This week Fraser Marlow and Joan Dasher from BlessingWhite, A Division of GP Strategies, led the webinar "Recent Trends in Employee Engagement". They explored how leading organizations are going beyond engagement surveys by fostering purposeful cultures in which employee engagement is part of everyday dialogue. They also shared the results from a recent BlessingWhite research study as well as concepts detailed in the book, The Engagement Equation: Leadership Strategies for an Inspired Workforce authored by Chris Rice, Fraser Marlow and Mary Ann Masarech. In case you missed it, be sure to listen to the recorded webinar on Trainingindustry.com: Get up-to-date on the latest state of workforce engagement. Learn best practices for building a culture of engagement. Identify the opportunities for L&D to equip individuals, managers, and executives to own a piece of the engagement equation. The webinar sparked a great conversation at the end. Unfortunately Fraser and Joan were not able to address all of the questions that came in, but they have compiled answers to all questions that were posted during the presentation in the following Webinar Q & A document. Do you think higher engagement levels from employees yield more positive business results? Let us know in the comments section below. The first three people to respond will receive a free copy of The Engagement Equation: Leadership Strategies for an Inspired Workforce!

Researchers have determined that a number of characteristics have been exhibited by decision makers, and those decisions can be timed right or off centered. Mike Koper outlines seven defining characteristics of decision makers in the following podcast:

People communicate differently online, so we can’t ignore the possibility that relationships forged in this space will be fundamentally different. Since trust and integrity form such an important foundation for how we work, we should strive to understand these dynamics better. Press play to listen to the full podcast. Originally published on Julian Stodd’s Learning Blog.

Fewer than 1 in 3 employees worldwide (31%) are Engaged. Nearly 1 in 5 (17%) are actually Disengaged. While organizations want to maximize the contribution of each individual toward corporate imperatives and metrics, individual employees need to find purpose and satisfaction in their work. Full employee engagement represents an alignment of maximum job satisfaction ("I like my work and do it well") with maximum job contribution ("I help achieve the goals of my organization"). Engaged employees are not just committed. They are not just passionate or proud. They have a line-of-sight on their own future and on the organization’s mission and goals. They are enthused and in gear, using their talents and discretionary effort to make a difference in their employer’s quest for sustainable business success. See the full Infographic for more information.

There are five distinct segments of employee engagement.  Are you "Engaged", "Disengaged", or somewhere in between? At the individual level, drivers of satisfaction and contribution will vary, as will longer-term aspirations and career goals. While the organization can help an individual examine and gain clarity on these, it does demand a partnership and a proactive participation from the individual. No individual can expect the organization to make them engaged. Individuals need to ACT on engagement by: Assessing their skills, strengths, career goals and current priorities. Communicating with their manager to ensure alignment and put together a plan on how to address their personal engagement drivers to reach higher levels of contribution and satisfaction. Taking action - with their manager’s support start to change those items they can and track their progress throughout the year. View the full infographic for more information.

Trust in Managers Managers are not necessarily doing the things that matter most. The actions that correlate the most with high engagement are not always the ones that receive the most favorable ratings. And in some regions, relationship trump skills, that is, employees’ knowledge of their managers as "people" behind their titles appears to impact engagement levels more than manager actions. Trust in executives The way that employees interact with and perceive senior executives is very different from their relationship with their manager. While executives do not get to interact one-on-one with every employee, their role in building a culture of engagement is pivotal. Setting the tone, fostering a purposeful culture and establishing an inspiring vision of the future are all important prerequisites to building engagement across the enterprise. Executives appear to struggle with key leadership behaviors correlated to engagement, yet our findings suggest executive behaviors can have a greater potential impact on engagement than manager actions. View the full infographic for more information.

What one thing would most improve your performance? Two items compete for first place: access to more resources and greater clarity on what the organization is expecting. These two items are clearly split based on engagement levels, with those already engaged looking for more resources. Contribution drivers vary significantly based on employee engagement levels and this should indicate how an engagement strategy should be adjusted to be relevant to a regional office or facility. View the full infographic for more information.  

Mobile learning isn’t a replacement for traditional learning, it enhances it. The way people get information has changed, this video shares how mobile devices can help support a more learner-centric approach.    

Many client-facing, revenue-generating employees in sales and service organizations struggle to communicate the value of their products and services to their customers. In many of our client companies, sales leaders and their managers often face an ongoing struggle to help their sales people increase their impact and achieve their sales quotas.  Without belaboring the point, there are many factors contributing to this challenge.  For example, products are getting more complex and buyers are becoming more sophisticated. Since the challenge of communicating value to customers is a very real one, many executives continue to invest in developing the skills of their sales team.  They have to respond (in other words, the have to take action), or they risk an eroding market share or competitive losses.   For example, many of our clients are investing in negotiation and questioning skills or looking to develop programs to connect with and educate executive level clients on industry trends and insights. Against this backdrop of increased business challenges on one hand and increased investments in skills training on the other hand, you would think sales enablement leaders within organizations are expanding their influence and taking more direct control over expenditures.  Surely, if the problem is in the "wheelhouse" of the sales enablement team and the need is so great, the influence of the sales enablement function will continue to evolve, right? Nope, that’s not happening in most of the organizations I talk to. The reality is that many sales enablement professionals are struggling to reach out to the sales leadership team and create a truly effective partnership that drives lasting business results. This is perplexing because the sales leadership team runs a specific functional area that needs the help of "skill developers" and also falls within the potential scope of "performance challenges that need to be addressed".  In the view of one VP of Sales, "I hate to say it, but I think I need too much help. The challenge I have is figuring out where to start." So, what’s up?  Why are sales leaders not engaging their enablement and training function more collaboratively?  Why aren’t training leaders able to earn the trust of the sales leadership team in order to truly take a more proactive stance? Tough Question. Tough Answers. When it comes to addressing this reality, it’s a two-sided coin.  Clearly the sales function and the learning function should, and could, become partners.  Getting there requires meeting in the middle. If you are a sales enablement leader, it’s likely you have a sales problem.  Your challenge has to do with helping sales leaders understand the help you can provide, and more importantly the value you can create with the sales teams you support. I will share more about this below. If you are a sales leader, it’s likely you have a creativity problem. Your challenge has to do with making a decision to create "white-space" around a specific team or group and boldly experiment to find out what will really truly work to communicate value differently within your sales environment.  Creating that white space requires bringing the right cross-functional team of training, marketing, technology, and content providers together with the sales team to work together. More importantly, it means allowing the cross-functional team to test, learn, and deploy in an iterative and adaptive manner that is equivalent to "failing forward" (more details on this forthcoming in another blog post). In both cases, business as usual is the equivalent of putting your head in the sand. Addressing the Sales Enablement Sales Challenge As I work with sales leaders, I often ask, "What is the business purpose of your sales enablement/training function?" Their answers provide a dose of reality.  Some current perspectives that sales leaders have about the training function include: "That’s the group that does HR training." "That’s the group that does training (and manages the course catalog)." "That’s the group that runs our kickoff events." "I’m not sure what they do.  They do their stuff, we do ours." "They help me shift the behavior in our sales team to sell to executives more consistently." (This is very infrequent: 1 out of 50.) So, where does that perspective come from?  As a sales enablement leader, you have a sales challenge.  So, what are you selling to sales VPs? Hello VP of Sales: "We need to make sure every salesperson attends information security training." "We would like to talk to you about the courses you would like us to offer next year." "We are hosting several lunch and learns on the technical aspect of product X." "We would like to conduct a needs-analysis." In sales, the way you engage your customer (the sales leadership team) often dictates the expectations you create.  In working with sales leaders, it’s important to take stock of the expectations they likely have of you and your group and confront reality.  To some in the space, this is equivalent to more design thinking, or thinking more like an architect.  I think Steve Jobs summarized the challenge the best when he said: "A lot of people in our industry haven’t had very diverse experiences. So they don’t have enough dots to connect, and they end up with very linear solutions without a broad perspective on the problem. The broader one’s understanding of the human experience, the better design we will have." So, what experiences have you had?  How are you at connecting the dots for your sales leaders?  Are your answers linear (that is, are you always recommending the same solution to a problem)? To help, let’s take a step back and look at the questions that sales leaders are likely asking with regard to their sales enablement teams. What’s in it for me? Translation: What are you selling me?  A course? A needs analysis? An approach? Why should I work with you? Translation: How are you going to work with me?  Are you going to put the burden on me to figure out things, or are you going to offer me your thoughtful point of view so that we can co-problem solve? What are you bringing to the table? Why should I care? Translation: What problems do you really solve?  What are you going to take ownership of?  What are you willing to get fired over (because that’s my reality - it’s likely I won’t be in this job more than 2 years)? These would seem like fairly reasonable questions to ask, especially if you’re responsible for a multi-million dollar sales quota, and you are getting questions from executives, board members, and customers on a daily basis. An Aspirational Charter As we begin a new calendar year, perhaps it’s time to take a moment and step back.  It’s definitely a good time to take stock of what you are doing well, and what you might need to work on going into a new year.  And it’s probably a good time to think deeply about how you’ll evolve as a sales enablement leader, responsible for partnering with the sales executive team. Here are some things to think about: How will you increase productivity of workers across sales, marketing, and service organizations in order to increase your company’s return on human capital assets?  What small initiative can you start that tries to move the needle? How will you help the executive team bridge the gap between strategy and execution by helping workers align work accomplishments to the forward-leaning business strategy and changing human capital strategy?  What likely initiatives are coming down from the executive team?  How can you get in front of them? How will you decrease the friction between groups within the organization that need to work together on important business initiatives and produce new outputs that are valuable to customers?  Where do teams need to learn and how can you help them? How will you help workers increase their value contribution by learning new skills and acquiring expertise they need to drive our company’s business strategy forward?  Do you know the future-state definition of the roles you support?  What are they moving away from, and what are they moving towards? A word of caution: Make sure you can deliver on the expectation you’re setting.  Take the time to ask yourself the three questions from above.  You have to be able to explain what you’re really selling, how you work with sales leaders, and the problems you solve for them. See more great sales enablement insights during one of our upcoming Webinars.

With today’s global workforce, learning is often needed in real time through mobile technology. But how can organizations best implement mobile learning content? Sometimes the simplest solutions are the most effective. Listen to the full podcast: