LinkedIn research found that employees who committed to learning on the job were 21% happier in their roles than those who didn’t. We want everyone on our team to feel happy and valued, so helping our employees grow and learn seems like an obvious investment. It’s clear to me that the leadership team at Booyah cares deeply about employees and wants them to feel excited about their careers. That’s why the agency prioritizes employee growth and ongoing talent development.
In 2020, we partnered with Powers Research Center to develop our New Manager Bootcamp Program, designed to provide new leaders with the resources they needed to succeed in their role. Twelve weeks after implementing this program, our managers were more confident, built their EQ (Emotional Intelligence) muscles, and had stronger communication skills.
Since then, Booyah has been named a top place to work in publications like the Denver Post, Outside, Inc., and more. We’re not trying to toot our own horn, but we also recently ranked #9 in Ad Age’s 2022 Best Places to Work for companies with up to 200 employees. In our eyes, this speaks volumes to the impact investing in ongoing talent development has on employee satisfaction.
While our New Manager Bootcamp Program was a success, our work toward employee development doesn’t stop there. Here are four more ways Booyah is helping employees grow in their roles this year.
Getting New Hires Up-to-Speed on Company Culture
The agency has grown rapidly throughout the pandemic. This past year saw more than 30 employees join the agency. We love adding new members to our team and realize a smooth onboarding process is important to make folks feel at home. When you work in a hybrid environment, it can be hard to get a sense of a company’s culture. However, understanding how a company operates and organizational values is key to new employee success. Rather than making new hires wait for quarterly meetings to get the lowdown on company values, we’re building an online ecosystem to close the company culture gap.
These new onboarding lessons will live on our learning management system and will cover a variety of topics. From Booyah culture to key management skills needed to succeed in your role, our onboarding system is designed to help new employees feel comfortable in their roles and at the company.
Self-directed Microlearning
We learned a lot from our New Manager Bootcamp program, so we’re taking all the program’s best aspects and creating microlearning self-directed training opportunities. Microlearning is a learning and development approach that delivers short bursts of information at a time. It’s a buzzword in the eLearning space, and for a good reason. This learning style improves focus and supports long-term retention by up to 80%.
These short lessons will be going live on our learning management system, making it easy for employees to learn about a topic when it’s most convenient for them. While group learning opportunities are great, they’re not always feasible in today’s remote work environment. At Booyah, we have a number of remote employees, and we want all of them to have the same learning and development resources that our in-office team has.
Self-directed learning not only makes it easier to pursue learning that interests you most, but it allows everyone to take ownership of their own development needs. For example, let’s say a team leader is getting ready to have a difficult conversation with an employee and is feeling a little nervous. They can go into the learning management software and watch a 10-minute video about handling the situation. At the end of the video, the manager will be given the tools they need to practice the conversation before having it in real-time.
Leadership Series
We wanted to provide our company leaders with the opportunity to grow and learn in areas they struggle. Rather than guess what those areas are, we created a focus group of 40 leaders and asked them about the biggest challenges they faced in their role. During these sessions, we learned that Booyah managers wanted more support and resources around the virtual working environment, so we’ve created a three-week series designed to provide learning resources around virtual work.
This series will teach leaders how to connect, collaborate, and build cohesion on virtual teams. We’ll be training managers on tools and activities they can implement within their own teams to create a more collaborative virtual environment. As time goes on and the work environment keeps changing, we’ll continue to touch base with teams to give them the learning and development resources they need to thrive in their role.
One-on-One Leadership Coaching
This past year, Booyah started offering one-on-one coaching for company leaders. Since the pandemic, company workplaces have changed, and managers’ leadership styles need to change too.
From client issues to leading rapidly expanding teams, our coaches have helped managers work through a variety of challenges to become better in their roles. As the workplace continues to evolve, resilience is more important now than ever before. Research shows that managers who participate in leadership coaching to build resilience see a 31% increase in team performance and a 52% decrease in burnout. Through one-on-one conversations, our company leaders understand their strengths, practice new skills, and discover areas where they need to grow.
Come Work for Booyah
We’re always on the hunt for hard-working individuals who are passionate about digital marketing. Many of our employees are in Denver, Colorado (which is a great place to live!), but we’re open to talent all over the country. You can visit our careers page to learn about available positions.
