November 2023 - PraxisLabs

Pivotal Practice: Redefining feedback training for lasting impact

Pivotal Practice brings together the latest innovations in Generative AI, learning science, and interactive simulations. This new product offers organizations a solution to improve feedback skills, foster empathy and collaboration, and enhance communication and innovation across diverse and global teams.

At our core, Praxis Labs helps organizations embed core human skills through a diversity lens. By immersing learners in real-world scenarios that map onto key moments of the employee experience, they have the opportunity to practice navigating difficult conversations and collaborating across diverse, global, and remote teams. Pivotal Practice is an extension of our commitment to elevate and transform the workplace through an equitable and science-backed approach. It comes at a time when actionable, effective, and unbiased feedback is needed most.

Research shows that employees who receive timely feedback see higher levels of performance, have more confidence, and feel a greater sense of job satisfaction. 72 percent of employees report that feedback can directly improve their performance.

“Candid and actionable feedback is one of the most sought-after yet difficult skills to cultivate in any workplace, and it’s essential to driving career growth, development, and engagement. Yet, there is a lot to be understood around how to give inclusive feedback across diverse teams,” said Elise Smith, Co-founder and CEO of Praxis Labs. “We see enormous potential in harnessing the latest advancements in AI and immersive technologies to build the confidence and skills needed to provide feedback that helps people of all levels and backgrounds advance in their careers and that supports a more inclusive and collaborative workforce.”

Pivotal Practice builds upon this foundation. It does so by offering bite-sized, experiential opportunities for learners to help them build and reinforce their communication and feedback-giving skills. All of this occurs within a safe, judgment-free environment.

Driving feedback development at scale

Pivotal Practice marks an innovation not only for teams looking to improve how they work, collaborate, and innovate together. It extends its impact to the broader corporate learning industry. The product introduces a novel way to combine immersive technology and gen-AI to drive skills development. Moreover, it gives learners the practice and experience needed translate learning into action.

Key Pivotal Practice design features include:

Generative AI Grading and Research-Backed Feedback

Learners deliver feedback, either by voice or over text, ensuring flexibility and accessibility for different learning and diverse communication preferences. Trained by Praxis Labs’ team of in-house learning scientists, gen-AI assesses participants’ responses. It specifically focuses on inclusive leadership skills. After evaluation, gen-AI offers personalized recommendations that clarify and improve participants’ feedback. This approach makes every practice session a valuable learning opportunity.

Perspective-Taking through Immersive Technology

In-the-moment learning enhances memory retention and skill development in areas like empathy and communication. With immersive simulations, learners navigate nuanced situations across differences and deepen their understanding of people with different identities and lived experiences.

On-Demand Microlearning at Scale

Packaged in 5-10 minute experiences, learners can practice giving feedback where they learn best and when needed most — like before performance reviews, 1:1s, and team meetings.

Unlock team performance with human-centered and inclusive feedback

Radical candor isn’t just a catchphrase; it’s a philosophy that promises transparent communication and transformative growth. Yet, its execution requires finesse and skill that many find elusive.

This latest addition to our platform offers an opportunity for organizations to reap the benefits of a culture that prioritizes effective feedback and inclusion. Join us as we unveil Pivotal Practice—a solution designed to revolutionize how feedback is given and received.

Ready to embark on this transformative journey? Discover the impact Pivotal Practice can have for your organization.

The biggest mistake we see companies make when scaling their diversity and inclusion programs? Not measuring DEI metrics beyond the hiring process.

Having a diverse pool of qualified candidates is of course important when recruiting, but the most successful forward-thinking organizations track diversity and inclusion at all stages of the employee lifecycle. That means throughout onboarding, performance reviews, compensation decisions, and succession planning.

DEI Metrics to Track

Keeping track of DEI metrics throughout an employee’s tenure at your company can help you spotlight barriers or highlight successes for your programs. With these metrics, you can measure the impact and ROI of DEI efforts, develop accountability, and ensure transparency.

Here are 5 key DEI metrics to measure when assessing your company’s DEI progress:

1. Hiring biases

If you’re attracting diverse candidates to your hiring pool, but your team is still not diverse, biases in the hiring process may be responsible. Certain methods of assessing potential candidates (on paper, in person, and even with AI) are riddled with bias against underrepresented folks.

A recent study showed that candidates who submit CVs with “Black sounding” names are less likely to get interviews. Prioritizing hiring people who went to certain schools, or requiring “prior industry experience” in entry-level roles where internships are often unpaid, unfairly excludes a huge group of qualified candidates.

How to amend this? Obviously there’s no easy, single solution. But there are ways to standardize your selection process to reduce the potential influence of bias.

Consider reviewing CVs “blind” without names attached
Standardize interviews with a clear rubric and templated questions
Give a work sample test

And critically – collect data throughout the entirety of the process. If the numbers suggest that diverse candidates are disproportionately losing out when compared to others with similar qualifications, follow up with your hiring team.

2. Retention

Retention is the #1 operational priority for organizations. If you find that people of a certain demographic are quitting in disproportionate numbers, consider that they may be responding to a non-inclusive work environment.

When employees quit, companies tend to assume that their decision was driven by a “hard line” factor like compensation. But this often isn’t the case.

A McKinsey report found that the top factors employees cited as reasons for quitting were that they didn’t feel valued by their organizations (54 percent) or didn’t feel a sense of belonging at work (51 percent). Notably, employees who classified themselves as non-white or multiracial were more likely than their white counterparts to say they had left because they didn’t feel they belonged at their companies.

This means you can improve your retention rates by making workers feel valued. In addition to compensating fairly and offering workplace flexibility, we’ve found that investing in empathetic leadership training and next-gen learning & development goes a long way in fostering a culture of open and honest communication.

3. Employee engagement

Understanding the drivers of employee engagement helps companies foster a fulfilling employee experience. If you find that your people are burning out or checking out, consider re-tooling your processes with a focus on feedback and recognition — two of the most overlooked drivers of employee engagement.

Top employers reward good work not just with bonuses and promotions, but by saying “thank you” and “good job” often. Without positive reinforcement, high-performing employees will feel unappreciated and begin to disengage. Regular pulse surveys are one easy way to collect data on your core engagement drivers and identify pain points.

4. Pay equity

The Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) recently conducted a study on pay equity and found that across experience and education levels, Black men and women continue to make less than their white counterparts, as low as 76 cents on the dollar. Despite countless efforts to dismantle pay ceilings and improve pay transparency, biases continue to factor into compensation models, often taking the shape of requests for “salary history.”

Conducting a pay audit — or assessing how pay gaps break across gender and racial lines — is one way to gain insight into the biases that may be unfairly influencing your company’s compensation structures.

5. Career advancement and internal mobility

In 2020, companies such as Meta attracted attention by making landmark commitments to increase BIPOC representation among leadership (vowing to increase representation by 30% by 2025.) And while these commitments clearly represent a step in the right direction, they fail to detail where these new diverse leaders will come from. Will they be recruited externally? Or will companies invest the time and resources to nurture diverse talent and source them from within?

If your company lacks BIPOC representation at the senior level, you may want to consider scaling opportunities for internal mobility. According to a McKinsey report, Black employees are 23% less likely to say they receive “a lot” or “quite a bit” of support to advance at work, 41% less likely to view promotions in their workplace as fair, and 39% less likely to believe their company’s diversity and inclusion efforts are effective, compared to their white counterparts working at the same company.

To bridge the promotion gap, companies like Merck are launching dedicated employee resource groups (ERGs) to help BIPOC professionals network, upskill and advance.

Measuring DEI metrics matters

For companies serious about building an equitable and inclusive culture, it’s mission-critical to understand the impact of your DEI efforts across every step in the employee journey. By tracking the DEI metrics above, you can gain insight into what’s working and identify areas for improvement.

To learn more about how to show impact from your DEI programs, check out our recent guidebook.

Download the guide

Month: November 2023

Introducing Pivotal Practice: A new approach to giving effective feedback