HR professional: To make employees stay, help them learn: the power of continuing education

How can upskilling both set your company up for success, and help make employees feel empowered on their own career journey? How do these programs impact talent attraction and retention? 

Transcription:

Deanna Cuadra (00:08):

So yeah, welcome to the Power of Continuing Education. We have a great conversation for you today. We're going to really be diving into how upskilling professional development can make or break an employee's commitment to their company and as well as what employers can do about that. I am joined by two wonderful speakers, Sari Daisey, head of Learning Development at Band Corp, and Anna Zappia, Vice President of Human Resources at Mr. Carwash. I too am at the end of the day, so you can see we're.

Anna Zappia (00:39):

Actually the one standing between everyone and happy hours.

Deanna Cuadra (00:44):

All right. Well, let me give them both a chance, introduce themselves and tell you a little bit about the respective companies.

Anna Zappia (00:51):

All right. I'm Anna Zappia. I work in HR for Mr. Carwash. If you couldn't tell by our name, we operate car washes across the United States. We have about 410 car washes in 21 states. We have several here in beautiful Austin, Texas and we have people in every stage of life in our company. We have high school kids who are looking for just a summer job to our headquarters executives and people building families, getting ready for retirement, just starting families and just starting out in life on their own. So we've worked really hard to create benefits packages and training and development that caters to all of those different needs.

Sari Daisey (01:42):

So I'm Sari Daisey, I'm Vice President and director for talent management at the bankcorp. We are a small financial services company and so basically I'm responsible for employee engagement at the company as well as our learning development programs and also in support of our performance management process.

Deanna Cuadra (01:58):

All right. And just to start out point blank, I want to ask, why do companies need to prioritize upskilling and development? Why is that so important for not just the individual employee but for company-wide success?

Anna Zappia (02:13):

Well, in our company, we are a growth organization, and so internal training and development helps us build a bench for the growth that we're looking towards in the future. It's a lot of work upfront, but it's easier to train the skills and knowledge that you need for the job specific to your organization than it is to try to get someone who already has certain skills and bring them to your company.

Sari Daisey (02:46):

So there was recently an article in Forbes about how learning and development is becoming a competitive differentiator. I wrote some notes because I didn't wanna misquote the study. So I wanna read to you just a little bit some of the key findings that in terms of the employee perspective they found that a vibrant learning and development culture is going to be a key part of what makes companies a great place to work. And so what they found is that 76% of employees are more likely to stay with a company that offers continuous training. 55% say they need additional training to perform better in their roles, and one in two employees is pursuing learning opportunities on their own outside of training at work. So learning and development programs are increasingly becoming a higher demand and companies need to respond to that.

Deanna Cuadra (03:34):

I wanna ask, I think probably one of the most important questions of today. What do leaders often get wrong about upskilling? What are some misconceptions or just some misunderstanding that surrounds putting learning first in a company? So

Sari Daisey (03:49):

I think many learning and development professionals are still having to make the case for why upskilling is a worthwhile investment. And there's an expression that the worst thing than training your employees and having them leave is not training them and having them stay. So we've heard all throughout the conference, even the panel discussion right before this about the importance of empathetic leaders. And so soft skills like emotional intelligence, dealing with change management, having difficult conversations, absolutely has to be part of the available training for all of your employees, including your leadership.

Anna Zappia (04:24):

I think I would just also add to that a big misconception is that someone can go take a quick online class and then have mastery of whatever skill that online course was trying to teach when in actuality, it takes a combination of formats, whether it's online, on the job and in-person training follow up and repetition to really get mastery in a topic.

Deanna Cuadra (04:57):

And I wanna ask as well, how does mentorship then play a role in how companies approach upskilling?

Anna Zappia (05:06):

I mean, for any leader, I think who's working to train their workforce if you're not following up with that mentorship, whether it's formal or informal with the people who you're trying to train, then you can't actually assess whether they are learning the intended skills or knowledge that you're trying to teach them. So it takes a real commitment and a two-sided commitment from both the learner and the leader to make sure that they're actually gaining the skills that you're looking for.

Deanna Cuadra (05:39):

And..

Sari Daisey (05:40):

I think part of that mentorship role is demonstrating the leaders, demonstrating that they're willing to invest their time to spend with the mentee. And just that in and of itself is demonstrating the importance and the significance of why this is so important and why it's important to support our newer employees in the organization.

Deanna Cuadra (06:00):

And I jumping back actually for a second, cause we were mentioning misconceptions. I think one huge one is that you briefly mentioned it, that if an employee is trained really well, they'll just find a better, better job somewhere else. And this is why my next question really goes to career mobility and specifically internal career mobility and how it's very crucial when it comes to upskilling. So yeah, I'm curious how you guys define that role, how you guys consider that role within development.

Anna Zappia (06:32):

I mean, almost all of our promotions within our car washes come from internal mobility. So I think our industry is a little bit unique, but I think this could be set of a lot of industries. If you've really invested the time and money to put together a really great training program and someone gets a taste of that and goes somewhere else, if other companies aren't putting that same time and investment in, I think it's going to be obvious really quickly. It's one of those, the grass isn't always greener situations, and then people will really realize the investment that you are making in them and in their development and training them for those specific jobs that you have in your company. I think even people who don't want to climb the ladder there's not a job out there that hasn't evolved over time. And so you always want your people learning and evolving and gaining new skills.

Sari Daisey (07:42):

Absolutely. I mean, I think even if an employee is happy with their current role, many of them want new challenges, they don't wanna feel stagnant. And if you're not offering those vibrant learning and development opportunities for your employees, they're going to find it somewhere else. And we've talked a lot about soft skills. There's always a need for increased efficiency or effectiveness in things like communication, teamwork, problem solving. And it's important to make sure that that's part of the solution, not just the technical training, but making sure that we focus on the soft skills training as well.

Deanna Cuadra (08:17):

And taking a step back, I guess, to the bigger picture of how I guess the perception of upskilling has changed in the recent, I would say past two years why, and you mentioned this right at the beginning of our conversation as well, why has it become much more important to employees now that they do are not just challenged accidentally here and there, but it's systematically a part of their company's culture?

Sari Daisey (08:44):

Well, I think for us, I mean we even had to change the narrative around what constitutes learning. So as a financial services institution, we're heavily regulated. We assign a crazy number of courses to our employees every year and they embedded that in the culture so much that in the last six years, no one has been late on their quarterly assignments, which is great. The other side of that coin though, when I started with the company, if I'd said the word training, they assumed I was talking about regulatory training. And so we created a program called Take eight which was really designed to support our career development process. So when employees meet with their managers once a year to have this career discussion, part of the output from that is a career development plan. And so Take eight was designed to say, we want you to spend time during the workday focused on your development and making sure that you implement the things that are outlined in your development plan. And so with Take eight, we encourage our employees to do at least eight hours of program year, which is nothing. It's like less than an hour a month. But we recognize them for doing that. And just by recognizing them for taking that effort it's saying that this is important. We're starting to see a culture shift and some of our employees were already doing these activities. But again, just by recognizing it, it's showing them that this is something that we value and something that's important to us.

Anna Zappia (10:06):

I think also most people inherently want to do a good job and keep learning and keep growing. And so when you formalize training and make it very obvious that you're making this investment and allowing them to do that, I think that just fosters a lot of loyalty from your people.

Deanna Cuadra (10:29):

And then I have to ask as well as an employee herself, how can organizations embed learning into the culture? So in a way that it doesn't become burdensome to employees who may already have plenty on their plate?

Anna Zappia (10:47):

I mean, it has to be intentional and you have to allow space. So it sounds very similar to your Take eight program, but with our workforce, we make sure it's part of the schedule. When there's certain courses that someone needs to take in our leadership training or our maintenance training programs, it's part of the program. So there's a certain amount of time spent in the learning phase, whether it's an online module in person or on the job, and then actually doing the job. So it is built into the actual position.

Sari Daisey (11:25):

Absolutely. And setting that expectation. One of the things we're really concentrating on communicating that learning is part of work and not a part from work and I think that's really key to embedding it.

Anna Zappia (11:38):

 I'll steal that.

Deanna Cuadra (11:42):

And my next question goes to, probably my favorite question I have for both of you is what are some of your favorite examples or some of the, your best examples of upscaling really working for employees that you've worked with or maybe even yourselves?

Anna Zappia (11:59):

We have countless stories like this in our organization, but there's one in particular where a young gentleman started with our company on the frontline washing cars as a summer job during college and just really enjoyed the culture we have at the company, joined our leadership training programs and has worked his way up to a senior executive position in our company. And in a conversation with him, he said that just from the culture of the company, but also through the soft skills leadership training that we put him through, and we like to teach our leaders to lead with their hearts and treat people like individuals and really put kindness at the forefront. He said that our programs actually made him a better boyfriend and a better father and a better citizen of his community in addition to this career development that he was able to gain as well.

Deanna Cuadra (13:01):

Thanks.

Sari Daisey (13:03):

So for us, I mean, think if I talk a little bit about programs. In addition to our Take eight program, we've identified learning ambassadors, which are individual contributors from each department in the organization, and they act as liaisons between their respective department and learning and development. And so it's a two-way conversation. We leverage them to help communicate out our learning and development initiatives, and then we get feedback from them about how our programs are being received. And so by reaching directly to our employees, we've kind of created another communication channel to amplify our messaging around learning and development. Another thing we did was start an annual employee learning week to show that learning can be fun. So we recruit employees to facilitate sessions based on their talents and interests. We've had cooking classes a self-defense class, somebody did budgeting, a woman self-published a book, she talked about that process.

(13:58)

And we talk about employees bringing their whole selves to work. And so this is one way to allow employees to share their passions with the rest of the employee population. So when we talk about success stories, we've seen increased engagement throughout the course of the four years I've been there and the programs we've rolled out we've had over 172% increase in consumption of unassigned training. And so that either tells you that our programs are that good or we were just doing really badly before that. So maybe right, a combination of both maybe. But I think just kind of setting that message and setting the tone again that this is important and this is something that we value and something that we expect our employees to participate in.

Deanna Cuadra (14:44):

All right. Well, I have one more question before we throw it to the audience. Just some last words of wisdom. What is your advice to an employer or HR leader? Really any leader in organization who wishes to cultivate a learning culture at their company?

Anna Zappia (14:58):

I mean, I would say you really need commitment throughout the organization for the resources that it takes, both financial resources and no pun intended, the human resources that are required to really put quality programs together and then, you know, have to be patient because change doesn't happen overnight and you're going to find areas where you didn't quite get it right. And you have to be willing to admit that and fix it and move on. And so over time is how it becomes embedded in a culture. It is certainly not a quick fix.

Sari Daisey (15:35):

Absolutely. Change takes time. As Anna said, consistency is key and you've really gotta do some analysis. The keynote speaker yesterday talked about listening. You've gotta be able to ask yourself real questions and talk to your employees. What are the barriers to learning? And are those barriers the same ones that managers perceive them to be? So managers may perceive barriers to be one thing, but they really, employees may view it as something else. And so you've gotta be open to hearing that feedback. And there was one other thing.

Deanna Cuadra (16:07):

I wanted to say and this was going to happen.

Sari Daisey (16:10):

Oh, the other thing, I think that is really important is if you already have programs in place, are you rewarding the behaviors that you want? So I wanna say that again because it's really important that you recognize or reward in some way behaviors that you want repeated.

Deanna Cuadra (16:28):

Alright, well I wanna give the audience a chance, ask any questions that might be circling the old noggin. Yeah, anyone? Yes, right here.

Audience 1 (16:39):

Just outta curiosity, what training programs do you currently use? What do you recommend? And in terms of what people are starting to leverage for, what are the subjects or areas that people are looking for the most in their training needs today?

Sari Daisey (16:58):

So for us we leverage, so we've got less, I don't think I said it in the introduction, we've got fewer than 700 employees and I came from ibm, so to me that's a really small company. But I've talked to other people and I know not everybody feels that way but we have LinkedIn learning for our employees, which is fabulous because it gives them access to thousands of courses online. There's no manager approval required. And so that's something that we really push, particularly around our Take eight. We encourage people to participate that way. We actually created a leadership development program called lead. And it's really designed, the leader has to, again, they have to initiate their activity in the program. We don't mandate a certain journey or it takes this amount of time. We put resources out there for them, we schedule specific sessions, we do fireside chats, but it's up to them to create the path and the journey that's important to them.

(17:50)

So for us, a big focus has been on leadership training managers. I heard somebody yesterday say they're the frontline workers, which I really liked. We always talked about them as the carriers of our culture. And it's really important, and I think we've heard it through a lot of the sessions through this conference, that midline manager is critical to having a lot of programs that we've talked about implemented and making sure it gets from the executive leadership, you know, talk to them and then you may talk to employees on the ground. But it's really those managers that kind of help carry out and influence the programs. So that's been a big focus for us.

Anna Zappia (18:28):

We use a combination of programs as well. We partner with Skillsoft for a lot of general education courses, but the majority of the training that we have within our organization, we've hired a team and we internally develop most of our training materials so that we can make it very relevant and specific to what people experience in our company.

Audience 1 (18:54):

Thank you.

Sari Daisey (18:55):

Yes.

Audience 2 (18:57):

Hi, I'm curious about some of the rewards you spoke to. So can you give examples of how you reward here you're looking for?

Sari Daisey (19:05):

Yes. So it's interesting cuz I don't have a big budget. So with our take eight program, all we do is we send out a personalized email. We monitor each month and as employees reach their take eight goal, we send 'em an email, we copy their manager and it's like, congratulations. Thank you for investing in your development. How wonderful. Please keep up the good work. We have this cool little firework kind of picture, we change the image. And even for managers now, for many of our hourly employees, this was the only kind of communication that they get a way to thank them or recognize, congratulate them for work that they've done. And we've seen managers reforward the note and say, oh, great job, congratulations. So it's not a big thing. Actually, the first year we did it, we gave out gift cards to everybody and now people have asked, but I only did it the first year. But people still wanna do it. And again, it's something that they talk about in their career discussion. So it's like, did you do your eight? Are you focused on your development? You say this is your plan, but are you spending the time to take that initiative to make it happen?

Anna Zappia (20:09):

We have 7,000 employees across the company and the majority of them are our frontline hourly workers. So as they complete certain courses, some are required as part of their jobs or if they get extra certifications, that is actually rewarded with an increase in their hourly pay. But a few of our more intensive programs are leadership programs and we have a large facilities maintenance organization within our company. I mean those programs and completing them actually results in promotion or a new job.

Audience 2 (20:48):

Thanks.

Anna Zappia (20:50):

It's very effective.

Deanna Cuadra (20:55):

Right? Yes. Gentlemen, right there,

Audience 3 (20:57):

I have two, but I'll ask one and then let somebody else go. The first one might be a little bit more applicable to you than both, but I'm always curious how you bring these continuing educations to your frontline workers since those are parts of the population that normally don't have technology at the workplace readily available. So what strategies do you employ?

Anna Zappia (21:17):

It's true. That is our probably number one biggest challenge is the majority of our workforces not sitting at a desk behind a computer. So all of the online training that we offer is mobile enabled so they can take it on their own mobile devices. And then we also provide iPads and things at our car washes for anyone who doesn't want to use their own personal device so that we have the technology available.

Sari Daisey (21:54):

I mean, I can speak to it a little bit for us, it's not the same. Most of our employees are at a desk but for our hourly employees, that was one of the reasons we launched their learning ambassador program and we make sure that they're all individual contributors. We don't want managers in the group because employees are much more likely to listen to a recommendation from a peer than from the learning and development department. So we've found that that really has been effective in terms of us getting the message out and getting feedback from our employee population.

Audience 3 (22:22):

Thank you.

Deanna Cuadra (22:25):

Oh wait, have I saw two hand flash? Miss, did you have a question to the right hand side of me? Maybe not. We can go back here and then I think we'll have time for.

Audience 2 (22:41):

It was just a second ambassador. So getting those partners just as a tactic works wonders and it's like, no, get off the L&D team. You want the information. And so I see that be effective.

Sari Daisey (22:57):

As well. Absolutely. And even in your session, which I really enjoyed we leverage working with our ERG's. So we have a health and wellness erg and so we work with them to help get out the messaging. So I'm in the HR department so if there are new benefits, we leverage them. And even training around just meditation or yoga, we work, we partner with health and wellness and they kind of help communicate cuz again, it's boots on the ground people like who are out in the workforce. So they've been really a great resource.

Deanna Cuadra (23:30):

Yes. Okay,

Audience 3 (23:31):

One more. So you all touched on it for a minute. Again, a lot of great information so you can't spend too much time on one thing. I get it. But I wanted to circle back on, you talked about for a moment, organizations that have a culture where they're almost afraid to train people cuz they'll leave. How do you think if people can go about changing that mindset that then opens up the possibilities for employees to get training and development and things? And yes, some who, but the richness that can come from giving the employee accountability. Do you change that mindset, especially from a top down from branch?

Sari Daisey (24:10):

Us, we've focused on the data, we've heard that as well. So you know, look at our retention numbers, we look at the feedback we get on our exit surveys when we interview new employees people have said, this is great that you have this learning program. Like, oh, I didn't have this at my other company. We've had people leave and say, oh, I'm going to tell them about this program. So it's looking at the data, looking at the feedback that we're getting from our current employees and making sure that leaders at the top kind of understand. But again, it can't just stop with them. We've gotta make sure it's communicated down to those mid-level managers and work with them. We have a HR business partner structure. I meet with each of our business partners individually to kind of figure out what the issues are for their particular business lines. And it's really being tied in with what their needs are and being able to demonstrate to them data about how the programs that we're creating is supporting and making employees happier. And their retention numbers are a lot better than before we were doing a lot of these things.

Anna Zappia (25:17):

I think that you can start with attrition numbers and if you have high turnover I think more and more people want to join a company who they connect with, who knows is going to invest in them, who shares their same values. So even if you could do a pilot and see if attrition reduces from the people involved in a pilot would help. Or if you have very low attrition and then you can make a case for upskilling the people who are ultimately staying with your organization. And to your point, some are always, you're always going to have some who are going to leave, but if you can keep the majority then I think that shows a successful program. And there a lot of organizations are doing good things and putting investments in learning and development, but there are a lot more who aren't. And so I think that ultimately people are going to see that. So they're going to see the company who did make an investment and if they chose to leave, see a company who's not making those same investments. And I think then that helps make the case.

Audience 3 (26:35):

Perfect. Thank you.

Anna Zappia (26:37):

Yeah.

Deanna Cuadra (26:37):

All right, well we just hit the end of the today's session, today's conference. I wanna thank everybody for taking the time to be here at the very end of the day with us and wanna thank our two wonderful speakers for being here with us and I hope you guys have a good rest of your evening. Thanks. Thank you.