15Five’s Career Hub Empowers Employees to Design a Strengths-Based Development Path

UPDATE: Career Hub is a 2022 Fast Company World Changing Ideas honoree!

Millennials currently make up the largest part of the workforce, yet almost 50% have significant career regrets. Looking back, many wish they’d chosen a different career path when they started out and the ones that made it to management are now wondering if they even want to be bosses. One thirty-five-year-old lamented in a CNBC article, “I wish someone had helped me figure out what jobs would be applicable for my interests and passions.”

Many organizations offer linear career ladders, which have been purported to retain and motivate valuable employees. But the reality is predefined roles can set employees on the wrong career path from the start and feel limiting to those who don’t want to climb the traditional ladder. Employees may not see a path fit for their strengths and skills and if growth and development feels out of reach, they’ll start looking externally. The best way to encourage career growth, engagement, and performance is through job crafting.

Leading science shows job crafting, that is the process of aligning an employee’s role to their top strengths, values, and passions, is the key to setting employees up for career success from the start, saving HR, managers, and employees time, energy, and money. 

15Five’s Career Hub offers an easy-to-use, customizable solution that empowers employees to co-create strengths-based careers. 

Using 15Five’s software, HR leaders and managers can use a strengths-based approach to have a truly strategic, holistic performance management strategy. Strategic onboarding, role clarity, and strengths discovery are critical yet often excluded parts of an organization’s larger performance strategy, but 15Five makes them easier than ever to implement. 

Career Hub benefits

• Shows your people that you’re putting them first
• Helps your people find and define what they want in a career
• Enhances your career ladders initiative, by starting with self-discovery
• Provides a strategic onboarding experience 
• Sets the foundation for effective performance management
• Equips managers to better leverage their employees’ strengths 
• Allows employees to take ownership of their careers and growth path
• Attracts, develops, and retains top talent by motivating and empowering employees 

Career Hub includes:

• The Best-Self Kickoff. This strategic, strengths-based onboarding process helps employees and managers start their relationship off strong, completing holistic continuous-performance management strategies. 
• Role Clarity & Energizing Work. Ensure everyone is on the same page. With job description and responsibilities visible alongside individual competencies, objectives, projects and tasks, employees will always know what’s being asked of them and managers can help them do more of what they find energizing. 
• Strengths. Uncover an employee’s top strengths, values, and passions. Self-discovery is an important precursor to self development but most companies miss this critical first step. 
• Career Vision. Help employees align their role to top strengths. Allow employees to envision their dream career and work with their managers to make it a reality.

Give your employees a real future at your organization

According to the Design Career Index Annual Report, the top three reasons people left their last role was due to poor leadership/management, lack of career path, and lack of meaning/purpose. If people don’t see a future at your company, they’re going to look for it somewhere else. 15Five’s Career Hub helps you keep your best people by giving them what they really want.

15Five’s Career Hub helps organizations of any size give their employees a future that isn’t dependent on traditional, often constrictive, career ladders. Facebook’s Head of People, Lori Goler worked with top organizational psychologist Adam Grant to understand why people really quit their jobs and found “if you want to keep your people—especially your stars—it’s time to pay more attention to how you design their work. Most companies design jobs and then slot people into them. Our best managers do the opposite: When they find talented people, they’re open to creating jobs around them.” 

In other words, the greatest mistake companies make with traditional career ladders is trying to put individuals in a mold. According to Alan Colquitt, leading expert in the field of HR and performance management, “Use jobs to motivate. If you have only one motivational bullet—look at the work people do.” 15Five’s Career Hub allows employees to own their careers and collaborate with their managers to tailor their development paths.

Here’s how we do it…

The Best-Self Kickoff

Help your teams build high quality relationships right from the start. The trajectory of a new hire’s success is set in the first two weeks, and the Best-Self Kickoff makes sure it’s going in the right direction.  This strategic onboarding feature is the first of its kind on the market. By strengthening relationships and uncovering what every employee needs to do their best work, the Best-Self Kickoff supports managers and employees at the beginning of their relationship, a crucial time to set the foundation for continued success. This unique feature unlocks psychological safety, creates long-term engagement, and provides measurable results, including increased retention and customer satisfaction.

Role Clarity & Energizing Work

Role clarity is one of the most basic and fundamental employee needs, yet only 50% of people know what’s expected of them at work. Continuous performance management that includes role clarity is known to increase productivity and goal accomplishment as well as morale, trust, and engagement, yet most organizations miss this critical first step. Role clarity helps to cultivate psychological safety because a clear understanding of job responsibilities and expectations gives people more confidence to speak up. Once employees truly understand what’s expected of them in their role, they can work with their managers to maximize the amount of energizing work that’s intrinsically motivating and enjoyable, which is the true key to high performance. 

Strengths 

15Five promotes active self-discovery, an important precursor to self-development that’s often overlooked in organizations. The self-discovery process helps employees identify their top strengths, values, and passions and orient every employee on a strengths-based growth and development trajectory – the key to long term engagement at work and beyond. Rather than relying on any single strengths test alone, we encourage organizations to have their employees take as many evidence-based strengths tests as possible. This offers the most robust strengths profile for developing the best strengths-based career path and minimizing career regrets ten  years down the line.  Along with strengths, Career Hub also promotes values and passions discovery. 

Career Vision

At 15Five, we created a new definition of employee engagement based on the latest science and we believe that engaged employees are those who find their work consistently energizing, inspiring, and meaningful because they are leveraging their highest strengths, values, and passions. Our definition of engagement was inspired by job crafting because research shows job crafting helps people experience meaningful work and shift from having jobs (work as a source of income) to careers (advancement in an occupation) to callings (fulfillment from the work itself). Job crafting measurably impacts engagement, performance, job satisfaction, resilience, and thriving at work. In Career Vision, employees can view their company’s career ladders in order to co-create strengths-based careers with their manager.

Launching soon…

We will be launching additional features that will help employees create a plan, take action, and align their strengths-based job description with their organization’s top objectives to drive the company’s mission and vision forward. The complete Best-Self Profile will showcase every employee’s strengths and insights as well as a measure of how they align with their role, their goals, and the impact they have on the company.

We took this approach, because when it comes to Career Growth, HR teams struggle with a department led approach that leads to low adoption, low success rates, and low engagement. People struggle to find company roles aligned with their strengths, they aren’t supported to reach their career goals, and without opportunities to grow and develop, engagement remains low. 15Five’s strengths-based approach puts employees in control of their career, gives managers the tools they need to support their team members, and results in talent led growth. Employees who find their work energizing and meaningful have the biggest impact on productivity, revenue growth, and will stay with the company longer. In fact, in a recent 15Five survey of 1k employees across the country, 95% reported being more productive when they perform work they find interesting or energizing

15Five’s Career Hub is Powered By Positive Product Design™ 

At 15Five, we use Positive Product Design, a method that aligns technology to the science of thriving, to unlock the potential of every member of the global workforce. Science offers a deeper understanding of human needs and how to meet them, and so we use it to guide our product decisions. By combining the leveraged impact of technology with the latest science of thriving and human needs, Positive Product Design helps business be a force for good and create a world where every person has the opportunity to realize their full potential.

15Five’s Career Hub is the first platform designed using the science of thriving to help fulfill human potential, making 15Five a completely different performance management solution. We are actually a people and performance solution that equips HR leaders to easily discover, develop, and retain top talent at scale and unlock the potential of their entire workforce. 

Courtney Bigony, MAPP, aspires to measurably unlock human potential through evidence-inspired technologies. As Strategic Science Advisor to 15Five, she integrates concepts from positive psychology into their software platform to help organizations worldwide increase thriving at scale. Courtney is the creator of Positive Product Design™, a new method for creating human potential technology, which was selected by Fast Company as a 2021 World Changing Ideas finalist. She holds a Masters of Applied Positive Psychology from the University of Pennsylvania, where she studied with the “father of positive psychology,” Martin Seligman. Courtney has also contributed to Forbes and The Huffington Post. Follow her on twitter @CourtneyBigony.

Image Credit: fizkes