RESOURCES FOR SURVIVING AND THRIVING WHAT’S NEXT

How Cornerstone can help your organization thrive in the COVID-era and beyond

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Introduction

Using Cornerstone to manage in times of disruption

Communicate effectively

Connect and motivate employees

Continue training and development

Navigating today and preparing for the future

Appendix: Collection of client examples mentioned throughout the eBook

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Contents

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In working with more than 3,600 organizations in a wide variety of industries across 20 years, Cornerstone has partnered with countless clients that are navigating organizational change.

We’ve found that during troublesome times there are three constants that emerge time and time again:

First, while crises are difficult and traumatizing, they can also bring out the best in people. In the past few months, we’ve all witnessed extraordinary acts of compassion, creativity, and selflessness.

Second, and on a practical note, organizations who are (or learn to be!) agile, flexible, and innovative during disruption have a better chance of surviving this and any other crisis.

Third, organizations that keep an eye on the future while still effectively managing the crisis at hand come out stronger and more successful than those who only plan for immediate needs.

And that, in a nutshell, is the purpose of this eBook: To help you and your organization not only navigate today’s challenges but to plan for the future by continuing to motivate, engage, and inspire your employees and stakeholders.

Within this eBook you’ll find practical action steps you can take today, using your existing Cornerstone investment, to navigate the recent COVID-19 pandemic and provide stability for your employees. Just as importantly, these steps will also ensure you’re prepared not just for today but also ready to succeed in the coming new reality, through 2020 and into 2021.

Introduction

Using Cornerstone to manage in times of disruptionThe COVID-19 pandemic has ushered in an entirely new landscape for organizations, and while you've addressed initial survival requirements, you’re likely still trying to figure out how to position your organization for the long term. How can you act today to increase employees’ resiliency, flexibility, and engagement, so that your employees—and your organization—are positioned to thrive?

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We recommend the following actions to help you manage more effectively, provide stability for employees, and facilitate business continuity to ensure you’re prepared not just for today but tomorrow:

Communicate effectively

Connect and motivate employees

Continue to train and develop employees, clients, partners, and

communities to give them the skills they need

Communicate effectivelyClear, consistent, meaningful communication with employees has always been important. But in the current environment, effective communication is fundamental, not only in maintaining productivity but in keeping employees motivated and emotionally secure amid constant change. Employees are frightened on many fronts—scared of losing their jobs, scared of getting sick—and frequent, clear communication can help mitigate these fears by providing both information and meaningful action steps. In times of disruption, regular communication also provides much-needed structure.

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Create playlists.Cornerstone playlists aren’t just for training! A large California real estate development company created playlists in Cornerstone Learning to engage with employees during the pandemic, as well as provide relevant, reliable, and critical information. According to Neiman Leyran, senior training specialist, “During these tumultuous times, we’ve been developing playlists and choosing courses from many of our vendor partners. Cornerstone Originals is the most relevant, user friendly, and consumable content out there. The content has become our company’s best friend.”

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Here are five ways your organization can use Cornerstone today to communicate effectively:

How-to: Build playlists in Cornerstone Learning to keep employees informed and engaged. Use the playlists to deliver courses and link to crucial information (such as CDC advice) they may be seeking elsewhere.

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2Customize Welcome Pages to deliver short but critical updates.Stakeholders need to know that leadership is actively working to both mitigate disruption and plan for the future. Highlighting key messages on Welcome Pages is a quick and effective way to reassure employees, partners, vendors, and others that your organization is aware of the latest developments and actively planning a response.

How-to: Use the formatted text box or the video widget to share announcements and display important messages from leadership.

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3Use Custom Pages to provide more detailed updates and information. While customized messages via Welcome Pages are ideal for brief updates, Custom Pages can be used to deliver more in-depth information, e.g., parameters for working remotely, actions the company is taking to safeguard the future, wellness practices.

How-to: Create Custom Pages describing COVID-19-affected policies, practices, and plans. Outdated information erodes trust: Assign daily updates to a small, reliable team to ensure pages are always current and relevant!

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4Connect with specific groups via Login Messages. Communications on Welcome Pages and Custom Pages are intended for broad audiences. Use Login Messages to communicate with specific groups as they enter the platform. One example may include a targeted message to managers with specific action items. Or, you can promote links to select popular resources for newly virtual employees.

How-to: Use the Login Message WYSIWYG editor to create colorful messaging and add images, links to postings, materials, or Custom Pages. Define a display period and configure the message in multiple languages. If using multiple messages, drag and drop them to display for the end user in the order you prefer.

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5Reach out with Marketing Emails. Don’t rely solely on Welcome and Custom Pages to get the message out. Actively push information to stakeholders, as well, using Cornerstone’s email administration function. Silence isn’t golden right now: Clear, concise emails not only provide information but reassurance, a simple reminder that someone is “minding the store.”

How-to: Insert branding, logos, and headers in your marketing emails to ensure consistency (and build trust) in each communication and send emails to custom Organizational Units from the marketing communications page. Because marketing emails reach a broad audience, vet content carefully. (Don’t send any content you wouldn’t want made public!)

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Connect and motivate employeesWhile we’re fortunate today’s technology enables remote working en masse, working from home creates its own challenges. Your employees are likely sharing space with roommates, partners, and/or children, many of whom are also working or attending school. Limited space, limited bandwidth, and limited patience all affect productivity and motivation, as does the rapidly changing nature of the pandemic itself.

Employees need more support and connection than ever before to be productive and stay engaged in the face of uncertainty and altered, often difficult, working conditions.

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Provide training to reduce stress and build resiliency.1

You can use your Cornerstone investment to connect and motivate employees with these five action steps:

REAL-LIFE EXAMPLE

Give employees the opportunity to better navigate changing conditions and build resilience by providing access to pandemic-specific training. Working effectively from home and managing stress are skills that can be learned, as can mindfulness and self-management.

Short courses on the above (and many other timely topics, including common sense hygiene, preparedness, communicating with insight, and even yoga) are available via Cornerstone Cares; select courses from

content providers ej4, Grovo by Cornerstone and Whil can be loaded directly into your Cornerstone platform.

More in-depth courses are available as part of the Cornerstone Content Anytime Remote Work Essentials subscription. Trackable and reportable, these 800+ courses have been curated directly in response to COVID-19 and include Crisis Management for Leaders, Remote Work Best Practices, Stress Management, Digital Collaboration Tools, and more.

A multinational investment bank and financial services company rolled out Cornerstone Cares content across their employee base. The content has helped employees to feel personally supported during this unstable time.

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How-to: Request to have relevant ej4, Grovo, and Whil courses loaded into your Cornerstone LMS for free, and share the Cornerstone Cares portal for 100+ more courses that help employees learn crucial work and personal skills relevant to the COVID-19 pandemic. Need more in-depth content? Get the Cornerstone Content Anytime Remote Work Essentials subscription for access to 800+ courses.

Consider building your own COVID-19 courses, as needed. An American office retail company is using Cornerstone to build their own COVID-19 courses and are sharing Cornerstone Cares content as additional resources to support their employees during this challenging time.

REAL-LIFE EXAMPLE

One of the world’s largest independent insurance firms rolled out a Content Anytime subscription to their agents earlier this year. After the COVID-19 outbreak, they transitioned to a remote workforce and have seen over 2,400 course registrations for the Remote Work courses.

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2Enable collaboration and social networking. “We’re all in this together” has never been more apt. Help employees realize that despite distance and isolation, they’re still part of a thriving community. Enable social networking and collaboration via Cornerstone Connect to not only create community but also drive informal learning and innovation.

How-to: You can create a COVID-19 Connect community to deliver information, playlists, and resources to all users.

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3Connect one-on-one. In a remote working environment, connecting one-on-one doesn’t just happen: It must be intentional. Invite managers to use Cornerstone Check-Ins to have more frequent conversations and maintain contact with individual employees.

How-to: Encourage all managers to use Cornerstone Check-Ins for regular syncs. Coming this May, Cornerstone will be releasing a new Check-Ins template that helps managers empathetically guide conversations around employee engagement and remote productivity during this challenging time.

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4Reduce uncertainty and create structure by quickly delivering remote-working agreements. Cornerstone clients are using Forms or Off-Cycle Performance Tasks to create and deliver their new telecommuting/remote working agreements. A sudden, statewide stay-at-home order meant a large healthcare organization needed to rapidly establish telecommuting agreements for non-essential personal. Using Cornerstone’s forms functionality, the organization rolled out telecommuting agreements to their entire non-clinical workforce in less than 48 hours. The organization is also using Cornerstone Cares courses to help workers adapt to working remotely.

How-to: Use Cornerstone Forms for short-term agreements that do not need to be changed once submitted. Use Off-Cycle Performance Tasks/Reviews for agreements that can be updated. As Off-Cycle Performance Tasks/Reviews can be open for a year, they’re ideal for now and when business is back to normal.

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5Connect with and interview candidates via video. While for many, hiring is currently frozen, some organizations are experiencing rapid growth to meet new demand and are hiring aggressively. In-person interviewing isn’t an option, but organizations can still connect with and interview candidates by integrating Cornerstone with HireVue for video interviews.

How-to: Cornerstone’s HireVue integration enables organizations to view, rate, and share candidate interviews. You can construct interviews and capture feedback in a standardized process and see more candidates while reducing the amount of time it takes to hire the best people. While existing requisitions won't allow the addition of a new integration, you can create an "Interview Only" requisition and assign HireVue step to existing applicants. Then, the feedback link can be provided in the comments on the original requisition.

Continue training and development Don’t let disruption hamper development! Ongoing training now is just as critical: Employees may need to fill in for ill co-workers and quickly learn new skills so they can operate with agility in the future. In addition, learning in and of itself can help provide structure, stability, and a sense of control. Employees who are given opportunities to develop new skills are more engaged and better prepared for the future.

Moreover, the need to upskill and reskill employees becomes more urgent as roles change in the new remote workplace. For example, some employees will need to switch their focus from events marketing to digital marketing, or pivot to virtual service delivery from in-person service delivery.

With Cornerstone Learning, Extended Enterprise, and Content Anytime, development and training are already available for remote workers.

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Don’t cancel your instructor led training, pivot to virtual classroom delivery.Just because your in-person events are cancelled doesn’t mean your entire program needs to stop. However, when deploying virtual training, your traditional learning methodologies may need a makeover. Think about the best virtual sessions you have attended – we bet it was more than lecture and uploaded PowerPoints! The principles of feedback, equipment functionality, instructions, scripting, visual and verbal cues, and time management provide a blueprint for adapting traditional classroom methodologies for live, online instruction.

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Here are five ways to make learning even more accessible and engaging for everyone:

How-to: Use Events and Sessions to manage and track your virtual training and Learning Objects to manage the recorded sessions. For more tips for converting ILT to virtual classroom delivery, check out an on-demand webinar recording from Cornerstone’s Steve Dobberowsky.

Alternatively, Velocity EHS, a fast-growing environmental health, safety and sustainability software company, transitioned their instructor led training to recorded sessions to allow more flexibility for remote employees trying to juggle personal and professional demands. Erin Vandenberg, Manager of Knowledgebase Administration & Training, said, “we rolled out our Cornerstone LMS just a few months ago and already don’t know how we would be getting through the COVID-19 crisis without it. With Cornerstone, we can have the flexibility to deliver training when employees need it, rather than being tethered to a strict virtual classroom schedule. For learners, this has meant the ability to take courses on their own time so they can better balance family, wellness, and work needs.”

With Cornerstone, we can have the flexibility to deliver training when employees need it, rather than being tethered to a strict virtual classroom schedule. For learners, this has meant the ability to take courses on their own time so they can better balance family, wellness, and work needs.”

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2Ensure training is available both via mobile devices and offline. With many working from home, bandwidth is often limited. Make training accessible by enabling employees to download content and complete it offline. Training should also be available on mobile devices, e.g., on smart phones and tablets.

How-to: Make your content “mobile enabled” and available for Cornerstone’s Learn app. Most pages work well in Cornerstone on a mobile device and are mobile responsive. Review your catalog to determine which courses are best experienced on the go. Keep in mind that training in short bursts of learning leads to more engagement and better information retention. Also, be sure to customize the app to match your company branding.

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3Nurture community and reduce isolation with events and sessions. Events don’t have to be in person to be effective! In fact, it’s more important now to nurture group connection, be it teams, customers, or other stakeholders. With Cornerstone events and sessions, you can easily create and launch trainings and regular meetings.

How-to: Think creatively! Consider hosting sessions such as HR Office Hours, a remote “happy hour,” or a “bring your kids to work hour.”

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4Give credit. Giving attendees credit for participating in ad-hoc meetings increases motivation and engagement and provides incentive to engage during challenging and distracting times. With Cornerstone Express Class, managers can easily credit learners after an ad-hoc meeting.

More informally, you can recognize accomplishments and keep employees motivated by giving badges for a job well done. Consider creating a new “remote work expert” badge for those employees that are guiding the way for others.

How-to: Express Class allows you to give credit for a training on a learner’s transcript, including materials, videos, events, and online classes. Badges are a form of employee recognition that can be awarded when an employee receives feedback or when training is completed.

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5Continue nurturing relationships with external partners. Many organizations have relationships that extend beyond their core employees: customers, students, vendors, distributors and others. Be a proactive partner to your extended enterprise training colleagues and let them know that Cornerstone can be used to help pivot classroom training to online training. With Extended Enterprise, you can deliver new training or extend the resources you’ve put together for employees to other stakeholders seeking information. Also, if your organization’s service delivery model has changed, you can create new certifications for channel partners and other stakeholders to make sure they’re fully trained on the new approach.

How-to: Cornerstone Extended Enterprise allows you to deliver training to your external stakeholders—all from within your central administration console. If you have Extended Enterprise, consider leveraging deep links and custom pages to highlight time-relevant content in your communications. If you’re looking for a great example of an Extended Enterprise implementation, take a look at the Cornerstone Cares portal.

Navigating today and preparing for the futureThe COVID-19 pandemic is a global event truly unprecedented in our lifetime. And yet while the situation changes from day to day, what we do know is that, together, people are finding ways to not only work but connect and thrive in extraordinary circumstances.

The present crisis has brought new challenges to every organization, in every industry, in every country. While no one is exempt from this disruption, some organizations are already finding new ways to adapt. In just the past few weeks, we’ve seen our clients use their Cornerstone investment to facilitate remote work, fast-track telecommuting agreements, deliver pandemic-specific content, and build and deliver their own COVID-19 courses.

Like them, your organization can also simultaneously navigate today and prepare for tomorrow by:

Communicating effectively to create

stability and structure for anxious employees

Connecting with and motivating employees to

promote productivity and engagement

Developing and training employees, clients,

and partners

• A large healthcare organization used Cornerstone’s forms functionality to roll out telecommuting agreements to their employees in less than two days.

• A real estate development company based in California created playlists in the Cornerstone LMS to engage employees and provide relevant, reliable, and critical pandemic-specific information.

• VelocityEHS is using Cornerstone Learning to achieve more flexibility in training delivery. Knowing employees are juggling work, wellness, and family demands, their instructor led training is being delivered via recordings that can be watched at any time—and can still be tracked using Learning Objects.

Cornerstone has helped more than 3,600 clients during the ups and downs of the last 20 years. We have the tools and experience to help your organization succeed in a time of great change.

Reach out to your Client Success Manager or Client Executive if you have any questions on how to get started.

Appendix: Collection of client examples mentioned in the eBook

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GOAL

Facilitate remote work TOOLS

• Cornerstone Forms

• Cornerstone Cares Portal

ACHIEVEMENT

Rolling out telecommuting forms to employees in less than 48 hours.A sudden, statewide stay-at-home order meant a large healthcare organization needed to rapidly establish telecommuting agreements for non-essential personal. Using Cornerstone’s forms functionality, the organization rolled out telecommuting agreements to every non-clinical employee in less than 48 hours. The organization is also using Cornerstone Cares courses to help workers adapt to working remotely.

GOAL

Provide critical information and reassurance

TOOLS

• Cornerstone LMS

• Cornerstone Content

• Grovo by Cornerstone

ACHIEVEMENT

A real estate development company based in California created playlists in their Cornerstone LMS to engage employees and provide relevant, reliable, and critical pandemic-specific information. They leveraged timely and consumable content from Grovo by Cornerstone content as-is and customized content from other providers to meet employee needs. “During these tumultuous times, we’ve been developing playlists and choosing courses from many of our vendor partners. Cornerstone Originals is the most relevant, user friendly, and consumable content out there,” says Neiman Leyran, senior training specialist. “The content has become our company’s best friend.”

Here’s how seven organizations are responding to the pandemic using Cornerstone:

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GOAL

Build customized COVID-19 courses

TOOLS

• Cornerstone

• Cornerstone Cares content

ACHIEVEMENT

To support employees, an American office retail company is using Cornerstone to build their own COVID-19 courses, as well as sharing Cornerstone Cares content.

GOAL

Support employees with pandemic-specific training

TOOLS

• Cornerstone Cares content

ACHIEVEMENT

A multinational investment bank and financial services company rolled out the Cornerstone Cares content across their employee base. The content has been a “hit” on an individual employee basis. They have felt supported by the Cornerstone team through this unstable time.

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GOAL

Help employees adapt to remote working TOOLS

• Cornerstone Content Anytime Professional Skills Subscription

ACHIEVEMENT

One of the world’s largest independent insurance firms rolled out the Content Anytime Professional Skills subscription to agents earlier this year. After the COVID-19 outbreak, they transitioned to a remote workforce and have since seen over 2,400 course registrations for the Remote Work courses.

GOAL

Help employees stay productive

TOOLS

• Cornerstone Content Anytime

ACHIEVEMENT

A leading healthcare and medical services provider was worried about employees staying productive in their new remote work environment. With the help of Content Anytime, they have provided their 30,000+ employee base with pandemic-specific content.

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GOAL

Provide training flexibility to remote employees

TOOLS

• Cornerstone Learning

ACHIEVEMENT

Velocity EHS, a fast-growing environmental health, safety and sustainability software company, transitioned their instructor led training to recorded sessions to allow more flexibility for remote employees trying to juggle personal and professional demands. Erin Vandenberg, Manager of Knowledgebase Administration & Training, said, “we rolled out our Cornerstone LMS just a few months ago and already don’t know how we would be getting through the COVID-19 crisis without it. With Cornerstone, we can have the flexibility to deliver training when employees need it, rather than being tethered to a strict virtual classroom schedule. For learners, this has meant the ability to take courses on their own time so they can better balance family, wellness, and work needs.”

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