnership with Marketing 

Learning and marketing are share many similarities except for their audience. Marketing caters to an external audience and learning is for internal audience. 

Today, learning and development (L&D) can collaborate with marketing on aspects like content design and target-based delivery campaigns. For very long, marketing has relied on human behavior data to engage their customers. Of course, their purposes are different but the social behavior of both their audience are same.  

You can learn how your marketing counterparts measure their audience engagement and implement the same in learning. You can also use marketing’s web analytics tools to derive deep insights about your people’s learning behavior. 

Working with marketing enables you to measure a data-rich environment your learners are creating inside and outside your LMS. 

Marketing and Communications 

Your marketing team can also communicate and convince people to take immediate action. 

Unfortunately, only some learning and development (L&D) teams do that efficiently. Marketing can help you lose your “corporate-jargon” and enable you to create positive relationships with your people.   

For example, L&D leaders only spend 9% of their time championing learning programs to executives. Only 27% of workers believe that their CEOs prioritize learning. So, the communication gap is obvious. So, involving your executives in workforce development can pay off in a big way. 

An association between marketing, HR and learning and development (L&D) can help you improve your company’s brand value. 

Working with HR 

When L&D and marketing work alongside HR, finding and developing the best talent to deliver the company brand message becomes easier. You can create a unified message that resonates with your employees, applicants, and customers. 

The partnership of Learning and development (L&D) with recruiting, talent management, succession planning, leverages training, self-directed learning, and development of an employee at every stage. You can make it all work to support your employer’s brand voice at every touch point. 

L&D Partnership with Finance 

Bringing Finance into the mix will open your channel for communicating directly with the CFO. You will have access to the insider’s perspective towards budgeting and financial acumen within the organization. You can benefit from preparing reports and proposals that get your CFO’s attention. 

Working with KPI or OKR Owners 

For your learning and development initiatives to see the light of the day, you need your KPI and OKR owner’s approval. Your relationship with them has a big role to play. 

Begin by understanding their challenges and frustrations. As you learn more, you can discover unique opportunities to create more value to your organization. That must lay a good foundation for a positive relationship. 

After you finish your project, ask the critical question: How did the learning program perform to drive results, and by how much? 

Sometimes, you may receive complaints about how learning and development (L&D) has failed. Acknowledge the feedback and re-strategize your efforts to show better results. 

Collaboration and Governance 

Every person in your organization has something to gain from learning and development. Let their requirements drive your agenda to build a collaborative working relationship across the organization. It might take a while to generate results, but it won’t be long for your people to realize the impact of your contributions. 

Once you create that impact, you know you’ve made the right decision upfront. And that will the time for you to introduce the concept of organization-wide learning governance that positions learning as a lifelong joint endeavor. 

Chasma Place, is an independent source for solutions that will help you keep pace with changes in the way your people work without ripping and replacing your existing systems.

However, digital transformation is not a recent phenomenon. The practice of leveraging human effort with digital technology has been around for decades. But what is new is how fast it is happening today. 

The Upskilling Imperative 

The evolution and intervention of digital technology is dominating our daily lives. Whether you employ a digital transformation strategy at work or not, your people are witnessing it in their personal lives.  

The use of smart devices and mobile apps have taken over the life at home. With the onset of the pandemic, digital automation has become necessity at work places too. So, both work and workplace learning are now heavily reliant on digital technology.  

And if you don’t provide your people with timely resources, they will move on. 

A Deloitte report on Human Capital Trends report in 2019, stated that L&D is responsible for creating “work centered learning programs, helping people consume information and upgrade their skills in the course of their day to day jobs.”  

Organizations across the world have already caught up with the trend before the pandemic. In 2018, World Economic Forum reported that 84% of organizations have increased their investment in re-skilling programs. The report also predicted that organizations may consider an extra 101 days of learning in their business calendar. According to Deloitte, organizations are preferring re-skilling over hiring the skills they need (Figure 1). 

New Ways of Learning Demand New Skills 

Digital learning isn’t just limited to digital content. It provides a blend of learning that enhance a broad range of skills in your learners. 

But the outdated methods of learning measurement— registrations, attendance, completions, and training hours — will not be adequate. So, your L&D teams must connect the dots between your people’s learning behavior and performance. This will require skills in analytics and the ability to tell the story behind the numbers. 

With personalized learning taking center stage, measurement has become much more granular. Using Experience API (xAPI), you can capture any kind of learning data, including mentoring and experiential learning. 

To provide adaptive learning, you need deeper analysis than our legacy gap analysis techniques provide. 

Above all, L&D must collaborate with operational management to evaluate and report the impact of learning transfer on job performance. 

Like any other organizational function, L&D leaders and professionals must now make better and faster decisions using their learning data. CEOs are also eager to know about the impact learning within the organization to align their re-skilling efforts for future needs. 

Achieving that requires L&D leaders to master their tools and resources to develop data collection, analytics, and reporting capabilities. 

if you are starting out on your transformation journey, here are a few things to consider. 

Learn to Use the Tools You Have 

Most learning platform vendors provide in-built reporting and analytics features, but L&D leaders often lack the expertise and resources to make the most out of them. If you want to expand your capability, consider using a combination of these four options: 

• Upskill your staff even though it takes some time 

• Hire a data scientist, data analysts, and report designers. As per the current job scenario, that could be expensive. 

• Let marketing or analytics team, or another segment of your organization take up the task. It could but short-term solution, but you will not have enough control over availability. 

• Find a consulting firm or a contractor to provide skilled analysts by the hour. You will have complete control, and the expenses will decrease as your team’s capability grows. 

Get Connected 

Collaborate with your organization’s Chief Data Officer to establish data governance and management system in L&D. 

If you don’t have a CDO, connect with your Chief Information Officer and the Data Governance Institute to implement a data governance management system in your organization. Sometimes, your CIO may also turnout to be your CDO. They can help you find resources you are looking for. 

What you learn from them can help you lead the digital transformation journey for your company. 

Share Your Discoveries 

Accurate and insightful reporting kills skepticism and builds trust with in your circles. When you discover new information, present it with well-designed data visualizations. Share those designs to the people in your organization who can benefit from your discoveries. If they need such information on a regular basis, pin it to their dashboards. 

As the roles of digitization and data analytics grow within an organization, your L&D team’s ability to deliver the right learning at the right time also improves. 

Chasma Place, is an independent source for solutions that will help you keep pace with changes in the way your people work without ripping and replacing your existing systems.

Growth in technology is rapid that skills become obsolete in no time. And, as newly learned skills just have half-life as short as two years, it calls organizations to create a culture of continuous learning - one that can offer engaging, timely learning helping its people learn and grow. 

What constitutes a learning organization? 

A learning organization ceaselessly prepares its workforce to face the future challenges, fit in the changing roles and grow both on a personal and professional level. An organization needs to shift from its static training methods to tailored methods that focus on performance. Organizations should integrate learning into the flow of work so it becomes a daily routine and a natural process. 

Learning managers need to be playing a critical role analyzing the skill gaps and collaborating with the L&D to offer the right learning opportunities. They should shoulder the responsibility of - 

• building a mindset open to growth 

• motivating people to explore the existing resources when they have to learn new things 

• establishing right learning goals 

Adaptive Learning 

Adaptive learning is one of the strategies you can consider if you are getting started to engage your people with continuous learning. This can be an effective way to engage your people with personalized learning opportunities.  

Evaluating the learners’ interests and organizational business objectives continuously, this modality offers learner-centered content and ensures learning makes impact. 

Microlearning 

Lengthy course content can put off your learners. They hardly find time to learn amidst the rush of their duties and deadlines.  

Using microlearning, you can offer short comprehensible learning snippets to your learners. Microlearning can give your people short courses with specific content, just enough to meet the need of the moment. 

Another important point we need to be mindful of is to offer resources instead of courses, so that resources are quicker to explore and find information. Also make sure to keep these resources accessible to your employees. 

Mobile learning 

Help your people tap into their learning programs using their mobile devices they use every day. Mobile learning is a great way to learn for those employees that spend most of their time in travel or those that work remotely. 

Advantages of creating a culture of continuous learning 

When you make learning a constant practice in your organization, it can give back in many ways. Some of them are - 

Enhance skills for better performance  

A culture of continuous learning can enhance the skills of your people. It can keep your people updated with the latest knowledge specific to their roles. Promoting learning while your people are at work, continuous learning can improve performance and retain people. 

Career development through continuous learning can make your people realize that they are valued and they can also go an extra mile to meet the business goals. 

Boosts employee retention 

According to a Gallup report 87% of millennials rate "professional or career growth and development opportunities" as important to them in a job;  

A continuous learning culture can help your people learn, improve their capabilities and lead to career progression. 

Learning leads to innovation 

Continuous learning culture keeps your people proactive in their roles and can trigger creativity. It can also  

• boost problem solving skills 

• enhance your people's confidence and competence 

• lessen the need to search for new talent 

• reduce costs as developing the existing talent is much affordable than hiring new

Offering continuous learning opportunities can become an advantage in times when change is the only constant. Get started to create a culture of continuous learning and motivate your people to learn, grow and succeed. 

Chasma Place, is an independent source for solutions that will help you keep pace with changes in the way your people work without ripping and replacing your existing systems.

Or   

Are you just looking to enhance your reports?  

In either case, you need to decide upon many things. You should have been generating a large amount of data from your organizational learning and talent activities. Here are some insights we want to offer from our experience to enable you to drive the maximum value from the data you produce.  

The first and foremost priority in your reporting and analytics is the data governance framework. You should have a set of standards, policies, and procedures to agree upon, so this will avoid any other confusions later. We recommend you to start working on the data governance framework now, if you have not yet established it.  

SumTotal platform has well-defined data structure and permissions but you still need to put the following in place  

• Naming conventions  

• Reports management and delivery 

• Server load management protocols  

This can help you not to   

• frustrate your users when they want to find a single report from a long list of reports,   

• clutter lists with outdated and duplicate reports, and  

• bogging down your servers during peak load times.  

Data Governance Institute is the best source of help while you get started.   

How to deploy Advanced Reporting?

Setting up your reporting structure and permissions entirely depend on the way your organization operate its business.  While a compliance driven, command –and-control organization might restrict reporting to a small select group; an open fluid, team-based organization may allow permissions to many people. But be mindful that the more people you involve, the harder it gets to maintain the standards. 

Here's how you can start?

With a great amount of data from SumTotal and much growth in eLearning, you can track more than just course completion. You can track the time of completed activities, evaluate engagement. To make sure that your users are learning, you can use spot checks without waiting till the end of a course. 

Here are some considerations before we discuss the recommendations to develop your reports library. 

• Showing your people one report will lead them to ask for another as they hardly know what they need till they look at the report. 

• Your people do not think about the information they need until they need it. It’s highly recommended that you have a process so your users request the specific reports they want to be developed when they can't build them. 

Apart from measuring learning, you can also track costs to evaluate ROI of your training. And you have many other options to integrate operational data to measure the impact of learning on your business. 

The process of deploying SumTotal Advanced Reporting 

Knowing what you have is the first step in deployment. SumTotal LMS gives you basic reports that can support most of your daily reporting needs. Get started to use the existing reports to develop any new reports you need. 

• Evaluate the requirement of your users once you have a good grip on the reports that are available. Few of your users may need more granular information while few may just require summaries in crosstab reports and charts. 

• Understand the needs of your user groups. Roles may also have similar needs but it requires to work with people in each role to know what information they need and how they will be using it. 

• Use scheduling function to provide for those that need regular recurring reports.  

• Test all your custom reports to make sure they report the accurate information, correctly calculating custom fields and conforming to your security settings. 

• Set up a standard process to request new reports and revise the old reports. 

Advanced Analytics 

The decision makers in your organization will need more than just reports. New business models demand leaders to have instant access to information. You can have customizable real-time dashboards to guide your leaders' decision making. But these dashboards will need an advanced analytics engine. 

While you have many options to deploy analytics, you should carefully consider the costs, capabilities and advantages before you select one for your organization. 

• Use SumTotal's integration tools to send data to your analytics platform, data mart, or data warehouse, if you already have analytics in place. 

• You can start with SumTotal analytics - a solution which is built on industry's most advanced business intelligence solution, if you do not have any analytics platform. 

• there are many Third-party analytics platforms, enterprise class solutions like Oracle and SAP. You have many options to choose from highly rated Tableau, SAS, and Qlik to low-cost open-source solutions like Pentaho and TIBCO. 

• A tight budget scenario can go forward with a custom executive dashboard on your SumTotal news page using the Jaspersoft tool in SumTotal or an open-source platform.  

One of the best ways to build an agile organization is to effectively optimize your learning and talent information.  

And we hope these recommendations and tips help you towards a successful analytics deployment.  

Chasma Place, is an independent source for solutions that will help you keep pace with changes in the way your people work without ripping and replacing your existing systems.

Despite our ability to learn and adapt, all we did so far was survive. But in this quarter, organizations are hoping to revive their businesses and thrive in this new normal. 

We know that the virus is still on the loose, but if your people are on your side, you can always reclaim your glory. But to get people on board, our HR and L&D practices need a fundamental reboot. 

Luckily, Cornerstone provided an opportunity to review and reinvent your HR and L&D practices. In Convergence Unbound 2020, it laid down numerous innovative solutions and bold perceptions to help organizations achieve their goals. 

Here are a few key insights our team has captured for you. 

Emerging Skills for the New Normal 

We've endured so much in the last six months. We risked our lives to save our livelihoods. That struggle gave us more skills than we could imagine. In a session moderated by Summer Salomonsen, Head of Cornerstone Studios, Liggy Webb and Mark Lamswood named resilience, curiosity, adaptability, creativity and flexibility as the top emerging skills. 

Summer also emphasized that these skills will have a prominent role in the next normal and our front-line mangers are uniquely situated to nurture them. When asked to share a tip on how to sustain and curiosity amongst people even after the pandemic, Liggy replied; 

Helping people to not be afraid to ask questions is my number one tip. There is no stupid question, that won't open up our potential. 

— Liggy Webb, Founding Director,The Learning Architect 

An Uncomfortable conversation for a Comfortable Workplace 

Just when we were reopening our workplaces, George Floyd's brutal murder came as a shock and devastated us. Soon, the discussion on racism and social injustice erupted sending its tremors down our workplaces. Just like the pandemic, we were not ready for it. 

In his session, The Uncomfortable Conversations with the Blackman, Emmanuel Acho, showcased the struggles of black people both inside and outside workplaces. He answered the questions that you weren't able to ask out of fear. Key takeaways from his session include; 

1. Organizations must educate their people on micro aggression and other forms of racism they unwillingly perpetuate. 

2. When your black brothers and sisters are grieving in pain, and you don't know how to console them, 

Tell them 'I don't know what to say and ask "How do I share your grief?" It shows that you care and that's a start. 

— Emmanuel Acho, Fox Sports Analyst 

The Capability Academy  

Global L&D analyst Josh Bersin, graced Cornerstone Convergence with his research on learning technology market and its trends during the pandemic. His session was an eye-opener, as he broke down many presumptive notions. Interesting points to be noted from his session were — 

1. During the pandemic, even with the restrictions, we've all become a service economy. We assumed that digital automation is going to take over soon. But that's not what happened. Research suggests that human part of the organizations is still the organization. 

2. Josh introduces the concept and working models of Capability Academy. According to him, we are not training people to attain skills, we are training them to attain capabilities. He also laid out almost 90 capabilities you need for a HR function. 

3. Lack of trust is now a crisis. Josh reminds us that it's our job to cultivate trust within an organization. 

Own Your Story 

Academy Award winning Actor, Producer and human rights activist for women and women of color, Viola Davis made a guest appearance at Cornerstone Convergence 2020. In an intimate conversation with Jeff Miller, she detailed on how owning your story can give you strength during tough times. 

From extreme poverty to making it big in Hollywood, her journey is an inspiration to all. She said that she owes her success to the suffering she had endured. And believes that positive change happens in an organization when individuals accept their true selves. 

Change is not possible without out struggle and we must derive strength from our scars too. 

— Viola Davis, American Actress and Human Rights Activist 

Summing It Up in One Word- Unbound 

Over all, the event delivered on its promises. With many more interesting keynotes, product sessions, and client testimonies, it cleared the air on work in the new normal. 

By reliving HR from the shackles of old-fashioned thinking Cornerstone Convergence empowered us with courage and creativity. 

So, we can truly be — Unbound.  

If that got you intrigued, catch all 40 sessions from Cornerstone Convergence 2020, on demand right now. 

Thanks to their efforts, we are now in the new normal. Its rules and demands have already sunk into our lives and livelihoods. So, survival is no more the flavor of the season. It's time for businesses, as well as your employees to recoup and thrive in this new normal. You already know what this means for HR; You are now responsible for bringing harmony to the free and flexible world of work  

That's the conversation Cornerstone is promising to unravel in its upcoming event, Convergence Unbound 2020. 

Cornerstone Convergence 2020 Unbound 

This year's conference is Cornerstone's first ever virtual convergence. The event features amazing keynote sessions, product presentations and fun filled networking activities centered around the theme of 'Unbound Thinking.' 

When: The all-new and all-virtual conference will stream globally for two half days across three regions and seven different time zones on September 16th and 17th. The conference begins at 9am PDT and ends at 1pm PDT on both days. 

Who can attend?  Cornerstone Convergence 2020 is open to all HR leaders, talent management professionals, L&D executives, business leaders and industry enthusiasts. 

Is it expensive? No. It's absolutely free for all its attendees. 

What to Expect from Cornerstone Convergence 2020? 

With over 50 sessions emphasizing on the fundamentals and the recent advancements of HR and learning, the conference is jam packed with innovation and perspective. You can hear directly from cornerstone's clients Bancorp, VMWare, BCG, Hulu etc., on how they were able to overcome the challenges of the pandemic and new normal. Here are our top-picks from the agenda.  

Paul Saunders 

On the first day, the conference will open with an informative and inspiring keynote from Cornerstone's CEO Phil Saunders. In his session, Phil will address the challenges present in the 'Now of Work.' He will also shed light on how Cornerstone's disruptive technological innovations can help your people navigate the change and drive positive results for your organization.   

Viola Davis 

With an Academy Award, an Emmy Award and two Tony Awards to her name, Viola Davis became the first black actress to achieve the Triple Crown of Acting. Her advocacy and activism on equal rights for women and women of color added to her recognition. On the closing of day one, Viola will engage us in an intimate conversation about owning your personal life-story can strengthen yourself and the people around you. 

Pulling from her own personal experiences, Viola will inspire you to draw strength from within and realize your worth. 

Emmanuel Achor 

We've all witnessed the racial chaos that shocked the world after the death of George Floyd. Many business leaders have admitted they are not sure how to have this conversation with their black employees. Convergence is setting up a safe place for you to have it. Leading Sports Analyst, Emmanuel Acho, is bringing his show 'Uncomfortable Conversations with a Black Man,' to Convergence Unbound. 

In this Q&A session, Emmanuel will answer questions about race, social injustice, diversity and inclusion. If you want to know answers for the questions you couldn't ask your black co-workers, here's your cue. 

Liggy Webb, Summer Solomonson and Mark Lamswood 

As you already know, learning and transformation is inevitable for organizations to move forward in the new normal. Our three panelists, Liggy Webb, a bestselling author; Summer Salomonsen, Head of Cornerstone Studios; Mark Lamswood, Regional Director for Cornerstone Content, will discuss on how to identify the right skills and build content strategies to harness a learning culture in the new normal. 

You can readily gain knowledge on 

• Skills you will need in times of crisis. 

• Nurturing a learning culture that lasts  

• Learning strategies to drive it all. 

Stacia Garr, Crysta Dungee, and Noel Hornsberry 

The recent social uproar exposed the diversity gap in our workplaces. The new normal will be an open place for people of diverse colors and thoughts. Organizations that nurture diverse, equitable and inclusive workplaces show high levels of creative and adaptability elements. 

Join the D&I leaders, Crysta Dungee of Sodexo, and Noel Hornsberry of Cornerstone as Stacia Garr moderates the discussion on key elements of a DE&I strategies. This session will focus on how to leverage your DE&I initiatives to promise a meaningful harmony in your diverse workplace. 

Joseph Cunningham, Laura Edwards-Lassner, and Gabe Aponte 

Under the client spotlight, there's an interesting discussion waiting to happen. In the County of San Mateo, KAR Global, and BeyondTrust successfully leveraged Cornerstone Content to deliver modern training to suit the new normal. 

Hear it directly from the team that it possible and learn how to tailor your learning content to meet the challenges of new normal. Meet Joseph Cunningham, LMS Supervisor of KAR Global, Laura Edwards-Lassner, Sr. Director of Talent Management of BeyodTrust and Gabe Aponte, L&D Program manager of San Mateo County. 

Schedule your Own Agenda 

It's not possible to attend and learn from every session. So, Cornerstone is providing the opportunity to schedule your own agenda for Convergence. Along with the keynote, you can curate sessions across five different tracks and schedule your sessions for a personalized Convergence experience. Also, you can avail these sessions on demand. 

The pandemic has opened-up the workplace and it's time for HR and L&D to open up for this new world of work. That's why it's called Convergence Unbound. 

If you're as excited as we are about it and want to learn more? 

Register here and get ready for Cornerstone convergence 2020 Unbound. 

If it's better than the one you're using now? 

Can it resolve your longstanding issues?  

Will it be easier to integrate with your existing systems?  

Can it engage your learners and do more? 

The list goes on because you want your LMS to transform your workforce without disrupting it.  

However, the present-day workforce is more dynamic than ever. There are nervous newcomers, know-it-all veterans, smart working silvers and hardworking horses. People from diverse educational backgrounds and skill-sets team up to achieve one goal. On top of that, there's a pandemic and its extraordinary demands. 

So, there is a necessity for learning to be more than a means or a measure. That's why the Learning Experience Platform or an LXP is trending in the industry. It might seem like any other Learning Management System at first, but fundamental differences exist between the both. 

 A Closer-look at an LMS and an LXP  

You can define an LMS as a system designed to administrate and deliver learning content to the learners. However, it also tracks and reports back on the learning developments to the admin. 

An LXP on the other hand is more personalized in its approach. It curates the learning content and aggregates it according to user requirements. Thus, it creates learning pathways and career pathways for your learners, so they can learn and grow in the flow of work.  

Admin-driven vs Employee-driven  

An LMS system is focused on pushing employees for training. It requires the admin to drive and manage the learning activities of your employees. However, the L&D teams, SME's and managers make the content choices for your people. 

But an LXP is tailored to be more user-centric. It's the employees that choose the content they want to engage or disengage with. It also enables them to create and share new content to encourage peer to peer learning and engagement.  

Closed vs Open  

You know that a learning management system offers multi-configuration capabilities. In the last two decades, e-learning went from ILT mode to blended, social, and micro- learning. Gamified programs with and AR and VR simulations also emerged recently. But in an LMS, all these modalities are served in closed networks with limitations on time and accessibility. 

On the other hand, a learning experience platform is designed with APIs that open gateways for content sources from a wide range of repositories. You can also integrate your internal content with any external and MOOC systems. This makes it multi-source too. To keep things more engaging and happening for your learners, it offers consumer-grade experience like in Netflix or YouTube. More importantly, it gives you the flexibility to track and analyze learning activities outside the platform too. Thus, providing a control to your managers over your people's learning behavior.  

Course Catalogue Vs Recommendations:  

A course catalogue, is often filled with thousands of courses. Administrators have a hard time curating and indexing the learning content according to your user requirements. The struggle only gets thicker as the library tends to expand over a period. This is what Josh Bersin calls, 'The Problem of discovery.' 

LXPs are equipped with various mechanics like skills, interests, or usage trends to curate the content. With the help of AI, additional metrics are also deployed to analyze user behavior and sort the content according to their needs and interests. So, your learners keep moving in their respective learning pathways, and expand their capabilities. 

Compliance Vs Impact  

Staying compliant with government policies and business processes is vital for the success and harmony of any organization. Your LMS prioritizes these essentials to keep you and your employees on the same page. However, your people may perceive learning as a means to ensure compliance, rather than an opportunity to improve knowledge and application. 

LXPs focus on learner engagement rather than learner compliance to create a continuous learning environment in the enterprise. Instead of pushing your people to learn, it favors pulling them in. Your employees will be motivated to indulge in learning themselves. This is the fundamental key for any business to flourish and gain results. When your employees indulge in continuous learning and bring that to the flow of work, the results and rewards are inevitable. 

Why is this considered as significant shift?  

According to industry analyst Nigel Paine, this trend could be the 'Seismic shift' for the L&D. Because for the first time, we are undergoing a transformation that is more user-centric. What caused such a turnaround?  

In a survey conducted by Dell Technologies, it is observed that "85% of the jobs that will exist in 2030 are yet to be invented." This could be the moment of opportunity for L&D and with the pandemic, we are already in the moment. 

The 21st-century employees are keen to explore their learning opportunities, now more than ever. But the time any employee gets for their personal development is just 24 minutes a week on an average. So, learning in the flow of work becomes a priority for your employees. 

For many years now in an enterprise, learning management system have been the cornerstones of its growth and success. But the rise of data and its consumption, is increasing the demand for more open and ready-made sources. And such sources need a flexible and yet robust platform for their availability and administration. 

Not Replacing but Enhancing  

Despite the popularity of LXPs, the LMS's are not going anywhere. It still has a role to play in maintaining the compliance standards in an enterprise. Most learning experience platforms can integrate with your Learning management systems. So many organizations have already began repurposing their content and re-configuring their LMS into LXP. However, it will still be in the scheme of things but not at its center. 

Here's Your takeaway 

Despite the changes and challenges, both an LMS and an LXP have role to play in nurturing a continuous learning environment. 

But if you have to choose between the both, ask yourselves this one last question-  

Which learning technology suits the day to day needs of my employees?  

And the answer becomes clear. After all, you're making these decisions for your employees, not for you. 

Chasma Place, is an independent source for solutions that will help you keep pace with changes in the way your people work without ripping and replacing your existing systems.

After a lockdown and work from home season of 3-4 months, organizations are now preparing for a safe return, calling back the staff to work from office. This phase makes it so crucial to effectively implement the safety measures, so you and your staff work in a risk-free environment. 

Each organization will have its own unique processes and procedures at work, but one precaution that is critical to all organizations is Social distancing in the workplace. 

As we all know that the Covid-19 virus spreads through social contact between individuals, implementing social distancing in workplaces is mandatory to reduce and avoid the spread of the virus and here are the five most important ways you can effectively practice social distancing in your workplace. 

Remodel your Workspace 

Remodeling your workspace to support social distancing is critical. Here are some thoughts on how you can remodel your workplace. 

Entrance Points - Plan mandatory screening at all your workplace entrances. 

Workstations and Desks - Keep a distance of 3-6 feet between each work station and desk 

Shared Desks - Let only 3 - 4 people share a desk 

Staggered Shifts - Plan staggered shifts and also a cleaning and disinfecting schedule between each shift 

Meeting Rooms - Fix large rooms to organize your face to face meetings, so you can maintain distance between each other 

Cleaning and Disinfecting - Have a cleaning and disinfecting policy in place to ensure consistent cleaning. Following are some of the ways you can make it effective - 

• Prepare a regular cleaning plan 

• Prepare an emergency cleaning plan 

• Keep enough stock of products used for cleaning 

• Assign a team to monitor the entire program

Personal Protective Equipment 

Having an effective personal protective policy can keep your staff from being exposed to infection. Once your employees are in your workplace, equip them with gloves, masks, gowns, safety helmets, goggles, etc. 

List out all your employees who interact with customers and are most vulnerable to infection to offer them the necessary PPE. 

Ensure your inventory has enough PPE for your employees and visitors, inform your employees on how they should clean their PPE and use them consistently. 

Attendance Control  

Discuss with your managers and colleagues on how you can control crowd and attendance in your workplace. Review whom you need in the office first and plan to bring back all your staff team by team, week by week. 

Talk to your employees to know if they are all comfortable to get back to the workplace. Make sure you  

• probe into the health of their family members,  

• screen their health when they arrive at your workplace, and  

• learn about their recent travel history too. 

Communicate your employees well in advance so they are prepared to get back to office. 

Let all your meetings be virtual and plan your most critical live face-to-face meeting in large rooms so you can stay at a distance from each other. 

You can also control the spread of infection by planning staggered shifts and limiting your visitors. 

 
Safe Commuting 

Public transport cannot be reliable as we do not know who might be the carriers of the virus. Thus, make sure your employees use their private vehicles or the ones provided by the organization when they come and leave. 

Discuss with your staff to know their challenges with commuting and plan on how you can address them. Limit the shuttle capacity to few so it can reduce the spread of infection. 
 

Breaks and lunch sessions 

Make sure your people do not take breaks in groups. Supervise your employees' cafeteria and lunch visits so they follow social distancing. 

Let a team monitor your employee breaks and lunch sessions to avoid close interactions, food sharing among your employees.  
 

Think. Prepare. Act. 

Times uncertain can make your return to workplace too risky. It involves a responsibility not just towards our own staff but our families and community.

Serious thought, coordination between the leaders and staff, effective preparation and planning can help you create a safe work environment where you and your people can operate not with fear but with trust. 

Though the adverse impact of COVID-19 is yet to be fully realized, it has been shaping the business world. We are writing new chapters in virtual business, flexible work styles, focus on employee well-being, and deepening customers’ trust than ever before. 

And so, The Skillsoft and SumTotal annual conference, Skillsoft Perspectives, followed the sun to make it a 24-hour digital event, jam-packed with ideas that can help businesses thrive and succeed. 

Here are some of the insights that can boost HR and learning leaders to stay courageous and resilient, in their path to adapt to the new normal. 

Unified Leadership and Inclusion – Mary Davis and her Team 

Mary Davis and her team from Special Olympics made the participants realize that people they are working with are not disabled but super-abled. 

-—Joey Reiman

Her thoughts on inclusion and unified leadership threw light on how today’s leaders can learn from the way athletes are overcoming challenges at Special Olympics. Tapping into the potential of this new perspective of leadership and inclusion, leaders can motivate their workforces and boost confidence to face an uncertain future.

Making Happiness Possible in Crisis - Shawn Achor 

Shawn highlighted how organizations can tap into the potential of the positive psychological approach during a crisis to create happy workforces. He made his keynote immersive by kicking it off with the five most critical questions which have been posed to him during his research. Here's a brief of it - 

1. How do we mentally process the crisis for the most adaptive response?  

Rational optimism accompanied by hope, gratitude for the present, meaningful work, and deep social connections can help us mentally process the crisis for the most adaptive response. 

       2.   How do we pursue happiness and success amid difficult times?    

Pursuing happiness can happen by being interconnected, which, according to Shawn's research, can lower stress, and create positive energy, where everyone is lit up by the people around them to face the crisis. 

       3.  How can individuals create positive change amid the difficult times?    

Practicing gratitude exercises like recollecting three new things we are grateful for amid crisis and maintaining a journal of positive experiences. Fifteen minutes of fun, mindful cardio activity, meditation, and random acts of kindness can create a positive vibe amid crisis. 

        4. How do we ripple positive changes to other people?    

According to Shawn, cultivating a constant culture of gratitude and praise can impact not just us but also others around us, causing a ripple effect of spreading optimism. 

        5.  What do we learn from the crisis?  

Shawn answers this by posing another question from a well-known doctor who asked his team about one thing that would remain the same after the crisis as it was during the crisis. The crisis has taught us many new meaningful things, like maintaining deep social connections, and giving more attention to our mental and physical health. If we continue, we can make a significant impact both in our lives and of others too. 

He emphasized the power of optimism, social connections, and how developing new meaningful habits create happy brains amidst crisis and stress. He believes that meaning triggers optimism, happiness precedes success, and stress fuels growth. 

Maximizing Women's Role in Building the Future – Ally Watson 

Ally Watson, CEO of Code Like a Girl, recounted her story and the vision that led to a growing company, successful in driving women towards working in tech. 

Her motto, “To Empower and Enable Women and Girls to be Equal Creators in Building the Future,” reflects her impact on women, so they never question their existence and importance in a dominant male industry but thrive together and share the responsibilities to face tomorrow. 

Watson's vision creates a hopeful picture for every girl and woman to aspire a career in the technology world, assuring them that there are organizations that support the cause of women's equality with career opportunities and tools to grow and succeed.

Reset Your Work, Workplace, and Leadership - Josh Bersin  

Josh Bersin’s call to organizations and HR leaders is to evaluate  

• how prepared they are to align their work processes to the new normal,   

• the effectiveness of a communication process that supports work and ensures productivity, and  

• review steps to ensure the safety of your workforce. 

He also shared that organizations need to adapt to the way the Military responds to crisis, which involves 

• top-down response systems,   

• maintaining good relations between humans and technology and data,  

• skilling,  

• embracing innovation and creativity, and   

• creating and sustain a sense of shared awareness and information. 

Bersin highlighted that L&D leaders should prepare for a transition from the traditional linear learning models to the self-directed world of Netflix-like learning, where learners browse around and find whatever they want to learn. He calls this a ‘capability academy’. 

Organizations can achieve this transition using Percipio, Skillsoft's intelligent learning experience platform. Percipio can offer your employees limitless learning opportunities accompanied by a consumer-like experience to engage and inspire. Percipio is 

• Purposeful in helping workforces realize and fulfill their dream of career advancement. 

• Intelligent in making personal learning recommendations and accelerating personal learning discovery. 

• Boundless in its content curation capability. 

• Immersive with learning packed in digital playbooks and enjoyable gamification. 

• Collaborative through its integration with platforms like Zoom and Cisco WebEx and other communities, discussion boards, and blogs. 

Your managers and platform administrators can track the progress made and view learning consumption through meaningful data visualizations that help to measure the impact of learning over each individual employee, the entire workforce, and the business. 

Percipio is a platform that can  

• engage and inspire learners while they learn, 

• monitor and track learning during and after learning, and  

• optimize every single user interaction to make future learning motivating and experiential. 

Learning from Nature for a Positive Behavioral Change - Jez Rose 

In London's session, Jes Roze enlightens about his journey of building the world's first Carbon Neutral honey-bee farm. Being a behavior insight Advisor and turning out to be a honeybee farmer, he shares his thought-provoking insights on how nature can be a great teacher. 

He calls everyone's attention towards how seeking a positive behavioral change can shape our character as professionals and leaders. Some of his takeaways are - 

• Keep Flying though its hard 

• Find your purpose to make a difference 

• See the moments which involves taking time out of our busy schedules to observe and learn from the beautiful and meaningful moments of nature around us 

• The need to overcome the decline of Respect for ourselves, for others and respect for differences 

• People always remember how we make them feel 

Concluding his keynote with Lao Tzu's quote, "Nature does not hurry, yet everything is accomplished", he adds that patience, trust, and a belief in the future to create something extraordinary can lead all of us towards the magic of creating a positive behavioral change. 

Get Better Mindset- Heidi Grant 

Heidi Grant, Social psychologist, speaker, and author explores into two kinds of mindsets - The Fixed Mindset and The Get Better Mindset and how the latter can help us manage and overcome challenges better. 

Some of the advantages of a Get Better Mindset are - 

• It helps look at a problem as a challenge than as a threat 

• It involves an attitude of improving our skills rather than proving our skills during uncertainties 

• It helps us compare our own selves in the past to the present, helping us realize our growth 

• It contributes organizations to become agile and innovative 

Her key advice to the leadership is to identify their own existing mindset, then shift towards a Get Better Mindset, and practice it while giving employee feedback, or dealing with talent development or rewarding employees, so it can lead to greater agility, better performance, more creativity, innovation, and well-being. 

 Make Courage and The Will to Adapt, Your Investors

Courage and the will to adapt can become investors during hard times. With technology supporting our existence from every end, let us explore new horizons and drive value from its wealth of opportunities for business continuity. 

"When written in Chinese, the word crisis is composed of two characters -- one represents danger, and the other represents opportunity. 

                                                                                                                                                                                       -   John F. Kennedy 

Seven out of ten times, the first budget to be cut when budget freezes happen is the L&D budget. It's not because companies don't value learning. It's because they lack enough evidence to support the request. 

Of course, your smile sheets can help you make a better argument, but they are not the ultimate indicators of your employee's performance and productivity. And now, with remote work claiming the center stage, the room for guesswork has narrowed. Organizations are relying on their L&D teams to build accurate learning strategies that ensure upskilling their employees. But the problem here is not the uncertainty of times. It's our unpreparedness. 

We always talk about how data should be the foundation of all our strategies. But according to a study, it reported that L&D leaders are facing structural and capability barriers, because—  

                       51% of companies cited L&D's lack of in-house data skills as the primary concern for their inability to deal with what is in front of them.                                                                                                                                     —Towards Maturity, L&D's Relationship with Data  

So, we got one of our own skill gaps here, and closing this gap is no rocket science. Here's how you can enable the wealth of opportunities hidden inside your people's data.  

Ask What's Your Takeaway 

Begin by asking the right questions, like; why your organization needs a data-driven learning strategy and what learning goals you are targeting. Most companies depend on it to: - 

• Quantify the impact of learning programs on ROI  

• Identify skill gaps and leverage the performance of the learning modules  

• Personalize the employee learning experience  

• Target specific business challenges and skill gaps  

• Determine the flow of expenses on learning programs 

Pay Attention to Your Learner's Digital Body Language  

Digital Body Language or DBL is the way your learners are telling you their likes, dislikes, and levels of engagement in an electronic format. Steve woods first developed the concept in 2009 to help marketing teams understand their customers. L&D professionals are now using the same idea to follow their learner's interests and goals. The signals your learners are sending via their digital presence speaks to their learning behavior. It provides you with an opportunity to design courses that meet your people's interests and goals. 

Reimagine Data Collection 

We often create learning programs based on our intuition and feedback. In other words, we deliver a course hoping it would work. When it doesn't, we look at completion rates and smile sheets to come up with a solution. But your LMS can track far more qualifying data than completion rates and reviews. 

Consider metrics like top search terms, failed search terms, incomplete courses to locate where exactly is the room for improvement. Other parameters, like most active times of the day or week, frequently visited pages, trending articles, and devices used for consumption (mobile or laptop), can give you deeper insights into your people's learning behavior and digital body language.  

Find Insights with Data Analytics 

As data accumulates, it demands you to mine, refine and analyze to derive meaningful insights. Most organizations lack the resources to accomplish these tasks. They depend on machine learning and business intelligence tools for holistic solutions. So, choosing the right tool that aligns with your company's goals is essential.  

Unlock the power of your learner's data with Chasma Analytics. Schedule a Demo 

Respond with User-based Recommendations 

Now that you've found your insights, it's time to respond accordingly with your recommendations. Findings regarding most visited pages, most active times, and devices of consumption counsel you on when and where to deliver a program. If your learners prefer videos over text format, you know how to pack it too.   

Not all businesses operate on the same metrics, but all companies want their people to learn and grow continuously. Making personalized recommendations based on their interests motivates your employees.  

Measure the Differences  

You've collected your data, found your insights, made your recommendations, and accomplished your goals. Great, but the job is only half-done. The other half lies in measuring the differences between the results obtained and input data. This is what quantifies the effects of L&D on our businesses. On further investigation, if you can correlate these results with your company's ROI, you have a strong business case to make.  

And then Repeat  

After demonstrating your results and finding the key metrics that influence your employees' learning behavior, pat yourself, and repeat it. Draw your conclusions from one cycle and use that data while creating another. This enables a chain of improvement for your employees.  

Conclusion  

With employees benefiting from your intelligent recommendations, you can have your mini-Eureka moments. But if you can mold these moments into a whole, you can harness a continuous data-driven learning environment across your organization. 

Chasma Place, is an independent source for solutions that will help you keep pace with changes in the way your people work without ripping and replacing your existing systems.

The world has come to a halt. The pandemic has altered the course of our lives and businesses. Many organizations are clueless about their future and are searching for ways to blend in. To help organizations understand the demands of our next normal, SumTotal and Skillsoft are organizing their annual learning conference—Perspectives 2020.

Perspectives 2020 

Perspectives 2020 is not your typical vendor conference. It manages to bring together an ensemble of L&D professionals from around the globe in an irresistible way. With respect to the travel restrictions and safety regulations, Skillsoft and SumTotal have announced that the conference will be a digital experience. The virtual conference will follow the sun and stream across five different time zones in its 24 hours run beginning at 9 am AEST on May 13 to 7 pm EDT on May 13th. 

Perspectives 2020 is free of cost and is open to all learning and talent professionals, business leaders, learners, and university students around the world. 

What to Expect in Perspectives 2020? 

The event promises to engage its attendees with 

• Keynotes on Industry related topics 

• Debates on remote workforce upskilling 

• Case studies and presentation from global business leaders 

• Product demonstrations by the vendor companies 

• Ask-an-expert programs and executive tracks 

• Interactive Q&A sessions for the user groups 

• Free access to the content on Skillsoft's Percipio 

SumTotal and Skillsoft's Perspectives 2020 will feature internationally acclaimed speakers from various geographies tuning in to share their perspectives on various industry-related topics. Their sessions will focus on learning as a positive influence in times of persistence. To give you a peek into the event, here are a few highlights. 

SYDNEY- AEST 

Kicking off things globally, Skillsoft CMO, Michelle Boockoff-Bajdek, and Wall Street Journal's best-selling author of Fanocracy, David Meerman Scott will welcome the global audience to the full 24 hours digital experience. 

9:15 am to 9:45 am— Michelle Ockers, the founder of Learning Uncut, will welcome Australian audiences to the Perspectives 2020 main event and will follow it up with her keynote on how L&D teams can grow into performance partners that drive strategic business value. 

9:45 am to 10:00 am— Rosie Cairnes, Vice President APAC at Skillsoft joins Michelle Ockers in a Q&A session to discuss the challenges faced by today's workforces. 

11:00 am to 12:00 pm— Shawn Achor, Ted Talk Rockstar and the author of Big Potential & The Happiness Advantage, will share his accounts of research on positive thinking and its influence on workplace success.

SINGAPORE- SST 

Ester Martinez, CEO and Chief editor of People Matters welcomes audiences from South-East Asia. Soon, the Founder and CEO of Bronze Phoenix, Su-Yen Wong join us to moderate the discussion on business continuity planning and talent management strategies. 

11:30 am to 12:00 pm— Ally Watson, Founder and CEO of Code Like A Girl, will share her efforts to empower girls in the coding world unfolded. 

INDIA-IST 

10:45 am to 11:30 am— Neelam Dhawan, Head of India Advisory Board at IBM joins the line-up to add her thoughts on designing the organizations of the future. 

12:00 pm to 12:45 pm— Anuranjita Kumar, an accomplished HR professional, author, and investor will brief us on diversity and inclusion during times of transformation. 

12:45 pm to 1:45 pm— Josh Bersin, Dean of Josh Bersin Academy, and a global industrial analyst will discuss the future of the corporate learning landscape. His session will focus on learning programs that create agile workforces, reskilling your current employees for new jobs, technology priorities, and the role of learning in the new normal. 

LONDON-GST 

11:00 am to 11:45 am— British broadcaster, award-winning writer, and a celebrity host, Jez Rose will welcome the London audiences by sharing the knowledge and experiences he gathered while living on the world's first certified carbon-neutral honey farm.  

12:30 pm to 1:30 pm— Lucy Adams, Founder of Disruptive HR, will emphasize the significance of innovative approaches and fresh perspectives to leading, engaging, and developing leaders during times of crisis. 

BOSTON - EDT 

10:45 to 11:30 am— Tara Westover, author of New York Times bestseller Educated: A Memoir will grace the mainstage with an inspiring story of her struggles for formal education. 

3:00 pm to 4:00 pm— Dr. Heidi Grant, Social Psychologist, who studies the science of motivation and communication will illuminate the benefits of a 'Get Better' mindset. Learn how to identify and develop a better mindset to influences your team and organization positively. 

Reinvent your workforce with Perspectives 2020 

Change is the only constant across all ages. But when it catches you off-guard; the capability to adapt is what defines the future of your enterprise. So far, our HR leaders played an instrumental role in driving business continuity. But in this new normal, if you are exploring ways to improve employee happiness, workforce potential, customer success, and retention, Perspectives 2020 is where you can start. 

Register today. So, we can learn and explore our inner potential together.  

Chasma Place, is an independent source for solutions that will help you keep pace with changes in the way your people work without ripping and replacing your existing systems.

Why is data hard to comprehend? 

Data is not information until you organize it. Information is not insight until you analyze it. 

Insight is not useful until you tell its story, but it takes more than a reporting tool to reveal a story. Many organizations lack the time and resources to embark on the analytics journey, and our HR and Learning professionals are no exception. 

Though vendor systems provide built-in HR or learning analytics to all its users, getting from raw data to useful insights is a do-it-yourself project. This is where Chasma Analytics comes in. 

How Chasma Analytics Drives Value 

With five years of research into learning analytics and the metrics that matter most, we developed Chasma Analytics as a tool to give your people deep insights into the power of learning in your business. Chasma provides multichannel dashboards that you can readily deploy in your HR or learning platforms. It offers: 

• Pre-Configured Dashboards: There is no room for one-size-fits-all when it comes to people data. Every business is distinct from the choice of KPIs it wants to track. However, a customized solution can be expensive. That is why we designed pre-configured dashboards to be both cost-effective and user-centric. Chasma Analytics features 180+ pre-configured dashboards tailor-made to plan, track, and manage your learning activities. 

• Advanced Analytics: Organizations that operate across various geographies and multiple domains have a lot to catch up on, but multiple reports for every activity from each of the locations can be a challenging task. With our advanced learning analytics, we provide a multi-dimensional report with nested drill-down facilities to ease navigation through all that information. You can also embed that report in your dashboard and hit the ground running within no time. 

• Data-Visualizations: Chasma Analytics provides a wide range of charts to visualize your data. Your executives can gain instant insights from these data visualizations and make decisions at the speed of your business. We develop responsive visualizations to provide the flexibility to communicate insights over any device.  

• TDRP/ Predictive Models: - Predictive models provide you with the insights you need for the future and prepares you for it. Chasma Analytics lets you take advantage of your people’s potential by foreseeing potential outcomes and risks. In the event of unexpected data influx, you can enjoy unruffled live reporting with Chasma Analytics. 

• Expert Support: - If you need support in optimizing your LMS data or want more information, we can help you with that. With assistance from our professionals, you can resolve your issues with-in 24 hours. If you are new to your HR or Learning platforms, we can walk you through our library and suggest which dashboards and widgets will work for you and which won’t. 

Key Performance Indicators in Chasma Analytics: Key Performance Indicators or KPIs are the metrics that allow you to track your employees’ patterns. Chasma Analytics enables you to define your KPIs based upon your needs, such as compliance, hiring, effectiveness, and knowledge pool. Some critical KPIs you can track for learning are: 

• Hours of training to let you compare and summarize the hours your learners spent in learning, so you can analyze its impact on work. 

• Cost of training for each learner or a whole team, so you can examine whether the costs align with results. 

• Activity score for each course to know the pass/fail percentage and score distribution. 

• Activity completions to analyze completions with learner-centric stats. 

• SCORM Interactions to help you track your learner’s responses on a SCORM activity. 

Some other standard features of Chasma Analytics include: 

• Advanced charts such as candlestick, scatter, stacked, time-series, meter, bubble, treemaps, and heat map 

• Map visualizations, derived tables, and calculated fields 

• Exports to multiple formats such as JSON, CSV, XLS, and PDF  

• Advanced widgets such as funnel, pyramid, sparkline, Gantt chart, and linear gauge  

• Custom reports with single value, single-select, multi-select input controls 

• Drill-down and nested drill-down reports using sub-reports 

• Custom domains, custom topics, and views 

• Scheduling reports to FTP, folder, and email 

• Security of data with user role permissions 

Why A Pre-Configured Chasma Dashboard Is A Cost-Effective Solution 

All types of organizations ranging from startups to large enterprises consult us regarding solutions for their people data. Over time, we have found that all their concerns come from similar needs. They needed a useful tool that doesn’t run through their resources, money, and time. 

We developed pre-customized dashboards that are easily deployable into your vendor platforms.  

You can achieve operational reporting excellence within days, not weeks. These data visualizations speed up your decision-making and enrich your business intelligence at the same time. And all of this happens only for a fraction of what you would spend on a customized data integration solution. 

Let Chasma Analytics Do the Talking: When a dashboard tells you the story you want to know rather than a pile of confusing reports, wouldn’t you appreciate it more? Refrain from manipulating tabular reports or wrangling spreadsheets and let Chasma Analytics do the hard labor for you. 

Learn more about transforming your raw data into insights  

Schedule a demo.

We see new stats about the efficiency of online learning almost every day. New technology and methods for social and collaborative learning are everywhere.

Some industry experts even tell us that instructor-led training is dead.

Not so fast. ILT still works best for many types of training. People like learning new concepts and skills in an environment where they can ask questions. Many also prefer to learn in a group where they can discuss ideas and concepts. For some, that discussion is essential to learning. As the central component of a blended approach, ILT can shine.

Instructor-led training is not going away

According to a 2019 CGSE study, 37% of employees said instructor-led training is the most engaging.

LinkedIn’s Workplace Learning Trends Report 2018 found that the percentage of organizations using ILT grew from 78% in 2017 to 85% in 2018. 

The CLO 2018 Learning State of the Industry reported that over 23% of organizations plan to increase spending on ILT.

Consider also that in many industries, face-to-face training is a regulatory requirement.

Why We Need to Make ILT More Efficient

While most companies will admit that ILT is most effective, they also see it as the costliest, both in terms of resources and productivity loss. In the CGSE report, only 13% of L&D leaders planned to increase investment in that area, and 22% plan to reduce it. (Although the report does not explicitly say so, we assume the remaining 65% will maintain the current level of spending.)

There are ways we can make in-person training more efficient. Think about what happens when you rely on printed rosters, paper-based attendance tracking, and manual data entry. It seems you always end up missing some detail just when you thought you were all set.

Last-minute registrations and walk-ins can add to the muddle—and it takes far too many people to get it all done. If our experience is a gauge, you may have to pull people away from their regular duties, and often must borrow them from the business units you are training—and nobody is happy about that.

Simplify Your ILT Administration with Automation

Automating your ILTs can reduce your administrative overhead and allow you to focus on delivering an engaging experience rather than administrivia. With a simple, low-cost app, you can offload the administrative tasks that make ILT so labor-intensive.

• Use mobile scanning to eliminate paper rosters and manual check-in.

• Manage tasks and assignments by bringing all communications, tasks, and attendance tracking into one easy-to-use application.
• Generate passes for Mobile Wallet, MobilePass, or other digital passes users can use for check-in and check-out.
• Integrate with your LMS to manage classroom training, seminars, remote classrooms, workshops, or OJT.
• Provide branded name tents or badges. 
• Automatically transmit attendance, credits, and certifications to your enterprise software.
• Facilitate attendee collaboration before, during, and after the event.
• Share class collaterals and documents, making the inverted classroom easy to manage.

Automate Your ILT Administration to Drive Training Efficiency

Despite the rapid advancement in training technology, ILTs are the most in-demand method in partner training, culture and ethics training, and in situations where live discussions are crucial.

Automating your ILT administration can make it more efficient, and the low cost of event management applications may surprise you.

Chasma Place, is an independent source for solutions that will help you keep pace with changes in the way your people work without ripping and replacing your existing systems.

Developing a learning organization of employees who make a commitment to life-long self-development is hard work. 

SumTotal Learn makes it easy for you to deliver any type of content to your users, but you need more than a user-friendly gateway to courses and resources.  

Your users need information on learning that is relevant, timely, and useful, whether they are learners, managers, administrators, or L&D professionals.  

One of the best ways to give them feedback is with a well-designed dashboard tailored to their needs. 

Dashboards for Learners 

Your people need to know where their learning plans will take them, how they are progressing, and where to focus their efforts. 

They want the information in an attractive, compact format that they don’t need to decipher to get meaningful information.  

Here are a few examples of what you can do with dashboards: 

• Visual display of achievements like progress bars and badges to motivate them to achieve more. 

• Training schedules and calendars so they can plan their activities, with a to-do list that helps them complete assigned learning on time. 

• One-click access to learning resources, no matter where they are, inside or outside your SumTotal LMS. 

• Resources and quick links that put knowledge and job aids at their fingertips, so they can bring learning into the flow of work. 

• News and announcements. To make information timely and relevant, you need it to update frequently so it never appears stale. One way to keep people engaged is to provide blog articles related to their learning or their field of work. You don’t even need to write the content. You can curate it from reliable sources and push out email notifications when you add new articles. 

Dashboards for Managers 

Managers need to know the learning status of their teams, their strengths and weaknesses, and where they need to focus their efforts. For required learning, they need to know who might be at risk for a lapse in certification, with the ability to take immediate action right from the display. 

Managers would much rather view a dashboard then wrestle spreadsheets and tabular reports. 

Dashboards for Administrators 

Instead of running reports every time they need to see what is happening in your LMS, your administrators can save time and frustration with a graphical view. You could show them recent activity, compliance status, content usage statistics, and user evaluations. 

SumTotal Dashboard Tools 

SumTotal provides widgets you can use to customize your LMS landing page, and Advanced Reporting gives you a number of data visualizations. 

However, creating a dashboard is a do-it-yourself project, and if you really want to provide the most relevant information, you will need a more robust tool. If you don’t already have it, SumTotal can make it available for your data and design needs. 

Make Your SumTotal LMS the Center of Your Learning Ecosystem 

If you want your LMS to become the place to be if you're going to improve yourself, you need more than powerful learning content delivered to your users on demand. You need to make the total experience one your users will appreciate. 

Well-designed dashboards that provide useful and relevant information can boost engagement in your LMS and help you further your progress on the road to a learning organization. 

Chasma Place, is an independent source for solutions that will help you keep pace with changes in the way your people work without ripping and replacing your existing systems.

Dynamic, flexible and easy-to-use tools will enable you to customize the user experience. They are in an HTML meta-layer, giving you the universal tools of online presentation. You can create a unique experience for each role in your organization.

• Target learning and talent channels to support specific business functions, projects, roles, or any other unique audience. 

• Streamline the user experience by removing friction, reducing the effort required to access tools and resources. 

• Turn your LMS into a Learning Experience Platform, where your people can easily access any learning modality. 

You can reinforce your culture and brand: 

• Embed cultural messaging in user interactions. 

• Provide company and industry news, team and project successes, and company objectives and milestones. 

Create a complete user experience ecosystem: 

• Create multi-page dashboards, so users can have all the tools and resources they need in one place. 

• Link dashboards to any URL, and since each dashboard page has a unique URL, you can link them to each other.  

We can think of many uses for specific channel dashboards, including: 

New Hire Onboarding: enable online new hire documentation, provide a new employee or partner training plans, enable a new hire checklist, connect new employee with the team, or any other onboarding activity 

Sales Learning Channel: provide new product learning resources and performance support. 

Customer Service Channel: enable knowledge resources, information sharing, and performance support for customer service representatives. 

Compliance Tracking: enabling individuals, their managers, risk management, and executives to monitor compliance learning and progress.

Leadership Development: begin lowercase your leadership programs together into one dashboard and link it to Succession Planning. 

Targeted Manager Dashboards: gather the resources your managers need to develop their teams into a multi-page manager dashboard. 

Generation Focused Channels: provide resources to people in different stages of their careers. 

Just-in-time Learning Channels: populate a Custom Content Widget with links to specific tasks and provide a link from associated work apps. 

Implementing SumTotal Dashboards 

SumTotal provides two types of widgets you can use build your dashboards.  

Each standard, out-of-the-box widget is pre-built for a specific purpose. The advantage is that you can just drop them into the dashboard, arrange and resize them, and create an engaging dashboard with little or no coding. 

As of this writing, SumTotal provides over two dozen widgets. They display items like employee profile, course offerings, learning progress, and motivational tools. However, you have little control over the configuration of standard widgets, and you cannot customize them. 

The Content Editor Widget is like a blank canvas you can use to drop in components to create your own widgets. You can add HTML code, embed pages and documents, display images, play media files, add charts and graphs, and deliver many other valuable tools. 

SumTotal provides training and complete guidance for using the Content Editor. See Appendix A in the SumTotal Core Platform Administrator Guide available at SumTotal Connect. 

Custom Widgets 

You or your SumTotal partner can build custom widgets. Since the widget framework is HTML code, what you can do is limited only by what you can imagine. We can think of dozens of ways to drive value for users. Here are a few examples: 

In custom widgets, you have complete control of the content and can make the design visually appealing. However, the work HTML and technical knowledge in linking and embedding resources. You must also re-validate that your widgets work with every SumTotal update. 

Build your SumTotal Dashboards 

Standard widgets, the Content Editor, and custom widgets each have their place in a well-designed dashboard plan. You could use them progressively, but they will work together to deliver a complete dashboard system. Begin with a few simple dashboards with standard widgets as you learn to use the content editor, then move on to more sophisticated dashboards. Finally, you could build your custom widgets to deliver even more value to your users. 

We recommend using Agile design method, in quick, iterative cycles. Involve your users in design from the very beginning. In the same way that doing so improves learning development, it will improve user satisfaction and help you drive business results. 

Chasma Place, is an independent source for solutions that will help you keep pace with changes in the way your people work without ripping and replacing your existing systems.

In our past roles as instructors, one of the things we wanted most was some way to automate sign-in sheets and attendance reports for instructor-led training administration. 

First, we had to cajole managers into providing staff for handling sign-ins and attendance monitoring. Then, we created and duplicated attendance rosters, but registrations seemed always to change right after we finished the paperwork. 

Then there was the set-up to direct and control traffic to the registration desk. If we were required to allow walk-in registrations, it got even crazier. When we needed to be getting our thoughts in order, testing equipment, and arranging instructional aids, we often got called in to deal with a registration issue. 

Reports…what reports? By the time we got reports done, nobody cared. 

What an ILT Admin App Should Be ?

So, when we got the opportunity to develop electronic registration, attendance tracking, and reporting for group events, it was personal. We wanted to create the best experience possible for instructors, attendees, and support staff. We had to provide the best solution for them, so that the process was precise and slick. We knew what it had to be. 

• Enable instructors to prepare to deliver an engaging experience instead of scurrying around to manage check-ins. 
• Simplify check-ins and registrations, so they require only a simple scanner to read a digital pass. 

• Speed up check-ins and registrations, so you don’t have long lines of attendees grumbling about the wait. 
• Eliminate data entry and manual registration. 
• Create an app built for any device to create and manage instructor-led training events, send invitations, provide  maps and directions, assign resources, and manage to-do lists and assignments. 
• Integrate app with your LMS to provide instant reporting and analytics. 

We think this is the minimum you should expect a training event app to do for you. 

But wait — isn’t the learning of the future going to be microlearning, video, virtual reality, and experiences? Isn’t everything going to be learning short bursts in the “flow of work?” 

In a word, no. Traditional classroom training is here to stay. 

Instructor-Led Training Is Not Going Away 

Despite the current growth of e-learning, experiential learning, and video instructor-led training (VILT), in-person training remains the foundation of employee and partner training in most industries. According to the CLO 2018 Learning State of the Industry report, over 23% of organizations plan to increase spending on ILT. 

Even in leadership development, where blended learning techniques and experiential learning are essential to acquiring critical skills, nearly three-fourths of organizations depend on instructor-led training. 

Most organizations prefer ILT in the right situations because of its advantages. 

• Updating e-learning courses can be difficult and expensive. If your content changes often, it is usually less costly and much easier to change your internally developed ILT. 
• When live group discussion is a critical component of the learning environment, even virtual ILT has not proved to be a viable substitute. 
• In role-playing situations, face-to-face scenarios are critical to learning, especially where active listening and body language are a factor. 
• In cultural and ethics training where introspection and nuanced behavior are essential, in-person training by a skilled facilitator is frequently the most effective. 
• In partner training and other situations where you sell training, consumers have a higher perception of value if they attend in-person training and are willing to pay for it. 
• Some regulatory bodies require in-person training. 

Why You Should Automate ILT Management?

The growth of platform technology, the Internet of things, and plug-in integrations have made innovations like this possible at a much lower cost than what it would take only a few years ago. 

Not only can you make administration for a group of any size simpler and more scalable, but you can also do it at a low entry cost in a very brief time. 

You can build an agile workforce without the administrative hassles. 

• Lower your costs, 
• Eliminate administrative overhead, and 
• Improve the quality of your reporting and analytics. 

Automate your ILT administration so you can focus on learning. 

Chasma Place, is an independent source for solutions that will help you keep pace with changes in the way your people work without ripping and replacing your existing systems.

In a survey of HR managers by job site CareerBuilder, 16% said poor or non-existent employee onboarding experience lowers their company’s productivity, 14% said it brings on greater workforce and project management inefficiencies, and 12% said it leads to higher employee turnover.  

Lower employee engagement leads to lower confidence among employees, lack of communication and trust within the organization and missed revenue targets are among other negative impacts of not having a consistent on-boarding program.   

Ben Peterson, CEO of BambooHR reported “nearly 90 percent of employees decide whether to stay or go within their first six months”. 

While a poor onboarding can confuse and disappoint your new hires leading them to quit, a well-planned onboarding program can increase your employee productivity and boost organizational potential.  

A 2007 study from the Wynhurst Group found that newly hired employees are 58 percent more likely to still be at the company three years later if they had completed a structured onboarding process.

Onboarding can transform your new hires into fully productive employees. It needs to be an interactive process, building trust in the organization.   

Refocus Your Employee Onboarding with Chatbots 

Your managers, teams and HR staff can often confine within their roles and tasks when your new hires have questions.  It may not be their intention to ignore them, but it can cause disappointment.  

A chatbot can be always available. It can handle your communication process during onboarding, answering questions like -   

How do I request a personal time-off?   

What is pay cycle schedule? 

How do I submit my time sheet? 

Personalized training path to achieve learning goals 

Chatbots can guide your new hires through their onboarding training plan. They can also help them manage their calendar and guide through resources.  With a chatbot, your new hires don’t need to stop what they are doing and search for information. They can ask the bot and get what they want.    

A sustained line of communication to engage your hires 

The biggest gain from chatbots is a smooth path to communication. Chatbots can respond with quick answers and just-in-time access to support resources. This creates an interactive and engaging experience for your new hires and keep them engaged.  

Reduce the time your new hires need to assimilate into your culture   

Your new hires need to understand organizational policies and look for answers to their common questions.  

You can save a lot of time for your employees and HR by redirecting their questions and challenges to a conversational bot. These bots can improve your employee experience and reduce your workload.  

Engage and Retain your new hires with Chatbots   

Chatbots do more than communicate. They can engage your new hires, support their development, and sustain their motivation. 

Chasma Place, is an independent source for solutions that will help you keep pace with changes in the way your people work without ripping and replacing your existing systems.

And…how much time do your employees spend looking for information before they give up and call your overworked staff? That’s too many of hours for sure!

Amidst the daily routine of attending to tasks, achieving targets, coordinating with managers and peers, your people can find it hard to get instant answers or respond to queries.  

This can slow down your communication and demotivate your people. 

Deploying a chatbot can make your HR process more efficient by handling many tasks and requests formally handled by humans. In areas where rapid communication, instant answers, and the availability of resources drive the user experience, chatbots showed great promise in removing communication bottlenecks. 

Chatbots are a special kind of virtual bots that use voice or text to simulate human interaction. 
There are countless ways to implement them, limited only by the imagination of their designers, but generally they fall into two types. The primary difference is whether they are driven by rules or intelligent algorithms.                                          

Rules based bots 

You can design a basic chatbot to provide programmed answers to specific questions. They are cognitive computing in that they can recognize input and give an appropriate response, but they are not intelligent.  

Rules-based bots are easy to train, sometimes requiring only that you upload questions, keywords, and responses, but they don’t learn from their interactions with humans.  

These kinds of bots can save your HR staff’s time by answering many of your employees questions they often handle. They can also simplify interacting with your applications interface. 

Algorithms based bots 

Algorithms drive the intelligent chatbots. When you add AI to chatbots, you get an entirely new experience. A smart chatbot can ask clarifying questions to get you to the right answer. you can train them to recognize speech or text patterns that show emotion, so it can “know” when an employee needs should reach a human. Sophisticated algorithmic chatbots can also be developed to learn from their experiences to provide better service. 

How Chatbots can streamline your HR process and bring HR into flow of work 

Chatbots in HR can help automate many of your routine repetitive HR tasks and free up your time for critical tasks like having one on one conversations with candidates and drawing insights to improve communications. 

• In recruiting, a chatbot can act as a real-time medium of communication and engagement. It responds to routine questions immediately and reaches out to a human right away when necessary. 

• Chatbots can be trained to offer suggestions for your employee training based on an individual’s career development plan or find recommendations for a new learning path.  

• Chatbots can support your employee onboarding with constant communication offering instant access to crucial resources they need to get accustomed to workplace culture. 

• You can also turn your employee feedback surveys into friendly chatbot conversations that make process interactive. 

• A chatbot can also save your HR staff's time by answering the common questions your employees will have during the open enrolment process. 

• Chatbot can help your employees find important resources right when they need them, serving as a quick resource finder.  

As chatbots grow into maturity, they will make both your HR group and the people it serves more connected and productive.  

Let chatbots handle your drudgery and create efficiencies that can improve communication and performance in your organization. 

Chasma Place, is an independent source for solutions that will help you keep pace with changes in the way your people work without ripping and replacing your existing systems.

More than 50% of L&D professionals cite poor UX among the biggest barriers to learning technology satisfaction. Poor layout, unavailability of some of the usable options, etc., are the prime reasons.  

Your learners will not be motivated to log in to your LMS if you cannot give them an intuitive user experience and quick access to the resources they need. 

When your learners lose interest, their failure to fully participate reduces your training efficiency. IBM found that 84% of employees at the best performing organizations are receiving the training they need compared to only 16% at the worst performing ones. 

Learner-centric dashboards are an engaging way to provide relevant information to your users. Show them where their learning plans will take them, their progress so far, and where to focus their efforts. They get the information in an engaging, compact format so they don’t need to decipher it to know where they stand. 

Here are six of our tips to help you design engaging dashboards: 

1. User friendly Design to sustain learners' interest. Your learners may get distracted if your LMS lacks visual appeal. Creating an appealing user interface attracts your users and brings them back for more. 

2. User focused content for a personalized learning experience. Learners are best inspired when the experience is relevant and personal. Dashboards enable you to visualise user information like course offerings, training status and other relevant details specific to their personal interest.  

3. Simple navigation to accelerate learning. Try to remove every barrier to navigation. One-click access is best, but certainly no more than three. Think also about where you place links and icons. Put them where your people expect to see them. 

4. Accurate data and resources to meet learning goals. While too much information creates unnecessary clutter, insufficient information does not meet the learners needs. Choosing relevant information that aligns to the learning objectives is critical. 

5. Graphical view of information to enhance interactivity. You can also improve engagement by visualizing learner information. You can have the information laid out in the form of arrays, carousels, bar graphs, line graphs or and any other form that your learners like most. Involve learners in the design so you know what they want. 

6. Real-time updates to keep your learners informed. Your dashboard can also provide company news, announcements, and industry trends. Keep your news feeds fresh to maintain interest. 

Learner Dashboards Boost Learner Engagement 

Learner-centric dashboards can be a quick way to improve your learner engagement. They not only put information at your learners’ fingertips but make the overall learning experience efficient and meaningful. 

Chasma Place, is an independent source for solutions that will help you keep pace with changes in the way your people work without ripping and replacing your existing systems.