Online Learning can be a bit like a slasher flick sometimes. The day can start out innocently enough, but before you know it, you’re hiding in a stationery cupboard, too afraid to open the door for fear of the zombie learners outside trying to eat your brain. As it’s the time of the year for horrifying hijinks, we invite you to switch off the lights, flick on a torch and gather around the TV for a monster movie marathon. This isn’t just for the fun of it, mind you - the world of horror movies contains a great deal of wisdom that you can use to save your online learning from a fate worse than death! 1. You can run… but you can’t hide Remember that nightmare you had where Freddy Krueger was chasing you with his scary knife-glove? Wasn’t it strange that no matter how fast you ran, he was always right there behind you getting ready to do something unspeakable. The thing with movie monsters like Ol’ Fred is that they are sustained by fear. The only way to defeat them is to stop running, turn around and face them head-on. It’s the same for your training programme. If your efforts aren’t having the desired results, ignoring the problem will only allow it to grow into an even more insurmountable beast. So, no matter how ugly and terrifying the reality is, the only answer is to roll up your sleeves and prepare to deal with it. 2. Kill it - TWICE! You’ve all seen it. The movie’s almost over, the monster lies motionless on the floor but just as the protagonist is breathing a sigh of relief, a gnarled claw springs up and takes a final swipe. It happened with Michael Myers in Halloween, and with Jason Voorhees in Friday the 13th - it even happened at the end of the first Terminator movie. The killer-comes-back-to-life-for-one-last-scare cliché is such a popular trope that it almost ceases to surprise. The lesson here is that complacency leads to certain doom. It’s too easy to assume that your training has had the desired effect after a single week’s positive results. Unless you stay on your guard and monitor your learners’ progress, you’ll run the risk of the same old horrors returning to haunt you. 3. Kids know everything If you watch Poltergeist or the Sixth Sense, you’ll come face-to-face with the creepy child who seems to be wise beyond their years. This crops up again and again in horror movies. From the very beginning the child speaks of ‘the little girl in the basement’ or ‘the scary old lady who won’t let me sleep’ but the adults shrug this off as the product of an over-active imagination. Of course, by the time they realise that the child was right all along, it’s too late and Robbie’s being attacked by his braces in the bathroom. ‘What’s this teaching me about online learning?’ you ask. Well, if you look at your learning program through the eyes of a child, the first thing you’ll probably realise is that it’s just plain boring! There’s a little kid inside all of us and your learners are no different. They want to be entertained as much as they want to gain the skills they need to succeed in their careers. If you produce dull online learning, that inner child will just throw a tantrum and your training will have no effect at all. 4. Don’t leave the group "I’ll be right back…" These ominous words are soon followed by a blood-curdling scream (See also: "We should split up and investigate this abandoned abattoir separately"). Without a doubt, you’ve found yourself shouting at the TV and calling the characters all kinds of unflattering names - because the fact of the matter is that THIS IS THE MOST STUPID IDEA IN THE HISTORY OF STUPID IDEAS!!! Never split up, never break from the group, never go off on your own, because you will be gutted like a fish and hung from a tree. Learning on your own might not have such grizzly results, but there’s always strength in numbers. If you want your training program to be a success (and why wouldn’t you!?), you should unleash the power of social learning. 5. Don’t take shortcuts It doesn’t matter how late it’s getting, or how desperate you are to get to the prom on time, the worst idea you can have is to take a short cut down that unlit country trail. Want to know why? Well, if you do decide to cut a little bit off of your journey, you’ll no-doubt stumble across a family of murderous shut-ins, hell-bent on cutting a little bit off of your head. Stay on the road, for heaven’s sake! The movie might not be quite so exciting, but at least you’ll be alive and in one piece! Similarly, there’s no quick route to online learning success. Don’t be tempted to throw an eLearning unit together in the hope that ‘it’ll do’, because unless you put some thought and passion into it, it won’t do. There you go, folks - our spooktacular guide to avoiding online learning horrors! We hope you take note of these cautionary tales and survive every L&D shock and fright that comes your way… at least until the sequel! Looking for ways to engage your learners and bring your online learning back to life (not in a Frankenstein way)? Download our White Paper!  The post 5 things Horror movies can teach you about online learning appeared first on Growth Engineering.

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Welcome performance management fanatics! This is the fourth part of our series on the amazing world of workplace performance management. If you like what you read, then please subscribe to our blog using the sidebar to the right, or follow us on Twitter for regular updates! A company is a living, breathing organism, made up of dozens, hundreds, often thousands of employees! But with so many people driving the organisation, how can you ensure that all of them want to steer it in the same direction? When we talk about values and principles, we mean the corporate values which define your company. They’re your organisation’s mission statement, they tell your staff and the rest of the world exactly who you are and what you stand for. Including values and principles as a key part of your performance management efforts is a great way to make sure that every employee understands your company and shares its philosophy. Why bother with values and principles? Back in 1992, Professors John P. Kotter and James L. Heskett published a ground-breaking study in their book Corporate Culture and Performance. They looked at the corporate cultures of 200 companies, and tracked their economic performances across an 11-year period. Their findings were simply staggering! For example, when comparing companies with strong company values to those without, they found that their revenue grew an average of 682% compared to just 166% over the 11 years. Net income grew an incredible 756% compared to a measly 1% for the companies lacking strong corporate culture! So spending the time and effort to clearly define your core values can bring real financial benefits! They drive the people within your business, turning every one into perfect representatives for you. They even help you when bringing new people on board, as you can make sure you only recruit people who share your vision and will fit perfectly into your organisation. So how do we do it? With our online Performance Centre, we’ve carved out a dedicated area for managing Values and Principles. And as you might expect from a company which has made its name through a gamified learning management system, we’ve added gamification functionality to performance management too! Any employee can come to this section to remind themselves of the different values which define their company and its workforce. But they’re also incentivised to demonstrate these values in the workplace. How is this done? Badges! Each time an employee becomes a paragon of a certain company value, they could be eligible to earn a badge for it. But there’s a catch… These badges can only be awarded by someone else! This means that each demonstration of a value has to be verified by a colleague. It also helps to foster a sense of team spirit, as you have everyone working towards meeting the values, and keeping an eye out for opportunities to reward their colleagues. Each badge has an accompanying comment to explain exactly why it was earned. You can even set a target number of badges to earn within a set period. So, for example, you can task employees with earning three of each type of badge between each review. This is sure to get everyone living and breathing your values and principles! Want to see more of what our Performance Centre can do? Take a free tour today!  The post Performance Centre Series: What are Values and Principles? appeared first on Growth Engineering.

Did you know that the original Popeye got his strength from rubbing a magic hen? Is that important to your training programme? Probably not, but I’ll bet you’re still glad you found that out! As leaders in gamified online learning, we’ve explored every avenue to find ways to keep learners’ attention and make the learning experience something that they want to do. We’ve had huge success in applying game mechanics like rewards and badges. A lot of people might consider these virtual accolades as ‘trivial’ but we’ve seen at first-hand what power these silly little trifles have! In fact, one of our clients reported a 24.7% increase in sales knowledge after implementing game mechanics like these on their Academy. The word ‘trivia’ by definition concerns details or pieces of information that have little importance or value. That doesn’t make it useless. Actually, you can leverage basic human curiosity by engaging your learners with facts. FACTS: The thinking-man’s jokes If you want to break the ice at a party and make everybody like you, there are a few ways to approach it. You could tell a long-winded anecdote or summarise the plot of that movie you watched last night, but you’ll probably lose your audience mid-way through. It’s often better to open with a quick one-liner, something to spark the conversation off. People like facts for this very reason. Facts are short and easy to remember and, if used correctly, can make you look like a genius! Your learners like facts and you’re always looking for ways to engage your learners… so why not bring these two truths together? How to use facts in online learning: If you want to use facts to improve the learning experience, just think of them as rewards. However your learning material is delivered, at some point you’ll have to generate feedback for each task. If you’re an instructional designer, you’ll be familiar with the problem of question feedback. Incorrect-answer feedback is simple enough - if they get a question wrong, your feedback should point the learner in the right direction, but what if they get the question right? There are only so many ways that you can say ‘Well done’. And you might not be fortunate enough to have a badge/reward system enabled within your learning portal. Instead, reward them with a fascinating piece of trivia! Keep a list You’ll run into interesting facts everywhere you go - you just have to keep your eye out for them. When you do come across something that gives you a ‘well I never’ moment, jot it down in a notebook, take a snap on your phone or just favourite that random tweet. Once you’ve built a nice repository of facts, you can dip in whenever you need to and share that sense of discovery with your learners. If you’re not sure where to start on your quest for tiny knowledge-nuggets, here are a few handy links to get your trivia juices flowing! Kickass Facts: From history to popular culture, you’ll find all sorts of facts here - all of them linked conveniently to their sources, just in case you’re the suspicious type! QI Elves on Twitter: This is the official Twitter account for the researchers of QI, that awesome land where facts just grow on trees. Answer Me This!: In this podcast, listeners email in their questions and our two presenters, Helen and Olly, attempt to answer them, unearthing a trove of trivia in the process! XKCD - What If?: This philosophical web comic by Randall Monroe also addresses questions from the audience. You may need to trawl a little for a short fact, but you’ll enjoy every second of it! Of course, with a fully gamified online learning solution, you can engage your learners in a whole galaxy of different ways. If you want to find out what gamification can do for your ROI, check out our white paper!    The post Reward your Learners with Facts and Trivia appeared first on Growth Engineering.

Hello, performance management buffs! This is the fifth part of our series on the remarkable world of workplace performance management. If you like what you read, then please subscribe to our blog using the sidebar to the right, or follow us on Twitter for regular updates! Reviews… Appraisals… Just mentioning these words can be enough to send chills down many people’s spines. Performance reviews are a staple part of just about any organisation you’re likely to come across. They’re often restricted to annual affairs, but sometimes they can pop up multiple times a year. Generally they give you a chance to look back over how well an employee has been meeting their objectives and KPIs. The actual review usually takes the form of a one-to-one interview, which is used to give feedback on performance, address any issues, and discuss future targets, among other things. You’re probably familiar with the process. But some studies show that as many as 98% of staff find reviews unnecessary! The problem with performance reviews So what exactly is so bad about performance reviews? Well, research conducted by YouGov for Investors in People suggests that a lack of visibility may be a key part of the issue. The study found that one in five employees (19%) are convinced that their manager doesn’t even think about the appraisal until they’re in the room doing it. Even more employees (23%) believe that their manager sees the review as little more than a ‘tick-box’ exercise! If the employee believes that their manager isn’t taking the review seriously, then it’s hardly going to inspire anything in them. That’s why it’s important to disrobe the review process as much as possible, to leave nothing to the imagination! A manager needs to make it clear that they’re putting effort into planning the appraisal, and should involve the employee in this if possible. They also need to prove that the review will actually result in action being taken. This is the key to making reviews useful and productive! So how do we do it? Through our online Performance Centre, organising and preparing for reviews couldn’t be simpler! Ahead of a meeting, a manager will set questions for the employee to answer. When the employee logs into the platform to answer them, they’re shown their current progress towards their objectives and KPIS, helping to guide their preparatory thinking. The manager can even leave comments on their answers, making sure they’re planning properly for the appraisal. This gives full visibility to the preparation, and shows that the manager is thinking carefully about the review and what they want to get out of it. Following the meeting, the manager heads back into the Performance Centre, and this is where the magic happens! The Performance Centre is fully integrated with our multi-award winning Academy LMS, meaning that learning and performance management can be handled from the same place. So after the review, a manager can use simply choose the perfect learning content to solve any issues raised during the meeting, and have it automatically pushed to the employee. This helps them focus their training efforts on the areas which will give them the most gain for their time investment. The recommended materials also get nicely organised into an Individual Development Plan (more on that next time!) Finally, a huge one-up compared to traditional paper-based reviews. Rather than having to hold on to hundreds of documents, every review is stored neatly on the Performance Centre. So you can review your reviews whenever you want! You can’t ask for more visibility than that! Want to try our Performance Centre first-hand? Take a free tour today!  The post Performance Centre Series: What are Reviews? appeared first on Growth Engineering.

Imagine what your eLearning would look like without any awesome images! Can you picture a piece of learning collateral with no video or audio to keep it interesting? It’s undoubtedly possible to make a text-based eLearning unit without any assets at all, but it’s going to need to be pretty magical to hold your learners attention. Well, luckily we don’t live in that upside-down asset-free wasteland - this is the 21st century and there’s an invisible cloud all around us filled with all of the assets you could ever need. What are assets? In terms of your eLearning, assets refer to the images, videos and audio clips that build up each screen. This covers everything from the voice-over to the photos representing characters in your scenario screens. Why do they need to be organised? Choosing assets for your eLearning isn’t just some wacky free-for-all. As an instructional designer, the first thing you’ll be considering is whether the asset you’ve chosen supports the learning objective. But the instructional designer isn’t the only person involved in an eLearning project. The company in question is going to be pretty keen to make sure that the assets reflect the brand and their overall mission. Since few companies sit still for very long, the chances are that your assets will need to be occasionally updated. Without a good system in place to help you keep everything where it should be, you’ll run the risk of creating an eLearning unit that’s full of contradictions and inconsistencies. ASSETS IN GENIE So how does our game-based authoring tool serve your asset needs? Genie currently supports the following asset types: Images You can easily upload images in a variety of file types like jpgs and pngs and we’re even working on enabling animated gifs! Video At the time of writing, Genie currently supports MP4 video files. By default, once a video is included in a unit, the learner will need to finish watching it before they can progress any further, ensuring that they don’t accidentally skip past some vital message. Audio You can add audio clips to your eLearning by uploading MP3 files. To keep everything as user-friendly as possible, the process for adding images, video and audio files is exactly the same - it’s just a matter of selecting an empty space and choosing whichever asset you want. ASSET LIBRARIES Asset libraries help you keep everything super-organised to make sure you don’t lose anything and you avoid committing any branding-crimes. It’s easy to create an asset library and you can assign as many libraries as you’d like to each project. For example, you could create a default library that contains assets that are universal to all of your eLearning units, and create individual libraries with specific assets for each. This saves a lot of time when it comes to creating new projects as you’ve already got the basic framework ready to go. Assigning/Reassigning Assets If you ever need to switch an image, video or audio clip out of a library and into another, it’s a simple process of selecting it, choosing another library from the drop-down menu and hitting the reassign button. Permissions Nobody likes to return to a project to find that someone else has been there and moved things around. You needn’t worry with Genie - every user is assigned a role that’s custom-built depending on the permissions you want them to have. These roles are fully customisable letting you decide who can edit libraries and who can’t. So there it is - Genie’s asset management functionalities! Bear in mind that our authoring tool is changing all of the time and we’ve got a development roadmap full of new and interesting asset functionalities. If you want to give it a spin for yourself, and stay informed about Genie’s new features, just sign up for your free 30-day demo!  The post Asset Management in Genie - Overview appeared first on Growth Engineering.

Having spent the past decade crusading against dull online learning, we’ve recently entered the ring to go toe-to-toe with dreary performance management as well. Our fully online Performance Centre makes the whole performance management process as user-friendly as possible. And, with everything online, performance can be managed remotely at any time during the year, and there’s no need to try to organise thousands of paper documents. As if that wasn’t enough, it’s fully integrated with our gamified, social Academy LMS! This means that it’s easy to tailor training and development programmes to meet an individual’s performance shortfalls. So it’s the perfect partner for anyone involved in performance management. Just ask Pedro, the star of the video below! Pedro is an HR Manager, and he’s been given some pretty tough targets to meet. But watch how he uses the Performance Centre to transform himself into a target-hitting, goal-smashing, objective-obliterator! If you’re eager to find out more about what our Performance Centre is capable of, then you’re in luck! Check out the Performance Centre Series we’ve been writing on our blog to learn about the different areas of performance management and why you should be taking them online. And if you’re looking for more of a first-hand experience of the Performance Centre, why not take a free tour?  The post The Performance Centre - Brand new video! appeared first on Growth Engineering.

Calling all performance management connoisseurs! This is the sixth part of our series on the remarkable world of workplace performance management. If you like what you read, then please subscribe to our blog using the sidebar to the right, or follow us on Twitter for regular updates! Imagine if we were all the same. If we all liked the same food, if we all liked the same TV shows, or if we all liked Nickelback… Thankfully everyone is different, so we can all celebrate our individuality however we see fit! But one side effect of this is that there’s no such thing as a one-size-fits-all approach to development. We all have our own strengths and weaknesses, and our own needs when it comes to what will help us realise our potential. That’s where the Personal Development Plan, or PDP, comes in! It’s also known as the IDP (Individual Development Plan), and it acts as a roadmap for how an individual should drive their professional growth. So an employee should be able to look at their PDP at any time to find out exactly what work they should be doing to develop their knowledge and skills. Because it’s tailored to them, a good PDP acts like a jigsaw piece, filling in any gaps in an employee’s skillset and making them into a perfect, beautiful picture! How to approach Personal Development Plans When putting together PDPs for your staff, it’s important to be as clear about their purpose as possible. A 2011 study by Simon A.J. Beausaert found that PDPs are most effective when they’re clearly used to support employees in taking learning activities. This helps an employee to acknowledge their strengths and weaknesses, and to focus their learning efforts on eliminating any flaws. This of course then has the effect of improving their workplace performance. The PDP is also a great way for an employer to show that it is thinking about the development of its employees. Most of the performance management methods we’ve looked at up until now have been focused on tracking past and present results. But the PDP is forward-thinking, and shows that there is a plan in place to help you deliver better results in the future! After all, a study by the Association of Accounting Technicians found that 51% of employers see the main benefit of training to be increased staff commitment and retention. Your employees are far less likely to jump ship if they can see that you’re prepared to invest in their professional development, meaning you can reap the benefit of their boosted expertise! So how do we do it? The Personal Development Plan is the final area of our fully online Performance Centre. In our system, this section is all about looking forward and planning for the future! It’s where an employee heads to find out exactly what learning they need to do to reach their potential. The learning content they find is anything which their manager has recommended to them during the review phase, meaning that it’s tailored to fit their needs. But the real magic lies in the fact that the Performance Centre is fully integrated with our Academy LMS. So the employee doesn’t just see what they need to complete, they can actually access it from within the same system! A simple traffic light system tells them at a glance what they’ve done and what they still need to do, and they can rate how useful they find each recommendation. Bringing performance and learning management together in this way has a multitude of benefits, such as cutting confusion and boosting engagement. It’s a no-brainer! Want to try our Performance Centre first-hand? Take a free tour today!  The post Performance Centre Series: What are Personal Development Plans? appeared first on Growth Engineering.

eLearning without video content is like the Eiffel Tower without tourists. It’s empty and sad without them. In most cases, it’s just unforgivably dull. If a picture speaks a thousand words, a two-minute video must have all the clout of a lengthy novel. In fact, the fine folks at Forrester Research took that old adage quite literally and calculated that a one minute video is worth 1.8 million words. That’s a lot of words. We just tried speaking really quickly, but we didn’t manage to fit even half that many words into a minute! We’re now accustomed to consuming information via video content - news, advertisements, documentaries, YouTube videos and the like. In fact, YouTube is now the world’s second most popular search engine, coming in just behind Ask Jeeves (just kidding, our lords and masters at Google are currently kicking it in first place). The truth is this: if you’ve got something important to say, it’s often easier and more effective to say it with a video. Still, despite all the evidence, Learning & Development types have been slow to embrace video within their content. We could just say that those who haven’t embraced video solutions are behind the times and leave it at that. But as we’re the giving type, we’ve cooked up THREE more compelling reasons why your eLearning needs to get up close and personal with some video content. Retention Extension Videos are memorable. Details find purchase within our mind and cling on for dear life. You’ll still probably remember individual scenes from TV programmes you watched as a kid, but can you recall individual sentences from the last book you read? If you can, you either have photographic memory, or need to get yourself over to MENSA immediately. The stats back this assertion up. Information that is ‘heard’ (such as a teacher discussing something in class), has a 10% retention rate. Information that is ‘seen’ (such as a teacher drawing something on a blackboard), has a 20% retention rate. But both of these rates pale in comparison to when information is both ‘seen’ and ‘heard’ (such as when you watch a video). In these cases, the viewer has a staggering 80% retention rate. Emotional Connection According to Simply Measured, video content gets shared 1200% more than text does. Text must be feeling pretty sheepish right about now. We’d wager that this discrepancy is in large part due to the emotional connection videos form with their audience. It’s easy to pull examples from the cinematic world (‘I am your Father!’), but this holds equally true within the eLearning landscape. If we have a video presenter guiding us through the content, we take more in and we enjoy the journey more. We form a low-level bond with the presenter. There’s something about the human face that plain text (or even emojis) can’t quite capture. This must surely explain the following set of statistics: 65% of video viewers watch more than three-quarters of a video. We are completists. (Source: ReelNReel) Videos currently take up 57% of all consumer internet traffic. That’s four times more than normal web browsing. (Source: Cisco) By 2018, this figure will have risen to 79%. In other words, video is becoming the way we communicate on the web. (Source: Cisco) We are video junkies. We are hooked and there’s no going back. YouTube’s very own Robert Kyncl has previously claimed that video will soon make up 90% of all internet traffic. Things certainly seem to be trending in that direction. We just need to make sure (collectively) that our eLearning follows suit. Learner Preference: Would you rather read a 12-page training manual, or kick your feet up on the desk and watch a 3-minute video? No doubt, there are some motivationally-challenged folks out there who would prefer the text-only option, if only because they’d be able to skim-read the content. But think about it. Do you really want to give your learners the ability to pick and choose what they consider to be the important elements of your training programme? As it happens, there’s a good chance that you picked the video option from the scenario above. Most people do. That’s because our brain processes videos 60,000 times faster than text, negating any real cognitive strain. Watching a video is a passive (but informative) process. Reading text is an active (though sometimes draining) process. In fact, studies have shown that sites which include video have on average, an extra two-minute ‘dwell time’ compared to sites that don’t. Given how much there is to explore, two minutes is a long time to spend doing anything on the web. (Source: comScore). What’s more, 59% of senior executives agree that when both text and video are available on the same topic on the same page, they prefer to watch the video. With that in mind, it begs the question: are you giving your learners what they want? ‘But I don’t have an in-house production team,’ we hear you cry. ‘How are we supposed to create the video content we need to pull off a successful training and development project?’ As with most things nowadays, this sort of work can be outsourced for prices ranging from ‘affordable’ to ‘you have to be kidding me!’ Heck, we could even help. We’re specialists in creating engaging learning technology solutions and we offer a range of video production services. Oh, and our Learning Management System, the Academy LMS is primed for video. Whether you’re including video within eLearning content, uploading it as a separate learning asset, sharing YouTube clips on the ‘What’s Happening’ social feed, or an Insight Group, we’ve got you covered. Want to find out more? Then let’s give you the tour. Seeing is believing, after all!  The post Three Reasons Why Your eLearning NEEDS to Embrace Video Content: appeared first on Growth Engineering.

Performance management experts, this is the seventh and final part of our series on the astonishing world of workplace performance management. If you like what you read, then please subscribe to our blog using the sidebar to the right, or follow us on Twitter for regular updates! Over the past few weeks we’ve taken a good look at some of the best ways to approach performance management. We’ve seen a lot of research which gives compelling reasons to take performance management seriously, and we’ve looked at why it’s best to be managing performance online. Now finally, we’re going to look at how our Performance Centre combines all of these features we’ve looked at into one comprehensive yet user-friendly package! It’s 100% online, so any employee can access it from any device and at any time. As if that weren’t enough, it’s also fully integrated with our multi-award winning Academy LMS, which means that all of your performance and learning needs are available in the same place! So how does it work? It comes down to five robust steps: Step 1: Objectives and KPIs This first section is for Objectives and KPIs. Here an employee can manage their own individual objectives, and also keep an eye on how their department and organisation as a whole are meeting their targets. Every over-arching goal is broken down into the Key Performance Indicators, the individual tasks which need to be completed to meet that objective. This gives everyone greater visibility about what exactly is being done to meet targets. And though employees set their own targets, everything has to be approved by their manager. If target-setting is falling short, the manager sends them back with comments attached. This ensures that only useful objectives are set. Finally, since our system is online, employees can update progress towards each KPI as they go along. So a manager can dip in whenever they want to get a real-time snapshot of how their team is doing. Handy! Step 2: Competencies The second area breaks down each employee’s job role into the individual Competencies it requires. This lets them keep track of their strengths and weaknesses, so that they can target their development to the areas which need more work. To make things as user-friendly as possible, each competency is followed by three sliders. The first slider is used by the employee to self-assess their ability in that area, anywhere from ‘foundation’ to ‘exemplary’. The second bar is then used by their manager to give their own assessment of that individual’s ability, and they can attach comments to explain any disagreements. The final bar is the target level, which someone in that job role should be at. Keeping an eye on this page is an easy way for an employee to make sure they’re focusing their efforts into building up their weaker skills, turning them into a complete, well-oiled performance powerhouse! Step 3: Values and Principles The third section is for Values and Principles, which includes some of the gamification features that we’re renowned for! This area serves as a reminder of the company’s defining values, and employees can earn badges for demonstrating them in the workplace. But there’s a catch… These badges can only be awarded by managers and colleagues! This helps foster a sense of team spirit, as everyone looks out for opportunities to reward each other’s hard work. Comments also get attached to badges so that it’s clear exactly what it was earned for. You can even set a target number of badges to earn within a set time, to nudge everyone into working hard to put company values into practice. Step 4: Reviews This fourth section deals with a staple part of any performance management programme - Reviews! It’s used heavily during the preparation for a real-world review of appraisal. So ahead of the meeting a manager will set some questions for the employee to answer, and to help guide their preparatory thinking. The manager can also leave comments before and after the review so that their entire thought process is on show. Then, since this is an online system, the employee can return to this section at any time to find full reports from all of their reviews! They include all of the comments their manager made, and also make note of how far they met their Objectives and KPIs for that period. Step 5: Personal Development Plan The fifth and final area of the Performance Centre ties together everything together into a Personal Development Plan, or PDP. Remember how we said that the Performance Centre is fully integrated with our Academy LMS? Well following a review, a manager will use a simple tick-box system to choose which learning content on the platform would be best for that employee to complete. This helps them focus their learning efforts on the areas which will give them the most gain for their time investment. The Personal Development Plan gathers all of this content in one place for easy access, and uses a simple traffic light system to show at a glance what they’ve already completed or started. Personal development has never been so easy! Want to run through this process first-hand? Sign up for a free tour today!  The post Performance Centre Series: Your One-Stop Performance Management Solution appeared first on Growth Engineering.