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Mark Schwartz, CFO of employee recognition platform Workhuman, spoke with us about how learning and development can be a way to help retain key personnel—and how CFOs can foster learning in their own organizations.
This interview took place over phone and email, and has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
How does recognition tie into retention?
The science behind it proves that having the right levels of recognition, asking the right questions about why somebody is being recognized, and then putting that in writing, really does promote better engagement…And we see that in our customers.
Has there been an uptick of interest in learning and development recently?
It’s hard for me to say. What we do even in the finance and the accounting teams that are underneath is provide opportunities for folks to do their continuing education, whether it's on the legal side or on the finance side, CPE or CPA credits.
But we also provide folks an opportunity, things like “what’s interesting to you that you’re not doing in your career today?...If we ever contemplate some M&A, would you like to be involved in that?”...Maybe you need to get involved in acquisition accounting, consolidation accounting, or on the FP&A side. Maybe you need to understand how integrations succeed or fail.”
What are some things that CFOs can do to help promote learning and development?
At a high level, it’s promoting that curiosity and creating an awareness of the programs that exist…And it’s a matter of the team believing that you care about their career development…Part of the measure of success for any leader is the growth of their teams…I don’t think you can be successful if you’re not measuring yourself in part on your ability to create the next set of leaders and do that succession planning.
How can data tie into employee development?
Together with the customer, there’s an enormous amount of data that gets collected. And when that data is managed and handled appropriately there’s lots of information that employers can learn about their employee base. For example, if a company is attempting to put together an acquisition team, we can help tell them who has the skill sets that fit the criteria.