Chief Learning Officer - August 2007 - (Page 52)

PRODUCTIVITY continued from page 41 and employees are meeting each other’s needs. Trust levels are maximized, and integrity is a cornerstone of the organizational culture. The organization’s human capital practices positively affect the corporation’s market value. How it’s measured: Employee life cycle assessment process (Gallup Q12), retention, attrition, punctuality, feedback to learning as a retention tool, commitment index, customer surveys, business results. An example: The organization wants to attract and retain top talent, as well as market itself as an organization that invests in its employees’ success. Monitoring point of engagement and its key measures empowers you with real information to show both candidates and shareholders the positive attitude and results your learning efforts help create through the cultivation of engaged workers. CASE STUDY continued from page 47 had been cutting and cutting our spending because we couldn’t bring people in due to the expenses of hotels, travel and meals.” These offerings haven’t eliminated face-to-face learning events, but they have improved the ones Whirlpool still offers by supplementing the content. “We do leverage it as prerequisite work for face-to-face training,” Provost said. “One of the best examples of that is our national sales meeting, when we bring the sales organization together from our field locations. About 1,000 people gathered in New Orleans this year. There were about 12 to 18 hours of prerequisite work that they took online before they came to the conference so that when we did get face to face, they were that much more prepared and able to take it to the next level. It definitely ensures that when we do spend money on face-to-face learning, we know exactly where we can take it.” Also, the system has been very helpful in terms of compiling metrics that show how salespeople perform in certain learning programs. “We’re tracking who is taking the courses, what courses are being taken, how many times it takes to pass a course, what the scores are and so forth,” Provost said. “We know how many people barely passed and how many just fly through it and get 100 percent. This is a way of assuring that they’ve been trained. We can demonstrate, for example, that 78 percent of our organization has gotten a passing score on assessments for KitchenAid dishwashers.” In particular, Provost and his team monitor new hires’ consumption of mandated training courses. “They’re required to perform 13 hours in pre-work before they come to our training, and we track that,” he said. “These are new people in our organization, and we’re getting them exposed to the language and some of the elements in the appliance industry.” Looking ahead, Provost wants to implement a sales certification program based on a combination of learning hours consumed and a live demonstration of mastery of the material. “We’ve talked about this, and I believe we now have the level of content needed to do this across our brands and categories,” he said. “We might say that out of a potential 100 hours of coursework, 80 hours could potentially be selected by the end-user. We would like to augment this online work with a demonstrated mastery of the content through a role-play, and that would all go toward certification.” In addition, Whirlpool has just started delivering to salespeople just-in-time, performance-based learning in short modules, and Provost would like to see these kinds of offerings expanded considerably. “One of the main things coming up is the sell-through of our brand and helping our partners sell more,” he said. “We need to work on getting content to the point of sale. There are educated consumers and savvy shoppers out there who want to know a lot, and the idea of content in an easily searchable format at the point of sale is kind of a dream space for us. Say a shopper wants to know about the energy efficiency of a frontload washer. Where do the savings really come from? How do you get a superior washing performance with so much less water? Well, we have that content in a very easily understood format, but how do we get it to the sales floor? That’s what we’ll be thinking about.” Based on past and current successes, Provost shouldn’t have too much trouble getting the company’s senior leaders behind these pushes. “It’s a pretty strong case when you talk about our speed, reach and frequency, especially when everyone understands the costs of training,” he said. “It’s one thing to do that internally, but when we talk about this message getting out to sales associates, it’s great that we have a vehicle that can reach them. One of our challenges is that these companies have their own learning management system, so we work on getting our content on their LMS seamlessly. The fact that we can say we’ve got 3,500 people on this system is pretty compelling.” – Brian Summerfield, bsummerfield@clomedia.com Hoist the Anchor Now that you know where you want to go and how to define and measure success, it’s time to hoist anchor and set sail. Yesterday, you might have been using your sextant and celestial navigation techniques, but today, you’re armed with sophisticated business intelligence tools that will help you avert risk while making a safe journey. The real keys to your endeavors are good planning and decisive action. Don’t be afraid of what your indicators tell you. If they’re not trending in the right direction, don’t reason the results away or change the underlying metrics to make them look better — use them to make reasonable business decisions on how to improve your processes and deliverables. In the end, it comes down to executing the work effort, delivering on your commitments and meeting your customers’ agreed-upon expectations. Let your key learning indicators be the radar system that shows you what’s ahead, next to and behind you so you can make educated decisions and bring new value to your stakeholders. Chris Moore is president of Zeroed-In Technologies, creator of CLO Dashboard and the author of “Seven Key Learning Indicators Your CEO Really Needs to Know.” He can be reached at editor@clomedia.com. August 2007 I www.clomedia.com I Chief Learning Officer 52 http://www.clomedia.com

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