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Gallup’s State of the Global Workplace found that when employees have consistent performance feedback, they become emotionally and psychologically attached to their work and company. With an increase in employee engagement, performance and productivity go up as well. According to Gallup, there are four levels of an employee’s performance development needs, including:
- Basic needs
- Individual needs
- Teamwork needs
- Personal growth needs
Beyond the first three, if we take a closer look at an employee’s personal growth needs, the criteria here includes:
- “In the last six months, someone at work has talked to me about my progress.”
- “This last year, I have had opportunities at work to learn and grow.”
Growth and learning are directly tied to an individual’s level of engagement. That’s why it’s so important that businesses invest in their employees' development. This learning goes far beyond books and courses. In this article, we’ll share 9 tools to better support your team’s growth and development, including:
- Together
- Hypercontext
- Coursera
- 360Learning
- Donut
- Kahuna
- Fuel50
- BambooHR
- Bonusly
Together
A great way to invest in your team’s growth is to connect them with relevant mentors that will help shape and support their career path, tackle existing challenges, and have access to a sounding board they can trust. Together provides an easy-to-use corporate mentorship management platform. HR leaders can easily manage pairing employees across their organization without the administrative burden of using spreadsheets.
Together’s algorithm will pair employees with relevant mentors within their company based on questionnaires that each individual fills out. For example, junior employees can match with senior executives within their department. After getting matched, Together’s platform will provide ready-made sesion templates, handbooks, and other resources like mentorship questions to ensure mentors and mentees have everything they need to be successful.
Key features:
- Supports 1:1 or group mentoring programs
- White-labelled program with customized registration questions, content and design.
- Pair up employees at scale without manually sifting through spreadsheets
- Built-in reporting and health monitor make it easy for program administrators to see the success of their program at a glance
Integrations:
Together integrates with native HRIS systems like Workday, UltiPro, BambooHR, ADP, SuccessFactors, as well as calendar integrations with GSuite and Outlook.
Pricing:
Refer to the pricing models to choose between a Professional and an Enterprise plan, or contact the sales team to discuss custom plans.
Hypercontext
One-on-one meetings are an important time to talk about growth and development. If you’re not already doing so, it’s time to start.
Recurring one-on-one meetings provide a dedicated space to connect with your direct reports, understand how they want to grow and where they need support and provide coaching.
With Hypercontext, leaders can organize all of their 1:1 meetings, notes, action items, and goals in one place, so you can hold your team and yourself accountable while building trust. To top it all off, Hypercontext’s meeting insights help you uncover your management blindspots by using AI to analyze your meeting agendas. With insights, you’ll see a breakdown of your conversations across four topic areas: growth, motivation, communication, and work. You’ll always have a pulse on whether or not you’re talking about growth enough with your team.
Key features:
- Collaborative meetings agendas and notes
- Next steps tracker to foster accountability
- Real-time employee feedback and post-meeting surveys
- 500+ Conversation starters, 60+ agenda templates, and 250+ goal examples
Integrations:
Hypercontext integrates with Slack, Microsoft Teams, Google Calendar and Google Meet, Outlook, and Zapier. They also offer a Chrome Extension.
Pricing:
Hypercontext has a free forever version without user limits. Their Pro plan is priced at $7/user/month and Business is priced at $11/user/month.
Coursera
Coursera is an online course provider that’s partnered with over 200 leading universities and companies. Their mission is to bring flexible, affordable, and job-relevant online learning to organizations worldwide. Their offerings range from courses to job-specific certificates and degree programs. This is a great option if your team is filled with visual learners who prefer a more educational approach to learning versus a coaching one.
Key features:
- Access to courses from over 200 prominent educational institutions like Yale, Duke, and the University of Michigan and leading companies like Google and IBM
- Access courses and material based on disciplines including data science, marketing, and computer science
- Earn job-relevant certificates like Google Analytics, Salesforce Sales Operations, and Facebook Social Media Marketing
- Ability to choose between multiple learning options including a guided project, course, specialization, professional certificate and degree
Integrations:
Coursera integrates with leading LMS platforms including Degreed, Cornerstone, CrossKnowledge, SuccessFactors.
Pricing:
While Coursera offers many free courses, their Business plan starts at $399/user/year.
360Learning
360Learning is a collaborative learning management platform. They combine collaborative tools with the power of an LMS to drive a culture of collaborative learning across an organization. High-growth companies can unlock learning opportunities for their employees by having internal subject matter experts develop internal courses and programs to level up the organization. This platform will enable employees to develop professional skills cross-functionally in one place.
Key features:
- Collaborative authoring tools to enable internal experts to create courses
- Easily embed content from Google Drive, Loom, Genially, and more
- Create classrooms sessions, assessments, certifications, and more
- Analytics on course feedback, completion rates, and overall engagement
Integrations:
360Learning integrates with platforms including LinkedIn, Google Drive, Salesforce, Zoom, BambooHR, and Udemy Business.
Pricing:
360Learning’s pricing starts at $8/user/month for teams of up to 100. Beyond the first 100 users, you’ll have to speak with their team to discuss pricing.
Donut
What better way to invest in your team’s growth than connecting them with other high performing individuals at your company? The most common use case for this app is to set up coffee chats within your organization, however they offer other benefits like supporting onboarding initiatives. With Donut, employees can opt in and be paired with coworkers on a set cadence. This is a great way to enable your employees to branch out and learn from other employees across the organization.
Features:
- Foster cross-functional collaboration and learning through “Connect”
- Replicate the water cooler experience in a remote environment
- Bring human connection right into your onboarding experience to help build camaraderie and ramp up new hires faster
- Built-in templates from successful teams on scenarios ranging from employee recognition to employee development
Integrations:
Donut integrates with Slack and Microsoft Teams.
Pricing:
Donut has a free forever tier for up to 24 users. For teams of 25 or more, you’ll have to switch to their standard plan, which starts at US $59/month. For larger teams, Premium pricing starts at $119/month.
Kahuna
Kahuna is a skills management software focused on operations, learning, and human resources. With this software, organizations can get an overview of their workforces’ skills, capabilities, and align existing talent with future needs. This is a great opportunity for leaders to understand where their team is lacking, what knowledge gaps need to be filled, and what areas each employee can improve from a development perspective.
Key features:
- Team matrix that gives leaders a single dashboard to view their team’s skills assessments and gaps
- Individual status overview for employees to understand what weaknesses and gaps they have and understand where they can improve
- Flexible forms that can help organizations improve how to assess employees, including quizzes, observational checklists, and more
- Talent finder to quickly find the right talent within an organization and level up employees internally
Integrations:
Kahuna’s API supports integrations with platforms like Workday, Oracle, and Success Factors. For more advanced integrations your could have your developer team consulting their portals for analyzing the possibilities their APIs offer.
Pricing:
Kahuna doesn’t have their pricing publicly available, so you’ll have to contact their team.
Fuel50
Fuel50 is an AI marketplace that’s focused on improving talent mobility within your organization. It’s not uncommon for employees to want to switch up their career and make a move from one role to another. Rather than lose great talent, it’s important that organizations are able to provide growth opportunities, when possible, that meet the changing needs and goals of their employees. With Fuel50, organizations can match employees to internal career opportunities, vacancies, and projects.
Key features:
- Use growth marketplace to enable employees to create their “career DNA” and gain visibility into internal growth opportunities
- Empower HR through the talent marketplace that drives talent mobility within the organization
- Develop career journeys that map out an employee’s skills, gaps, and internal opportunities for growth
- Internal talent search to find individuals with specific skill sets across the organization
Integrations:
Fuel50 integrates with leading HRIS, ATS, and LMS platforms like Workday, Oracle, Degreed, Taleo, and Namely.
Pricing:
Fuel50 doesn’t have their pricing publicly available, so you’ll have to contact their team.
BambooHR
BambooHR is an HR software focused on employee data management, PTO tracking, and performance reviews. While formal reviews shouldn’t be the only time to share feedback with your team, it’s an important part of helping your team grow. Using BambooHR’s performance review software, employees can get a better understanding of where their weaknesses and strengths lie. Having that self-awareness is a great way for employees to consistently improve and grow. It also gives managers a touchpoint to support an employee’s development in a more formal setting.
Features:
- Facilitate and document formal performance reviews
- Employee engagement surveys with qualitative and quantitative data
- Create employee assessments to keep performance and development top of mind
- Create, track, and share individual goals
Integrations:
BambooHR has a marketplace for all of their integrations including Payscale, Okta, Greenhouse, Goodhire, and more.
Pricing:
BambooHR has a free trial. To get their pricing, you’ll need to reach out to their team to get a custom quote.
Bonusly
Another way to invest in your team’s growth and development is by sending positive signals through recognition. That’s where Bonusly comes in. This employee recognition software that helps connect people to their work and their colleagues in meaningful ways. Plus, who doesn’t love being appreciated through public and private recognition?
Key features:
- Company-wide and team-specific dashboards to see activity across the company
- Access to an international reward catalog to help incentivize employees to share recognition with their peers
- Give recognition with text, GIFs, images, and emojis to add a personal touch to recognition
- Easily create surveys to gather employee feedback across a range of topics
Integrations:
Bonusly integrates with Slack, Microsoft Teams, Zapier, Yammer, and Zoho.
Price: The core plan begins at USD $2.70/user/month (not including the cost of the rewards themselves). If you’re looking for more features, you can upgrade to Pro or Custom plans. There’s also a free 14-day trial available.
Wrapping up
While books are a great resource to learn and grow within your respective field, they’re not the only resource out there. Not to mention, not everyone learns best through reading business books. From mentorship to 1:1 coaching, open the flood gates of growth on your team by investing in a new avenue for learning and development (and your team!)
