How HR Can Collaborate with L&D to Retain and Upskill

This article discusses ways that human resources and learning and development teams can collaborate to retain and upskill employees.

Key ways for HR and L&D teams to collaborate to keep your team engaged

Retaining top talent and upskilling the workforce are essential for any successful organisation. Factors impacting staff retention and upskilling typically sit in the overlap of a Venn diagram between Human Resources and Learning and Development.

By collaborating to tackle these challenges together, HR and L&D teams can achieve better results, reduce employee turnover and create a culture of continuous improvement in the organisation.

Here are some of the key areas in which collaboration between HR and L&D benefits the entire organisation.

✳️ Making smarter hiring decisions

While recruitment is typically HR’s responsibility, the HR team can liaise with L&D to achieve the outcomes discussed here. Hiring people who are ready to learn and grow professionally makes everything that follows much easier.

The L&D team may be able to share insights or data on the competencies a new hire should have if they are to develop over time to meet the organisation’s needs. These are all ways in which to build a sustainable talent management strategy.

✳️ Integrating and automating systems

Technology is a key area of collaboration between HR and L&D. Integrating your LMS with your HR system has a few advantages.

Firstly, integrating systems creates a single source of information, ensuring that both teams are working from a consolidated set of data.

It also reduces duplicated tasks and eases collaboration between the two teams. This saves time and resources that both HR and L&D can put to better use, as well as creating a starting point for sharing best practices.

This opens the door to introducing automated reporting, which saves time for HR and L&D and makes it easier for both teams to track and measure compliance and other aspects of learning.

✳️ Creating a culture of development

It starts with the hiring decisions we’ve already mentioned and continues in other areas. By working closely together, HR and L&D can create a culture of development that is ingrained within the organisation.

This could include introducing people to opportunities and expectations around upskilling during a comprehensive onboarding process (a key collaboration area for HR and L&D). It’s important to introduce new starters to the culture of development at this early stage.

It may involve recognising and rewarding employees who commit to developing new skills. Ensuring that managers within the organisation buy into the culture of development will be vital, too.

✳️ Training managers

Collaboration between HR and L&D will only succeed to the extent that individual employees are developing new skills and working in an environment in which they want to stay. That means HR and L&D need to collaborate to ensure people in managerial roles are supportive of this process.

Again, decisions around hiring and promotions are key here. But managers also need training on the importance of giving their team time and space to upskill. They must fully understand the benefits this will bring to them and the organisation as a whole.

✳️ Encouraging collaborative learning

It’s not just about collaboration between HR and L&D. You can also work together to encourage collaboration between employees. Nurturing peer-led collaborative learning helps you to retain staff. It also supercharges your L&D programme.

Putting in place an infrastructure to support social, informal and self-directed learning allows each employee to follow a path that suits their needs and ambitions. It also creates an environment where subject experts can share knowledge across the organisation. In the course of doing so, you build stronger connections and relationships within your team, which helps to retain staff.

✳️ Closing skills gaps

HR may know of a skills gap within the organisation. L&D has the opportunity to close that skills gap. By working together, they can solve that problem and, by sharing data and insights as we’ve suggested, preempt future skills gaps.

You can use the collaborative learning approaches discussed above to harness the knowledge of in-house experts to quickly and effectively close skills gaps.

✳️ Building a sense of belonging

Staff retention is made much easier if employees feel a sense of belonging. We’ve already touched on some of the things that can encourage this. This includes making employees feel valued and rewarded for engaging with development and creating a collaborative environment.

It also means showing people you’re invested in their personal and professional development. This can be achieved through personalised learning pathways that are defined through conversations involving the employee, HR and L&D. This helps to put in place career progression plans that encourage the individual to see their future within the organisation while also supporting succession planning.

Explore ways for your HR and L&D teams to collaborate

Interested in bringing some of these ideas to your organisation to increase collaboration between HR and L&D? Fill out the form, and we’ll be in touch.

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