Chief Learning Officer - August 2007 - (Page 32)

environment in practice: Burson-Marsteller University: Educational Evolution For international public relations and public affairs firm Burson-Marsteller, the development of its corporate university is a more or less ongoing process. The objectives of Burson-Marsteller University (BMU) and the tools it uses to reach those objectives have changed significantly since it was established about a decade ago, and they’ll continue to do so, said its dean, Michael Glazer. “The corporate university was formed about 10 years ago, and the CEO at the time wanted to align all of the people in the organization with his vision,” he said. “The way that happened back then was getting all those people on a plane and physically bringing them to one location. As the landscape changed, those physical, classroom-based learning events have been blended with virtual offerings.” BMU’s creation was hardly the company’s first foray into enterprise education, though — Burson-Marsteller has long emphasized the competitive advantage learning offers, Glazer said. “Learning has always been a part of Burson-Marsteller and a differentiator for the company in the industry,” he said. “It’s part of being what we call a ‘Burson person.’ It’s a little funny, but it’s serious, as well. We look for that in the talent-acquisition process, and we look to develop that through some of the proprietary models we have.” Today, BMU offers learning to about 1,800 employees in more than 25 countries. “One of the interesting things about learning at Burson-Marsteller is that we have local-level, regional and global programs,” Glazer said. “You’ll find a lot of learning experiences are happening in local languages and are localized for their norms and values. And a lot of our global programs are deliberately designed with multiculturalism and global scope in mind.” Because of the quick-changing nature of the business, a series of variable “themes” drives BMU rather than a permanent philosophy, Glazer said. “A lot of learning functions have static, stated mission statements,” he said. “What we’ve developed at Burson-Marsteller University are themes. The same way the market landscape and business needs have various degrees of change, we’ve developed some themes — some of which are stable and have a long shelf life, others of which are shorter.” The three primary themes now guiding BMU are: • Productivity quotient: “Optimizing our productivity allows us to deliver an extra level of value to our clients,” Glazer said. “We’re making a deliberate shift from learning events to learning experiences. We recognize that learning doesn’t necessarily have to be limited to a formal setting, especially in the age of social networking. Smaller is better — you could almost think of it as ‘nanolearning.’ That also means embedding the learning in the way we do business.” • Everyone a teacher, every teacher a learner: “It’s all about creating a learning ecosystem in the organization and then extending that as far as we can to our clients around the world,” Glazer said. “We’ve all seen the studies that tell us that so much of a firm’s capital is stored in employees’ heads. So much of the traditional focus around learning functions has been rewarding the learners for learning. There’s another side to that: rewarding the people who share wisdom and experience that helps us better serve clients.” • Use familiar systems to scale learning: “This is everything from internal social networking sites to blogs and video blogs to podcasts, as well as any other platforms that store and share knowledge and connect people to one another,” Glazer said. This built-in flexibility helps Burson-Marsteller’s public relations professionals handle the constantly changing challenges of their clients. “We’re in the public relations business — we provide counsel to our clients to help them achieve their communications goals,” Glazer said. “To align with that, BMU equips the people who work at this company to be the best counselors possible. We’re empowering them to solve the business issues of their clients. That happens on a number of different levels. In this business, we see everything from brand engagement to crisis management. And when it comes to things like crisis management, it’s not just a matter of understanding what’s going on but also applying critical- and strategic-thinking skills to solve those issues.” – Brian Summerfield, bsummerfield@clomedia.com August 2007 Berge said of the challenge facing the organization when it instituted its first corporate university environment in English in 2003. He said that today, Océ supports a “total learning environment,” which includes an integrated learning management system (LMS), a learning content management system (LCMS) and a LearnLink distance application to drive individual competency development and management delivered worldwide across five languages: English, German, French, Italian and Spanish. Given the influence of emerging markets and the company’s growing footprint in the Asia-Pacific region, ten Berge said he expects the platform will soon add both Japanese and Chinese language capabilities to fuel organizational learning across the region. He also said the company’s learning environment was designed to provide the intelligence needed to increase workforce skills and track performance. “What we have been doing over the past couple years is rolling out competency-based programs in headquarters, then into the operating divisions in the 34 countries that we are directly active in,” ten Berge said. “For the top two layers of management, this competency development program serves as our leadership program. These competency-based development plans are updated every year and provide the modeling for all of Océ’s succession planning and executive development programs. “These plans drive our learning — we don’t support a university model where we have a catalog of courses prescribed for us by others. Instead, we have competency profiles for all 200 critical performance roles across the global operation. We conduct assessments against the required profiles on a regular basis. The resulting individual development plans determine the need and demand for learning — a pull rather than a push method.” I www.clomedia.com I Chief Learning Officer 32 Influencing the Bottom Line Despite the cultural and qualitative successes of many of these new global models, CLOs continue to receive pressure to deliver and show impact on specific business results. “The pressure to perform is ratcheting http://www.clomedia.com

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