Chief Learning Officer - December 2007 - (Page 24) tactics in practice: Royal Ahold: Ensuring Consistent Brand Image and Customer Service Shelly Heiden coach, reinforce and measure how their work groups are doing. It’s also dangerous to assume that it’s possible to simply reclassify traditional trainers as internal performance consultants. Not every trainer can or wants to assume that particular role. Effective performance consulting requires a deeper level of business acumen, organizational development skills and perhaps even knowledge of industrial and organizational psychology to do it exceptionally well. Generally, organizations that have tried to relabel their trainers as internal performance consultants have found many lacked adequate perspective, depth of understanding of the business and the necessary background in organizational development and systemic performance. Thus, their business management “customers” have been unimpressed. A trainer cannot automatically be renamed a performance consultant. They must deliver results, or line management’s patience will expire quickly. Rather, performance consultants who are carefully selected, well-equipped and have established solid relationships within the business are able to deliver at the level expected by the executive team and thus are viewed as highly valuable internal partners. The retail industry tends to be decentralized in nature, with a large corporate entity overseeing several smaller branches or franchise operations. The challenge for many companies with a decentralized structure is that employees in one division or locality are operating in accordance with procedures and policies with little or no knowledge of or regard for overall corporate goals and objectives. Consistent brand image and customer service are critical to the success of retail outlets. Many organizations find that online talent management solutions can help them quickly and dependably train and maintain their dispersed employee base. Delivering consistent training programs across all locations can be challenging and complex, and video- and workbook-based training are time consuming and dated. In addition, employees do not always have time to keep their training updated, especially in retail. Working in a dynamic and competitive industry, retail employees must be well-versed in and trained on the latest sales promotions and ready to respond to competitive changes and pressures when corporate headquarters issues such directives. Without access to timely, consistent and appropriate training, retail organizations will find it difficult and expensive to compete effectively. Royal Ahold is an example of how a global organization operating different companies and business units is reaping significant cost and efficiency benefits by implementing centralized software solutions that streamline training and development. Ahold is an international group of quality supermarkets and food-service operators with businesses across the United States and Europe, including Giant, Stop & Shop and Peapod. Previously, the company conducted manual employee training workshops, which were time consuming and inefficient and made it difficult to roll out uniform training across the entire company. Deploying a centralized Web-based solution that delivered the usability, flexibility and configurability needed to accommodate Ahold’s decentralized organization, the company was able to easily distribute training courses to large employee populations in different locations around the world. Using an LMS, employees browse an online catalog of courses relevant to their job function and have real-time visibility into what they should be learning and the courses they need to take. They can then take courses when needed and in their own time. To augment and accelerate this process, Ahold also selected a managed services solution that provides a single location where the company can procure, manage, store and update a variety of custom and third-party talent management content and materials. The flexibility of this solution enables Ahold and its operating companies to integrate their own training processes from several sources into the single LMS system. Ahold developed its own change-management tool kit but contracted with an international provider based in India to develop an online change management learning program. Ahold also contracted with a local provider in the Netherlands for its orientation program and uses a PowerPoint conversion product to bring presentations online. All pieces are integrated seamlessly into the content-integration process. December 2007 Performance Consulting at Work The best performance consultants have an intimate knowledge of the economics and operating models of a business. With that in mind, CLOs must provide that information or make connections with others who do. Consultants need access to key players who guide, design or perform in roles that govern those operating models. They need access to financial analysts and others who measure business results. The steps of a performance consulting process might include: • Analyzing the organization to gain an understanding of how its operating models and customer relationships work together to produce the desired business results and how human capital performance contributes directly to all those moving parts. • Engaging in organizational assessment, analyses, behavioral observations and related studies to discern those competencies (skills, knowledge, abilities and motivations) that predictably produce superior performance. At the store level, each organization has the ability to develop its own training or contract with local and international vendors to create content. This integrated system provides tremendous flexibility for those who want to do their own thing. The transparency of Ahold’s content delivery ensures a streamlined learning process for Ahold’s associates. Overall, centralized training allows Ahold to effectively administer, manage and track employee training and development across the entire organization. This integrated approach provides Ahold employees with consistency in training, tracking and reporting while delivering the flexibility necessary for supporting local learning and training requirements and initiatives. Shelly Heiden is executive vice president for global field operations at Plateau Systems. She can be reached at editor@clomedia.com. I www.clomedia.com I Chief Learning Officer 24 http://www.clomedia.com
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