management Archives - Coorpacademy

Intergenerational management: Dive into the basics of X, Y, Z & Co!

“Things were better before”

Every generation may tend to think so… and rightly so, since it’s easier to collaborate with people of the same age as ourselves. We don’t have the same aspirations or day-to-day needs as those who have more or less professional experience than we do. Our ebook “X, Y, Z & Co: A Practical Guide  to Managing  All Generations” is here to enlighten you about this phenomenon and to convince you to work with intergenerational teams, which are the most effective at work.

In this ebook, we explore the differences that characterize each generation at work, the better to demystify preconceived ideas and discover the commonalities attributed to them. But that’s not all! We also give you practical advice on how to meet the challenges of intergenerational management and find the keys to motivation for each group. In short, the ABCs of X, Y, Z and Co!

There’s more to the world of work than philosophy, but we’d like to give you a minute’s thought. According to André Comte-Sponville, successful management depends on employees enjoying their work. Today, the question of the meaning of work is back with a vengeance: why do we work? Everyone answers this question in their own way, with varying degrees of importance. Different generations, shaped by distinct and constantly evolving eras, approach work in different ways. Whereas Baby Boomers and Generation X saw the company as an extension of themselves, Generations Y and Z see work first and foremost as a means of personal fulfillment. And this shift in perception is at the heart of the matter, because everyone could answer the question posed above in a different way.

We recently watched the WeCrashed series, which tells the story of Adam Neumann, the charismatic founder of WeWork (a controversial and topical venture). He asserted that tomorrow’s employees want to “People want to make a life, not a living”. We can’t argue with him when we see the proliferation of coworking spaces and ultra-cool startup offices, with their table soccer games and after-work parties. Today’s company has become a real place to live, where future generations want above all to feel good and fulfilled. The relationship with work has shifted from a purely professional one to a more affective one, bringing with it new expectations on the part of employees and requiring adapted management.

This new affective paradigm of work requires a change of mentality on the part of managers. They must take on the role of coach, showing empathy and inspiration, and providing regular feedback. The traditional relationship between manager and subordinate is gradually giving way to a balanced exchange. To win the loyalty of their teams, managers need to be constantly listening to their employees. The master-pupil relationship is gradually giving way to a win-win one, and this is leading to a reorganization of hierarchical relationships.

So how do you meet the challenge of intergenerational management? First of all, you need to be flexible and adaptable. Each generation has its own preferences and needs, so be prepared to adapt. Find out what your employees’ needs and expectations are, and try to meet them by adapting your posture.

Managing teams is always a continuous process of adaptation and learning, and even more so when you have to manage employees with different motivating factors. Stay tuned and open to change!

The first step? We strongly advise you to gain a better understanding of the specificities of each one and discover all our tips for developing intergenerational management skills by downloading our ebook “X, Y, Z & Co: A Practical Guide  to Managing  All Generations“.

It’s not you, it’s me: the great resignation phenomenon

Subway, work, sleep. This expression sums up quite well the system that many American workers have been questioning in recent months, claiming a sense of enforced work routine. This is what the new workers, those who followed the “big quit” are questioning. They decide to resign from a job that no longer suits them, and go to work for companies that are in line with their values. So, how did this phenomenon export itself to France, and what lessons can we draw for the future?

The “Big quit”

This phenomenon is known as the “Big Quit” in the United States. In 2021, more than 38 million Americans left their jobs, 40% of whom had not found another job when they took the plunge. Since then, the phenomenon has intensified in France, albeit to a lesser extent, but affecting all jobs and sectors. For example, a large CAC40 company recently lost 23.5% of its workforce. The DARES (Direction de l’animation de la recherche, des études et des statistiques) indicates in a study that “the increase in employee-initiated contract terminations does not only concern permanent contracts. In June 2021, early termination of fixed-term contracts stood at 25.8%, above the level reached two years earlier.

With the unemployment rate stagnating at around 8.1% and over 45% of companies experiencing recruitment difficulties in 2021, the phenomenon is making its way into France. With the French economy doing well even after the health crisis, employees have not hesitated to leave a job that did not suit them, even without necessarily having another guaranteed position. Moreover, the current labour market situation is rather to the advantage of workers, allowing them greater mobility. By the end of 2021, the same DARES study cited above reported that 130,000 to 265,000 jobs were unfilled and 80% of HR managers surveyed reported a labour shortage. These conditions have encouraged employees in all sectors to leave their jobs and look for better opportunities elsewhere. Nevertheless, the next few months will be crucial for our economy, which is likely to be affected by the domino effect of the war in Ukraine and may reshuffle the deck in the labour market.

A social phenomenon first and foremost

Two years ago, we did not yet know how to react to the health crisis and we were still in the process of adapting. Thus, the French workforce went through a series of confinements, periods of partial unemployment, teleworking, etc. This unstable period raised real questions about the future of the economy. This unstable period raised real questions about the absurdity of the system, made many employees question their real motivation at work. For many, the confinement was an opportunity to catch their breath, or rather, to breathe for the first time.

The health crisis has reshuffled the deck in many aspects of our lives. The world of work has not been spared: the balance between personal and professional life, the search for meaning, the prioritisation of needs, etc. For a number of French employees, the crisis has been a source of concern. For a certain number of French employees, COVID19 has served as an accelerator to take the plunge and leave their jobs for a more meaningful profession, which feeds a real need for consideration at work.

Towards the “Big transformation”

The expectations of employees have changed radically and we have to adapt to them. Make way for the “big transformation”. Indeed, if workers quit, it is also due to a lack of listening or recognition at work. According to Danny Nelms, president of the Work Institute in Franklin, Tennessee, organisations that want to retain their employees must “listen” and “put tools and processes in place to be able to respond to the needs and demands of their people”. For example, Danny Nelms suggests tools such as ‘retention interviews’.

The phenomenon of large-scale resignations, although on a lesser scale in France, bears witness to a real change in the needs and expectations of employees. Nevertheless, this phenomenon is not inevitable, if the company transforms itself and does everything possible to adapt to this new labour market. On the manager’s side, listening is therefore crucial. The work environment must be pleasant and the teams play an essential role in maintaining a positive work atmosphere. On the recruiters’ side, the attractiveness of an offer is a key point to attract talent. Teleworking, flexible working hours, geographical proximity and other advantages are all motivating factors. More than the benefits, it is also the company’s values that will give employees a sense of belonging and commitment.

From then on, learning takes on its full meaning when it comes to onboarding new talent, retaining employees and training them in the company’s challenges and values, or even creating or reinforcing a corporate culture, etc. It also allows managers to adapt management methods to each personality and to learn how to encourage employee commitment.

There is an urgent need to develop work environments that are pleasant to live in and that encourage employees to make a long-term commitment rather than to quit. Training is an essential tool for this, because learning is the only way to evolve.

Management 3.0

Tell me how you remote work and I’ll tell you what country you are from

Since February 2nd, remote working is no longer compulsory in France but still strongly recommended. Although this legal constraint has now been lifted for companies, employees have adopted this practice, which has rapidly become normalized since the first lockdown.

Une récente étude de PwC révèle que 68 % des dirigeants déclarent que les employés doivent être présents au bureau au moins 3 jours par semaine pour maintenir une culture d’entreprise unique. Si la situation est plutôt favorable à l’adoption du travail hybride en France, qu’en est-il pour les entreprises et les collaborateurs chez nos voisins Européens ? Ces réponses, nous les trouverons dans une enquête menée par l’Ifop pour la Fondation Jean Jaurès auprès d’actifs issus d’échantillons représentatifs en Allemagne, en France, en Espagne, en Italie et au Royaume-Uni.

A recent PwC study reveals that 68% of managers say that employees need to be in the office at least 3 days a week to maintain a unique corporate culture. If the situation is rather favourable to the adoption of hybrid working in France, what is the situation for companies and employees in our European neighbours? These answers can be found in a survey conducted by Ifop for the Fondation Jean Jaurès among working people from representative samples in Germany, France, Spain, Italy and the UK.

How many days do you remote work in a week?

If you are in France, you may have “less access” to remote working. Indeed, according to the survey, only 29% of French workers declare to remote work “at least once a week”. This compares to 51% of Germans, 50% of Italians, 42% of British and 36% of Spaniards. Globally, remote working is present, but not to the same extent, and therefore covers a desire for a balance between face-to-face and remote working.

What is your socio-professional category?

Remote working is not accessible to all. Indeed, even among our European neighbours, inequalities in access to remote work by socio-professional category (CSP) are visible. All the countries surveyed showed that the CSP+ have more access to remote work than the CSP-. This gap is reinforced in France, with a 39 point difference (56% of CSP+ and 17% of CSP- have access to remote work) whereas the gap between the two categories is “only” 8 points in Italy, the country where access to remote work is the most socially homogeneous (with weekly rates that concern 56% of CSP+ and 48% of CSP-).

How many days would you ideally like to remote work?

At least 2 days? Are you thinking of moving? On average, the number of “desired” days of remote work is 2.7 in Spain, 2.4 in Italy, 2.2 in Germany, 2 in the UK and… 1.8 days per week in France.

How old are you?

In Europe, a majority of workers under 35 remote work, while those over 50 do not. In France, this discriminating variable is more homogeneous. 31% of those under thirty-five work remotely at least once a week, compared to 28% of those aged fifty and over. This shows that “digital natives” and “boomers” are not as different as they would have you believe!

Do you have children?

According to a study by Valoir, remote working has resulted in an overall productivity decrease of only 1%. However, a nuance appears! Among parents, for whom the balance between personal and professional life is more difficult to guarantee, productivity is of 2%. This is lower than for employees without children, for whom productivity has fallen by 3% since they started remote working. Perhaps more accustomed to juggling multiple tasks and organising their time, parents also have obvious reasons for wanting to work harder to manage other daily tasks!

What are the advantages of remote working?

La pratique comme le souhait de télétravail diffèrent selon les pays. Néanmoins, ses représentations associées y sont partout plutôt homogènes et positives. En effet, trois avantages reviennent systématiquement : les économies financières (trajets, repas, garde d’enfants…), l’autonomie supplémentaire en matière d’organisation et la meilleure conciliation entre vie personnelle et vie professionnelle. Les pays qui ont davantage recours au télétravail voient la motivation de leurs actifs augmenter. Tout du moins en Europe. Au Japon, une étude révèle qu’alors que le télétravail a concerné jusqu’à 25% des salariés japonais (contre 6% avant la crise), il a paradoxalement débouché sur une baisse de productivité d’environ 20% en moyenne. Ainsi, le télétravail n’est pas accueilli et vécu de la même manière selon les cultures : il existe des spécificités et exceptions.

Both the practice and the desire for remote work differ from country to country. Nevertheless, the representations associated with it are everywhere rather homogeneous and positive. Indeed, three advantages are systematically mentioned: financial savings (commuting, meals, childcare, etc.), additional organisational autonomy and better reconciliation between personal and professional life. Countries that make more use of remote work see an increase in the motivation of their workers. At least in Europe. In Japan, a study shows that while remote work has reached 25% of Japanese employees (compared to 6% before the crisis), it has paradoxically led to a decrease in productivity of about 20% on average. Thus, remote work is not welcomed and experienced in the same way in different cultures: there are specificities and exceptions.

We are only at the beginning of the managerial and organisational transformations that the implementation of remote work implies. If it is an increasingly common practice for some, it would be wrong to think that it concerns the entire workforce in France. However, aware of the advantages brought by these new ways of working, these figures can only evolve positively. Therefore, supporting companies in these developments is a priority in order to give them the keys to meet the expectations of their employees and ensure their commitment at work.

A youtuber joins our exclusive list of premium publishers!

Not all training content is equal. Indeed, as Arnauld Mitre, co-founder of Coorpacademy, explained back in May 2020, “one of the big problems with the learning and training industry, which is a content industry, is thinking that content that has the same name as another is worth the same.”

At Coorpacademy, our off-the-shelf course catalogue contains over 1700 courses which are updated regularly and new courses are added to the catalogue every month. In order to offer premium course content, we work with experts to co-edit our courses.

We have recently added new partners to our catalogue, such as Mandarine Academy for training in office automation tools, 7-Shapes for training in Lean Management, and most recently the French youtuber Florian Manicardi, French memory and speed-reading champion and founder of Memorall, a company that provides training in memorization, speed-reading and mind-mapping techniques.

The integration of new partners gives us the opportunity to review the different types of course co-publishers with whom we enrich our premium training catalogue.

Editors

Bescherelle

Bescherelle is a brand of the Hatier publishing house, which publishes numerous school, extracurricular and youth books. Today, the Bescherelle range offers, in addition to references, works on history, languages, the subtleties of the French language, but also family games. With 1 million books sold each year, Bescherelle is the reference in French language. Historically innovative, the brand has developed a free training website and two reference applications, Bescherelle Conjugation and Bescherelle Synonyms, which have sold over 150,000 units to date.

Dunod Formation

1st business publisher in France, with strong names such as Mercator, Strategor, Communicator and emblematic collections such as La Boîte à Outils, 5 Keys or 2h flat, Dunod has never stopped innovating. From books to digital learning, Dunod successfully supports your employees in their training needs, on business themes but also on soft skills, with proven pedagogy and a strong commitment objective. Dunod now relies on the expertise of its best authors to offer you exclusive digital training with CoorpAcademy. Dunod is a publisher of the Hachette Livre group.

Éditions Eyrolles

A family group and independent since its creation in 1925, Eyrolles is in the top 20 of the French edition. Both publisher and bookseller, the Eyrolles group now offers e-learning training in partnership with Coorpacademy. These training courses come from the most emblematic works written by the best authors of the publishing house.

Wolters Kluwer

Wolters Kluwer France is known and renowned in France with the signatures Lamy and Liaisons Sociales. Specialized in law, taxation, finance, accounting, risks, compliance, health and their applications in business, the experts support their 100,000 professional clients in their strategic and daily decision-making. They offer paper and online legal editions, management software for law firms, training and conference offers, as well as a service for announcements and legal formalities. This training was designed by teams specializing in three areas: Compliance, Digital Risks and Enterprise Risk Management.

Press

Challenges

Challenges is a weekly French business magazine, covering the main economic events in France and abroad. All the economic news is in Challenges: budget, consumption, public finances, economic situation, taxation, growth. Files, analyses of the greatest economists, strategies, practical investment and investment advice, Challenges magazine makes the economy clear and exciting!

Capital

Brand media, Capital helps to better understand and live today’s economy. Capital brings the world closer to the economy of everyday French life. Capital decrypts, unveils, advises to enable its readers to make the right choices in a society where everything is economy.

Forbes

Forbes is a quarterly digital and paper magazine dedicated to entrepreneurs and decision-makers who want to follow business, finance, management and technology news.

Management

Management is the reference media brand for those who are involved in their lives and want to progress according to their desires. It is a magazine, specials, books, communities and online courses all at the same time. Their mission: to help give meaning to work in order to enjoy it more and ensure that it is no longer a goal, but a means. The aim of the magazine is also to show the company in 360 degrees but by getting back to the basics and the one thing that really matters, you.

Science & Vie

The leading European magazine for scientific news, Science & Vie strives to provide a clear, readable explanation in the fields of science and technology. Science & Vie investigates, is enthusiastic about real discoveries, denounces false truths. Science & Vie offers the keys to understanding the present, exploring the world, dreaming of the future.

Usbek & Rica

French quarterly magazine created in 2010 by Jérôme Ruskin, Usbek & Rica explores the future. Is technical progress always synonymous with human progress? How to remain human in the ultra-technologized world that we are promised? By playing on the astonishment dear to the characters of Montesquieu’s Letters persanes, from which its title is directly taken, Usbek & Rica questions the fastest and most dizzying upheavals in our history.

Product experts

7-Shapes

7-Shapes offers training courses in Lean Management and Supply Chain based on an interactive business simulation. Learn by immersing yourself, interacting, making mistakes and then success is our motto! Several thousand people have already trained with 7-Shapes School, so it’s up to you!

Fabernovel

FABERNOVEL was founded as an innovation company in 2003, and has offices in Paris, San Francisco, New York, Shanghai and Lisbon. FABERNOVEL INSTITUTE works to develop a digital and entrepreneurial culture among major companies’ managers and employees. FABERNOVEL INSTITUTE’s mission is to realign employees’ viewpoints to make them active participants in transformations within their professions and organisations.

Global Exam

GlobalExam is the leading EdTech start-up for mobility and employability of students, employees and jobseekers. We offer everyone the opportunity to enhance their language skills by obtaining the highest score in internationally recognized certifications. The trainings are prepared by professionals with specialized programs, assessments and situations in 5 languages (Spanish, English, German, French and Chinese). Today, GlobalExam has enabled more than 300,000 users to pass their language certification and support more than 450 higher education institutions and training organizations in France and 20 countries.

IBM

IBM has positioned itself for more than 100 years as the privileged partner of companies by providing them with the most complete range of resources – skills, systems, software, services, financing, technologies – to help them differentiate themselves in their market and their enable them to become innovative companies thanks to their data and cognitive systems, in the cloud, around the customer experience. For more than a century in France, IBM has been building the foundations of a world based on intelligent and interconnected systems and on new IT architectures, thus contributing to the transformation of the French economy and society.

Institut François Bocquet

Every year, the François Bocquet Institute organizes more than 1,000 talent development training courses around Europe. More than 150.000 professionals have been trained, and even transformed, by the Institute since 1986.

Learn Assembly

Learn Assembly is a learning company that designs innovative learning experiences for healthy and sustainable employability and offers online B2C training on many subjects: digital learning, animation of a virtual classroom, training marketing …

MySezame

MySezame is a training organization specializing in impact business topics. We are experts in impact business: we engage and train managers and their teams in business transformations and innovations linked to societal issues. Our ambition is to create a shift of individuals in the company to engage them in collectively redesigning business and success models, in order to make the economy sustainable, sustainable and inclusive. MySezame is one of the 100 French companies to be certified “B Corp”, the label for companies committed to the common good.

Numa

NUMA is the School of the future of work, providing solutions for continuous and engaging learning experiences for individuals and corporates all around the world. Created in 2000, NUMA created Paris’s first entrepreneurial association, first coworking space, first startup accelerator and first open-innovation program. NUMA is today a key player in championing the startup culture and instigating innovation worldwide through training. This course features internationally acclaimed author and executive coach Jeff Gothelf and Claudio Vandi from NUMA.

The Data Touch

The Data Touch contributes to the success of businesses by providing them with tangible results from the exploitation of Internet data. The Data Touch also offers in-company data training to increase employee skills. The products and services offered include: the production of machine learning prototypes aimed at predicting results centered around company objectives, the creation of a data culture within companies, the implementation of data initiatives around online consumer behavior and Internet performance in general.

Video Arts

Learning is often designed to fill learners with facts and information. This is great if you want to increase their understanding of a subject, but what if you actually need to change their behaviour? Simply put, video allows complex ideas about human behaviour to be put across in a short space of time. And Video Arts gets the message across in a way that your learners won’t forget. Since the company was founded in 1972 by John Cleese, our learning content has become famous for stimulating, engaging and entertaining people, triggering them to think, feel and do things differently.

People

Olivier Sibony

Olivier Sibony is Affiliate Professor of Strategy at HEC Paris. Previously, he was a senior partner at McKinsey & Company, where he spent 25 years advising executives of global companies. He is the author of articles in various publications, including Harvard Business Review, McKinsey Quarterly and California Management Review.

François Fourcade

François Fourcade has worked for 15 years in a major international automotive supplier. After a PhD thesis in Strategy and Innovation Management realised at the Management Research Center at the Polytechnique school in Paris, he left the industry to return to one of his passions: teaching and pedagogy. He helds now the position of Associate Professor at ESCP Europe, based on the Paris Campus. He coordinates several courses in the Master in Management programme: The Management Control course (Master’s Level) and the Business Planning elective course. He is experimenting numbers of educational innovations, including the HEC Executive Education Continuing Education Platform. François Fourcade also participated in the writing of a collective work entitled ” Pour en finir avec le management efficace ” (Pearson, 2015).

André Tordjman

André Tordjman is the CEO of the store, Little Extra, which he founded in 2005. Little Extra is a low-price lifestyle brand. Designed to recreate a loft environment, the stores are dedicated to everyday items for the kitchen, bathroom and children. Little Extra currently has 18 stores in France and an e-commerce site. Before becoming an entrepreneur, André Tordjman lectured in marketing at HEC for more than 15 years and worked as the marketing director of the Auchan Group for seven years. André Tordjman has written several books and has had several articles published in international magazines. He was awarded the Paul Nicolas prize by the ‘Académie des Sciences Commerciales’ for his book, Stratégies de concurrence dans le commerce, as well as the ‘Thèse d’Or’ award for his research in the field of distribution.

Grégoire Sentilhes

Grégoire Sentilhes, a serial entrepreneur in Europe, China and the US, provides an innovative and global vision of the entrepreneur’s transformative role in the third industrial revolution that is reshaping the world. Based in Paris since 2002, he is the president and co-founder of NextStage AM, one of the major players in capital development, which won the Gold Award for the best Growth Equity Fund in Europe in 2015.

L. de Brabandere & A. Mikolajczak

Of very different training, one engineer, corporate philosopher and today a “Fellow” at the Boston Consulting Group, the other philologist, Luc de Brabandere and Anne Mikolajczak have worked together for more than 35 years and have led dozens of creativity seminars in companies. An experience that inspired them to two courses: the first on cognitive biases, the second on creativity methods. Recently, they also run introductory seminars in philosophy. It is the practice of this discipline that led them to take an interest in the art of argumentation. If after this course, you want to know more and go further, we recommend that you read Petite Philosophie des arguments fallacieux (Eyrolles 2021).

Entertainment

Trivial Pursuit

Do we still need to present the very iconic and 40-year-old Trivial Pursuit? Invented in 1979 and released in 1982, the game Trivial Pursuit has passed through generations of competitors and has sold over 100 million copies worldwide (in over 30 countries). Through a series of courses addressing the 6 emblematic themes of the game, Hasbro, Trivial Pursuit and Coorpacademy offer a shared vision of learning: giving access to general culture – a soft-skill, invaluable during a meeting or during a meeting. a working lunch – in a fun, engaging and entertaining way.

Clue

A manor, six characters… a murder! Clue, the most famous deduction game, imagined by Anthony Pratt and his wife Elva, was first put on sale in 1949. Decades – and multiple versions and adaptations (movies, series, video games, comics…) – later, its success is still undeniable. Through the Clue: Murder on Skill Island educational investigation, Cluedo, Hasbro and Coorpacademy team up to offer an entertaining learning format where your critical thinking skills will be put to the test.

Management as a pillar of the cultural transformation of companies

Following a year of lockdown, organisations’ culture is undergoing a profound change. The pandemic has changed our habits and behaviours, beyond the personal sphere. To ensure recovery, companies are resilient and are preparing to face the transformations they are going through. The new management and working methods also imply a profound change in the corporate culture and this transformation is essential to support the other transformations to come.

Google searches around Employer Brand have doubled in three years, and 77% of adults in four countries (US, UK, France and Germany) say they first learn about a company’s culture before applying for a job, according to Glassdoor‘s Mission and Culture 2019 survey.

The culture of a company is now an inseparable factor in employee well-being. This trend is only becoming more pronounced as Millennials enter the workforce. The new generation is challenging organisations, demanding a corporate culture that shares their values and, above all, that these values are supported by management and embedded in the day-to-day running of the business. The Glassdoor study confirms this new paradigm as 73% said they would not apply to a company if they did not share its values.

But the arrival of millenials on the labour market is not the only issue of cultural transformation. Indeed, our contemporary economy is giving rise to new trends, new modes of organisation, which are giving rise to transformations. There are many issues at stake: the transition from a vertical organisational mode to a more horizontal and open organisation, the transition from a product-centred economy to a customer-centred strategy, new managerial functions and practices (start-up model, reinvented company, emergence of the manager-coach). Companies are also working more and more with a wide range of international players: suppliers, customers, employees, etc. Being able to work, exchange or negotiate with people of different nationalities and profiles is now a key skill. For all these reasons, companies must transform themselves to meet the new needs of the talents they recruit, to ensure the diversity and richness of their teams, to consolidate their operations on a global scale and, finally, to adapt to a changing world.

Transforming a company’s culture means questioning all the behaviours in the company, but also the policy, commitments and processes, so that all these elements that make up the organisation reflect the values and beliefs of the employees. It is not just a question of adopting behaviours and ready-made sentences, but of deconstructing the tacit “rules” that regulate the life of the company and the unconscious, informal and non-verbal behaviours of each person. Thus, a cultural transformation is also an individual transformation, which upsets the ways of thinking of the employees, which makes the values shared by the group evolve, and concretely change the way employees act.

Corporate culture is defined with words and implemented with actions. Behaviours are the concrete testimony of an organisation’s culture. To ensure that change is successful, that attitudes are aligned with the company’s values, collective and individual coaching is crucial. The manager is a pillar of all major transformations, as they guide change by involving each employee in the great adventure that is corporate life. So, what skills must the manager develop to ensure the cultural transformation of his organisation?

Diversity and Inclusion

Our organisations are made up of people from different backgrounds and interact with a multitude of stakeholders around the world. The term diversity, as Dr Derrick Gay – an international educator specialising in intercultural competence, diversity and inclusion – points out, is often used to refer to people who are identified as ‘different’. But different from whom, from what? The term implies that there is a normality, but there is only a plurality of personalities, cultures, religious practices; ways of perceiving and experiencing the world. While the company is a place where societal changes can be brought about and developed, knowing how to disseminate a culture of inclusion and truly understand diversity is crucial for today’s managers if they want to accompany the cultural transformation of their organisation and encourage employee fulfilment. Working in a company that encourages different points of view, that listens to a variety of experiences, and where everyone can express themselves freely, has a positive impact on the overall performance of the team and the company.

Preventing Discrimination and Encouraging Diversity

Adaptability and Resilience

In physics, resilience is the ability of a body to absorb shocks. In psychology, it is the ability of an individual to cope with a difficult or stressful situation. As the COVID19 crisis has surprised us all and forced us to change our processes, resilience has become an urgent skill to develop. Indeed, employees and organisations today evolve through disruptions, which we must learn to overcome without being destabilised! This is the whole point of developing resilience in business. A resilient individual will be able to better manage stress, adapt more easily to an unforeseen situation and remain optimistic when faced with adversity. Resilience and adaptability are two highly sought-after soft skills. According to an Ifop Lavazaa study, adaptability is even one of the most valued soft skills in companies. Adaptability means knowing how to evolve in an environment that is different from the one you know, without letting yourself be conditioned or influenced by this new context. As a manager, developing the resilience of teams is key to fostering group cohesion and supporting the cultural transformation of the organisation. Overcoming hardship, being resilient together reinforces the feeling of belonging to a group, a tight-knit group in which we can rely on each other. Knowing how to adapt also means knowing how to work surrounded by different ways of thinking, doing and conceiving projects, which is key for organisations that wish to succeed in their cultural transformation.

From Individual to Organizational Resilience

Creativity and Innovation

Working in teams, especially when they are composed of diverse profiles, is an excellent way to foster creativity and innovation. To support the cultural transformation of companies, managers must favour co-creation and facilitate the expression of each individual. Creativity is sometimes innate, but it can be cultivated and developed through training. To stimulate teams and create true multicultural collaboration, managers must also stimulate their own creativity and spread this climate of the right to make mistakes, imagination, etc. All employees must feel legitimate to express their ideas, to experiment, but above all, to build collectively. The challenge of creativity for cultural transformation lies in the group’s ability to work collaboratively, to expose itself to different ways of thinking and to hear the points of view of the other members of the team. In addition, our new ways of working have also led to the emergence of new methods such as Design Thinking or Mind Mapping. These new methods, which are familiar to the new generations, promote team cohesion, unleash creativity and bring out innovative solutions. Eventually, in an organisation where everyone looks the same, ideas are similar, and questioning is more complicated. Creativity is therefore an essential element for successful cultural transformation, because it initiates everyone to work together and to imagine diverse solutions, just like the company.

Unleash your inner creativity

In conclusion, organisations are facing new challenges regarding their employees. New quests for meaning, new managerial paradigms, new demands, the company must transform itself to meet the values and expectations of today’s and tomorrow’s workforce. To promote cohesion, creativity and innovation, the manager must instil this culture of diversity in everyone, so that everyone understands it and promotes its inclusion. We are all different, and everyone is “abnormal” according to an established norm. The company must be nourished by this plurality, and must also put in place the means to achieve it. This is the cultural transformation and the manager is a pillar for its success.

Manager of tomorrow: 3 skills to adapt to the managerial revolution

Companies are changing. Like the world around us, organizations are evolving and with it, the teams that make them up. To guide these transitions, managers are the ones who will take the first steps towards change. New work methods, project management, and new cultures require the adoption of a 3.0 management style that adapts to the new needs of employees, and also responds to the upcoming challenges. So how can we transform our management so that everyone invests in the common good and achieves their objectives?

There is no ideal organizational model. When we talk about transformation, we may tend to believe that there is an ideal to be reached and that it is enough to meet the challenges of major transformations for them to be “completed”. But in a world that is constantly and rapidly evolving, transformation is never finished, it is renewed. Today, all major transformations ultimately depend on the ability of individuals and organizations to adapt, to evolve serenely in an uncertain world, and to react to the unexpected. Management is a pillar for supporting business transformations, because they are driven by teams. The challenge for management in 2021 is to guide change.

Towards a management 3.0

Companies are facing new challenges: hybridization of work, digital and cultural transformation, renewal of skills and talents, to only name a few. The context of the pandemic has transformed our management methods towards more agile methods and requiring more autonomy. Added to this is the arrival of the younger generations, called millennials, which implies, for example, a review of management methods.

According to a study by the recruitment site Monster.fr carried out in 2020 with the Yougov institute, at the end of May 2020, 19% of 18-34 year olds said they did not need meaning in their jobs, whereas at the end of 2020, only 4% shared this view.

In search of meaning, millenials are therefore no longer just looking for compensation, but rather a sense of purpose. It will be important for these new recruits to understand how, at their own level, they participate in the company’s collective adventure. These new generations of employees are also looking for feedback and encouragement. In exchange for their involvement, it is important to be thanked and congratulated regularly.

The term management 3.0 was coined by Jurgen Appelo, a writer and lecturer, who works on leadership issues. Today, a manager is a leader. This means that they use their power of conviction to lead people towards their objectives. This concept describes all the methods of agile management: the manager-leader gives meaning to the employees, rather than giving them directives.

Management 3.0 would be an agile management type, based on a sharing contract. More linear, horizontal and collaborative, it would increase the autonomy of each person, and would be more empowering for employees. For the smooth running of organizations, it is essential for managers to develop certain skills, which will enable them to better understand the needs and expectations of employees, and to get closer to the role of coach. To do this, managers must learn to better manage their emotions, but also those of their teams. So, what skills should a manager develop today to reinvent his management and better support employees in the future?

Management 3.0

Active listening

Knowing how to listen is an essential professional skill for any good manager. Sincerely listening to one’s employees has important consequences on the overall efficiency of the team, both individually and collectively, but also on the quality of inter-colleague relations. So what is active listening? First of all, it’s about clearing your head to make room only for the information that your interlocutor communicates to you. Without thinking about what you are going to answer, you let the other person finish what they are saying. To draw the best conclusions from what your interlocutor communicates, you should not think about what you are going to say next. You let the speaker finish what he or she is saying, and only decide what to think about it once it is over. You can ask questions, show that you are attentive and constructive to what the person you are talking to is telling you. By developing your listening skills, you will truly understand the needs of your teams, and be able to respond effectively to their expectations.

Discover the course on Counselling

Managing conflicts at work

Within the company, we are in daily contact with each other and this can lead to conflicts. Indeed, in all human groups, tensions can occur and it is up to the manager to take charge of these conflictual situations in order to transform them into an opportunity to improve relations. Because it is by building together that we reach a satisfactory solution, managing conflicts is a crucial aspect of management. Between conflicts of objectives; conflicts of strategy or methods; conflicts of interests or needs; and conflicts of values, dealing with these tense situations requires very specific listening skills, particularly in order to resolve them. Even if the conflict often appears in a brutal way, it almost always presents signals beforehand, which one must learn to identify in order to manage them as soon as possible. As a manager, you must not only learn to identify situations of tension – which can lead to a rupture – but also learn to prevent conflicts between employees by instilling the right practices and behaviors.

Discover more on Managing conflicts at Work

Leadership

The company is first and foremost made up of people, each of whom will have different behaviors. The adoption of new processes and the smooth running of certain projects can be encouraged – or not – by the employees and their behaviors. Thus, the organization is influenced by the personalities that make it up, and the manager’s mission is to unite these pluralities of behaviors around the achievement of common objectives. To guide transformations, leadership is a key skill because it allows one to learn how to respond to the needs of individuals and to understand the behaviors of each person, in order to better guide them. Getting teams involved in projects and enabling them to achieve their objectives requires a climate of trust, which can be fostered by the social influence of the manager, who knows how to communicate with the various individuals who make up the company. To go from manager to leader, you don’t necessarily need to have a strong personality, but above all you need to be aware that leadership is about motivating people.

Learn more on Evolving from manager to leader

Of course, there is no ideal organizational model. However, well-managed teams can make all the difference in creating the optimal conditions for collectively achieving business goals. According to a Gallup study, organizations that manage to personally involve employees in their missions achieve very good annual results. For example, a 10% improvement in the connection between employees and their organization’s mission or goal leads to an 8.1% decrease in turnover and a 4.4% increase in profitability. And finally, managers themselves want to be better trained to improve their job performance. According to a TalentSoft study, during the pandemic, 44.5% of public sector managers requested training for themselves, and that’s good! Managers, in their role as leaders, set an example and encourage employees to learn, so that they can continue to perform well in the long term, despite the unforeseen events that the future holds.

Back on track

It’s the resumption. Business activities resume, terraces are alive again and the subway is full again. We are finally seeing the end of the crisis, and we cross our fingers while writing this. This unprecedented period arouses excitement but also interrogations about the best way to support employees, as the stakes are crucial.

How can we create the ideal conditions for this resumption? What are the best practices to adopt? What about employee motivation? How will remote working be organized from now on?

For more than a year, we have evolved in an uncertain and worrying climate that has changed the usual reference points for collective and individual interests. We made one while being apart. And this has not been without consequences on the general mood and hope for the future.

While it is now time to reunite gradually and (re)discover our habits, some might find it confusing. Whatever happens, humans get used to everything, and finally, it is returning to normal that might seem abnormal.

The revolution that this crisis has brought to light is mainly that of remote working, leading to hybrid work. And as individuals, this crisis has taught us that adaptation is an essential ability. We know that the world changes, but it is also unpredictable. Training is an effective response to this.

Indeed, without the right support, resumption can be hard, both individually and collectively. That’s why we’ve designed the Back on Track playlist, to answer these questions and ensure that your employees return to the office in the best possible condition.

To get back on track, our dedicated playlist contains the following courses:

Adapt in all circumstances

Test your adaptability – Coorpacademy
Learning to Learn – Learn Assembly
Boost your learning abilities – Science & Vie

Manage effectively

Take a fresh look at your management style – O. Sibony
Making Quick and Effective Decisions – Dunod

Work better together

Remote Working: From Theory to Best Practices – E.Eyrolles
Motivating your team – Video Arts
30 Ways to Make More Time – Video Arts

And to discover our entire catalog, click here

ROI of continuous training: HR Directors’ unsolvable problem?

For many years, calculating ROI (return on investment) of continuous training has been difficult, especially with the pressure of Direction Committees and stakeholders, with expenses sometimes hard to justify with actual and tangible results.

‘The main issue for Human Resources is the calculation of its return on investment.’ Catherine Benet, former HRD of Paris Airports (Aéroports de Paris).

How do we calculate the ROI of continuous training?

In the 50s, PHD and former president of the American Society for Training and Development Donald Kirkpatrick described an evaluation model of training efficiency in a 4 levels pyramid: The Four Levels of Training Evaluation. Jack Phillips then completed this model in the 90s in order to calculate ROI, with a 5th layer.

However and despite the evolution of HR practices over the years, the attendance sheet is – way too often – the method used to follow how people train and to see how many employees attended a course.

In this article, I’ll try to show you how asking yourself 12 questions can help nurturing the debate on the return on investment of continuous training. Food for thoughts and maybe a few leads to start calculating a tangible return on investment.

This is 7 minutes read. But there is a summary at the end of the page, for people in a rush 😉

Which ROI? For whom?

The 1st issue with return on investment comes from each and everyone’s expectations. When expectations are different, the calculation of ROI is different as well. Let’s take a few examples:

The stakeholder: ‘If I invest 1€ in training, I need to get 1€ + interests back.’

The senior executive: ‘To measure the return on investment, I need to see the training’s added value to business. How does it impact my business results?’

The HR Director: ‘In order to improve the return on investment of continuous training I can use digital learning tools. It’ll allow me to deploy our training content to the whole company very quickly, and to reduce face-to-face training times. My costs will be reduced, I’ll improve the return on investment.’

The Chief Learning Officer: ‘How can I measure my coworkers’ real learning impact? How can I measure with tangible results what they actually learnt?’

The managers: ‘Are these training programs concrete? My team doesn’t have any time to waste.’

The employees: ‘I hope the training content will be interesting.’

12 steps to calculate the ROI of training

In the end, the calculation of the ROI comes from a group of questions to be answered first.

These 12 questions aims at obtaining a positive and lasting return on investment with corporate continuous training.

How many employees like to train?
How many employees really train?
How many employees train with qualitative content?
How many employees remember what they learnt?
How many employees apply what they learnt in their day-to-day jobs?
How many employees are more efficient thanks to what they learnt?
On how many professional tasks are these employees more efficient?
How are these employees performing better?
Is the company seeing the result of this better performance thanks to tangible and measurable results?
Is these results important to senior executives and management?
Is the Direction Committee rewarding these results?
Is the reward valorized by the employee?

If you apply a conversion rate to each of these questions, you will obtain a ROI calculation and an estimate of this feedback loop efficiency. Obviously, the more your conversion rates will be high, the better will be your ROI.

Does this solve the main problem of HRs?

No.

The calculation is complex. These tasks cannot be completed by HR executives only. HR executives cannot impact all of these elements. Learning, learning tools, content, pedagogy, trainers, senior executives are also playing an important part in this cycle. We also know there will be loss at each step.

To illustrate what I’m saying, let’s say we apply a 70% conversion rate to each steps.

On the 70% of employees who like to train, 70% are actually training for real. 70% of those former 70% are training with qualitative content, 70% of those remember it… And so on – you get it!

At the end of the 10th question, it’s easy to understand how it is complicated for a HR Director to justify the return on investment of continuous training.. The direction will only look at the result in the end: here, it’s a 2,82% performance (70%^10).

How to maximize your impact as a HR Director?

On which key performance indicators do you have the most impact?

Basically, on the first 4 steps of this cycle: make people enjoy learning, make training more accessible, provide qualitative content and improve how people memorize and learn.

If – thanks to you – you achieve getting 75% people enjoying training and learning instead of 70%, with 75% of them actually and effectively training, with then 75% of them training with qualitative content and 75% of them – the ones who train with qualitative content – memorizing better, then your impact will almost be perceived as twice as better than previously: 4,96% of performance! This is the KPI the Direction Committee will study and see as important!

The 4 key steps

MAKE PEOPLE ENJOY LEARNING!

To transmit the will to learn to someone is often a balance between what’s mandatory to learn and the will to give knowledge as a trainer, whether the trainer is a parent, friend, teacher, manager, coworker of HR manager.

To say that a student or a coworker doesn’t want to learn is a mistake. Everybody enjoys learning, but not on all topics and not if the learning process is boring, annoying or sometimes humiliating. It’s normal that the school system or some training programs are disregarded because of these observations.

A very few of us wake up in the morning wishing to learn theories we won’t be able to apply in real life, for hours, before to be tested via a quiz that won’t explain the notions we might have not understood previously.

A good User Experience is the essential basis in any training programs, whether it is in face-to-face learning or e-learning. Do you want to learn in a freezing classroom with boring teachers? Do you want to learn on a e-learning platform full of bugs where you can easily get lost? NO.

To exit the scheme of traditional learning and understand what really drives learners, we need to understand the Facebook quiz scheme. Why does a Facebook quiz engage students more than a lecture course in a large classroom, on a topic students voluntarily chosen?

Answer: format and methodology.

When Facebook asks you 10 questions to see which country would be the most suitable for you, your brain understands it’s a game, without challenges, in which you will probably learn something. Used in pedagogical ends, reverse questioning can be very efficient.

We need to deeply change the way we see training, and the solution doesn’t lay in what we were used to at school. Gamification can bring us a part of the answer. If you’re skeptical about the benefits of gaming, I invite you to take a look at the proportions of video games players per age ranks in France in 2018. The good balance between the game aspects and the learning ones is still to be found though.

MAKE TRAINING MORE ACCESSIBLE!

When does someone want to train? The morning before going to work, or going to work? When facing a business challenge? During a meeting? In the evening? Between two meetings?

Like any desires, it can happen anytime! We’re not robots: the urge or the desire to learn something new can pretty much happen all the time.

What is fuelling this desire?

Sometimes it’s a life goal, sometimes it’s a weak stimulus, something that got you curious at the coffee machine: ‘Did you hear about the latest scandal of misappropriation of funds by top executives of this famous international bank?’

10 minutes after, you’ll probably be reading press articles about the case, on your laptop or your smartphone.

From the beginning of content conception, we need to think it – the training content – to be as accessible as possible, on any support, at any time, from wherever we are.

PROVIDE QUALITATIVE CONTENT!

Would you rather look for information yourself among thousands of possible results or receive the most accurate information, summarized?

Don’t make the mistake of seeking volume over quality. By doing this – volume over quality – you’ll reduce your coworkers’ engagement, lose their trust and it’ll be way more difficult to monitor their progress on a large volume of content. Without mentioning how difficult it would be to update all content pieces.

2 options are available if you’re looking for qualitative content: look for the experts in each skill fields or look for training players who chose the quality of content as the main part of their editorial lines.

In order to massively and internationally deploy your training programs, keep in mind that your main constraint will be the cost of deployment of your training courses. For this reason, digital learning is a very interesting tool to massively and instantly deploy your content all over the world, at reduced costs.

IMPROVE HOW PEOPLE MEMORIZE AND LEARN!

What are the best practices to memorize information?

Some use the ‘Method of loci‘ to improve memorization, others simply follow training programs.

To repeat several times is a well-known technique to improve memorization. Right now, the buzz word is blended learning: mixing training methods to repeat information while avoiding the monotony of repetitions. Blended learning became very popular among large corporations but might not be enough to ensure information retention.

Well-thought quizzes where each right answer can get you a bigger bonus of points than previously will motivate you to repeat your actions without feeling it is boring or annoying. It’s the art of gaming: making you better while having fun.

The challenges – ‘Battle’ on the Coorpacademy platform – between learners are a good example of efficient gamified repetitions, especially for people who like to challenge themselves and others. It particularly suits salespeople.

At last, pedagogy need to stay at the heart of the learning system. Forcing someone to learn doesn’t guarantee – at all – the memorization of information. Sometimes we think we know the topic already and we don’t want to go through the ‘learning step’ before answering questions and actually test our knowledge. Why then force a learner to watch a video, learning material before answering any question? The learner could simply answer, make a mistake, relearn, redo it a bit later. This counts already for 2 repetitions, while it’s not more expensive, and the key learning factors will probably be way more memorized by the learner than if he/she was working on a classical learning format (the course, then the questions, then the evaluation).

To improve information retention, memorization, one needs to master the art of repeating while making the experience pleasant and enjoyable for the learner.

To sum up…

The return on investment of training is still hard to measure. A lot of factors – and most of the times factors that you can’t impact as a HR leader – need to be taken into account. But it is possible – still as a HR leader – to impact positively the ROI.

At the Human Resources level, it’s by making people enjoy learning, making training more accessible, providing qualitative content and improving how people memorize and learn that you’ll increase significantly the impact of continuous training on teams’ performance.

A few ingredients are essential to a good learning process: desire, pedagogy, repetition, top-notch user experience.

For an efficient international deployment for organizations of +1000 employees, e-learning and more particularly Learning Experience Platforms (LEP/LXP) became the essential tool which guarantees instant deployment at reduced costs.

Continuous training is even more important today as new jobs are created and others disappear before we even invented the right training for them. Learning how to learn is becoming essential in order to maintain one’s future employability. Training on soft skills is becoming more and more important as studies from the World Economic Forum and McKinsey show it.

BONUS

Why companies serious about training need to embrace a new generation of e-learning tools? – An article of Jean-Marc Tassetto, co-founder of Coorpacademy, published in Computer Business Review.

By the way, last but not least…

If you Googled the ‘Method of loci‘, you’re among the learners that are proactive in the way they learn. Congratulations!

If you haven’t but now want to Google it while reading this, it proves that it just takes a small stimulus to make people wanting to learn 😉

How to Stop Worrying About a Jobless Future? An article from Jean-Marc Tassetto, co-founder of Coorpacademy

This article has been originally published in Bdaily Business News. It has been written by Jean-Marc Tassetto, co-founder of Coorpacademy. To read it in its original form, it’s here.

Digital business transformation and training expert Jean-Marc Tassetto, co-founder of Coorpacademy and former head of Google France, says new ways of helping employees to ’upskill’ are on their way.

Here are some extracts of the article:

“We all know that Artificial Intelligence and automation are coming at us at breakneck speed. So how will business cope? Will we all be unemployed soon?

According to The World Economic Forum, technologies like AI and Robotic Process Automation are indeed entering every profession, and at speed. But does that mean fewer jobs, as so many fear – or a completely new set of career opportunities?”

[…]

“That means we all need to change jobs and careers multiple times throughout our lives: an ability to adapt will be critical. Against this backdrop, the job of the responsible business owner is to create ways to help their employees access the kind of training that might help them adjust, as well as cope with any new advanced tech you introduce yourself.

This is being crystallised down as the need to create a ‘learning culture’ – encouraging workers to gain new skills that organisations require now or in the future and in attracting and retaining talent.

One problem: we’re not doing that yet. Training and HR teams are there to provide the resources, tools and time to support learning, scheduling the diaries and career plans of staff, booking the armies of trainers and projectors, and making hundreds of hours of relevant content available. But, traditional training culture seems to assume staff are passive objects that simply get shuffled in and out of all those training rooms!”

[…]

“To get workplace training back to where it should be, this needs to change. In particular, if we are serious about our commitment to re- and up-skill and prepare for that near future, we need a way to connect back with the employee and deliver what they want. We also need to rethink the way training has traditionally been delivered – and we have to ask ourselves if it is realistic to expect people who work remotely and anytime, to stop everything and sit in front of a trainer with a PPT and a laser pointer for eight solid hours.

What does that look like in practice? Actually, very similar to what you and I are already doing in our day-to-day lives, and especially the Millennials and digital natives on your team. We live on our phones and we all try and make dead time waiting for a train as useful as possible, looking for content. We refuse to be delayed by a knowledge gap, turning to the Internet to plug any lack of understanding – and we might play a mobile game for a minute or two during a lunch break.”

[…]

“The old method of scheduling fixed hours needs to be discarded in favour of a blended learner-chosen model, where classroom training could be supported by a virtual environment in which all lessons and material are digital and available, 24×7 and increasingly via mobile and in short bursts. In addition, incorporating gamification and collaboration features will increase staff engagement by activating the joy of competition, too.

Such learner-centric approaches really work – and can, our data shows, secure user engagement levels for digital training content of more than 80%.”

You can read the article in its complete and original form here!

Discover other articles from Jean-Marc Tassetto, co-founder of Coorpacademy:

Let’s welcome a new dawn of behavioural learning analytics – TrainingZone

Why Training is an Under-Used Source of Employee Insight – Incentive & Motivation

Jean-Marc Tassetto’s interview for French television (BFM Business).

Interview BNP Paribas Asset Management: Digit’learning, an upskilling tool with gaming elements

To accelerate the upskilling of branch advisors and “deliver durable returns on investment for our customers in the long term”, BNP PARIBAS ASSET MANAGEMENT, the group’s division specialising in asset management, chose to complement its training package (in-class and online) with an innovative digital learning solution: the Digit’learning platform.

Developed by Coorpacademy and co-created with the company’s marketing department, the platform offers several training courses on BNP Paribas Asset Management’s financial products. 6,000 advisors have used the platform since 2018 to develop their expertise.

On the forefront of innovation, the company headed by Frédéric Janbon just announced the reinforcement of its commitment to sustainable investments.

We sat down with Sylvie Vazelle-Tenaud, Head Of Marketing For Individuals, Advisors and Online Banks, and Camille Lafon, E-Marketing Manager, who were kind enough to answer our questions.

What are your main functions within BNP Paribas Asset Management?

Our role is to conduct the promotion of BNP Paribas Asset Management products within the BNP Paribas group’s distribution networks and towards individual clients. We also provide our sales teams in different countries innovative digital marketing solutions to help them conduct efficient training and provide the right information for branch advisors.

What was the problem you wanted to solve with Coorpacademy? And what was your objective?

We wanted to increase the expertise of our branch advisors on BNP Paribas Asset Management products. Considering the number of people targeted (nearly 12,000 employees), we needed a solution that would complement the training and information provided by BNP Paribas Asset Management sales representatives in the field. The digital solution was the most efficient way to reach that objective quickly.

How do advisors become familiar with BNP Paribas Asset Management products?

We use two ways to help them build their expertise and learn on BNP Paribas Asset Management products.

The first way is conducted either through physical presence in the field or via web-conferences with BNP Paribas Asset Management sales teams in every country where BNP Paribas has a distribution network.

The second way is done remotely, with pedagogical videos, online learning modules and games on digital platforms deployed across the entire network worldwide (challenges for building virtual allocation portfolios, for example)

What did the Coorpacademy platform add to the equation?

The Coorpacademy platform provided innovation and pedagogy. It is different from traditional online learning thanks to its additional gaming aspect. It also offers flexibility in learning without being time-consuming, as the average duration of an entire learning journey is 20 minutes. Employees build their expertise in record time while having fun!

The learners seem to be open to playing and use the gaming functionalities a lot (over 70,000 battles have been initiated). Do you think gamification is a key success factor in acquiring expertise?

Yes, absolutely. We present the platform as a tool for gaining expertise with a gaming aspect. In our communication, we mainly highlight the functionality of “lives” (to complete a level, an employee has 3 lives, represented as hearts on the platform; one wrong answer and they lose a heart/life, after 3 wrong answers, they must start again with a new quiz). We also highlight the fact they can earn stars (stars reward the completion of a course: the ranking of employees is ultimately defined by the number of stars earned). This functionality enables us to generate emulation between employees and make them want to take the courses again. Conversely, we didn’t communicate very much about battles (a functionality on the Coorpacademy platform which lets a player challenge another one on a course, with stars to win for the player with the most correct answers) but the employees discovered that functionality on their own and loved it!

What are the main results you observed?

Lots of enthusiasm! User feedback is a good indicator:

“Great digital initiative! Very good pedagogical approach.”
“The platform is user-friendly thanks to the battles, much better than traditional online learning!”
“Very clear, the videos are graphically pleasing, and just the right length!”
“A way of revising that is quick and efficient, very succinct content, congenial platform.”

And once people are connected, the activation rate is high, the courses are often taken to the end, and the employees are even asking for more programs. The gaming functionalities are highly used and have a strong part in the enthusiasm surrounding the platform.

How do you create your tailor-made courses on the Coorpacademy platform?

We work according to the commercial calendar of each country and create upskilling programs designed to support the reach of pre-defined commercial objectives. At the marketing department, we define with the BNP Paribas Asset Management sales teams the content of the courses, which is then validated by the concerned distribution network. Once this step is over, the marketing team takes charge of the writing process of the scripts, makes suggestions for the videos, and everything is sent for production to Coorpacademy.

We generally launch one program per trimester in each country. We have already completed 10, and we have a dozen more in the pipeline for 2019!

Thank you very much!

Thank you!

Tag: management