I caught one of my favored news shows the other day and surprisingly, I lost interest within a few minutes and turned off the television. Historically, this show was one I watched consistently, so having the urge to turn it off made me scratch my head. The lead anchor had left the show a while back and the replacement was another member of their news team who was promoted to this position. The replacement had always been someone I did not favor, mainly because they were not very believable in their delivery – like a bad actor attempting to over compensate using emotion. Having invested in this particular news show for years, I thought that maybe I just needed to get used to this change and that I would eventually get back to perceiving it as a trusted and engaging source for world news. –Well unfortunately, the over-acting anchor is still delivering world news, and I have moved on.
As I contemplated my negative response to the change and decision to turn off the broadcast, it dawned on me that delivery and how we obtain information is so crucial to the success of a world news show –or for any medium targeted at informing or educating an audience. In this day and age, people can choose from multiple mediums/platforms to receive information, news, and communications. This forces the source providing informative content to consider their delivery, ensuring that they keep their audience engaged to accomplish the organization’s goals, and for their own survival. Content providers must keep current with evolving methods of delivery to maintain and engage their audience. So having an unappealing or outdated delivery model, your audience may “tune out” or worse, you could lose them entirely. Does your audience believe and respect your message in a way they are compelled to act on it, or are you simply paying for the equivalent of an over-actor?
Applying this perspective to human capital improvement within your own HR ecosystem, consider the message you are delivering in your own Onboarding, employee development, workforce engagement, or corporate learning programs. Ask yourself the following questions:
- Is your content delivery current for today’s workforce and your environment?
- Will your employees remain engaged through the entire experience?
- Will they absorb the information you are communicating as well as retain the content throughout their tenure with your organization?
Information delivered in a rote, disengaged manner or by a disingenuous “newscaster” can be tuned out as quickly as I turned the channel on my former favorite news program. Effective human capital improvement is not just presenting job expectations and/or meeting the requirements in an HRIS or Talent Management System checklist. Beyond procedural and informational knowledge, it involves building your company’s brand and culture, establishing standards for your employees to carry through their tenure with your organization, and giving them a reason to act in support of your company’s vision long after finishing each corporate activity, position, or experience. And social media and networking tools are being integrated to further engage employees with mapping/monitoring their own career development and performance management.
Fortunately, there are ways of keeping your company information delivery engaging and current without spending millions replacing your LMS, HRIS, or by having to hire a good actor. Utilizing a technology layer that resides on top of your current human capital improvement systems and information repositories, you can offer individualized dashboards for each employee. Your current systems and processes remain in place, but the dashboard informs and directs employees with the right information at the right time, so they have what they need to succeed. ! It’s like having my trusted news anchor presenting what I want to see in a format that is current and interesting to me.
So before your employees turn you off because your content delivery method is outdated – I encourage you to consider using a dashboard solution as your “Lead Anchor.”
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