Bridge positioned as a Core Challenger in the 2020 Fosway 9-Grid™ for Talent & People Success

The 2020 Fosway 9-Grid™ for Talent & People Success was recently published, and as usual makes for thought provoking and insightful reading. I’m delighted that Bridge has once again been included as a Core Challenger but now with our expanded and integrated suite offering. This is a key development not only here at Bridge but for the market in general, and I’d like to outline my thoughts on some points made by the Fosway team that have, and continue to lead the development of our software.

In recent years organisations have adopted more agile approaches to talent, where they look to develop skill sets rather than focus on static knowledge retention or pure experience. Each time learning is delivered, employees are given the opportunity to apply new acquired knowledge within their everyday working life. This is a cyclical experience. The key to an organisation’s success is a certain amount of horizon scanning and scenario planning for what skills will be required in the near term and what learning is needed to deliver those skills.

It is in this new world that we developed Bridge, with the firm belief that talent and people success is a cyclical loop of learning, applying knowledge, gaining skills and then assessing where employees can look for further development opportunities and so beginning the cycle again. We also know that approaching talent and people success as a continuous loop means demonstrable outcomes of learning in the form of talent development, increased performance and engagement.

This approach has allowed forward thinking organisations to pivot quickly to take advantage of new market opportunities, or during crisis, to rethink skills and talent deployment.

Covid 19 has already driven seismic transformation in many industries and disciplines. Talent, learning and skills development, HCM and employee engagement will not remain untouched.
The Fosway team believe talent management providers have been asleep at the wheel, and whilst that may be true for some providers, it hasn’t been here at Bridge. It’s worth noting, it often takes an external event to force organisations to think differently, and Covid might be the black swan event for many industries.

At Bridge, we think the cyclical approach of talent and people success will now become mainstream as a response to the changing talent landscape. We have always developed software based on an employee’s experience of the world of work, and that is clearly not silos of learning, engagement, talent development, in fact that is not the way they think about what their experience is. Their experience is one of a holistic employer and a conducive culture for development, not individual departments and corresponding software modules.

However, we do agree that a one stop shop of software will not always solve all challenges and are in firm agreement with Fosway that HR will need to look at an ecosystem of likeminded vendors who believe in a cyclical and people centric approach to talent and people success.

Here are six questions we suggest you ask of your current talent development, people success and engagement software provision.

1) Can you close your skills gap through tailored learning & assessments?

Bridge delivers skill assessments that help organisations identify the skills that are lacking so they can establish a baseline, and then makes course authoring and course delivery extremely simple. By tailoring a learning strategy around those critical skills that your organisation lacks, you’ll be prepared to close the skills gap and raise overall performance.

2) Can your software help you deliver continuous performance management all under one roof and tie to learning?

Bridge enables your organisation to manage and track company wide 1on1’s, quarterly performance conversations, year end performance reviews, and can even help align individual goals with company goals, all in one place. Best of all, the Bridge LMS integrates with every piece of the performance module, giving rich context to your learning strategy.

3) Does your software help you to create a culture of feedback and career conversations?

Bridge helps you easily author and deliver pulse surveys that ask your people for their anonymous feedback on the topics that matter most to your organisation.

Take that culture of listening to the next level by enabling employees and managers to have consistent career planning & development conversations, where employees are empowered to articulate their long term career visions, including what skills they’ll need to get there.

4) Can you track, measure, and demonstrate the impact through robust analytics?

In order to show learning & performance improvements, you need to be able to track the right activities, and on top of that, you need access to real time data. With our analytics dashboard, you’ll be empowered to make more informed business decisions.

5) Can you deliver engaging learning & compliance with your software?

Whether you need to create onboarding programs, or simply deliver compliance training for different teams and departments, Bridge has everything you need to craft learning experiences tailored to your organisations’ specific needs.

6) Does your software speed up new employee time to contribution?

Bridge enables you to decrease the time it takes for new employees to begin contributing by infusing the onboarding process with easy to use, intuitive learning experiences.