In many organizations, human resources, learning, engagement and performance teams work in isolation. While this isn’t always a problem, it does increase the likelihood of crossed wires, conflicting information, confused communications, duplication of effort and missed opportunities.
For instance, assume the learning team launches a new training program — but doesn’t realize that this clashes with the upcoming performance review period. At the same time, the HR team is leading a drive focused on employee well-being. Employees feel like they’re being bombarded with conflicting information, and everyone loses out as learners’ attention is pulled in multiple directions.
If this sounds familiar, the good news is there is a solution. Breaking down the silos between your learning, engagement and performance teams is key to unlocking greater productivity and better results across your organization. Let’s explore the benefits of breaking down silos, how you can achieve a united team and what that looks like in practice.
The benefits of HR uniting learning, engagement and performance
Getting your HR team on board with uniting your learning, engagement and performance functions as a cross-functional team enables your entire people management department to work toward common goals and achieve them faster.
A united team will also naturally think more holistically about supporting employees. Instead of thinking of your people as learners or people to be managed, breaking down the silos between your teams ensures your people are considered from all angles to better tailor your offerings.
Additionally, combining your learning, engagement and performance functions means you end up with one source of data. Instead of splitting your data across separate teams, systems and objectives, all three functions will work together to provide broader and more sophisticated data, which is only going to become more important for increasingly digital organizations.
How to achieve a united team
These three functions are created to help employees, but they can interfere with one another.
Achieving a united team relies on three important factors:
1. Integrated technology
An integrated team is best supported by integrated software. A talent experience platform combines the best of the learning, engagement and performance disciplines for a friction-free user experience, aligned communications and a single source of data, improving accuracy and reliability.
2. Improved cross-team communications
Holistic data sharing across and between teams encourages innovation and broader thinking at the intersections between learning, engagement and performance. Cross-functional teams can take collective ownership of initiatives with close collaboration and teamwork, helping you to instill true behavior change.
3. Linked performance objectives
Aligning your people around linked, consistent performance objectives (using learning initiatives, certifications, internal communications and more) ensures that everyone is working toward a common goal. Ensuring everyone has a shared purpose means you should see better results across the board as everyone works toward a collective, meaningful mission.
How to choose the right technology
As stated above, a talent experience platform is the best way to bring together the learning, engagement and performance functions within your organization. This should include:
- A learning management system, allowing you to upload, deliver and track formal learning courses and programs.
- A learning experience platform to support informal learning, collaboration and knowledge sharing across the organization.
- A performance management system, allowing your HR team to track performance over time and link it to various aspects of your learning, behavior change and communications initiatives.
What a united team looks like in practice
Let’s look at an example of what it looks like to break down the silos between learning, engagement and performance functions.
Luxe Stays is a global hotel chain. The HR team comprises learning, engagement and performance specialists in a single, cross-functional team. In light of the global pandemic and travel restrictions being eased, Luxe Stays is rolling out a new set of stringent health and safety standards, requiring the upskilling of all hotel employees.
The HR team launches a new health and safety course, with e-learning modules leading to a certification, which must be renewed annually. The course is supported by performance support resources. All of these items are uploaded to the Luxe Hotels LMS as a program.
A dedicated collaborative workspace is set up within the LXP, where employees around the world can share useful resources (such as official government advice in their region, hand-washing videos and tips for speeding up the guest check-in process), ask questions and collaborate with their co-workers to solve problems.
The learning course is added to hotel employees’ learning plans, and managers add a new competency to reflect their understanding of the new health and safety standards. Performance check-ins with managers help to embed the new knowledge, establishing a mentoring relationship leading to long-lasting performance success.
Uniting learning, engagement and performance management functions within a single HR team provides everyone with better, richer data. This, in turn, supplies the HR team with better evidence of the impact of their initiatives on workplace performance, which uncovers opportunities for further improvements and opens the door to agile iteration processes.
Bringing it to life
The new world of work is only going to become faster-moving and more uncertain. This means you must equip your workforce with the skills, knowledge and resilience they need to perform at the required level, both now and long into the future.
Paying closer attention to employees’ underlying motivators — the need to improve and develop, the need to feel part of a team aligned with their own values and the need to exercise their skills within an environment of mutual trust — is the key to success going forward.
Breaking down the silos between your teams to work cross functionally will be the most important approach to take to ensure this happens. Supporting your people with flexible, integrated technology will not only allow you to create a friction-free workplace experience, but will also ultimately help your organization and its people succeed in the volatile times ahead.
