BEST in Tech
Each year, ASTD announces the BEST Awards, which recognizes organizations that demonstrate enterprise‐wide success through employee learning and development. According to Tony Bingham, ASTD’s president and CEO, “The ASTD BEST Award winners set the standard of excellence for exceptional learning practices, and demonstrate that a skilled workforce is vital to achieving results. They use learning as a strategic tool and have the support of senior leaders who champion a learning culture.”
Here’s a look at how some of the 2009 winners are using technology to support learning and performance in their organizations.
A New Lease on Learning
Gables Residential
Houston, Texas
The real estate firm successfully executes learning imperatives with tech-savvy initiatives, plus a little fun and games.
Gables Residential is a privately owned real estate investment trust that builds, develops, and manages multifamily communities and mixed-use developments in such U.S. urban markets as Houston, Dallas, Atlanta, Boca Raton, and Washington, D.C. A strong commitment to strategic planning that incorporates and leverages employee learning and development has enabled the company to remain profitable despite challenging economic times.
Jana Muma has been with Gables for 18 years and has served the company as vice president for learning and development since 2001; she is the first to hold that title and reports directly to the chief operating officer. She supervises a staff of eight, including six management-level trainers and two instructional designers.
“Learning and development really is a part of our culture,” she says. “Our executive committee has recognized its value and has supported a lot of new initiatives. “That commitment has been noticed by our peers and competitors, and ours is the company that others turn to for advice and information.”
Between 70 and 80 percent of Gables’ 1,300 employees work on site at property locations as leasing agents, and service and technical personnel. Muma says that industrywide turnover in the sales force is high, but that the tide is turning. Gables is working with community colleges that offer degree programs in property management so that employees can gain college credit for Gables training and so that degree students can pursue internships at Gables. “As the industry becomes more professional and specialized, it becomes more respectable, and we expect to see turnover drop,” she says.
Although the economic downturn brought an initial benefit to apartment communities as banks foreclosed on mortgages and tightened their lending procedures, that was just a short blip, Muma says. As part of its process to attain maximum return on training and development investments and to manage and contain expenses, Gables constantly evaluates major programs for both cost and learning effectiveness. In the past year, that evaluation process has brought about extensive revision to two major programs—new employee orientation and Standard Operating Procedure compliance.
Formerly, Gables had offered new employee orientation as a three-and-a-half-day, classroom-based, instructor-led workshop during the third week of every month. New employees were brought to regional training centers, and corporate trainers traveled there to meet them. With employees spanning 12 regions and six employees responsible for training them, the company was faced with monthly travel costs that were high and difficult to forecast accurately. “It was a very expensive logistical challenge,” Muma recalls.
The evaluation process also revealed that the training wasn’t getting to new employees quickly enough, and these workers weren’t permitted to conduct property tours until the training had been completed.
The updated orientation program is completely online. It features pre- and posttraining assessments and is organized into chunks that can be completed in any order and according to an employee’s schedule. It features video messages from company executives, corporate history, and video clips of associates who welcome the new workers onboard.
The orientation program is accessed through the Learning SPOT, Gables’ new learning management system that launched in July. (SPOT is an acronym for “Shaping Professionals and Optimizing Talent.”) In the multiyear planning and development process that informed the LMS design, Gables surveyed its associates closely and assessed their needs. Primarily members of Generations X and Y, the associates indicated a desire for a system that is youthful, exciting, and easily customizable—all goals that have been met, says Muma.
“The initial response from our associates has been very positive,” she says, as they begin taking assessments and courses that will feed into new individual development plans. Muma also notes that the next phase of development will incorporate some social media tools into the SPOT.
The SPOT also hosts Gables’ e-learning and online course libraries, proprietary corporate online courses, and a WebEx Training Center, which allows instructors to lead live virtual classes. All of these initiatives have enabled the company to reduce travel and accommodation costs by 21 percent from last year.
The second major program that was closely evaluated was Gables’ training on Standard Operating Procedures. Quarterly internal audits of the observance of these procedures found that compliance was low nationwide on 14 measures. The SOPs had been taught via a required web-based training class; audit results indicated that this training was ineffective.
To facilitate improvements in compliance and audit ratings, the learning and development group moved from a course approach to one-on-one coaching in those 14 specific areas. They prepared an audit coaching guide that contains all of the SOPs for those 14 areas and a list of coaching questions for each area. After reviewing the procedures, coaches help property managers conduct self-audits on the items to increase awareness and identify areas that still require improvement.
“This is one of the few times that our process has changed from online to face-to-face, instead of the other way around,” says Muma. She notes that the new coaching process can be tailored to each community, allowing increased or reduced focus on items as needed, as well as clear communication of accountability for the SOP areas.
Learning retention is tested in a game show format. Learning and development team members developed a Jeopardy! game that covers SOP knowledge and frequently missed items. Attendees are divided into teams and choose team names. They buzz in with handheld controllers to answer questions, and the system tracks the scores on the scoreboard. Contrary to what one might think about SOP training, the Jeopardy! game has made this the most requested class in the learning and development team’s portfolio. Additionally, satisfactory scores have been increased on 48 percent of the control areas.
Decisions about learning and development initiatives are made collaboratively among the company’s vice presidents, who gather for a weekly conference call to discuss goals and strategies. Muma has recently hired two instructional designers (a step that she says is unusual in the property management industry) who conduct formal needs assessments on most training requests. The requesting department is heavily involved in the development of any new programs, and its vice president acts as sponsor. The addition of these positions has also allowed Gables to reduce its outsourcing commitments and content development cycle time, now producing new courses in as little as one to three weeks.
“It has been an interesting road, to say the least,” says Muma. “When we pull out of these economically challenging times, we will begin to grow and expand rapidly. We will be ready to manage that growth and to support corporate strategy as it evolves.”
Learning Is Center Stage at CSC
CSC
Falls Church, Virginia
“I want to be the leading edge for my organization,” says this company’s CLO. From all accounts, she is.
It stands to reason that a company launched 50 years ago as the Computer Sciences Corporation, better known today as CSC, would have a learning organization that’s ahead of the curve. After all, the global provider of technology-enabled solutions tackles projects such as modernizing the tax system at the IRS and digitizing the healthcare system in the United Kingdom. So improving learning with 21st century ideas should be a snap.
Also to its credit, the company has Holly Huntley as its energetic and resourceful CLO. Under her leadership, the learning and talent development function has become central to almost everything. For example, consider the company’s 2008 launch of an initiative to create a new brand identity, both to the market and its 92,000 employees. The image revamping project might logically have been driven by the marketing department, but instead was a partnership between the two units.
“We never had a brand strategy before,” says Huntley of the consulting and services firm that competes with brand-centric goliaths IBM and Accenture. “It has become important for us to tell our story.” She suggested to the executive team that the mission be undertaken “from the inside out.”
“We know our employees are the best branding tool we have,” Huntley states, “particularly as they’re out on Twitter and social networking sites.”
CSC launched the brand campaign internally by creating training programs to ensure that employees understood and appreciated how it wanted to be seen in the marketplace. It included brand ambassador training, as well as instruction on communications and client interaction. Employees became inspired with the new corporate values and created forums to share their stories. “It was not a top-down endeavor,” Huntley says.
Although the learning department’s pivotal role in the exercise was initially questioned, even by its own team members, Huntley says that its success proves a valuable point. “The lines between organizations within companies are blurred by all the technologies and functional expertise that often reside within them. You’ve got learning, knowledge, innovation, marketing, technology, and communications—all converging into one place. So as a learning officer, it’s in my interest to understand my peers in the C suite so that I can support their agendas, and vice versa.”
In addition, it’s important for learning organizations to gain the trust of marketing and other departments, Huntley says. Doing so can also pay dividends. Several years ago, her department sponsored a research grant to explore the creation of a 3D virtual world for a sales training product. The concept has since been applied to other types of virtual world learning.
Huntley proposed a follow-up use of the learning tool to help celebrate the company’s 50th anniversary in April 2009. She suggested holding a virtual party in Second Life that would include a gallery walk of the company’s history, underwritten by marketing. She suggested that if the idea clicked, the learning department would take over the island and use it for CSC orientation.
That’s exactly what happened. “We used marketing as a gateway to expose the workforce to Second Life in a secure environment. By doing so, it became a lower-risk activity than if it had been a learning initiative.”
Huntley is also Director of Enterprise Learning and Talent Development at CSC, which makes her role central to two other key initiatives—strengthening the firm’s leadership pipeline and improving organizational capability.
Under the CEO’s sponsorship, the department is transforming the succession planning process to include broader talent pooling. It established a common succession planning framework across the company, and it standardized business units on a common process. To ensure full transparency, validation workshops were designed with input from senior teams, which also shared accountability for developing and grooming every candidate. It was a significant shift away from the previous silo approach.
The move to talent pooling also requires the executive team to identify emerging leaders earlier in their careers, while allowing for greater internal mobility and opportunity for rotational assignments. The learning department tracks each candidate to ensure that they receive the right kind of training, coaching, and assignments.
In addition, a new talent pipeline review process enables senior teams to match development opportunities to high-potential candidates and provide more assignment-based learning. The move has elevated talent development to the executive business agenda.
Yet another important initiative aims to integrate CSC’s talent processes under a single platform—a complicated undertaking for such a large organization. The company hopes to integrate the talent suite into CSC’s recruitment activities to address the full life-cycle of employees. One important aspect of the plan is a social networking component that could have a dramatic impact on the company. “When an employee does a performance review, they could use the social networking tool to solicit feedback from colleagues they’ve worked with throughout the year,” says Huntley. She says that the capability would constitute an important power shift away from the current top-down review procedure.
The system would also help CSC to discover the talent capabilities that reside within the company and to locate the right people—always a challenge in large, matrixed organizations. It would also increase the mobility of individuals across organizational lines. One innovation would insert social networking capabilities into the career development process, enabling individuals who aspire to certain position to network with employees who are already in those roles, for career development guidance.
Huntley classifies the department’s most innovative initiative as its enterprising use of “ideation”—web-based tools for collaborative innovation and enterprise crowd sourcing solutions. Ideation uses a software application that enables whole-system problem solving by bringing all organizational members into a virtual room to attack challenges.
In short, the tool facilitates the flow of ideas from the bottom up. Introduced with help from CSC’s office of innovation, the learning department has begun using it to co-create training with employee help, says Huntley. Content developers can tap the wisdom of experts in the field rather than simply rely on subject matter experts interviewed by a learning architect. “Co-creation decreases development time and gets employees involved in the learning process,” she says.
Ideation is also being used at CSC as a leadership development tool. CEO Michael Laphen recently implemented it to challenge every employee to suggest the next business opportunity for the company. The move showcases a transparent leadership style while leveraging the concept of collective intelligence.
In response to some 2,000 ideas from the workforce, the company appointed a group of high-potential employees to filter the ideas and build scenarios. “It becomes a learning event because everyone can see the outcome,” Huntley says.
She says it also creates a fascinating pattern of collected views shifting from divergence to convergence, and back. “The tool facilitates a new learning pattern of harnessing divergent thinking and coalescing it around a business challenge.”
They All Shine On
Sun Microsystems
Menlo Park, California
Maximizing on its innovative culture, Sun Microsystems’ finds the balance between the knowledge that people need and the ease and freedom that they want.
“You never have enough money to do all the training you want to do,” says Karie Willyerd, vice president and chief learning officer at Sun Microsystems.
Sun releases a product or an update every day around which training could be built; but putting out a new program or module daily—even with a learning staff of more than 300—is impossible. Plus, in this era of cost containment, every training dollar must be stretched to the limit and achieve maximum efficiency. These concerns have driven innovation in learning at Sun, and SLX chief among these innovations.
“When the sales division reduced training hours and budget, our learning organization needed to get strategic,” Willyerd says. “We needed to solve both an operational problem (sales teams didn’t have the information they needed when they needed it) and a business problem (as a result, sales professionals were not as successful as we’d like in closing sales).”
Further, theirs was a moving (and expensive) target audience. Sun employees are geographically dispersed, with more than 50 percent working from home, in regions around the globe. Observing Web 2.0 popularity, increased peer-to-peer information sharing among its employees, and sales team demand for learning in the field, Sun Learning Services (SLS) met learners where they already were—informally finding and sharing information in any medium, often through their cellphones.
Leveraging open source technology and the company’s culture of innovation, SLS created Sun Learning eXchange (SLX), a YouTube-like collaborative multimedia portal where employees can post, view, rate, tag, share, or download content to a computer or MP3 player. “The technology came along at the same time as our need for it,” Willyerd says.
SLX was rolled out virally. Beta testing among 1,500 employees generated a stealthy buzz. High-profile internal bloggers talked it up. SLS engaged internal influencers and sought their feedback. After one official announcement, with prizes for best content, it was all word-of-mouth. The intuitive user interface made training unnecessary.
In its first seven months, SLX garnered more than 5,000 pieces of media uploaded, more than 47,000 unique users in 146 countries, and more than 300,000 page views. “Now the same environment that makes the personal lives of our employees fun and cool helps them succeed at a given task or their job overall,” says Willyerd. SLX has since been turned into a product for sale.
Willyerd was hired as Sun’s first CLO in 2005. Her first task—to turn around Sun University, which offered no sales, technical, or external training, and consisted of 12 different legacy organizations. As a chargeback operation, the key to generating revenue at Sun University was simply to offer popular courses that people wanted to take, such as the “7 Habits of Highly Effective People.”
“There was no place to go but up with employee learning,” says Willyerd, who immediately shut down all of those courses. She then began building an organization that only offered training that aligned with the strategic intent and purpose of the company. “It was a heart-pounding time. It was hard to sleep at night for the first six to 12 months,” she says.
Now, employee learning and development is represented at the highest levels within Sun (Willyerd is counted among the company’s top 50 executives), and her global learning organization is a respected profit center. If SLS were a stand-alone training organization, it would be among the world’s largest. In FY 2008, SLS exceeded all annual financial goals, surpassed global revenue goals four quarters in a row, and achieved 6 percent year-over-year revenue growth.
Annual company goals drive annual SLS goals; Willyerd works with Sun’s CEO and other top executives to define business requirements and learning. SLS team members engage in formal strategic planning with key business unit leaders and the CEO at a two-day, annual Strategy Summit, where a rolling three-year strategic plan is updated with critical learning and business goals at departmental and corporate levels.
A program management office manages and tracks all programs, projects, processes, tools, and more, maintaining the information on a wiki so that any SLS employee can check it at any time. A finance and reporting team measures training function management and program effectiveness, individually and at an aggregated level based on companywide metrics.
Learning has helped to drive a dramatic turnaround in revenue and profitability through the creation of sales training programs, most notably Storage University, which generated nearly $500 million in revenue in 12 months. Storage U is a groundbreaking, three-phase sales accreditation program that requires learners to demonstrate comprehension of learning content (product and services coursework), application of learning (demonstrating skills through peer and customer presentations), and validation of impact by documenting results (closing a sale). Participants can earn accreditation at three levels: advocate, specialist, and expert.
Storage U leverages just-in-time, peer-authored content delivered with Web 2.0 technologies. To prepare for their presentations, candidates can download slideshows narrated by the company’s top sales performer. The Web-based “win report” learners submit to document closed sales is reviewed by a peer board, along with training records, that approves or rejects the sale.
ROI evidence is incontrovertible: The $2.25 million development cost of Storage U was covered by the first three sales. Its program budget has now been quadrupled to extend the model to all sales divisions worldwide, and Sales University, an umbrella role-based accreditation program for all sales personnel, was created.
“We are methodically developing our sales professionals in terms of their skills and their careers, ultimately driving engagement, retention, productivity, and job satisfaction as well as significant revenue,” Willyerd says.
Employee satisfaction is a key metric for Sun, and one that SLS has worked to improve. “Our survey data demonstrate a strong positive correlation between opportunities for skill development and employee engagement levels,” says Willyerd. Learning 2.0 initiatives have received a strong response from employees, who enjoy blogs, wikis, Facebook groups, Second Life, and Twitter as learning tools. MyLearning is a new single-sign-on portal where employees can access all formal and informal learning content; and can use widgets to personalize their pages with favorite resources and coworker profiles.
In attempting to keep up with demand for learning, SLS has tried to reduce the time required to deploy new initiatives. The team has worked on making content more modular, trying to avoid prerequisite content between modules, and dividing content into nuggets as small as possible. Increasingly, the team engages subject matter experts to create content for internal audiences. SLS provides guidelines, coaching, and tools to capture information quickly. They then package content for tracking, post it to the learning management system, and map it to audience-specific learning paths.
Willyerd views all of these successes with mixed emotions: pride and “a tinge of sadness.” Oracle Corporation has announced plans to purchase Sun, and SLS will be assimilated into multiple Oracle organizations.
More information about the 2009 ASTD BEST Award winners may be found in the October 2009 issue of T+D magazine and online: www.astd.org/best. Details about the 2010 program will be available next February.