Lessons from Convergence: How to drive content engagement

For two days, Cornerstone's global customer community virtually gathered to participate in sessions focused on turning change into opportunities for everyone at Cornerstone Convergence.

Under the theme of "Meet the Moment," Convergence provided HR and talent leaders the opportunity to connect with peers, thought leaders and the Cornerstone team to share strategic insights, lessons learned and success stories on creating inspired, aligned and successful workforces.

One of the terrific sessions on the conference agenda centered on how to strategically align your learning and content strategies to create meaningful development experiences.

In the session, Good to great: Six strategies for driving content engagement, adoption & impact, Tom Cush, manager of the Cornerstone Content Experience team, and Jarrad Skinner, learning experience designer with Cornerstone, revealed a few strategies for developing and executing successful content initiatives that drive business impact.

Here are some of the strategies outlined in their session:

Start with a goal tied to a pain

Before you roll out new training, identify pain points in your company that you believe content can solve. If you're struggling, think back to why your organization invested in content. Then set goals to ease that pain.

For example, let's say your company bought content because of low employee retention. You've seen teams are missing deadlines and employee surveys suggest people are unclear on what skills they need to advance. You can set a few specific goals to target these pains, such as improving employee survey results about career growth, increasing internal employee promotions by the end of the year, and increasing employee retention by a certain date.

Get stakeholders involved

As you roll out the training content, get stakeholders involved in the process.

"Getting stakeholders on board and making sure they know how your goals align with bigger goals in your organization is a good start," says Skinner. "Getting stakeholders involved in the promotion of training content is great! Can they send an email talking about the content and what they hope people will learn and achieve with it?"

A simple action like this shows that stakeholders support the initiative.

Target learners and managers

Managers and individual contributors are the main targets of training rollouts. With the right support, managers can be the key to change in an organization.

One way to support them is by holding enablement sessions to help them understand content offerings and how to use Cornerstone content. If you can help them understand how this training benefits their teams as well as them personally, managers will be more invested in the training and can help their direct reports get invested too.

Launch ongoing initiatives

Launching an ongoing initiative can reinforce the importance of the training content.

For example, you can post training reminders in newsletters or recap important learnings points in blog posts. The Cornerstone Activation Materials go along with some of the content that includes training launch templates, reminders, posters and flyers, team discussion guides and more that you can roll out over time to reinforce training courses.

Tie content to events

In addition to regularly promoting content, you can align training to certain events.

You can try rolling out goal-setting training just before your company's performance review cycle or assigning change management training after announcing organization changes.

You don't have to restrict these rollouts to just internal events; look at the annual calendar and get creative. Like how October 10 is World Mental Health Day. Maybe assign training about mental health at work throughout the month.

Making training timely and relevant can help make it more impactful.

Track your success

How can you make sure your rollout plan is actually working? You can set goals to see if your plan is making an impact on your organization, such as month-over-month usage, total content views, and more.

"Beyond that, you should look back to the goals you set before launching your program," says Cush. "How are you progressing towards these goals? Do the goals need adjusting? Has your success towards these goals reduced the pain points identified? Also of this information is gold when you're presenting your content program to stakeholders within your organization."

A great content strategy requires great content

Cornerstone offers learning content that works for everyone. Our content is innovative, fresh and constantly evolving to keep your employees engaged as they learn so you can build a culture that sparks curiosity, growth and impact.

For example, our latest Cornerstone Originals content series, A Seat at the Table, takes an innovative approach to diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging (DEIB) training. Across eight episodes, the series features unscripted, meaningful conversations about important DEIB topics, such as how to talk about pronouns, racial discrimination, depression, and more.

Watch the A Seat at the Table trailer here:

If you’re interested in learning more about A Seat at the Table and how our strategic content offerings can support your people and organizational goals, reach out. We’d be happy to connect with you about your organization’s unique needs.