BUSINESS AS (UN)USUAL CAREER GROWTH DURING A PANDEMIC
We now find ourselves in an unprecedented time where virtual work has become our new reality. As all of us are trying to get comfortable with working from home, there is a lot of talk out there about how to remain productive while we are away from our colleagues and our workplace. But what about staff development and skills growth? How exactly can we keep that going virtually?
Before the COVID-19 pandemic, it was easy to monitor productivity and skills growth amongst staff. Managers can visibly see the progress of staff in the office, induction, and training was usually done in person, and learning on the job is easily supervised because managers and staff are co-located. As the world tries to embrace the virtual work model, organizations and managers must not forget that learning and development also must adapt.
In other posts on virtual work, we shared with you the advantages of purposeful job design and how it enables organizations to shift to a virtual work model, and how performance can continue to be measured despite disruption. While it is easy to tell staff to just keep working from home, the challenge is managers cannot visibly see them being productive, nor utilize their normal techniques of monitoring their team’s progress. And because most learning is done on the job, how can managers ensure employees are working in ways which help to upskill them in their work?
In Birches Group, we have taken a few measures to maintain productivity amongst our staff, continue learning and development, and still effectively measure skills growth, all while working from home:
- We conduct our on-boarding programs online. This has allowed us to continue to recruit and orient new staff despite a shelter in place order. Applicant interviews and orientation of new employees do not always have to be done in person.
- Our staff development has shifted to virtual learning. We have put in place a central online resource through our learning management system to house various materials on different topics that relate to their work. Staff can easily pull resources while working from home to assist them in everyday work.
- We also believe that the slowdown in businesses caused by the current pandemic should not affect staff productivity. In fact, one of our teams in Birches Group shifted their learning and development tasks that are usually involved in external project work with clients, to focus more on internal product development which requires the same level of conceptual understanding, cross-unit collaboration on ideas, and focus on timely delivery.
- Lastly, we use a clear standard to assess the skills growth of our staff through our Community™ platform. This standard is common to all jobs which our managers use as basis for discussing skills development with their staff and creating individual development plans.
We know the focus of HR in most, if not all organizations right now is getting their staff through the pandemic crisis. However, we must not forget that it still the responsibility of HR to enable managers and staff to continue building their skills and finding ways for them to develop even while we all work from home. By allowing our staff to find learning opportunities in everyday work and shifting the focus on other areas of their job, we can keep staff productive even during a crisis.
Interested in learning more about how we use Community™ Skills to manage learning and development? Contact us for more information, and to schedule a demo of our software.
Bianca manages our Marketing Team in Manila. She crafts messaging around Community™ concepts and develops promotional campaigns answering why Community™ should be each organization’s preferred solution, focusing on its simplicity and integrated approach. She has held various roles within Birches Group since 2009, starting as a Compensation Analyst and worked her way to Compensation Team Lead, and Training Program Services Manager. In addition to her current role in marketing and communications, she represents Birches Group in international HR conferences with private sector audiences.
