Career Conversations

Release version: Washingtondc

Updated February 1, 2024

4 minutes to read

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Summary of Career Conversations Employee Service Management

The Career Conversations application enhances communication between employees and their managers, fostering meaningful dialogues focused on employee growth and development. This tool aids in creating and tracking one-on-one conversations through the Employee Center, which are vital for building strong workplace relationships and supporting employee aspirations.

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Key Features

Conversation Initiation: Employees and managers can initiate both one-time and recurring conversations to discuss growth and development.
Talking Points: Users can add suggested or custom talking points relevant to the employee's aspirations and growth plans.
Action Items: The app allows for the creation of specific tasks that support the employee's goals.
Concealed Notes: Users can compose private notes for each conversation for better tracking and follow-up.
Integration with Microsoft Outlook: This feature simplifies scheduling by allowing users to view calendars and schedule meetings seamlessly.
Conversation Types: The app supports three main types of discussions: Growth Conversations, Growth Plan Check-ins, and Mentoring Conversations.

Key Outcomes

Implementing the Career Conversations app promotes internal mobility, reduces employee attrition due to dissatisfaction, and enhances cost savings through improved employee retention. By facilitating structured and meaningful dialogues, organizations can better support employee development and career progression.

The Career Conversations application supports dialogue between subordinates and their leaders. This application enables your employees to engage in meaningful conversations that are focused on the employee's growth and development.

When the Career Conversations app is installed, you can use it to create and track conversations from the Employee Center. An employee's growth and development is produced substantially by the conversations held in the one-on-one discussions with their managers. These conversations are imperative in building strong relationships in the workplace. The effectiveness is optimized when the dialogue revolves around the employee's aspirations and growth plans. The Career Conversations app facilitates the administration of one-on-one conversations between leaders and their subordinates. It simultaneously improves the effectiveness of communication by enabling you to establish the topics of discussion.

Benefits of the Career Conversations app

The Career Conversations app provides the following benefits to your employees, managers, and organization:

Employees and managers

Enables both employees and managers to initiate one-time or recurring conversations with each other to discuss the employee's growth and development within your organization.
Add suggested or custom talking points so that the employees and managers can indicate pertinent topics of discussion associated with the employee's growth plans and aspirations. Talking points can be about aspirations or growth plans that employees share with their managers.
Create action items to specify discrete tasks that must be accomplished by the employee or manager to support subordinates with their goals and aspirations.
Compose concealed notes for each conversation that an employee and a manager have with each other.

Organization

Fosters an environment that promotes and increases internal mobility.
Decreases attrition related to employee dissatisfaction.
Boosts cost savings through employee retention.

Integration with Microsoft Outlook

The Career Conversations app provides an integration with Microsoft® Outlook® so you can conveniently schedule conversations with your employees or manager from the Employee Center. This integration enables you to view your employees or manager's calendar as it appears in Microsoft Outlook so you can effectively schedule meetings for each conversation during the conversation creation process. The integration with Microsoft Outlook lets your employees and managers schedule meetings using a single interface, thus developing a seamless process for creating conversations. This streamlined process simplifies the steps to create and schedule a conversation, which helps to promote the adoption of the Career Conversations app across your organization.

Conversation types

The Career Conversations app supports three types of conversations that you can use to facilitate discussions between subordinates and their leaders. To accommodate dialogue for the dynamic relationships that exist within an organization, this application supports the following conversation types:

Table 1. Conversation type field values in Discussion Series form
Conversation type	Description
Growth conversations	A one-time or recurring conversation to discuss an employee's growth and development within your organization. This conversation type is intended for the employee-manager relationship.
Growth plan check-ins	A one-time check-in conversation to discuss a growth plan for career advancement that an employee shares with their manager. This conversation type is intended for the employee-manager relationship.
Mentoring conversations	A one-time conversation to discuss topics from which the mentee can benefit most and to provide counsel on career development. This conversation type is intended for the mentee-mentor relationship.

Components of the Conversations module

Depending on your role within your organization, the Career Conversations app displays the following widgets when you access the Conversations home page from the Employee Center portal:

Table 2. Roles and corresponding widgets on the Conversations home page
Role	Widget
Employee	Your conversations
Manager	Your team's conversation Coming up soon Tip: This widget reflects conversations that are set to transpire within one week of the system date.

After a conversation is created between an employee and manager, the Career Conversations app displays the agenda page. This page contains the following components that you can use to enhance your conversation:

Your agenda section

This section contains four widgets that you can use to administer, facilitate, and navigate your conversation. The Your agenda section contains the following widgets:

Suggested talking points
Talking points
Action items
Your notes

Contextual side panel

This side panel reflects your employee's name and job title in your organization. The contextual side panel also contains a list of details specific to the employee to whom the conversation pertains. A description for each employee detail appears on an accordion. When you expand an accordion, more information about the corresponding employee details appears. The contextual side panel provides the following accordions for each employee with whom you create a conversation:

Aspirations
Growth plans
Feedback
Skills
Goals

The name of the contextual side panel changes depending on whether a manager or employee has accessed the conversation. The Career Conversations app displays the following names for the contextual side panel depending on your role within your organization:

Table 3. Roles and corresponding names for the contextual side panel
Role	Contextual side panel name
Employee	Your details
Manager	Employee details

The contextual side panel doesn’t appear when the corresponding conversation is defined as a mentoring conversation.