Cornerstone Reveals Vision for the New World of Work

Following its acquisition of Saba Software, Cornerstone announces a new strategic vision and accelerated innovation plans to help organisations thrive through change

London — 13 May, 2020 — Cornerstone OnDemand, Inc. (NASDAQ: CSOD), a global leader in people development solutions, today announced a multi-year strategic vision to help companies adapt to a new world of work that requires continuous people development and rapid organisational agility.

Over the past few months, the global COVID-19 pandemic has required businesses across industries to pivot on a dime. Whether converting their entire workforces to remote work, or manufacturing completely new products to address new needs, having the ability to change course quickly is becoming a fundamental measure of lasting viability. Even after this crisis comes to an end, the world will be forever changed, and business volatility – which has been increasing for decades – will become the new normal.

“The emergence of this new world of work is proof that companies must be more agile than ever to succeed,” said Adam Miller, founder and CEO, Cornerstone. “The winners of tomorrow will be the companies that are ‘unbound,’ those that aren’t confined by yesterday’s conventions and are ready to adapt to changing environments. And at the heart of an unbound business is continuous people development.”

At Cornerstone, we are committed to helping companies navigate this new world of work. Over the past 20 years, we’ve honed our software and applied our expertise to help companies quickly adapt and continuously develop their people with the right skills and the right training. Following our recent acquisition of Saba Software, we are now in an even stronger position to help our clients transition to this new reality. Together, we support nearly 7,000 clients worldwide. This expanded reach, combined with an enhanced R&D team that is 60% larger, will enable us to accelerate innovation in three strategic areas that will help companies transform into resilient businesses.

Innovation Initiative #1: Learning is the Accelerator

Learning is the adaptability accelerator. In fact, Cornerstone People Research Lab data shows that training has skyrocketed in the last few weeks as companies help their employees adapt to this new normal, including a spike in courses about stress management and working from home. This shows that rather than using learning only to meet compliance requirements, businesses will need to provide employees with more holistic learning to address all aspects of work life. To do that, workplace learning will need to be:

• Ubiquitous: Available on any device, and, most importantly, delivered in the flow of work in the systems and tools where work is already happening.
• Hyper-Personalised: Remove the time and energy it takes for employees to seek out learning by presenting relevant trainings that are contextualised based on their skills, experience, aspirations and preferences.
• A Business Enabler: For businesses to adapt quickly and at scale, they need to promote real learning – the kind that sticks with you – which requires repetition, reinforcement and nurture.

Cornerstone has begun to make significant steps in this strategic direction by providing people with the most modern, relevant learning content available through our subscription service offering, Cornerstone Content Anytime, and partnering with world-class content providers, including VR training developer, Talespin.

Innovation Initiative #2: AI-based Personalised Coaching

One of the top reasons people with high potential choose to leave a company is because they don’t have the opportunity to learn and grow. And, according to a trend report from Mercer Consulting, they want to feel a sense of purpose more than ever. To address these evolving and key motivators for employees, organisations will need to re-examine how they support their workforce in these two areas:

• Transform managers into coaches: Organisations will need to provide their managers with tools to better understand their individual employees, not just the roles they fill. Holistic information, such as deep skills profiles, interests, personal and professional aspirations and their emotional well-being, will equip managers to have more meaningful, data-driven conversations and enable personalised career navigation.
• Supplement employee guidance with AI-powered digital coaching tools: Managers can’t coach alone. Organisations will need to provide digital coaching tools that guide career growth, suggest personalised development experiences and help employees identify when they are off track for early course correction. For example, intelligent chatbots will do everything from suggesting new training, to an upcoming project the employee might be interested in, to a role suited to their skills.

Delivering against this vision, Cornerstone recently launched Cornerstone Careers, a new product solution focused on helping employees to connect with their managers and navigate their careers. Cornerstone Careers includes Check-Ins and Capabilities, and we’ll be adding more features in the coming months, including Career Centre, to help employees navigate their careers in a fully personalised way.

Innovation Initiative #3: Holistic People Data for Better People Decisions

With technology has come an explosion of data and analytics. And for years, organisations have been striving to extract insights and important business value from people data. However, yesterday’s data sets fell short of giving organisations a holistic, meaningful understanding of their people, such as employees’ capabilities, strengths, experiences, aspirations, mood, learning preferences and well-being. We believe having access to more holistic people data will benefit companies in two ways:

• Enable organisations to make better business decisions: A comprehensive data set will allow companies to dynamically develop and deploy the right people to projects, roles and key investments, and assemble teams with the optimal mix of employees, candidates, contractors and freelancers.
• Improve their employees’ well-being, engagement, and retention: Employees and their managers will be able to use this data in development conversations, enabling a hyper-personalised approach to growth instead of one-size fits all.

Earlier this year, we took a big step in the area by RealWire