The HR themes of the recovery: what are the skills to develop to go back to work serenely?

 

September is the end of the vacations and the return to the office, but it is also the time to start all over again, the beginning of a new chapter. This new school year is particular, it follows a long period where individuals and companies had to adapt in record time. In a world in upheaval, what are the key HR issues of 2021? What skills are already essential to meet the challenges of the new year?  Let’s discover the chapter that is being written.

 

Transforming to last

The list of skills you can develop by accessing the more than 1,800 courses available in our premium content catalog covers all those deemed indispensable by the World Economic Forum for 2025.

This year, the most sought-after topics on our platforms reflect the upheavals that companies and their organizations are facing. The key competencies to support managerial, digital, cultural and organizational transformations are widely represented in the catalog, as shown by the top 5 competencies covered in terms of number of courses offered.

Continuous learning to evolve in a changing world 

Learning allows you to progress and evolve, and in a context as changing as the one we know today, it is a key to ensuring the relevance of the skills you will develop to face the challenges that the future holds.

So which courses make you want to learn the most? Let’s find out in the top 5 most played courses of 2021:

  1. The course “Communicate effectively to collaborate better” co-edited with Dunod Formation, which gains 2 places compared to the 2020 ranking.
  2. The Coorpacademy course “Big Data”, which loses 1 place compared to the 2020 ranking, but which remains a must!
  3. The course “Adopt an agile culture” published by Coorpacademy, which enters the Top 5 by gaining 4 places compared to the 2020 ranking.
  4. The course “Solving complex problems with the 4S method” co-edited with Bernard Garrette and Olivier Sibony, which also makes a triumphant entry in this Top 5 2021, gaining 10 places compared to the 2020 ranking.
  5. The course “1 hour to stop stressing and stay zen” co-edited by Dunod Formation, which remains in the Top 5 despite losing one place compared to the 2020 ranking

Key skills for the future 

Training plays a crucial role in ensuring that your employees develop their skills and adapt to the new expectations of the job market.

In view of the top 5 skills consumed in the 2nd quarter of 2021, our learners are already ready to serenely apprehend the uncertainties of tomorrow’s world:

Topics that are on the rise

The skills found in the top 5 skills consumed in 2021 do not vary so much from those whose consumption is growing fastest in Q2 2021. The need to meet new employee expectations and adapt to new ways of working is only intensifying. Not surprisingly, digital literacy skills are on the rise, as the digital transformation of companies is never done

The start of the HR season will not take place without the transformation of companies, and consequently, not without an increase in the skills of all employees. To accompany them in the changes that are already concrete, soft skills will be essential.

Thus, to apprehend the start of the 2021 school year, we recommend:

  • To know and understand the technological evolutions that are taking place more and more rapidly;
  • Develop your ability to identify, understand and react appropriately to the emotions of others in order to promote team cohesion;
  • Demonstrate flexibility and agility to respond effectively to current and future developments
  • Successfully leverage relevant company data to create value
  • Manage your teams in the best conditions, including remotely, while making good use of diversity
  • To learn continuously on Coorpacademy, to increase your skills while having fun!

It is better to have 1 engaging course than 1000 boring courses

Most Digital Learning providers rely on a platform that provides a large library of content from various experts to cover as many topics as possible. While this may be a useful argument for HR decision-makers looking to provide employees with as much training content as possible, is it really the best approach to effective learning?

Wanting to learn

Do you remember, in high school, when looking at the clock slowed down time? Strangely enough, as soon as you participated, time returned to its normal course… Today, thanks to cognitive science, we can explain this phenomenon in a rational way. During our schooling, we get used to learning in a passive way, sitting on our chair, raising our hand and waiting for someone to give us the right – or wrong – answer. This pedagogical approach is based on the transmission of knowledge, and is centered on the teacher, who comes to deliver his knowledge in a unilateral way. The exchange is restricted, participation is a privilege. Beyond the inequalities that passive learning creates – and reinforces – within a class, we want to address the reasons why this method of learning is ineffective in terms of deep learning and retention of information.

 

At Coorpacademy, our pedagogical team, at the origin of the creation and co-edition of all the courses of our premium content catalog, relies on active learning. As you will have understood, this pedagogical approach is centered on the learner, and not on the teacher. Our quiz-based courses are based on the flipped learning method: we ask the questions, and it’s up to the learner to draw on their knowledge to test their skills! Because the learner is also involved in the learning process, his or her cognitive biases are more stimulated, which will encourage attention and retention of information. From then on, the learner is committed to his training, which he sees as a real opportunity to progress, for his own benefit. 

Engaging and quality content

What differentiates Coorpacademy courses from all the other courses that you may play in your life, is the quality and relevance of the content to your training needs. Indeed, if our unique pedagogy and our functionalities borrowed from gaming are key assets to engage learners, the quality and the relevance of the content of our courses are essential for a real rise in competence.

To ensure that our courses deliver truly effective content, our educational team is still on the job. Thus, all the courses in our catalog are created by our pedagogical team or co-created with partner publishers, experts on certain subjects. Moreover, if you wish to know more about the recipe of Coorpacademy courses, we advise you to read the interview of Solène Rascle, educational engineer. Everything that is given to learn: the reading of documents, the viewing of our short course videos, and the course questions are read and reread by our pedagogical engineers, who carry out an important work of verification of sources, to ensure the relevance of the information contained in the course.

Stimulate curiosity

Continuous learning is about being curious throughout your life. Curiosity is an essential quality to progress, because if we focus on what we already know, we don’t have the opportunity to evolve. So our courses are also designed to stimulate the learners’ curiosity. As soon as they answer a question, a screen to explain the answer appears. Whether the answer is right or wrong, one element always appears: a “Did you know? This insert is an opportunity to complete the answer while amusing the learner with general or unusual information.

This little insert is also a way of saying to our learners: keep learning! Sure, you got the right answer, but learning never stops, there is always information that can add to your knowledge, and that’s why continuous learning is essential to progress.

 

 

In conclusion, for effective learning, interaction with course content is far more impactful than interaction with a large number of courses. The more learners are stimulated in their learning, the more effective the courses will be. With the active learning mode, the cognitive engagement of learners is reinforced by the manipulation of information, or by an action on their part. Thus, their attention is required, not to say solicited. In short, it is better to have 1 very engaging course, which makes the learner interact with the learning material, than to follow 1000 courses where the only interaction is that of your mouse clicking on pause, because you stopped following what was said 10 minutes ago.

Traveling abroad builds soft skills

 

August is coming to an end and with it, the taste of vacation. This month, we’ve told you about the formative virtues of travel. In this article, we would like to refer to another type of travel – perhaps one of the most formative – to which we want to refer. Whether you are a student or an employee, it is often advisable to gain international experience. In fact, you may know someone who is preparing for an Erasmus exchange year for one of their children or someone who is moving to a country with a different time zone. But even if it is only for a short period of time, travelling abroad is extremely useful to develop your soft skills! 

 

Interacting better with colleagues

Communicating with people from different cultures can be difficult. In the world of work, corporate culture differs greatly from country to country, and if you want to successfully build relationships, work in different regions, or simply visit a subsidiary or colleague abroad, it is essential to be comfortable with cultural differences!

When you travel abroad, you are confronted with the unknown, both literally and figuratively. You discover the behaviors of a society that is different from the one you know, and you witness the customs that govern it. To interact smoothly with the inhabitants of this country, avoiding misunderstandings, you will identify the attitude, vocabulary and communication approach best suited to your interlocutor. This way, as soon as you return from your trip, you will be ready to interact with people from different cultural backgrounds.

To go further: Cross cultural communication

Training your memory

Going on a trip requires a lot of organization, and we often leave with several things in mind. Train tickets, check; hotel reservations, check; knowing how to say thank you in Italian, check; so much information that puts our memory to work, especially when we find ourselves in front of the waiter and end up stammering a timid “grazie”.

Thus, when we travel, we stimulate a specific part of our brain: the prefrontal lobe and more particularly the hippocampus, this part of the cortex which allows us to pass from a short-term memory to the long-term memory. The hippocampus receives all the information decoded in the different sensory areas of the cortex, and sends it back to where it came from. A sort of sorting center that compares new sensations with those already recorded. The hippocampus reinforces the links between the different characteristics of a thing, and by dint of repeating the links between these new elements, the cortex will have learned to link the different characteristics itself to make what we call a memory.

Thus, when you are traveling abroad, your hippocampus is strongly stimulated, which improves your ability to memorize information in the long term!

To go further: Boost your memory

 

Improve your English – if you’re not an native English speaker

Well, English is still the most widely spoken international language in the world, with 1.348 billion native and second language speakers. Mastering English is essential for professional success and for interacting in multicultural environments.

Going abroad means practicing your English – unless you are a language whiz and have mastered the national language of the country you are going to – and improving your speaking skills.  Speaking in a foreign language is not always easy. It can be stressful and impact the way you deliver information, describe a situation or express a feeling. In fact, travel allows you to confront this challenge and get used to speaking a language that you don’t practice often enough.

To go further: Holding a meeting in English

Are companies prepared to deal with short-term environmental disasters?

 

On Monday, August 9, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) presented the first of three reports expected by 2022 as part of its sixth climate assessment cycle. This new report presents the current state of knowledge on the climate crisis, its origins, causes and impacts, and on possible actions to respond to the environmental emergency. The findings of this report represent a final warning to individuals, but especially to governments and businesses around the world.

 

“Life on earth can recover from major climate change by evolving into new species and creating new ecosystems. Humanity cannot.” – IPCC report

The urgency is not new, but it has never been so current.

Established in 1988 at the request of the G7, the 7 richest countries, by the World Meteorological Organization and the United Nations Environment Program, the IPCC synthesizes and assesses research conducted in laboratories around the world. Its fifth report, released in 2014, had already concluded that the human influence on climate systems was clear. But the new report, the sixth since 1990, allows the organization to be even more incisive about the direct link between human activity and current global warming.

If these reports provide essential elements to limit the extent of global warming and the severity of its impacts, it is up to governments, businesses and individuals to collectively organize and take concrete action in the face of the facts highlighted.

What is currently happening in the world, such as the megafires all over the planet from California to the Mediterranean basin or Australia, are the direct consequences of climate change. And as the IPCC report concludes, directly linked to human activity. The consequences exposed by scientists for several years are a strong argument for action, yet this sixth report still has the effect of a bomb. Today, humanity does not have time for a seventh report, we already know the conclusions, but we can contribute to write a few lines, if we act now.

 

The ecological crisis: a risk for companies

In our model of infinite growth and exploitation of (limited) natural resources, only a radical transformation of our modes of production, consumption and lifestyle can limit the catastrophic consequences for which we are responsible.

“Our current mode of development, based on a linear economy, is not sustainable.” – Célestine Julien, Inter-Company Pathway Manager (GR20²°) at MySezame – In what world do we want to live in 30 years?

In business, environmental risk refers to the possibility of an accident occurring in a company, which would have harmful repercussions – direct or indirect – on the environment, people, company employees and the company’s objectives and reputation. Today, not only is this environmental risk unavoidable, but it also impacts the environment in which the company operates, i.e. the external factors that influence the proper functioning of a company, such as political, environmental, societal and economic aspects. The company’s strategy must then identify the climate emergency and evaluate how it impacts and threatens its activity. If the ecological transition is so necessary, it is because companies will not be able to exist in a world that is disappearing, or at least will not be able to survive if they do not accelerate their adaptation to climate change, the consequences of which we are already seeing. 

 

The IPCC report is clear. If global warming is limited to +2.0°C instead of +1.5°C, sea levels will rise by +30cm to +93cm, impacting more than 10 million people and the number of people affected by drought will increase by +410 million. Through these impacts, climate change is already influencing migration worldwide, and the United Nations predicts 200 million climate refugees by 2050. The impact of the migration crisis on the political and economic environment is obvious.

And internal consequences

Our modes of production are not sustainable. If the resources on which we depend are finite, it is not a shortage that we will face, but an impossibility to produce at all. Already following the pandemic, traders and businesses have faced a major shortage of raw materials, as in Canada where accumulated droughts and heavy rains have caused a drop in production and a rise in wheat prices. But in a few years, shortages may prove much more difficult to overcome. Reduced production, higher raw material prices, loss of personnel, the consequences of the ecological crisis on the production cycle is a risk that companies cannot ignore. 

Beyond the political, economic and logistical aspects, the ecological crisis also impacts a resource that is essential to business: people. On a personal level, we are all witnesses to this catastrophe, and we can sometimes feel even more helpless in the face of the emergency. Of course, we can each participate in the collective effort, but we are also aware that the emergency requires a radical and global change in our society. Thus, the anxious and cataclysmic environment in which we evolve every day with a feeling of powerlessness, has an impact on our personal well-being – not to say our mental health. In addition, the expectations of employees – and particularly of the new generations – have changed. To flourish, their work must have meaning and their values must be in line with those of the company.

The world as we know it today will no longer exist in a few years. To keep existing, companies will have to reinvent themselves, adapt and train in order to avoid the risks they face. If the ecological crisis has direct impacts on the company’s environment, it also has indirect consequences on its internal functioning. The strategy must therefore be aligned with this new reality, and the entire organization must adapt in order to anticipate certain now inevitable repercussions on their activities and businesses.

 

Because the problem is complex, the solutions will be in essence innovative. To act now, discover Coorpecology, the first training platform dedicated to the ecological transition. To quickly train all employees and give them the keys to build a viable future. Sustainable transformation can’t wait any longer, click here to learn more.

Trivial Pursuit : 2 new courses to make people love to learn

December 15, 1979, two friends who love board games decide to play a game. Scott Abbott, a sports journalist, and Chris Haney, a photographer for the Montreal Gazette, ask themselves: who is the better player?

One argument leads to another, and an idea germinates in the minds of the two friends on this cold Canadian night. They don’t know it yet, but they have just invented a board game that will become mythical…

Trivial Pursuit !

Vendu à 20 millions d’unités en 1984, le jeu Trivial Pursuit est depuis plus de 40 ans, le jeu de culture générale pour animer soirées ou après-midis en famille, entre amis, et entre collègues.

Selling 20 million units in 1984, Trivial Pursuit has been the general knowledge game to liven up evenings and afternoons with family, friends and colleagues for over 40 years.

And it is also a partner publisher of Coorpacademy’s emblematic courses for 1 year now. The Trivial Pursuit courses offered on the Coorpacademy platform cover different themes, each time with 30 general knowledge questions on the chosen subject.

 

A partnership for a love of learning

If we are proud to collaborate with Hasbro to enrich our training offer, it is because this partnership is the symbol of our deepest conviction: learning can be fun and entertaining, while remaining effective and engaging. Indeed, with this partnership, we combine our desire to deal with all existing soft skills (and general knowledge is one of them!) with our constant search for innovative and entertaining formats, which make people want to learn and, above all, love learning.

 

To date, 7 Trivial Pursuit courses are available on the Coorpacademy platforms, and we have just added 2 new courses accessible from today, 23 July 2021:

 

Trivial Pursuit courses

Science & Nature

Trivial Pursuit – Science & Nature

Geography

Trivial Pursuit – Geography

Entertainment

Trivial Pursuit – Entertainment

History

Trivial Pursuit – History

Arts & Literature

Trivial Pursuit – Arts & Literature

Sports & Leisure

Trivial Pursuit – Sports & Leisure

(New) Planet and Environment: 30 questions to test your knowledge of the circular economy, to develop your sustainable thinking and initiate change.

Trivial Pursuit – Planet and Environment

(New) Web & Technology: 30 questions specially created for those who think they know everything about the Internet, GAFAM and the big names of Silicon Valley.

Trivial Pursuit – Web and Technology

At the end of the programme, you can win a special certificate with all the pie charts to illustrate your general knowledge!

 

But what does an online Trivial Pursuit course look like?

Of course, you can find your Trivial Pursuit courses in your course catalogue:

Let’s choose the Planet and Environment course, published this week, which will allow you to develop the new essential skill for tomorrow’s world: sustainable thinking. It looks like a classic course, like all the courses you can find in the Coorpacademy catalogue. The same interface, a Basic, Advanced, and Coach level.

As part of this pie chart, you will, on completion of the Basic level, be able to :

  1. Know a simple technique for air conditioning homes
  2. Understand the concept of the circular economy

At the end of the Advanced level, you will be able to :

  1. Know which resource is the most exploited by humans after water
  2. Master the concept of grey energy

Finally, at the end of the Coach level, you will be able to : 

  1. Understand the etymology of the word “climate”
  2. Know the plant-based alternatives to leather

Three levels, increasing levels of difficulty. So far, nothing new.

The difference with another course lies in the structure of the questions, as well as in the way the course is “validated”. Each level will “ask” you 10 general knowledge questions. There is no lesson, no video. Each correct answer earns you 4 stars (as in any other course) and you need 6 correct answers out of 10 minimum to access the next level. Here is an example of a question:

In 2016, Bertrand Piccard made the first round-the-world trip in a…

solar-powered

nuclear-powered

hydrogen-powered

 

In a solar plane! By answering a question, whether you answer correctly or not, you will have access to these two irremovable elements of the Coorpacademy pedagogy. The Key Point, and Did You Know? As in the following screenshot:

 

Now you know everything! All you have to do is play the course. And it is perhaps in this context that the expression we regularly use (playing a course, rather than following it, for the entertainment dimension we try to add to all our training content) takes on its fullest meaning. 

It’s your turn to play!

TRIVIAL PURSUIT, the associated logo, the distinctive design of the game board, trivia cards, game tokens, and scoring wedges are trademarks of Hasbro and are used with permission. © 1981, 2020 Hasbro. All Rights Reserved. Licensed by Hasbro.

We truly engage learners in their training

Michelin, which employs 125,000 people worldwide, uses Coorpacademy as a platform for digital acculturation for all its employees. Catharina Bot, Group Competency Manager for the IT and Digital professions (3,000 people), spoke at one of the workshops of the We Love Our Clients by Coorpacademy programme about the advantages and positioning of the platform. According to Catharina Bot, one of the main challenges of online training is to succeed in “bringing learners in and constantly renewing their interest! She gives us concrete details of the actions deployed to successfully meet this challenge.  

Q.1 : In order to acculturate employees in digital technology, what was important for you in choosing the training platform?   

The first criterion was to have content that was completely adapted to our needs, i.e. dealing with “soft skills” associated with digital and accessible in several languages. This training content also had to be available in microlearning mode, so that learners could follow independent five-minute modules on the subjects of their choice.

Another much needed requirement on our side, and one that was much appreciated by the top learners, was to have a mobile application where all the courses on the platform and its progress can be found. This will also allow us to reach the on-site manufacturing agents, who represent about half of the Michelin population.

Finally, the last element that seemed essential to us was the possibility of structuring the online learning paths to avoid the learner feeling lost in the 1700 modules offered, and wondering what to do! Hence the creation and promotion of “digital passports” (3 certifications of increasing level on digital) grouping together the courses considered as fundamental.

In short, the Digital Culture platform is just what we need!

Q.2 : Tell us about the flagship event organised annually at Michelin around digital: the Digital Week! 

Digital Week is an annual event that has already taken place twice in person, and which has been transformed into a 100% digital and remote event, due to the pandemic. The aim is to show everyone all the digital achievements made in the group, and to share with as many people as possible the vision of what the group wants to do in this area.

We had to deal with the transition of Digital Week to 100% remote, and to keep the interactive and fun side, we decided to use the platform as a tool for animation during this event.

In concrete terms, we deployed a program of challenges using the training platform. This enabled us to reach an even wider audience than the one usually involved in Digital Week. Digital should not remain the exclusive preserve of the IT and digital professions, but should permeate all levels of the organisation.

Q.3: How did you use the Digital Culture training platform at the Digital Week event?

The animations aimed to introduce the platform, engage learners, and of course, intelligently complement the other Digital Week workshops and remote presentations. Our aim during the week was to build a coherent and attractive experience to promote digital within the group.

To do this, we first selected the most relevant content and launched this challenge programme. I can think of three animations in particular. The first animation consisted in setting up and promoting a “Digital IQ test” allowing learners to assess their level of digital skills at the beginning of the week, and again at the end of the event. The second, called “Star Week”, allowed participants to obtain bonus stars to move up in the ranking. The third animation, called “Battle Week”, rewarded the participants who had launched and won the most duels (battles) on a series of questions!

As a result, we have seen a 3-4 fold increase in platform activity during the week of Digital Week and the following week.

One of the key success factors was the active collaboration with our Customer Success Manager at Coorpacademy, Catherine McKernan, who helped us to create and coordinate the animations and communication.

Q.4 : Do you have any tips and good practices to share on how to successfully engage learners?

Thanks to the modular courses and the certificates, we really engage the learners in the training. However, we do not impose anything, we rely on events, or on Coorpacademy’s communication, through personalised follow-up emails (Note: intelligent follow-up emails sent automatically by the platform according to the learner’s activity). 

Also to boost employee motivation, we offer prizes to be won (purchase vouchers) during the events and games organised on the platform. The winners are also highlighted and promoted via a dedicated Sharepoint.

Soon, we will be running an internal promotion campaign based on learners’ testimonials, following an assiduous collection, so that everyone can see what the platform can do for them and thus increase the number of people and their attendance!

Finally, another avenue that we are exploring is to offer highly specialised, tailor-made content, in response to the natural demand from the professions to have their specific training courses on this platform.

We are constantly trying to reinvent ourselves in order to develop our employees’ commitment to training day after day.

A digital Escape Game to raise awareness of recruitment and integration of people with disabilities

SQLI, a European digital services group with 2200 employees, has been using Coorpacademy as a digital learning solution for 2 years. Within the framework of the workshops of our We Love Our Clients programme, Alexis Guillotin, Group Development and Training Manager, shared with us the backstage of the most original animation of 2020, aimed at learners and rewarded a few months ago by a Coorpacademy Award.

Q.1 : Where did the idea of offering a digital Escape Game on your online training platform come from?

We had the idea of taking advantage of the European Week for the Employment of People with Disabilities (EWPD) to raise awareness of the recruitment and integration of people with disabilities. This week took place last November and so our plans were disrupted because of the lockdown imposed at that time.

We had a double challenge. The first was to create an event for the whole group, simultaneously in several countries, several languages and which could be done at a distance!

There was also the question of the content, and how to disseminate it to raise awareness of disability. With this in mind, we chose our Coorpacademy digital learning platform Onegenius to reach all our employees. We worked on the content with the agency T by Talenteo, an agency that supports us on the subject of disability, and then, with the help of Coorpacademy, we decided to adapt it to integrate it into the Onegenius platform in order to benefit from its gamification aspect.

We had noticed the great success of a playful format among our teams: the digital Escape Game! It allows you to learn without realizing it, by solving puzzles to move to the next level! We therefore reused our existing initial content, but put it into this new format in order to raise awareness among our employees while keeping the gamification aspect.

Q.2: How did you go about setting up this Escape Game?

The Escape Game: Disability Awareness was created, translated and put online in a record time of one month. The idea was to make it clear how the five disabilities we had listed (essentially non-visible disabilities) impact the daily lives and therefore the work of the people concerned.

We decided to turn the tables: each level of the Escape Game takes the learner to a world where people with attention deficit disorder, autism or visual impairment are in the majority. It is up to the learner to adapt!

The pitch was as follows: “Travel aboard a ship in other dimensions where the disabilities you know are mostly shared. Practice with our simulation module to better understand the daily consequences of each of these disorders and diseases.”

Q.3: What communication actions did you carry out to promote this game event? Are you satisfied with the results?

We set up a very fast-paced communication campaign to ensure that as many employees as possible tried to solve the Escape Game and were effectively made aware of disability during this European week.

The first step was to send out a teaser by e-mail a week beforehand.

All the members of the CODIR participated in the promotion and were active relays.

Then, each day of the week, the learners were reminded by e-mail to invite them to travel to a new dimension, with five disabilities being covered. Finally, all the employees received a summary email containing all the stages and solutions to the riddles of this unique journey, so that everyone could finish or redo the game as they wished.

We are pleased with the results, as we observed a 280% increase in connections on the platform during the week of the animation.

And all the countries played the game! Beyond the figures, in this particular year, the Escape Game helped to unite the teams and encourage exchanges between them, as well as raising awareness about diversity and disabilities.

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. 

 

The Coorpacademy platform as a progression tool for employees: a Square Management success

 

Since 2019, we have been supporting Square Management‘s employees in training, in order to promote their upskilling on various subjects and their progression within the group.

Square Management met with one of the 3 co-founders of Coorpacademy, Arnauld Mitre, to discuss the benefits of this partnership. Back to this interview which describes the projects and successes of this partnership!

A continuously evolving collaboration

This partnership with Square Management began in early 2019. The platform was first made available within two of the group’s practices and then, as more and more employees showed their commitment to training on Coorpacademy, we expanded the partnership to the entire group practice in early 2020. To date, we have trained around 700 Square Management employees thanks to the Coorpacademy platform.

 

Why choose Coorpacademy as your online training solution? 

The need expressed by Square Management was clear. Training was a pillar to accompany the progression of the employees within the group and to enable them to increase their skills, improve their performance and guarantee their employability. Thus, several elements guided the choice of the consulting firm:

 

A catalog of premium content 

The off-the-shelf catalog that we offer contains premium contents, with courses created in collaboration with publishing partners and our team of educational engineers, and also the possibility of using an authoring tool in order to add their own content to the training catalog. Square Management also chose Coorpacademy to accompany the training of their employees because the consulting firm had a real need to train on specific subjects, such as management, leadership and other soft skills, which our catalog covers in depth.

 

Certifying courses, to validate the expertise of the consultants

Another success factor of the Coorpacademy platform within Square Management is the possibility to validate a range of courses corresponding to a field of excellence of the consulting firm. With this functionality, the consultants could concretely validate their acquired knowledge but also motivate themselves to complete the set of courses thanks to the delivery of a certificate once the set is completed. One of the success factors of the platform today is therefore the strong match between Coorpacademy and Square’s training teams, which gives employees the possibility to use the platform as a tool for their career progression.

 

Employees seduced by the platform gaming universe 

Another aspects that has generated so much enthusiasm for Coorpacademy is the significant attraction for the gaming universe that the platform offers and which is also possible thanks to our pedagogy. Indeed, the Square consultants particularly appreciate the video game inspired functionalities: the quiz format, the player’s life which designates the chance given to them to progress in the course, the battles between learners, etc. The consultants really played the game. This motivation is also rewarded, because we also have a feature that is obviously rather positive, where we present the 20 best participants on the platform. This motivates learners to go to the platform and challenge each other to commit to training.

 

Pedagogical innovations to encourage collaboration

At Coorpacademy, our objective is to release one pedagogical innovation per quarter. The latest one: the Escape Game “The Forum of Babel“. In this innovative format, learners will join forces to climb the four floors of the digital Tower of Babel. Each week, they are provided with documents and clues to solve a riddle. A Babel Forum is also available for peer-to-peer exchange. In this Escape Game, collaboration is key to finding the answers to the riddles. Employees had only one week to decipher each puzzle and reach the top of the tower! This format generated a lot of engagement among Square Management’s consultants, who won the collaboration award with the highest number of exchanges on the forums.

Previously, we also launched an interactive series, “Suspects“, where the goal was to help conduct three interrogations – one per episode – by applying behavioral skills, the famous soft skills. And most recently, we launched a podcast series called “Cybercafé“, to learn about the great history of the Web!

 

A final word 

The success of this collaboration would not have been as great without the involvement of Square Management’s training teams, with whom we are thrilled to keep this partnership going. We look forward to seeing the learners engage in their training and learn things! As Arnauld Mitre reminds us, at Coorpacademy, we believe that all means are good to learn something, even the most unusual ones, such as gaming.

 

New skills available on the Coorpacademy catalog!

 

Coorpacademy’s catalog is being renewed to better meet the training expectations of tomorrow. In a constantly evolving environment, it is necessary to know how to train continuously. To do so, it is crucial to identify the essential skills to be acquired. As mentioned in our article on the 10 key skills to be developed by 2025, identified by the World Economic Forum in its Future of Jobs 2020 report, training is essential to prepare companies and employees for the challenges that will disrupt them, and to anticipate the major transformations to come. While we already cover 100% of the skills identified by the World Economic Forum, we are investing in new skills for the future, such as sustainable thinking!

Therefore, we are glad to enrich our training catalog with 3 new skills. The ones that we, and the World Economic Forum, believe will shape the future of work in the years to come. In order to better accompany you in the training of your employees, in your upskilling or simply to feed your curiosity, discover the new skills to be developed on Coorpacademy:

Adaptability and Resilience

Showing adaptation and resilience is crucial in all circumstances. We can never say it enough, being prepared for the unexpected is essential to remain efficient and not to be destabilized by the obstacles we encounter. For companies, developing a culture of adaptability and resilience allows them to prepare for the unexpected, paradoxically. 2020 has shown that the unexpected is often confusing, which is why you should learn how to react to such situations, and do so before the next event.

Sustainable thinking 

The next (r)evolution will be ecological and to prepare for it, we are adding the competence entitled “sustainable thinking” in the Coorpacademy catalog. The ecological transformation of companies involves numerous stakes and the changes it implies must be thought sustainably, in order to conceive an organization that would take into account its whole ecosystem (economic, social and environmental) to build a sustainable model. To begin the acculturation to these vital subjects, we’re adding the sustainable thinking competence to the Coorpacademy catalog!

Learning to learn 

Because learning is not always easy, between notification and lack of concentration, we think it is important to go back to the basics: learning to learn. This is the theme of the new skill added to the Coorpacademy catalog. Rediscover the mechanism of your brain, to better understand the way it processes information and thus learn more efficiently. As we evolve in an uncertain world, learning to learn is essential to develop your adaptability and respond rapidly to the transformations of your profession. Become a learning ace with this new skill available on Coorpacademy! 

By enriching the Coorpacademy catalog with new skills, we enable companies to promote their transformation(s).  To ensure a successful digital transition, discover the 3 main skills to acquire:

Digital transformation: what if it is not over? Discover the top 3 skills for a successful transition

To discover in detail the new skills available in the Coorpacademy catalog, click here.

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