Learn how this world-class technology provider won a prestigious Brandon Hall Excellence Award, and dramatically improved employee performance across 80 offices, with a strategic skills training program and their new cloud LMS.
Company Overview
A global powerhouse in electronics and electrical engineering, and the world’s largest provider of environmental technologies. Its Building Technologies division is the global market leader for safe and energy efficient “green” buildings and infrastructures − with best-in-class offerings for building automation, heating, ventilation and air conditioning (HVAC), fire protection and security.
Challenge
To succeed as a business, the employees must be able to sell, install, start up, and service an extremely complex combination of hardware and software that centrally controls buildings, such as research facilities, hospitals, multi-story buildings, and corporate or school campuses.
Just as challenging… the company has to deliver these systems precisely on time and with no cost overruns. It’s critical to their profitability and reputation. And it’s crucial for their customers’ success.
“Although our company has more than 60 years of providing excellent employee training and support, we had no standardized, sustainable process in place to document the technical skills that already existed in our workforce and to track employee development. This important need led us to develop the ‘Standardized Training Program’, which documents employee skills and provides faster/better training programs − thereby ensuring that all product implementations are delivered on time and under budget.”
MANAGER, EDUCATION SERVICES
About Training Program
Known as the global powerhouse in electronics and electrical engineering, the company is also considered a pioneer in corporate learning.
Classroom training began in the 1950s and laid the foundation for the company’s pervasive, award-winning training culture.
Other key business challenges the Standardized Training Program was designed to address included:
- Improve customer retention by increasing customer satisfaction
- Improve employee productivity
- Reduce cost overruns and rework
- Reduce employee turnover by increasing employee satisfaction
- Implement standardized processes across 80+ offices by capturing and following their best practices
Solution
As the global powerhouse began to develop and implement its Standardized Training Program, it quickly realized that a major component of this program, and its success, would be a robust, user-friendly Learning Management System (LMS), one that would:
- Increase the program’s efficiency and effectiveness
- Allow the Company to offer the right type of training to employees with specific job roles, at the precise time that it would be most effective
So they decided to replace their legacy learning system with PeopleONE’s ExpertusONE LMS − which has a next-gen, cloud-based design and great usability.
“Early on, it became obvious that our existing learning management system software was inadequate to sustain and expand our new competency training program,” the Manager explained. “So, we reviewed several replacement technologies and chose the ExpertusONE LMS primarily because of its intuitive usability for employees, managers, distributors, and customers.”
Along with their new LMS, the Standardized Training Program fully addressed the company’s top issues and now provides:
- A clear, sustainable, and effective training process
- The correct training and development activities for each job role
- Easier, streamlined development planning for employees and managers
- Comprehensive reporting to quickly identify gaps and easily monitor achievements
“Our Standardized Training Program consists of identified roles and associated training paths that are based on best practices from across the company. Employees are assigned these roles and the corresponding training paths based on the functions they perform for our company,” the Manager explained. “This prescriptive method of assigning development requirements based on the roles employees fill standardizes the competencies employees must develop to be successful in their roles. So, once assignments are completed, gaps across every level of our organization are quickly and easily identified − which greatly simplifies our employee development planning.”
Following is a breakdown of the 10-step program:
Step 1: Determine the competencies required to meet their customers’ needs.
Step 2: Determine the roles that must be filled.
Step 3: Determine best practices.
Step 4: Develop training for best practices or identify existing training.
Step 5: Develop training paths.
Step 6: Implement the program by assigning job roles and training paths.
Step 7: Conduct reporting and accountability.
Step 8: Ensure conformance.
Step 9: Review for improvement or sustainability.
Step 10: Develop programs for new job roles or edit existing programs.
Proactively Addressing Change
The top technology provider implemented another multi-tier process to proactively address change management:
- Direct follow-up for job role assignment
Even though the company had a strong learning culture, some offices weren’t using the training provided. So they had their Education Services department contact supervisors directly when they didn’t assign job roles to their direct reports. Education Services personnel would also, in some cases, assign job roles and training paths directly.
- Set standards for internal recommendations
Their Education Services organization used the recommendations of field managers to develop standardized methods for assessing the competency of long-term employees. And, because field managers were involved in the development of job roles and related tasks, most took ownership of the new program.
- Reduce skills gaps with LMS-based reporting
With the reporting that was available immediately after job role assignment (which was a built-in module/feature of their ExpertusONE LMS), upper managers were able to focus on the offices that had the widest gaps between job roles and development. And, since these reports were part of their annual employee review process, field managers worked hard to reduce the gaps.
- Ensure program success via virtual meetings
Their Education Services department held several online meetings to explain and discuss the Standardized Training Program with every supervisor and manager. This streamlined its rollout and maximized its success. Also, the standard operations and quality managers who implemented the standardized processes met in person with Education Services’ managers and supervisors. And this is why the managers and supervisors could not and cannot say today that they don’t know the standards inside and out.
Resourceful Resources
A final set of challenges that green building provider overcame in their Standardized Training Program was finding creative ways to enlist extra resources to meet their new competency goals.
“We didn’t have enough resources in our Education Services organization to develop new training. Instead, we hired external consultants to build this training and had our experienced internal training developers manage their work to ensure our quality standards and content accuracy,” Kuhn remarked. “We also needed to find people to design and implement our program successfully, while still maintaining our training department’s normal day-to-day operations.”
Lastly, their Standardized Training Program’s project team had a “whatever it takes” attitude, which resulted in some extended work hours.
“As in almost every project, our resources were stretched thin during peak periods of activity,” the Manager explained. “To overcome this, department members not directly involved with the program took some work from the program’s members − ensuring both the program’s work and our training department’s day-to-day tasks were completed.”
Result
Not only was the Standardized Training Program successfully implemented for over 90% of its employees, but it was also fully embraced by the vast majority of the organization’s managers.
Even better… the global powerhouse’s main goal was achieved! Their new competency program and LMS dramatically improved employee performance so that their combined overall slip is maintained at or below zero.
Standardized Training Program − Goals Achieved
| Goals | Results |
|---|---|
| Improve customer retention by increasing customer satisfaction | The program allowed them to develop and assign training that specifically addressed precise quality improvement and customer satisfaction goals.
To date, over 20,000 Customer Services training activities have been assigned and completed, which helped to better support and bolster their high customer satisfaction rates. |
| Improve employee productivity | For offices with low productivity, they typically found a correlation to low training.
After targeting these offices with National Operations Standards, their training consumption and performance are now on the rise. |
| Reduce cost overruns and rework | Thanks to this program, they have profoundly reduced cost overruns and rework because their employees are trained to better estimate jobs and correctly install and service the company’s hardware and software.
The world’s largest technology provider’s performance has also improved, so their combined overall slip is now at or below zero. |
| Determine best practices; implement standardized processes across 80+ offices | From the beginning, this program was designed to span/affect the entire organization.
It, along with their LMS technology, was able to efficiently standardize and implement the organization’s work processes (accounting and finance, purchasing, project management, estimating, project design, installation/start-up, and service methods) across all 80+ offices. |
Faster, Easier Training Completion
Backed by their next-gen, simple-to-use ExpertusONE LMS, this global powerhouse’s competency program made finding and taking required training easy as 1, 2, 3…
- They are now able to pinpoint, by office, any gaps between job roles and development
- It’s easier and more efficient for supervisors and managers to find and assign their employees’ training
- It’s also easier and more efficient for employees to locate and complete their assigned training
“As a result of implementing our ExpertusONE solution, it became much faster, easier, and more efficient to get people through their training,” the Manager concluded. “In fact, we estimate that our learners’ average training time was reduced from one year to only six months!”
Six Lessons Learned
Looking back, the Manager and his team have a few lessons learned that may be helpful to others preparing to launch a new competency training program:
- It’s much easier to do this type of program with a small core team that has worked together on previous projects and who participate in the new project from planning through implementation.
- Your core team must understand data and reporting. Everything that’s developed has to be viewed from the perspective of: “What data do we need and how will we use it?”
- It always takes longer than you’ve planned to develop and implement a new program.
- Sometimes you should start a program with the LMS you have, so you’ll gain a much better idea of what your new learning management system must deliver.
- Don’t wait for job titles to become standardized throughout your organization. Instead, use related job roles to define the necessary development.
- Sometimes what seems completely impossible is absolutely possible − as long as the will and buy-in are there!
Future Plans
As for what the global powerhouse is going to do next, the PeopleONE Director explains that…
“They’re eager to expand the use and exploration of ExpertusONE’s next-gen capabilities to further improve manager, supervisor and employee efficiency. Its industry-best features like gamification, mobile learning, and two-way Salesforce.com integration will definitely up their learning engagement and time-to-competency rates.”
The Manager also plans on offering their learned expertise to their other organizations − helping them to develop job roles and create development plans that optimally align with their global initiatives.
What Analysts Are Saying About ExpertusONE
“…represents a new breed of corporate training platform.”
BERSIN & ASSOCIATES
“…achieved our #1 LMS ranking, again. It has every crucial component that today’s learning organizations need. From its future thinking approach and next-gen capabilities, it makes learning an easier, more successful endeavor.”
E-LEARNING 24/7
“…is a state-of-the-art LMS, without the legacy issues faced by Saba, Plateau (SuccessFactors), SumTotal, and others.”
WAINHOUSE RESEARCH
“…propels the learning profession forward by letting customers make learning faster, better, and easier.”
BRANDON HALL GROUP
