We cover the more technical aspects of setting up managers in Bridge here. It covers:

• How are managers created?
• What permissions do managers have?
• What actions do you want managers to take?
• What notifications do you want your managers to receive?
• What training do you want your managers to see?

One of our really key suggestions is to generate a manager-specific smart group (this is easiest to accomplish through a “manager group” custom field where the values are “Y” or “N” and the group is set up to collect all those with a “Y” value).

Managers placed into this group can have three different types of training auto-fed to them:

• Bridge training courses or Program [recommended or required]
• Manager development Program or Journey
• Manager training category

We have a Learn Overview for Managers that you can share with your team members. You can also download it and put it into your own BAV instance within your account or upload it directly as a media file into a Bridge course. That course, or a Program or Journey of courses, can be used to train your managers.

This manager group can also support placing managers into development training (especially if they are new hires or new to management in general). 

A popular format for a Journey is a cohort model where social tools (i.e. Teams, Slack, etc.) from the manager’s toolkit are leveraged for ongoing discussion while live virtual trainings serve are the catalyst for each new module.

If using Journeys, the curriculum will manifest in Bridge like this:

Leverage categories to increase content visibility.

Categories are unique in that they can be made visible at the group level, which means that you can aggregate manager-specific content and only make it visible to the manager group, creating a customized experience for those team members.

We have more details here on pairing categories with smart groups.

If you have a manager newsletter, you can create monthly themes with a “course of the month” that can be featured in the newsletter (or on your intranet) through the shareable link feature.

Managers with this role in Bridge are auto-provisioned the role (along with the “observer” role) as part of their mapping to the manager UID value that is connected to a learner (you can download a sample user upload and a roles & permissions tracker here).

Outside Bridge

Like the newsletter option above, leverage your internal tools and systems to drive engagement and collaboration:

• Host “ask me anything” sessions where managers can come and ask questions about best practices within Bridge
• Keep a spreadsheet of available titles for full company visibility
• Start a chat group with managers where they can discuss the content they are creating (or needing to create)
• Train them on specific nomenclature to use for courses to create better systems for finding what content is available within Bridge
• Encourage collaboration through hosted sessions on how to build out quality content
• Use a form to collect requests from managers for Programs and Journeys that leverage multiple learning items (potentially across departments)

Content

By default, managers are able to create content and enroll their reporting line (direct and indirect reports) into learning items. One of the most effective ways to increase engagement of managers and their learners is by allowing them the option to build out and assign their own content. 

Keeping this open will allow them to see all authored content, but they will not be able to edit anything that they did not create.

The “History of Britney Spears” was created by Stephanie Admin. Stephanie Manager cannot edit the course. She can only see her Learners already enrolled in the course and also enroll any of her reports.

This course, “Sleigh Operations 101,” was created by Stephanie Manager. The edit option is available.

In a world where many of us are often working asynchronous, permitting managers to leverage this functionality is a great way to encourage more immediate knowledge transfer and better new employee onboarding.

Of course, the more authors that are in Bridge, the more this can increase a need for quality control (we have an article here that walks through cleaning up your Bridge content).

A good admin exercise can be to pull the course_templates.csv from the data dump (Admin > Tools > Download All Data). The user_id value will have the Bridge ID for the authors for those courses.

Admins can create a process to alert managers of their authored content and remind them to make any updates on a bi-annual or yearly basis. If an author is no longer with the company, an admin can reach out to Bridge Support to assign a new author to that content.

Again, having a channel for managers to engage in conversations around content they’ve created is helpful to avoid duplication of efforts. If there is content that a manager creates that is helpful for other learners or teams, those learners can be enrolled by their manager or an Account Admin.

Direct Messaging

Another engagement tool is that managers can direct message their learners through Bridge.

They can do this to their entire “My Learners” group.

They can also do this to individuals in their hierarchy.

Managers can also send direct messages to their learners in any course based on the status of those learners (i.e. required, not started, etc.).

We have more information on the direct message feature here.

Summary Notifications

To drive managers into Bridge, admins can enable the digest emails that will send weekly (learn more about the setup and execution of these summary emails here).

Managers will be able to click into the Overview dashboard or the respective courses.

These are great reminders to check in with team members during one-on-ones to ensure that training is being completed.

Analytics

Managers can also view data and reports for users in their managerial hierarchy through Analytics.

SIDE NOTE. The default setting in Analytics is “in the last 90 days,” and this can be adjusted to include any timeframe of the manager’s choosing (we often see “is any time” as a popular view).

Reporting is huge for manager engagement because it allows them to own the accountability to their reporting line.

Analytics URLs are unique to the filters, so there is also the option to bookmark specific reports that can be opened by any manager with that provisioned role.

In addition, managers can schedule reports to go to themselves, their managers, or anyone else in or outside of Bridge.

Our Skills feature can be enabled in the LMS (at no additional charge) by contacting support at support@bridgeapp.com. This will unlock some new features for your team that will support your managers in better understanding their reporting line (and others in their company).

A new “Company” icon will appear in the universal side panel navigation. This will include a people search and org chart.

The “Me” icon will now include access to a personal profile and skill communities. Profiles can include free text for a bio and interests. The skill selections are preset for uniformity (admins can also add custom skills in the backend).

You can learn more about building a profile in Bridge here.

We have some email copy here to support you should you choose to roll this out within your organization (we’d love to help you with a strategy!).

We also have a suite of performance tools that include 1:1s, feedback modules, and goal setting.

If you have any questions or would like to speak to our Bridge team about any of the additional features, please contact us a support@bridgeapp.com.