How to keep your people from joining competitors- Feathercap

Photo by iStock photos - Your people will leave if they don't get the answers they need to succeed.

How to keep your people from joining competitors

By the Feathercap team
10 minute read

Imagine you have a new hire employee starting a job with a very informed, always available co-worker, work peer or mentor.

Keeping your people happy and successful while staying at the company and not jumping ship to a competitor are the main goals for every boss. Imagine an employee’s first day of work. They’ve completed your on-boarding training and as the day begins they feel nervous but great since they have access to a friendly work peer/ mentor, completely knowledgeable about their role and open to answer questions anytime and without judgement. As the day progresses, the new employee texts their work peer job and company questions and receives answers based on role, time on the job and overall experience. Very quickly, your new-hire employee’s confidence, productivity and success rises. This is great! The makings of a great employee. Studies have shown, if that state is maintained, they have the least likelihood of leaving you for your competitors.

According to Pew Research in 2021, and a recent Mckinsey study, desiring greater advancement, was a top reason employees left their job.

Imagine if those employees before they felt like leaving received from their company a direct way to boost their job capability, confidence and connection with all the answers they needed to succeed and grow? How many of them would have stayed at their company continuing to advance and prosper, more likely to achieve pay raises and promotions instead of leaving for a competitor?

Problem: Your people don’t have enough bosses, mentors or peers with the time to give them the answers they need. And it’s getting worse.

We’ve long known that employees need the right answers to be confident and successful in their jobs. After completing their initial on-boarding training, the vast majority who have job questions ask their peers or manager. But rarely do employees have multiple knowledgable job peers or a boss with enough time to answer their questions. In fact, as every job becomes more complex and requires more skills. “Skill creep” sets in requiring less people to do more with greater number of required skills. There are simply not enough people to do all the jobs available making questions to peers or bosses less practical and even discouraged. Or worse, because of rising employee turnover in every industry, peers or bosses may not be on the job long enough to know the answer to specific job questions or in error provide wrong answers.

Don’t existing learning and employee experience technologies help?

Traditional learning systems or learning management systems (LMSs) are great at delivering a crafted curriculum of on-demand content and vILT/ ILT (Instructor Led Training) at the beginning of an employee’s job tenure, for up-skilling and setting a cultural mindset for employees anytime. All content is crafted regardless of size to be consumed as a whole; varying from 5 minutes of micro learning to multi-hour on-demand courses or virtual instructor led sessions. Examples of these are offered by Docebo and Cornerstone-On-Demand.

Learning experience platforms (LXPs) which focus on delivering the right learning and other content to employees as a learning path are great at letting employees get credit and earn credentials for learning any number of skills. The most advanced also help companies develop a talent marketplace and capability academies to drive and know who based on newly acquired training credentials and capabilities are ready to move to another role. Great examples are Degreed with their acquisition of Learnin and now Cornerstone-On-Demand from their acquisition of Edcast.

Problem: Most employees with questions ask their boss and peers first…Lastly or not at all to their learning system…

According to a study conducted by Degreed back in 2016:

Percent of employees who ask job questions, they first ask:
69% ask bosses or mentors.
55% ask peers or co-workers
28% to their company LMS/ LXP

The above isn’t a surprise for LMSs/ LXPs, since they’re not designed to give “answers”. They’re designed to deliver whole courses and content based on set events and direct employees to a specific document or course when asked as designed by the learning team. They mostly house on-demand courses and prepared content. Rarely all the job and “how to” documents, videos or SOPs (standard operating procedures) employees need.

The state of AI driven cognitive search and knowledge management today. A drop in the bucket to stop people from leaving their current jobs.

Knowledge management and enterprise search systems as offered by Microsoft, Google, Coveo and most recently Moveworks have come a long way in understanding the relationship of content to all other content. Known collectively as cognitive search platforms. They focus on automatically indexing and curating all of an organization’s content and the collective experience of this content by all employees and empowering searches to be more accurate. To date, they show success and promise. A challenge is they’re not focused or priced for every employee and so relatively few employees have access to them. They tend to focus on consumer sites or on highly paid employees in the biotech, pharmaceutical or IT sectors.

More resources:

The power of a digital peer with on-demand learning

What’s missing from enterprise learning?

The case for self-directed learning in the workplace

Three reasons to align user generated content with an LMS

The rise of conversational learning

Digital peers are the most cost effective way to keep your people.

We’ve seen the inherent value of having access to knowledgable work peers, mentors and bosses. Now imagine all of them in a digital, automated form. AI search with a digital replica of the very job every employee does. This digital peer knows the context of questions based on a wide set of industry specific language domains and gives the exact right answer. Such as in IT, HR, financial services, insurance, travel & hospitality, food & beverage and more. At Feathercap, we’ve developed our digital peer to combine all this with our employee experience tracking and AI driven cognitive search that gets to know which content, answer and interaction does the most to make all of our client’s employees curious, more capable, successful and less likely to leave their current job.

More resources:

Five reasons content curation is getting more difficult

Five reasons AI will soon curate all your content

Feathercap has AI driven search and curation

Three reasons video search can now rock

About Feathercap

Feathercap lets people connect to the right job answers they need to succeed and grow. We make every employee happier, more curious and less likely to leave as we answer their job questions. For more:

https://feathercap.net

Have questions? Contact us.

Feel free to reach out to us with any questions.