Organizations have a keen focus on attracting, developing and retaining talent. Why? Because talent is their most precious resource for creating a competitive edge in dynamic and swiftly evolving markets. Designing an attractive and effective employee value proposition can be critical to winning the talent wars.
Mark Mortensen and Amy C. Edmondson describe this employee value proposition as having four components: material offerings, connection and community, meaning and purpose, and a growth and development culture. Each of these components merits research to understand potential impact and investments.
The Truist Leadership Institute chose to focus on one of these components in new research evaluating the learning and development (L&D) cultures created by organizations. The goal of the research was to create a new index that could be used to measure organizational learning and development cultures — and then to relate that index to key organizational outcomes like retention and engagement.
Organizations could then use the index to evaluate their own ability to create strong learning and development cultures and drive organizational outcomes. The link between the two is sorely needed to justify L&D budgets and the time given to employees to grow.
Our research utilized two different samples: A national panel of participants representing companies with over 2000 employees within a variety of industries and Truist’s volunteer research panel. We developed a quantitative assessment of learning and development cultures drawing from previously published research as well as work by Truist Leadership Institute.
We asked respondents 35 questions reflecting a five-factor model that describes a robust learning and development culture, including employee career satisfaction, employee motivation for growth, manager support, organizational support and learning and development offerings. For both samples, we modeled the impact of each of the five factors on three outcomes, including engagement, intent to stay and sense of purpose.
Concepts within each factor included:
Employee Motivation for Growth
Desire to improve skills, commitment to leadership development, desire for challenging work.
Employee Career Satisfaction
Satisfaction with career success, progression towards goals and income, desire to stay at current level vs. advance career.
Manager Support
General support, time permitted for growth and development, assignments that raise visibility and develop new skills, imparts information about current business impacts, assistance when needed.
Organizational Support
General support, fosters ability to grow through work, adequate time to develop, aligns L&D offerings to needed skills, cross-training and job rotation opportunities.
L&D Offerings
Programs offered (skill-based, leadership, delivery method), awareness of available programming, attendance
To our surprise, L&D offerings had the least impact on any of the three outcomes: engagement, intent to stay and sense of purpose. In other words, while investing in learning and development classes and programs is a necessary element of any talent development strategy, the other four factors have far larger impact. Regression modeling determined that each of the other four factors had significant, positive impact on employee engagement, intent to stay and purpose—which was true for both samples.
The descriptive statistics below illustrate the magnitude of the differences between those who had high vs. low scores for each of the four factors on the three outcomes. Differences in scores range from 6% (high vs. low growth commitment for intent to stay, Truist sample) to 24% (high vs. low organizational support fact for engagement, national sample).
What does this mean for chief learning officers and other L&D executives? First, employees must both own their own growth and understand the advantages to them for investing in that growth. Organizations that communicate those advantages can inspire employees to participate in the L&D opportunities offered by their organizations. Similarly, they must have some desire to advance their careers — and see that career pathways are available.
However, no matter how motivated individuals are to grow and develop, they must have a supportive environment to do so. Organizational policies must emphasize the importance of growth and development as a key part of organizational strategy. The messaging must emphasize how talent drives success and illustrate how the organization is prioritizing investments in employee growth. Managers must make those policies come to life by giving individuals the time to develop. Deliverables and deadlines cannot always take precedence over development — and the actions of managers and organizational policies must align.
For example, imagine a manager who runs a call center, with a scorecard based on utilization and number of calls successfully resolved within a certain time frame. If the manager dedicates time each week for employees to learn new skills, how will that impact the scorecard? Will the organization support potentially lower production numbers? The choices of individual managers and leaders will make the policies come to life — or not.
Along with continuous communication about committing to employee growth and commitment, organizations can develop opportunities outside of the classroom. They can formalize opportunities for mentoring, coaching, stretch assignments, job rotations and other mechanisms that foster on-the-job learning. Finally, the organization must invest in both skills training as well as leadership development that spans different employee levels. Defined journeys for both skills and leadership development clarify expectations for advancing from one level to the next — creating concrete career path expectations and providing structure for growth that meets the organization’s talent needs.
Measuring an organization’s learning and development culture can diagnose opportunities. More importantly, those measures can be related to critical business outcomes that justify L&D budgets for investments in employees. More importantly, learning and development cultures are a key part of a compelling employee value proposition that attracts, grows and retains your most important asset — your people.
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