What is noteworthy among the 2013 BEST winners is that training and development initiatives clearly focus on the line of sight from customer needs and expectations to business strategy and business goals. Regardless of industry or workforce size, these BEST winners exemplify how learning can be a strategic partner that drives performance and profitability. From fast food to financial services and from hospitality to healthcare, the 28 companies that earned the 2013 ASTD BEST Award have a culture of and commitment to learning that benefits the employees and the customers they serve. (View entire list of 2013 BEST Award winners.)
#3 Savvis, A CenturyLink Company
Savvis provides IT infrastructure solutions to its clients by delivering cloud, colocation, and managed-hosting services over advanced networks. When a customer satisfaction survey revealed that clients were concerned with the firm's ability to provide quotes in a timely manner and in a format customers wanted, the IT department decided to replace the existing quoting system.
One-third of Savvis employees interact with the technology in some way, so a significant training effort was in order before the new system went live. The learning and development team coordinated with both the sales and IT departments to deliver training in a six-week timeframe during an annual lull in providing quotes.
System users were separated into three groups based on how they used the technology, and training was developed according to each group's needs. Strategies ranged from e-learning and virtual instructor-led training to a 16-hour instructor-led course with job aids and e-learning follow-up support. All training assets were designed with ongoing training support, and the program was immediately converted into a 100 percent e-learning system for all users post-launch.
In all, more than 1,300 employees learned to use the new system without any interruption in revenue and with no increase in calls to the sales support center related to skills gaps.
#4 Nemours
Nemours, a children's health system, can be best characterized as a learning organization. "Learning ... began more than 70 years ago with a mission that included providing hospitalization for critically ill children, supporting research to improve children's healthcare, and providing post-graduate education for physicians and clinicians," says the not-for-profit's leadership.
Nemours is committed to providing its practitioners with continuing education opportunities. A remarkable example is its pediatric emergency medical skills course for first-year pediatric emergency medicine fellows, which involves intensive role playing. The scenarios frequently focus on patient and family interactions, especially emotionally complex ones—such as when fellows must deliver difficult news to patients' families. Experienced clinicians observe and mentor the fellows, providing insightful feedback on their communication and interpersonal skills.
The learning function took center stage in 2012, with the opening of the Nemours Children's Hospital. With more than 600 new positions to fill, Nemours offered workshops to help managers assess both behavioral and clinical skills to ensure that candidates possessed the culturally required behaviors. These workshops also trained families to participate in behavioral interviews—powerful proof that the organization's learning is driven by customer needs.
#5 DenizBank
Becoming one of the top five private banks in Turkey in only 16 years, DenizBank attaches great importance to its learning function, called the Academy.
The Academy takes a proactive role in establishing, executing, and supporting business strategies. The learning team does this by routinely evaluating training initiatives delivered throughout the year, as well as through banking and customer surveys. Once the data are evaluated, the Academy prepares a development plan and SWOT analysis for each business line.
Providing innovative and technological learning initiatives has been a huge driver in supporting and maintaining employee development. The Academy uses several platforms, including e-learning, mobile learning, and training via Facebook.
One of DenizBank's most innovative learning initiatives is its Captains Log Book. Referring to branch managers as "captains," the Captains Log Book model constitutes the basis for the guide.
At the top of the model sits the company's mission, vision, and strategies; other layers show each branch as a separate entity, which provides managers with flexibility in their responsibility for defining their new hires' development route. The model guides captains by providing them with ideas and resources to help new hires be immediately effective in their first days at the branch.
#7 Mindtree Limited
The learning function at Mindtree, a global information technology solutions company, balances the needs of its employees and the needs of the company by mapping out programs to specific roles, expecting employees to complete programs prescribed for them, and allowing them to "learn the way they want."
The learning function plays an integral role in building leadership and managerial capacity for the future. Learning and development focuses on skills related to customer management, project management, team management, personal excellence, and strategic thinking.
Given the severe scarcity of technical talent, Mindtree used multidimensional approaches to managing technical talent by working with its partners and employees to create comprehensive certificate programs aligned with policies related to promotion and incentives.
Programs based on action learning were designed, developed, and implemented using blended learning methods. These workshops are cognitive and experiential in nature, and simulate everyday business scenarios.
"As we look at the future, we believe that learning will be an integral engine in taking us where we want to go on our journey of organizational growth and expertise," says Krishnan KS, general manager and head of culture and competence.
#9 Cerner Corporation
As healthcare organizations move toward the use of electronic health records to manage patient care, physician leaders are essential to helping drive the clinical and cultural transformation. To provide this need, Cerner developed the Chief Medical Informatics Officer (CMIO)/Physician Change Champion Bootcamp—a new course that offers content and curriculum to support and develop physician informatics leaders.
Focusing on change management, behavior change, and leadership and communication, the course addresses the core knowledge and skills CMIOs and physician change champions need in the fluctuating healthcare environment. During 2.5 days, material is delivered through instructor-led collaborative discussions combined with hands-on activities tailored to individual roles.
Cerner's corporate structure has the HR and learning and development functions as separate organizations reporting to different senior leaders. To ensure that learning is integrated into corporate imperatives, the chief learning officer reports directly to the chief of staff. The learning and development team is typically at the table as strategy is being discussed, and both functions closely align to unite human capital planning and workforce development.
#14 Nuance Communications, Inc.
Innovation can be taught. Nuance, a technology company in Burlington, Massachusetts, is acutely aware of this. As a business that is driven by its engineers' ability to innovate, Nuance depends on its learning function to educate, engage, and retain technical talent.
The learning function recently created the Engineering Excellence program, which provides specialized technical training on the technologies engineers need to develop new generations of products. This program was born after careful study of similar companies' approaches to engaging technical talent, including NASA's.
After extensive interviews with NASA engineers, Nuance's learning team vetted the program content with global focus groups of technical employees. The resulting Engineering Excellence program not only provides specialized training; it also launched a hierarchy of technical certifications that gives engineers a career roadmap, and formed reward and recognition systems. The program was a success from the start: Within three days of launching the program, 2,500 engineers had registered for at least one program.
The Engineering Excellence program also broke down geographical barriers by connecting engineers across the globe. "This is how cross-pollination happens," says Chief Learning Officer Linda Landry, "which is where the richness of new ideas can take hold and grow."
#15 Cigna Corporation
Cigna's learning function drives business results. Since its inception, the corporate university has played a vital role of informing, influencing, and setting critical business and people strategies. The cornerstone of the university's, and in turn the organization's, success is its emphasis on "outside-in" thought leadership, which instills a collaborative culture that fosters a dynamic life cycle of continuous learning between external stakeholders and employees.
The university holds the key responsibility for shifting the corporate culture, and is focused on changing the traditional view of learning as only a means for skill development to the concept that learning is a major component of doing business and delivering an exceptional customer experience.
Given the considerable number of changes occurring in the pharmacy management environment, Cigna needed to increase frontline managers' performance and develop capabilities in change leadership, customer centricity, managerial courage, and coaching skills. Combining fair process theory and neuroscience, the learning team developed a methodology to capture the "wisdom" of the company's highest performers and then encouraged others to embrace the best practices on their own.
Performance improvement increased, customer service improved, and the program's success led to broader implementation in the company.
#16 TELUS
"Customers First" is a longstanding priority that the learning team at TELUS helps to advance. For example, when the company added the Consumer Service X (CSX) program, the learning team created a separate CSX call center queue and six-week training.
However, it was taking 17 weeks for new hires to reach preparedness since they first had to be trained on core services before moving on to CSX training. This lag was potentially costing TELUS business as hold times grew because of the lack of CSX-trained agents.
The solution was to redesign the CARE New Hire curriculum as a streamlined onboarding program that prepared more proficient, customer-focused, confident agents in less time. With this program, the learning team was able to reduce time to productivity from 17 to 12 weeks with measurable improvements in agent performance across four key metrics: revenue (up 28 percent), customer satisfaction ratings (up 29 percent), repeat calls, and transfers.
Another initiative based on the Customers First priority was a customized eight-month call center coaching methodology course for team managers and operations managers. Half-day monthly programs follow a two-day kickoff. Success was tracked based on customer satisfaction ratings, repeat calls, transfers, and coaching effectiveness. Phase I measures exceeded targets in all but one category (a near miss), with a weighted average of 1.27 (1 = met target).
Additional T+D articles about TELUS:
TELUS Reveals Its Secret to Success
Culture as a Competitive Advantage
#19 OptumRx
An organizational learning strategy is a two-way street. OptumRx, a pharmacy benefits management company and one of the Optum companies of UnitedHealth Group, understands this: Its learning strategy is not dictated by leadership, but driven simultaneously from the bottom up and the top down.
Key initiatives are handed down from senior leadership, while others are proposed and developed by members of the learning function. Adjustments to the strategy are made according to a collaborative, iterative model referred to as "T.I.N.E.S." Each "tine" is represented by training, instructional design, needs analysis, executives, or stakeholders, and each contributes to the learning strategy.
The learning function makes every effort to remain integrated with all parts of the organization. It is involved in every stage of the employee life cycle, from talent acquisition and new-hire orientation, to career planning for midlevel managers and retention through continual operational training.
In a recent period of explosive growth (OptumRx's membership will have more than doubled by the end of 2013), the learning function was agile enough to anticipate internal customers' needs, and designed custom training that addressed how employees' roles would change with the influx of new members.
#23 University Health System
As the teaching facility for a major academic medical center, learning is part of University Health System's DNA. When the organization adopted the "Triple Aim" business strategy—improve patient experience, quality and outcomes, and efficiency—the learning department served as the executive team's business partner in rolling out the strategy organization-wide.
The executive team articulated the Triple Aim strategy, and teamed with the learning department to communicate the importance of directing all human capital investments toward performance that would lead to achieving success.
Triple Aim is hardwired into all learning and development efforts, including needs analysis, content, facilitator selection, and delivery mode. It also is integrated into all learning programs, including new employee orientation, nursing orientation, and the Institute for Leaders.
The Triple Aim vocabulary is introduced and reinforced at the beginning and end of every learning program and scenario. End-of-course evaluations specifically ask whether the program made a difference in the participant's ability to work toward Triple Aim in each of the three areas. Based on these evaluations, some learning events were redesigned to more closely align with Triple Aim outcomes.
#24 Valvoline Instant Oil Change
Franchise expansion and the pilot of a new business model with a key strategic partner required Valvoline Instant Oil Change to prepare for future growth and expand the pool of potential manager candidates. The result was the Multi-Unit Manager Development Program.
During the program development process, it became apparent that the learning needs for multi-unit managers were less about knowledge transfer and more about relationships and collaboration—they needed to know and trust the people who could help them be successful.
The development program occurs in two phases. In the first, learners are paired with a coach who guides learners through exercises designed to teach "nuts and bolts" skills. When the learners enter their new roles, coaches become ongoing mentors, with learning exercises and interactions tracked centrally.
In phase two, structured peer projects are added, introducing collaboration in larger teams. Also, learners attend a three-day event where they build relationships with key support personnel.
A social collaborative learning platform allows for short online sessions led by a member of the learning team. Learners collaborate on assignments via an integrated social networking environment, blogs, video, audio, and print media.
The program has placed Valvoline Instant Oil Change in a position to expand without outside hiring, the associated training costs, and lost productivity.
#26 Clarkston Consulting
Clarkston Consulting's vision, mission, and core values have remained consistent since the company's founding more than 20 years ago: Brilliantly serve life sciences and consumer products clients and help them gain strategic advantage through business and technology initiatives.
Within that standing framework, it is critical that the skills of Clarkston's workforce align with the company's strategic goals. To ensure that happens, executive management works hand in hand with the learning function to address skills gaps. Supporting this strategic alignment strategy requires ongoing analysis and real-time enhancements and improvements. The ability to ramp programs up and down effectively and efficiently is essential.
The learning team is responsible for ensuring that programs continuously identify and develop new leaders, provide innovative learning opportunities, and afford professionals the abilities to keep core skills fresh and relevant. Innovative learning programs, such as the Building a Culture of Feedback initiative, were developed to improve the quality, timeliness, and consistency of feedback for all employees. After the first year of the program, on-time performance appraisals increased significantly from 15 percent to 59 percent.
Talent management is integrated across the organization to ensure seamless, high-touch processes for Clarkston's workforce.
#27 SunTrust Banks, Inc.
At SunTrust Banks, the learning organization is one of the highest funded internal functions in the company, second only to the technology department. "We've increased our training budget every year over the past several years," says CEO William H. Rogers Jr. "We are just fundamental believers that, ultimately, training builds sustainability not only for our workforce, but for our clients. It's highly correlated."
When it comes to setting organization strategy, the chief human resources officer and the leaders of all four Centers of Excellence he manages, including the chief learning officer/senior vice president of talent management and development, are all present during quarterly meetings. Since one of the company's guiding principles is operating "as one team," the learning function plays an equal role—alongside leaders from all corners of the organization—in discussions that set the company's strategy.
Last year, SunTrust launched a new talent review and succession planning process championed by the CEO and chief human resources officer, which included new succession roles and tools to evaluate potential and readiness for specific positions. In 2013, the company is focusing on improving these processes and driving accountability toward key talent management metrics, including internal mobility, targeted development plans focused on strengthening its bench and building ready-now successors, and succession plan use.
Additional T+D articles about SunTrust Banks:
A Banker's Trust in Training
Success at SunTrust Begins and Ends With Talent