Chief Learning Officer - March 2017

March 2017 | CLOmedia.com

Special Report

L EARNING T ECHNOLOGY

➤ Ready or Not, the Future is Now ➤ How to Become a Digital CLO ➤ Virtual Instructors: Almost as Good as the Real Thing ➤ 7 Ways to Boost Employee Engagement in the Digital Era Sears Holding Corp.’s

FRANK NGUYEN

85% of employees want learning that is engaging.

Time to rethink the LMS

axonify.com/rethinkLMS | #rethinktheLMS

EDITOR’S LETTER

From and With T

here’s nothing quite like a roomful of bored teenagers to test your character.

Nearly two decades ago, I stepped in front of a classroom full of them for the first time. Despite a newly minted college degree and several weeks of intensive teacher training, I had no idea what I was doing. No doubt, it showed.

Despite the shaky launch, I kept at it. For two years, I taught English in the Highlands of Papua New Guinea in the Peace Corps. After coming back stateside, I moved to Arizona and taught at Navajo and Hopi schools while going to graduate school.

I learned from studying great educators and watching other teachers. I saw their tricks and techniques for effective teaching and learned the ins and outs of adolescent psychology and classroom management. I learned to be compassionate yet firm.

However it happens, learning is best when it’s done with others.

While I learned a great deal by watching and studying, I learned much more working with fellow teachers and students.

From the Peace Corps I learned that no matter our many differences, we mostly want the same things. I learned intelligence, curiosity and capability know no borders — and no group of people can claim to be more special than any other.

From my Navajo and Hopi students, I learned about resilience and strength. I learned how great a struggle it can be to learn when conditions are challenging and how very much achievement should be nurtured and celebrated.

Most importantly, working with others showed me not so much how to teach but how to learn. It’s easy to fall back on the coursework and curriculum and forget that learning is a process that’s never really complete. It’s about examining assumptions, absorbing new information and ideas and synthesizing them into a point of view informed by evidence.

Above all, it’s a process that works best when it’s done with others. Synchronously or asynchronously? In person or online? These are worthy questions to ask. But the most important element is working alongside others. Put people in situations where they share ideas and information, exchange points of view and synthesize and analyze a wide range of information.

In corporate learning, skill development and knowl4 Chief Learning Officer • March 2017 • www.CLOmedia.com

edge acquisition get the lion’s share of focus. No doubt, we need employees with quantitative skills and technical management know-how. But learning isn’t just by the book. It’s the fuel for something much more powerful.

For most of us, work is one of the most significant pillars of life. Regardless of whether you hop out of bed eager to get to the office or reluctantly trudge your way along, work is a core part of your identity. It provides structure and meaning and delivers value, even if that’s nothing more than a salary that pays the bills.

Learning is what gives work its deeper meaning and purpose. It ties the stuff that has to get done today with what matters in the big picture. Learning reinforces the bonds between all of us and reorients us around our goals.

Investment in people through learning and development is the fuel for better organizational results.

It’s in that spirit that I invite you to join us at the Spring 2017 CLO Symposium at the Hyatt Regency Coconut Point Resort & Spa in Bonita Springs, Florida.

You’ll learn from some of the brightest, most insightful and experienced people, including keynote speaker Susan Packard, the visionary media pioneer behind the success of HGTV; Harvard University professor and adult education expert Robert Kegan; futurist and author Alec Ross; and Walgreens Boots Alliance executive and diversity pioneer Steve Pemberton.

That’s not to mention learning from leaders at iconic firms like McKinsey & Co. and Lucasfilm, powerhouse brands like Western Union, Mastercard and SAP, global organizations like the World Bank and pioneering companies like kCura.

But you’ll also learn with them and the many others who will be at the symposium from April 24-26. You’ll be challenged in your thinking and share perspectives and points of views with the industry’s best and brightest.

You’ll contribute to that conversation and walk away changed by the experience.

There’s no question that learning can happen anywhere and anytime. But just because learning can happen doesn’t mean it will. We learn from others. But it happens best when we learn with them. CLO

Mike Prokopeak Editor in Chief mikep@CLOmedia.com

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A PUBLICATION OF

March 2017 | Volume 16, Issue 2 PRESIDENT John R. Taggart jrtag@CLOmedia.com VICE PRESIDENT, CFO, COO Kevin A. Simpson ksimpson@CLOmedia.com VICE PRESIDENT, GROUP PUBLISHER Clifford Capone ccapone@CLOmedia.com VICE PRESIDENT, EDITOR IN CHIEF Mike Prokopeak mikep@CLOmedia.com EDITORIAL DIRECTOR Rick Bell rbell@CLOmedia.com GROUP EDITOR/ASSOCIATE EDITORIAL DIRECTOR Kellye Whitney kwhitney@CLOmedia.com CONTRIBUTING EDITORS Frank Kalman fkalman@CLOmedia.com ASSOCIATE EDITORS Andie Burjek aburjek@CLOmedia.com Lauren Dixon ldixon@CLOmedia.com

EDITORIAL ART DIRECTOR Anna Jo Beck abeck@CLOmedia.com EDITORIAL INTERNS Mia Mancini mmancini@CLOmedia.com Camaron Santos csantos@CLOmedia.com VICE PRESIDENT, RESEARCH & ADVISORY SERVICES Sarah Kimmel skimmel@CLOmedia.com RESEARCH MANAGER Tim Harnett tharnett@CLOmedia.com DATA SCIENTIST Grey Litaker clitaker@CLOmedia.com RESEARCH ASSISTANT Kristen Britt kbritt@CLOmedia.com RESEARCH GRAPHIC DESIGNER Theresa Stoodley tstoodley@CLOmedia.com MEDIA & PRODUCTION MANAGER Ashley Flora aflora@CLOmedia.com PRODUCTION COORDINATOR Nina Howard nhoward@CLOmedia.com

EVENTS MARKETING MANAGER Anthony Zepeda azepeda@CLOmedia.com WEBCAST MANAGER Alec O’Dell aodell@CLOmedia.com EVENTS GRAPHIC DESIGNER Tonya Harris lharris@CLOmedia.com BUSINESS MANAGER Vince Czarnowski vince@CLOmedia.com REGIONAL SALES MANAGERS Derek Graham dgraham@CLOmedia.com Daniella Weinberg dweinberg@CLOmedia.com Nick Safir nsafir@CLOmedia.com DIRECTOR, BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT Kevin Fields kfields@CLOmedia.com

LIST MANAGER Mike Rovello hcmlistrentals@infogroup.com BUSINESS ADMINISTRATION MANAGER Melanie Lee mlee@CLOmedia.com CONTRIBUTING WRITERS Julie Abel-Hunt Robert O. Brinkerhoff Ken Blanchard Jeff Carpenter Robert B. Cialdini Amar Dhaliwal Sarah Fister Gale John Gillis Jr. Bravetta Hassell Nidhi Madhavan Joelyne Marshall Elliott Masie Lee Maxey Bob Mosher

MANAGER, BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT Brian Lorenz blorenz@CLOmedia.com

Bravetta Hassell bhassell@CLOmedia.com

VICE PRESIDENT, EVENTS Trey Smith tsmith@CLOmedia.com

AUDIENCE DEVELOPMENT DIRECTOR Cindy Cardinal ccardinal@CLOmedia.com

COPY EDITOR

EVENT CONTENT MANAGER Ashley Collins acollins@CLOmedia.com

DIGITAL MANAGER Lauren Lynch llynch@CLOmedia.com

Christopher Magnus cmagnus@CLOmedia.com

DIGITAL COORDINATOR Mannat Mahtani mmahtani@CLOmedia.com

CHIEF LEARNING OFFICER EDITORIAL ADVISORY BOARD Cushing Anderson, Program Director, Learning Ser vices, IDC Frank J. Anderson Jr., ( Ret.) President, Defense Acquisition Universit y Cedric Coco, Senior Vice President, Human Resources, Lowe’s Cos. Inc. Lisa Doyle, Vice President, Learning and Development, Lowe’s Cos. Inc. Tamar Elkeles, Chief People Of ficer, Quixey Thomas Evans, ( Ret.) Chief Learning Of ficer, PricewaterhouseCoopers Ted Henson, Senior Strategist, Oracle Gerry Hudson-Martin, Director, Corporate Learning Strategies, Business Architects Kimo Kippen, Chief Learning Of ficer, Hilton Worldwide Rob Lauber, Vice President, Chief Learning Of ficer, McDonald’s Corp.

Maj. Gen. Erwin F. Lessel, ( Ret.) U.S. Air Force, Director, Deloit te Consulting Justin Lombardo, Interim Chief Learning Of ficer, Baptist Health Alan Malinchak, Executive Advisor, Talent and Learning Practice, Deltek Universit y Lee Maxey, CEO, MindMax Jeanne C. Meister, Author and Independent Learning Consultant Bob Mosher, Senior Par tner and Chief Learning Evangelist, APPLY Synergies Rebecca Ray, Executive Vice President, The Conference Board Allison Rossett, ( Ret.) Professor of Educational Technology, San Diego State Universit y Diana Thomas, CEO and Founder, Winning Results Annette Thompson, Senior Vice President and Chief Learning Of ficer, Farmers Insurance David Vance, Former President, Caterpillar Universit y Kevin D. Wilde, Executive Leadership Fellow, Carlson School of Management, Universit y of Minnesota Chief Learning Officer (ISSN 1935-8148) is published monthly, except bi-monthly in January/February and November/December by MediaTec Publishing Inc., 111 E. Wacker Dr., Suite 1200, Chicago IL 60601. Periodicals postage paid at Chicago, IL and additional mailing offices. POSTMASTER: Send address changes to Chief Learning Officer, P.O. Box 8712 Lowell, MA 01853. Subscriptions are free to qualified professionals within the US and Canada. Digital free subscriptions are available worldwide. Nonqualified paid subscriptions are available at the subscription price of $199 for 12 issues. All countries outside the US and Canada must be prepaid in US funds with an additional $33 postage surcharge. Single price copy is $29.95 Chief Learning Officer and CLOmedia.com are the trademarks of MediaTec Publishing Inc. Copyright © 2017, MediaTec Publishing Inc. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. Reproduction of material published in Chief Learning Officer is forbidden without permission.

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ONLINE EVENTS

TABLE OF CONTENTS MARCH 2017

Special Report

Learning Technology

18-25

Special Report 18 20

23

25

Special Report: Learning Technology If innovative new technologies don’t drive business results they’re probably not worth the investment.

Ready or Not, the Future is Now Sarah Fister Gale Machine learning is changing the way organizations curate content and manage learners. But are CLOs using its full capabilities?

How to Become a Digital CLO Sarah Fister Gale The willingness to bend, stretch and remain agile are some keys to thriving in today’s alternative anywhere-anytime workplace.

Hot List of LMS Providers Compiled by Nidhi Madhavan A list of learning management system providers.

8 Chief Learning Officer • March 2017 • www.CLOmedia.com

26 Features

38

Why You Should Encourage Leaders to Play Games John Gillis Jr. Some say it’s never a good thing when leaders play games. But when development is the goal, gamification has its perks.

42

Virtual Instructors: Almost as Good as the Real Thing Joelyne Marshall Virtual instructor-led training is an effective learning alternative when budget dollars are scarce.

46

Promote Learning Transfer, Accelerate Strategy Execution Robert O. Brinkerhoff Learning transfer platforms are changing the game when it comes to boosting engagement, performance and accelerating change.

ON THE COVER: PHOTO BY CHRISTOPHER BARR

TABLE OF CONTENTS MARCH 2017

42

38

Departments

46

Experts

26 Profile

10 IMPERATIVES

The Learning Side of Sears Bravetta Hassell Sears Holding Corp. Chief Learning Officer Frank Nguyen is using the power of data to help transform the retailer.

54 Case Study

Elliott Masie Your Learners Have Attitude

12 SELLING UP, SELLING DOWN

Bob Mosher Compliance Training: Cheers or Jeers?

A New Direction at Western Union

14 LEADERSHIP

Sarah Fister Gale Western Union’s GPS program helped build mentoring teams to drive a measurably engaged and interactive performance management culture.

16 MAKING THE GRADE

58 Business Intelligence 7 Ways to Boost Employee Engagement in the Digital Era Julie Abel-Hunt Technology offers myriad convenient and user-friendly ways to build a learning culture that promotes development, retention and engagement.

Ken Blanchard How to Build a High Trust Workplace

Lee Maxey An Investment in MOOCs Pays Off in Talent

62 IN CONCLUSION

Robert B. Cialdini To Persuade More Effectively, Pre-suade First

Resources 4 Editor’s Letter

From and With

61 Advertisers’ Index

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Chief Learning Officer • March 2017 • www.CLOmedia.com

9

IMPERATIVES

Your Learners Have Attitude Change expectations to have learners act out in the best possible way • BY ELLIOTT MASIE

L

Elliott Masie is the chairman and CLO of The Masie Center’s Learning Consortium and CEO of The Masie Center, an international think tank focused on learning and workplace productivity. To comment, email editor@ CLOmedia.‌com.

earners have a lot of attitude these days. collaborate to save time and energy. Both pass.

Their choices are changing; their attitudes in the Your learners have attitude because times are changmiddle of learning experiences are shifting; and their ing, and choices are getting more complex: assumptions about the yield of learning time invested • Memorization is less important. Learners know are evolving. they can get content online, so why pretend to Your learners aren’t being rude or arrogant, but memorize it? Navigational readiness may be all they do have a new attitude, which may be surpristhey need or want. ing, disappointing or confusing to us learning and • The employment lifespan for a new employee is development veterans. Some of your learners, normuch lower. Some new hires want to jump in mally grateful recipients of all the development you and start performing quicker, since they may not can give them, may be showing new behaviors that be sticking around for long. look more like online dating. Your learners look at a • They may be more interested in context than learning offer and: content. They can’t look up the real backstory on• Quickly give it a swipe left or a swipe right — line, so in a classroom they hunger for context, keep it or let it go. not PowerPoint slides.

• Want to know, “Did other employees like this? Is Your learners have fewer barriers to keep them from it worth my time?” getting the best learning experiences. Beware: • Say, “Hey, give me the good stuff; skip the fluff.”

• Given an IT problem, they may call their friend Your learners are better guardians of your wage who works in the IT department of another comtime than you. Set up a 75-minute webinar for every pany for help. Why? They trust them and will get regional manager, and their attitude kicks in: a more targeted answer.

• “Is there really 75 minutes of new and valuable • They will likely validate or confirm knowledge stuff?” from a trainer via a real-time search. I mentioned a statistic in a program last year, and five minutes later one of the participants kindly corrected me based on real-time research on my stated fact.

• They are more drawn to short videos and FAQs, not a well-formatted instructional layout.

• They want us, as teachers and facilitators, to honor what they know already and sort by what they need to know now.

• “Could I watch the archived version, and skip to Your learners have attitude, and it is time for learnthe few minutes of important info?” ing leaders to adjust our own attitudes: • “Ah, let me order my lunch, check my emails, and • Encourage learners to own their learning process. have a side telephone call during this very long • Toughen up and tighten assessments to be of webinar.” more value and guidance to learners.

Your learner’s attitude will grow as the panorama of • Expand the curation skills, tools and organizalearning options expand. They will: tional strategies to harvest and target more per• Skip the leadership videos your learning and desonalized content. velopment group purchased and watch a few • Take the school branding out of learning resourc18-minute TED Talks that seem more engaging. es, treat learners more as colleagues, employees • Ask to take the assessment quiz before the class — and candidates — rather than students. to skip the teaching and jump to the certification.

• Allow our own attitudes to shift. My lectures can • Partner with other colleagues to gain efficiency. go on video. My ice breaker activities may be too One person goes to the important meeting and familiar. And learners want to connect with my sends real-time, internal update tweets. Or, Joe knowledge more than my curriculum. does module 1, Karen does module 2, and they Learning deserves some new attitude. CLO

Some of your learners may be showing new behaviors that look more like online dating.

10 Chief Learning Officer • March 2017 • www.CLOmedia.com

SELLING UP, SELLING DOWN

Compliance Training: Cheers or Jeers?

Don’t push an event-based solution for a workflow problem • BY BOB MOSHER

I

Bob Mosher is a senior partner and chief learning evangelist for APPLY Synergies, a strategic consulting firm.

To comment, email editor@CLOmedia.com.

f you said the words compliance training to your employees, what would their reaction be? Would they jump for joy, smile, roll their eyes, or run for the hills?

This issue has been the 800-pound gorilla in our industry for years now. I’ve done some informal surveying of late in the health care and banking industries, and three common reactions emerged: everyone thought compliance training was a complete waste of time; everyone had figured out how to “get through” it as quickly as possible; worse, none felt they learned anything making them feel more compliant on the job.

Now, these are only three reactions; not all compliance training is bad. But we can do a lot better.

I get where compliance training comes from. As a consumer of many of the products where compliance is mandated, I’m happy some degree of compliance is required. I also understand the unrealistic expectations regulatory folks can put on us. Often we feel like our hands are tied. But my greater concern is whether we’ve created a learning solution for a problem that’s not truly being fixed.

For the most part, we’ve created an event-based solution for a workflow/performance problem. Compliance is not measured at a point in time, it’s demonstrated throughout the lifetime of employment. Yes, it’s important to get up to speed on knowledge, to demonstrate a certain level of understanding around compliance issues, but performing in a compliant way happens in the workflow; that’s where our solutions need to target.

Many of you have heard me talk about Dr. Conrad Gottfredson’s Five Moments of Need learning model.

This approach challenges us to develop solutions that not only meet a training need, but also include a workflow support component. With the advent of new technologies, our ability to design compliance learning solutions across these five moments is better than ever.

This approach will never completely replace compliance training, but it will have a significant impact on what format that training takes.

We need to take a closer look at the tools and methodologies emerging in workflow learning such as performance support and adaptive learning. These tools are not designed as training solutions, but rather as ways to guide, support and reassess employees at the appropriate moment of performance need, as they navigate the workflow. These assets can include job aids, standard operating procedures, instructional vid-

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eos, e-learning, even access to peers and coaches. This discipline has been around a long time, and it has long been limited to IT or system support, but with the advent of newer technologies such as mobile devices, performance support can easily accommodate many softer skill training areas such as safety, leadership and onboarding, to name a few.

I get where compliance training comes from. I also understand the unrealistic expectations regulatory folks put on us.

Adaptive learning is a technology-based approach that uses human interaction to adapt learning content to an individual based on rigorous behavior algorithms.

The ideal approach is highly personalized and considers the user’s prior knowledge. It manages cognitive load effectively, not overloading the user with vast amounts of information. These systems use spaced repetition to allow time for practice, which aids long-term memory, and they recognize and fight the forgetting curve, which is unique by topic or by person, tailoring assistance based on each individual’s performance needs.

Adaptive learning pushes relevant learning to the individual when it is needed. When this approach is married with training and performance support, the overall solution offers measurable support well beyond an event-based strategy. Further, these systems are fully trackable, and provide the performance-based analytics we’ve been chasing in our profession for years.

This isn’t a pipe dream. There are organizations doing this right now, and they are being recognized for it.

I recently spoke with a learning leader from a hospital who just received the best practice award from the Joint Commission, their highest honor. The award was not for their training or event-based options, but for their performance support platform.

The tools and methodologies are out there. It’s up to us to adopt them and elevate compliance training to a whole new level. CLO

LEADERSHIP

How to Build a High Trust Workplace Most leaders assume that trust just grows over time. Not so. • BY KEN BLANCHARD

T

Ken Blanchard is chief spiritual officer of The Ken Blanchard Cos. and coauthor of “Collaboration Begins with You: Be a Silo Buster.” To comment, email editor@ CLOmedia.com.

he research is in and the case has been proven: When companies create trusting work environments, employee engagement soars and the bottom line thrives. Yet most organizations don’t put resources into intentionally building trust; leaders just assume trust grows over time. Not so. Trust begins at the top, when leaders set trust-enhancing values and strategy.

How can you tell if you have a trusting work environment? Reading the nonverbal clues. If people trust leadership, they’re willing to turn their backs to their bosses.

In other words, they turn and focus on their own work because they know the leadership means them no harm.

Horst Schultze, one of the retired founders of the Ritz-Carlton Hotels, was a great example of a trust-building leader. During Schultze’s reign, after orientation and extensive training, every employee was given a $2,000 discretionary fund they could use to solve a customer problem without checking with anyone. They didn’t even have to tell their boss. Horst loved to collect stories about how people honored this trust by making a difference for customers.

If people trust their leadership, they’re willing to turn their backs to their bosses.

My favorite story is about the businessman staying at a Ritz-Carlton property in Atlanta. In one day, he had to fly from Atlanta to Los Angeles, then from Los Angeles to Hawaii, because the next day at one o’clock he was making a major speech to his international company.

He was a little disorganized as he was leaving. On his way to the airport he discovered he’d left behind his laptop, which contained all the graphics he needed for his presentation. He tried to change his flights but couldn’t.

He called the Ritz-Carlton and said, “This is the room I was in, and this is where my computer was. Have housekeeping get it and overnight it to me. They have to guarantee delivery by 10 o’clock tomorrow morning, because I need it for my 1 o’clock speech.”

The next day Schultze was wandering around the ho14 Chief Learning Officer • March 2017 • www.CLOmedia.com

tel, as he often did. When he got to housekeeping he said, “Where’s Mary?” Her coworkers said, “She’s in Hawaii.”

Horst said, “Hawaii? What’s she doing in Hawaii?”

He was told, “A guest left a computer in his room and he needs it for a speech today at 1 o’clock — and Mary doesn’t trust overnight carrier services anymore.”

Now you might think that Mary went for a vacation, but she came back on the next plane. And what do you think was waiting for her? A letter of commendation from Schultze and high-fives around the hotel.

That’s what a trusting environment is all about.

Punitive evaluation, on the other hand, leads to a low trust environment. Again, you can recognize these places by the nonverbal cues. People are not focused as much on their work as they are focused on the leader.

They’re afraid to turn their back to the boss and concentrate on their projects because they’re worried. Is the leader going to find fault with the work they’re doing and punish them?

Once that anxiety begins, it can permeate the whole organization. People become demoralized, disengaged, unproductive, afraid to take risks and more likely to leave the organization. The fastest way to restore trust in a low trust environment is to revamp the way people are evaluated.

When I was a college professor, I always gave my students the final exam at the beginning of the course and spent the rest of the semester helping them answer all the questions so they could get an A. Garry Ridge, CEO of WD-40 Co., heard me tell that story and decided to do the same thing in business. He threw out WD-40’s old performance review system and created a process where people received feedback that helped them instead of labeled them. As a result, the company’s performance boomed, and employee engagement scores are consistently in the high 90th percentile.

As Garry and I point out in our book “Helping People Win at Work,” a leader’s job is to set clear goals and coach people to help them win. When people realize the good intentions behind a leader’s coaching — to help them succeed — they welcome feedback, and their performance shines. By the time performance evaluation rolls around, there are more celebrations than surprises because leaders have been encouraging them all along.

When trust is restored, creativity flourishes and productivity rises because when people win, the company wins. CLO

MAKING THE GRADE

An Investment in MOOCs Pays Off in Talent Schools are bridging the gap between corporate and employee needs • BY LEE MAXEY

S

Lee Maxey is CEO of MindMax, a marketing and enrollment management services company. To comment, email editor@ CLOmedia.com.

ince I began writing this column, I’ve been roving the crossroads of higher education and business to chronicle real-world advice and success stories for CLOs. Georgia Institute of Technology’s online master’s degree in computer science has received a lot of media attention. CLOs should care because Georgia Tech’s program may be the first financially successful credit-bearing MOOC in the world.

That credit-bearing part is good news for employers looking to build up their employees’ skills as talent gets tougher to find. The online degree program came about through a partnership between Georgia Tech, AT&T and Udacity. It’s a hybrid between a free MOOC and an on-campus master’s degree. The price tag for the latter is significantly more than the approximately $7,000 Georgia Tech charges for its online master’s in CS. I asked Nelson Baker, Georgia Tech’s dean of professional education, why the university launched the program and what need it was trying to fill. Baker said Georgia Tech has been offering distance learning for 40 years, beginning with courses transmitted by satellite. As technology developed, he said Georgia Tech felt it could unequivocally identify interested learners – in the same way a key logger measures each student’s typing pace — and verifiably issue credit for a course and, in turn, issue a degree.

“When we looked at our master’s level CS program, we could admit about 100 folks per year,” Baker said.

“But when we thought about that 101st applicant, we realized the reasons they weren’t admitted were negligible.”

Baker estimated there were many other competent individuals who administrators might be able to admit to the program if Georgia Tech could build something to scale. So, the university approached the Board of Regents of the University System of Georgia in 2012 after looking at QA, pedagogical support and cost.

“Our president [G.P. Peterson] had the foresight to call the program a pilot because pilots don’t fail,” Baker said.

“The regents were excited and gave the pilot approval.”

Georgia Tech was able to enlist support from AT&T for the pilot, in part, because the company has a critical need for people with the latest, greatest STEM credentials. Communications and technology are changing so rapidly new skills are paramount for success and competitive advantage, according to AT&T CLO John Palmer. Georgia Tech also had a history with BellSouth Mobility, a forerunner of

16 Chief Learning Officer • March 2017 • www.CLOmedia.com

AT&T Wireless Services, which had given philanthropically and funded research. Further, AT&T executives like Palmer believed the pilot was a way to seed the education space and create a pool of workers. For these reasons, the company helped launch the pilot with a $2 million investment.

Creating a financially viable, degree-granting program via MOOC made a powerful impact on Georgia Tech.

Since launching the program in 2014, Georgia Tech has plenty to boast about: The university has just shy of 4,000 online master’s degree CS students; 80 percent of these learners are from the U.S.; and the program is cash flow positive according to Georgia Tech’s president in a 2016 interview with Inside Higher Ed. Of course, there were MOOCs prior to the Georgia Tech program. But the ones that existed were searching for a business model and a way to credential learners, which led to rising enrollments but a steep fall off in completions. Creating a financially viable, degree-granting program via a MOOC made a powerful impact on Georgia Tech, students and AT&T, Baker said.

“When you’re a company our size you can’t hire external talent with critical tech skills at the volumes we need,” said AT&T’s Palmer. “The partnership with Georgia Tech delivers a master’s in computer science available to our employees at a fraction of the cost of what a bricks-and-mortar degree would cost.”

Palmer said Georgia Tech’s online master’s program is cultivating a development pipeline for AT&T and other companies. “We are transparent about what we think our jobs of the future will look like,” he explained, “so employees can take control of their own development and careers. Georgia Tech’s program helps our people align their skills with our needs.”

I asked Baker if he would’ve changed anything about the pilot; he said, “We were too cautious; we could’ve moved faster.” CLO

Do Games and Gamification Drive Positive Business Results?

CLO Advisor takes a deep dive into the core issues that learning executives must be thinking about. Gamification is one of these topics. While there is a plethora of information on games and gamification, what’s lacking is the context needed to transform that information into strategy. The CLO Advisor community is taking a comprehensive look at games and gamification, helping senior learning executives determine whether these approaches make sense for their organization.

We invite you to join the journey.

Strategy, Execution, and Implementation

CLOAdvisor.com/games

Special Report

L EARNING T ECHNOLOGY

18 Chief Learning Officer • March 2017 • www.CLOmedia.com

Learning Technology

Learning leaders should not be scared of technology. They should be scared of what will happen if they don’t learn about and adapt to all of the technology-based changes that are coming.

T

echnophobes would have us believe that technology is bringing about the end of the world one click at a time. OK, that’s a bit of an exaggeration, but there is some fear — even in the most adaptive of us — that whispers that technology in its various seemingly ubiquitous forms may one day replace humans.

Why not? It’s already happened in manufacturing, automotive, health care and many other industries.

Others insist that machines will never be able to do what humans can do. Some artificial intelligence, machine learning and virtual reality innovations, however, beg to differ.

And while it never pays to be overconfident, technology may indeed render some human functions unnecessary, even while it enables others.

Whichever way the wind ultimately blows, learning and development strategy and practice must evolve to partner with technology without being eclipsed by it. That means the learning leader’s role will change. This special report will discuss why we still need learning leaders, what their evolution will look like alongside the latest gadgetry and software, and examine how technology like machine learning — which is part of any new technology that learns, feeds users information, predicts or searches — is changing learning and development, and what learning leaders will need to adapt to, and look out for, down the pike. CLO

Chief Learning Officer • March 2017 • www.CLOmedia.com

19

Ready or Not, The Future Is Now

L EARNING T ECHNOLOGY

BY SARAH FISTER GALE

Machine learning is changing the way organizations curate content and manage learners. But are CLOs using its full capabilities?

T

wo years ago, billionaire tech venture capitalist Vinod Khosla made the bold prediction that in the next 20 years, “machine learning will have more impact than mobile.” He’s still got 18 years to go, but his prediction is already coming true.

Machine learning is the underpinning for many common learning technologies, including learning management systems, MOOCs, data analytics and other tools; and many learning vendors have marked it firmly on their future road maps. The allure of machine learning is clear, said James Cross, director of learning product strategy for Workday. “Research shows that it increases engagement and makes the learning experience more relevant and ‘sticky.’ ” The technology works through a series of algorithms, or computer-based queries that allow a piece of software to learn from data over time so it can identify trends and patterns that inform future searches and suggestions. In other words, the software watches what learners do, and how they engage with content, then proactively provides them with content they need the moment they need it.

For example, if a learner always chooses audio content, or skips over lessons on a certain topic, the machine can learn from that, and make more informed suggestions in the future. Similarly, if the machine sees that specific types of employees choose the same set of courses, it can automatically recommend that content 20 Chief Learning Officer • March 2017 • www.CLOmedia.com

to new employees in those roles.

“The ultimate goal of this technology is to create a more custom learner experience,” Cross explained.

“Think of it as Netflix for learning.”

In addition to telling employees what training they need, machine learning can save them from having to complete courses they don’t need, said Joshua Crumbaugh, CEO of PeopleSec, a cybersecurity training company. PeopleSec uses machine learning and artificial intelligence in its computer security awareness training to reward employees for good behavior, and to increase training requirements for those who are higher risk.

“We can be more invasive with employees who need it the most, and less invasive with the rest of the staff.”

Such customization cuts training time and cost because it’s only required for those who need it, and is respectful of the learners’ time. And because employees know training is linked to whether they embrace the lessons learned, they have more incentive to change their behavior. “If they don’t want to end up on the negative list, they know they shouldn’t click on phishing scams,” Crumbaugh said.

There are also social implications for machine learning in the workplace, said John Schneider, vice president of product marketing for Jive Software.

When users rate a course, or participate in an online discussion about a topic, machine learning tools can capture and learn from those interactions. It can indicate which courses are successful, where knowledge is

L EARNING T ECHNOLOGY

falling short, and who are the influencers and subject matter experts for a given topic, he said. This can be powerful information for CLOs. “When they can tap into the knowledge of the company, it strengthens their ability to chart the learning curriculum.”

Machine learning offers exciting opportunities for learning leaders to deliver better, faster, custom content. It also should prompt them to take stock of their current skill set. CLOs in a digital world may not need an IT degree to be competitive, but they do need to understand the technology behind the tools they use. Then they can make the right investment decisions, and use those technologies for strategic business benefit, said Ian Barkin, cofounder of Symphony Ventures, a future of work technology consulting firm. Machine learning enabled tools can automate common tasks, like updating LMS databases, transcribing documents or assigning content.

“That can free CLOs to focus on more important tasks, like culture building and strategic planning,” he said.

But he said none of these advances are plug and play.

Learning leaders need to add data analytics talent to their teams if they want to make the most of these tools.

Consider IBM Watson, one of the most famous machine learning computers in world. Watson was built by IBM researchers to answer questions posed in natural language, and went on to win the million-dollar prize on the game show “Jeopardy.” “Watson didn’t just magically work,” Barkin said. “It took years of training and programming to teach it how to think.”

As with all new technology, that’s where the real work comes in. Before a company can make use of machine learning or artificial intelligence to improve their learning strategy and programming, they need to figure out how the technology applies to their business case, what benefits they want to derive from the tools, and how to make that happen, said Dani Johnson, vice president of learning and development research for Bersin by Deloitte. To do that, learning leaders need to educate themselves on how these technologies work, what questions they want answered, and how to use the information they glean.

They also should think about how these tools will change the way they do their jobs and the knowledge their people need to acquire. Johnson said in the past two years there has been a huge shift in the skills organizations need. The most innovative CLOs are crafting new learning strategies in response to technology trends to meet long-term talent development goals and to effectively engage learners. “There is a huge opportunity here for forward-thinking CLOs to have a dramatic impact on organizational strategy — if they are willing to adapt.” CLO Sarah Fister Gale is a writer based in Chicago. To comment, email editor@CLOmedia.com.

The CLO’s Guide to AI

W

hat if CLOs could predict personalized learning needs or deliver targeted learning content based on work tasks before employees need it?

They can. Artificial intelligence technology, or AI, can process vast quantities of data and content to target the right piece of content to the individual employee, when it’s needed, no matter where that employee is. By predicting and delivering highly specific learning in real-time, AI can transform corporate learning and development.

Here are a few ways AI will impact the future of learning: A virtual learning assistant, or learning bot, for every employee: There are now AI-based virtual personal assistants such as Amy, from x.ai, which help to manage and schedule meetings. Learning departments may soon roll out virtual learning assistants, or learning bots, which could upend workplace learning by making users more effective. For example, they could identify and recommend the most important knowledge to help get a job done, making the everyday workflow easier. Learning bots will rely on conversational interfaces, which are likely to be the first way learners experience AI. Anticipate employees future performance: Skills, training conducted, information shared, and internal connections to other high performers are just a few of the data points that will give managers the information they need to better predict outcomes for teams and each individual’s level of contribution. While there may be some initial knee-jerk reactions to such AI uses, this is essentially about improving a manager’s ability to nurture talent by addressing an individual’s strengths and weaknesses.

Real-time competency modeling: Competency models are expensive to create, to maintain and to use, and they’re out of date the second they are rolled out. AI, in particular natural language processing, or NLP, will revolutionize this area of the CLO’s role and help to achieve the results competency modeling has promised for so long.

Learning leaders will be able to use AI and NLP to read performance data at the task level, and map it to skills. For instance, read content metadata, and accurately map it to skills that will be developed by its consumption. Or, run matches between roles and tasks to target learning. Or, predict the likelihood of high task performance. Other uses for AI in learning may include: • Automatically suggesting bite-size learning based on upcoming meetings on an employee’s calendar.

• Suggesting learning based on a deep analysis of team behavior.

• Personalized and contextual content delivered directly to where learners are working, such as Slack or Salesforce.

The possibilities are exponential, far-reaching and exciting. Organizations seeking to drive digital innovation should evaluate a number of business scenarios where AI and machine learning could drive clear and specific business value; consider experimenting with one or two high-impact scenarios.

Also, consider key performance indicators to drive adoption. AI’s growth will bring new criteria for success including an organization’s collaboration capabilities and information sharing culture, experimentation, learning and decision-making effectiveness, and the ability to reach externally for insights.

The aforementioned disruptions won’t arrive all at once, but the pace of innovation and development is faster and the implications more far-reaching than most learning leaders realize. But if CLOs can visualize what tomorrow’s workforce will look like, they will be on the right path for AI’s inevitable arrival.

— Amar Dhaliwal, chief evangelist at EdCast, a learning experience company

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L EARNING T ECHNOLOGY

Alec Ross on the Future of Learning

On the positive side, I see AI becoming an increasingly powerful tool for research. We’ve already seen what algorithms have done for Internet search, enabling information retrieval that would have once been unimaginable. This trend is only going to accelerate and will enable the store of human knowledge to become increasingly accessible.

To prepare for the future of learning, CLOs need to be open minded, observe millennials’ behavior for clues and be aware of their own learning habits.

CLO: What are the biggest challenges companies face today in preparing for — and taking advantage of — this technological evolution?

Over the past two decades, technology has transformed every aspect of corporate learning, from the way content is created to where, when and how it is accessed and shared.

According to New York Times bestselling author and innovation expert Alec Ross, this is the only the beginning. Ross, who speaks to audiences around the world about the impact of innovation on the economy and on society, sat down with Chief Learning Officer magazine to share his perspective on how technology will shape the future of learning.

CLO: When you think about the future of learning, what technologies do you think will have the biggest impact?

Ross: One of the trickiest parts is that budgets tend not to be nimble, and learning leaders need the ability to be flexible and to experiment. In my experience, learning leaders are often forced into “all or nothing” investment choices. They have a choice between investing in enterprisewide systems with a multiyear commitment and a lot of risk, or not changing anything, and the latter offers more certainty and security. Learning leaders need to be able to try different programs and methods on different audiences within an enterprise to test and measure the product/market fit; how well a specific program fits their enterprise.

CLO: What advice would you offer learning leaders today on how to prepare for the future of learning?

Alec Ross: Virtual and augmented reality technologies can and will be game-changing in education, but this is probably seven to 10 years away. In the meantime, there will be a number of things that are attempted but which prove pedagogically unsound or ineffective.

Ross: The first thing is to be open-minded. Technologies can be painfully overhyped, but we can’t be cynical.

Eventually the right technologies emerge that meaningfully enhance the learning environment, and as learning leaders we need to keep our eyes, ears and minds open.

Over the shorter-term, we are finally getting to the point of video connected to other enabling technologies producing educational outcomes that are positive and significant. I love the work a company called 2U is doing in partnership with some of America’s best universities.

The second thing is to closely observe the learning behaviors of millennials. I’m fascinated by how they learn in part because it’s so different than my own learning modalities. I could be negatively judgmental about it, but it’s important to recognize that millennials make up an ever-larger and more senior part of our workforces; the way they learn and work will only grow in importance.

CLO: How will artificial intelligence change the way we create and engage with information as learners?

Ross: There is positive and negative to this. On the negative side, I see AI-enabled computer programs taking over the jobs of tens of thousands of teachers. Any kind of instruction that can be routinized will likely become a combination of video and computer programs with evermore-powerful machine learning tools. I confess to not looking forward to this. This will likely be concentrated initially for instruction aimed at lower-skilled professions, which does not make it any easier to stomach.

22 Chief Learning Officer • March 2017 • www.CLOmedia.com

The third thing I’d flag is our own learning habits. Learning leaders need to be intellectually omnivorous, taking in information from wildly varying sources. We need to be interdisciplinary learners ourselves if we expect to be good stewards of the learning environments in our organizations.

CLO

Sarah Fister Gale is a writer based in Chicago. To comment, email editor@CLOmedia.com.

L EARNING T ECHNOLOGY

How to Become a Digital CLO Technology is great, and it’s necessary. But learning leaders have to maintain human engagement in a technology-driven world.

I

BY SARAH FISTER GALE

n 1994, software company Asymetrix released ToolBook, a computer-based training authoring tool that made it possible for virtually anyone to create web-based training programs. It was a defining moment that changed the way companies think about how and where employees learn.

Since then, online learning has gotten cheaper and easier to create and store, making it possible for learning groups to disseminate millions of pieces of content to serve every learner’s needs. At the same time, new technologies have emerged to enable learning to happen at the point of need via mobile phones, wearables and cloud-based learning management systems.

Current advances in machine learning and artificial intelligence will continue this evolution by enabling an LMS to automatically predict what content learners need, and to customize it so that they only receive relevant lessons. These advances won’t just change the way learners engage with content. They will fundamentally alter the CLO’s job and how their teams work.

Develop a New Skill Set Technology has changed how quickly and effi-

Chief Learning Officer • March 2017 • www.CLOmedia.com

23

L EARNING T ECHNOLOGY

ciently learning leaders craft and deliver employee training to reach diverse learner populations, what skills they need to succeed, and what purpose they serve in the organization, said Tonya Corley, head of the global center of excellence on digitization and learning for McKinsey and Co. She said her biggest shift came in the early 2000s, when the economy was struggling and budgets for corporate travel dried up. “We still had to reach learners, so it forced us to become more innovative.”

Companies started acquiring or building e-learning libraries and harnessing videoconferencing to teach remote learners in a classroom-like setting.

That was only the beginning, she said. The constant stream of new technologies — and the move from enterprise systems to cloud-based solutions — meant learning leaders had to evolve from workforce development planners to technology experts who understood how to vet learning vendors, choose new development platforms, and curate content from inside and outside the company to meet multiple generations of learners.

“It changed what it means to be a learning professional,” said Dani Johnson, vice president of learning and development research for Bersin by Deloitte. “As companies tried to figure out how to use these technologies, the onus fell to the learning leaders to answer their questions.”

Over time that forced CLOs to adopt new skill sets and build stronger relationships with the IT team.

At the same — Rahul Varma, time, the global economy was changing. Companies were expanding into new countries, and the talent war began heating up, forcing executives to acknowledge the importance of learning and workforce engagement to their longterm business strategies. The combination of increased demand for training and new tools to deliver it set the stage for learning leaders to gain new authority in the business. In a knowledge economy, talent became the competitive asset, causing executives to treat workforce development as core to their business strategy, Corley said. “It had a huge impact on our careers.”

It catapulted CLOs from operational support people to strategic leaders who played a crucial role in driving organizational strategy, but Johnson said

not everyone could keep up. “Forward thinking CLOs saw it as an opportunity to help build the strategy of the company, but others cowered,” she explained. “It all depended on their mindset and willingness to adapt.”

Be a Change Agent Accenture CLO Rahul Varma was one of the forward thinking learning leaders who lived through this transformation. For the past seven years, Varma has been changing the way the global consultancy delivers training, and helping to adapt its talent development and performance management strategies as the company doubled in size to 400,000 employees.

Much of that growth happened in Asia, nowhere near the company’s headquarters or brick and mortar learning centers. Varma had to recreate the learning organization to be relevant to all employees — not just those in the Western Hemisphere. “It required massive innovation, and technology was a critical enabler of it all,” he said.

His team implemented mobile learning tools; established 2,000 learning boards made up of subject matter experts who have curated more than 24,000 internally and externally developed online courses; and built 100 connected classrooms where employee groups learn together with their remote peers and instructors via video.

Varma said there was no corporate mandate to use the training, but in the past 2 1/2 years alone, all of this CLO, Accenture content has been used more than 30 million times. The popularity is generated by social sharing, and by peers and learning leaders’ endorsements.

“None of this was possible without technology,” he said. But he admitted in many cases, technology was more of a detractor than an enabler. “As a CLO you need to consider where technology belongs and where it ought not to be.”

While giving employees access to technology-enabled content is a vital step in educating a global workforce, time for reflection and an opportunity to practice what’s been learned are also key if learning is going stick. That’s where technology can get in the way. “We’ve become so obsessed with how technology makes our lives easier and

“Leading CLOs will become evangelists so that people from across the company will come to them to understand what these technologies can do.”

24 Chief Learning Officer • March 2017 • www.CLOmedia.com

L EARNING T ECHNOLOGY

boundless, we forget to make space to synthesize what we’ve learned,” he explained. No matter how cool and easily accessible learning becomes, without taking time to use lessons learned, that knowledge is fleeting.

Finding that balance has shaped Varma’s career as a CLO and his ambitions for the organization.

“I’m laser-focused on looking at all learning through the lens of mindfulness, and creating durability in learning.”

He also sees himself as a coach to the senior leaders in the organization, helping them figure out how to “lead from the front” and drive the change they seek. Being a CLO today is not about understanding instructional design or what new technology to use,

he said. “It’s about driving change, and building solutions that enable people to learn when and where they need to learn.”

To do that, CLOs need to be willing to experiment with new tools, challenge their people to be innovative in their technology use, and partner with IT and individual business units to pilot these technologies in response to specific learning needs. “Leading CLOs will become evangelists so that people from across the company will come to them to understand what these technologies can do,” Varma said. CLO Sarah Fister Gale is a writer based in Chicago. To comment, email editor@CLOmedia.com.

HOT LIST Learning Management System Providers Listed alphabetically; compiled by Nidhi Madhavan; editor@CLOmedia.com.

Company name and web address

Cornerstone OnDemand cornerstoneondemand. com

Halogen Software halogensoftware.com

Saba saba.com

SAP SuccessFactors successfactors.com

SilkRoad silkroad.com

SumTotal Systems sumtotalsystems.com

Number of Learning product Number of LMS clients products manager/lead

Name of LMS

Major LMS clients

Cornerstone Learning

Starwood Hotels & Resorts, Xerox, Walgreens, T-Mobile, Abbott Laboratories, Hallmark, New Belgium Brewing

85% of more than 2,800 total clients*

5

Summer Rogers, associate vice president of product management

Halogen Learning

Black River Memorial Hospital, Brundage Management Co., Canal Insurance Co., SGT Inc., University of Wisconsin Credit Union

More than 2,100 worldwide

2**

Kristy Holmes, product manager

Saba Learning

Dell; Hyatt Hotels; RR Donnelley; Air Canada; Guitar Center; Countrywide; Yum Brands

2,200

Can be licensed alone or as part of a suite

SAP SuccessFactors Learning

Microsoft, Allstate, Prospect Mortgage, B/E Aerospace, The Timken Co.

6,000 cloud customers. 45 million+ cloud application subscribers

SilkRoad Learning

VMS, Levin Furniture, Hydrite Chemical Co.

American Cancer Society, Capgemini, SumTotal Learn Pfizer, Air Canada

300

3,500

Ben Willis, vice president of product management

2

Joe Herman, vice president of product management

1

David Winter, senior vice president, products and innovation

2***

Bill Docherty, senior vice president of product management

*Cornerstone OnDemand does not share the number of clients for specific products. **Does not include learning content provider partnerships. ***SumTotal Learning is part of an integrated suite of products. Note: Workday, Deltek, PeopleFluent and Oracle did not respond to requests for information.

Source: Companies

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PROFILE Frank Nguyen

The Learning Side of Sears Sears Holdings Corp. Chief Learning Officer Frank Nguyen is using the power of data to help transform the retailer.

BY BRAVETTA HASSELL

F

rank Nguyen has a knack for entering companies during periods of significant transition.

It happened at Intel Corp. in 1999 during the Y2K frenzy when the technology company wanted to get 100 trainers off the road. It also happened at American Express Co. in 2007, when the home sourcing movement emerged, and leaders were trying to figure out how to hire and train call center agents who worked off-site.

And it’s the case now. Nguyen is the vice president of learning and performance at Sears Holdings Corp. — which includes the storied retailer Sears — working with business leaders to transform a company that many business analysts have said is skirting the edge of failure.

In spite of this, Nguyen sees opportunity, just as he has in the past. “I’ve seen companies at their highest peak, and I’ve seen companies at the bottom,” he explained. “That aspect doesn’t scare me.”

Over the years, he’s learned that when companies are in a state of transition, that’s often the most opportune time to do innovative work. Sears, once well-known for its trademark Sears, Roebuck and Co. catalog, has been around for more than a century, and Nguyen doesn’t see it disappearing overnight. “In fact, I’m 100 percent certain that some form of Sears will survive; it may just not be the Sears that you and I knew growing up.”

In the past decade or so, the old-school version of Sears has become a distant memory. Once one of the country’s leading retailers for everything from clothing to household goods, appliances and automotive services, the company has fought to compete with rivals like Costco and Wal-Mart, specialty stores like Home Depot and e-commerce giants like Amazon.

Sears Holdings, which was founded in 2005 after Kmart bought Sears, Roebuck and Co., has seen its

26 Chief Learning Officer • March 2017 • www.CLOmedia.com

sales steadily decline since then, Fortune reported in April 2016. That was the same month the company announced it would speed up closure of underperforming stores to restore profitability. Several months later, the company disclosed a net loss of $748 million for third quarter 2016. In its results release, Sears Holdings Chairman and CEO Edward Lampert said the company would continue its cost reduction measures and improve its gross margin performance.

As the company strives to become profitable again,

“It’s really about giving people goals and quantifying their performance against that goal.”

— Frank Nguyen, Sears Holdings Corp. reinventing itself to lean less heavily on its brick-andmortar locations, it is — among other things — looking to learning and to its people for value. Nguyen said the retail reality is this: Products across competitors are virtually the same; pricing is transparent, thanks to the web, and so is product information. People have to be the differentiator.

In sheet music, dal segno is a symbol used to tell musicians to repeat a given section. At Sears, Segno is the name of the learning and performance management system Nguyen and his team built to support the company’s metrics-driven roles and promote a culture

PHOTOS BY CHRISTOPHER BARR

Chief Learning Officer • March 2017 • www.CLOmedia.com

27

PROFILE Frank Nguyen

of continuous learning. It includes two data-driven tools, Segno Expertise and Segno Reputation. Segno challenges the notion that hiring and training people at onboarding is enough. Rather, learning is a gradual process that can come from formal training, making mistakes on the job, reading a magazine or blog article, or supporting a customer. The platform honors all of these learning experiences.

In today’s fast-paced business environment, continuous employee learning is imperative since the employee experience and customer service are invariably intertwined, said Lisa Rowan, vice president of human resources and talent management at market research firm IDC. “What do I want from a retail associate when I walk in a store?” she asked.

“They need to know the merchandise very well. They need to be someone who is cheerful and helpful and have a personality for the public.”

Customer satisfaction is critically important, but Nguyen, Sears Holdings Nguyen’s philosophy on learning doesn’t exist solely to drive the company’s competitive advantage, it encompasses a vision beyond than that. One of Nguyen’s biggest inspirations is Tiffany Morris, the company’s vice president of talent management and human resources.

Morris got her start at Sears as an apparel associate and worked and learned her way through the business.

“I’ve seen companies at their highest peak, and I’ve seen companies at the bottom. That aspect doesn’t scare me.”

— Frank

Frank Nguyen, chief learning officer, Sears Holdings Corp., started out in the IT sector, and applies that knowledge to e-learning opportunities.

28 Chief Learning Officer • March 2017 • www.CLOmedia.com

“That’s kind of the perspective that we have to have as corporations,” he explained. “It’s not just training people for a job, it’s actually, can we give them the skills to prepare them for a lifetime?”

Nguyen uses Segno Expertise and Reputation together, relying on data and gamification to help make that happen. Segno Expertise shares some similarities with a typical learning management system. It can deliver and track e-learning and capture attendance at an instructor-led training, for instance. But it also can track learning that happens offline, things like reading an instructional brochure or a coaching conversation between an employee and a manager. These learning engagements are recorded and quantified, yielding a score that represents how much employees know.

If Expertise captures what employees know, Segno Reputation takes that information, casts it alongside business data about their job performance, and gives them an idea of how well they’re applying that knowledge. If an associate’s learning metrics look good but Reputation shows they are not doing well in customer service, Expertise can recommend content objects, or peer or leader activities to bolster their progress.

Nguyen said developing Reputation has been an eye-opening journey. “It’s actually the first time in my career that we’ve dug so deeply into performance management as a learning organization and used data the business is generating and correlate it back to learning.”

Segno also gamifies expertise. “Forget about ‘Call of Duty’ or forget about ‘Pac-Man,’ it’s not even about that,” he explained. “It’s really about giving people goals and quantifying their performance against that goal.”

Sears Holdings’ future will require multiple things from learning and development, Morris said. The company needs to be thoughtful about learner consumption habits, and it needs to give people access to a wide variety of learning and development in and outside of their role. The company’s transformation strategy also involves using technology to connect people to products and services, so the employees’ own brand interactions need to mirror that.

With improved ways to collect data and the company’s increasing integration of technology into its business, Morris said Nguyen and his team have been exceptional at marrying learning and other data her department generates with business results. For instance, Segno has helped leaders understand what’s working and what’s not from a results perspective. Essentially, Nguyen’s technology expertise and his diverse work experiences have helped to distinguish him.

He started out in the IT sector, working as a systems engineer for a few years after he finished his undergrad

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PROFILE Frank Nguyen

work in philosophy at the University of Arizona in Tucson. During his master’s program in educational technology at Arizona State University, he took an internship at Intel around the time people were first figuring out e-learning. “Of course, back then, we didn’t call it e-learning. We don’t know what to call it,” he said.

The three-month internship, during which he built the company’s first online course, turned into a seven-year stint where he moved up the ranks and built a learning management system that ran for 10 years. He also pursued his doctoral degree during that time, studying educational technology at ASU. Nguyen served as director of learning innovation at American Express before arriving at Sears Holdings in 2013 with the charge to transform learning for the company’s Sears and Kmart stores as well as its call centers and other operations, totaling roughly 150,000 employees.

On paper, “I probably shouldn’t be doing what I’m doing,” Nguyen said. His family were refugees from the Vietnam War who arrived in the U.S. with nothing — “maybe a box of cigarettes they sold off in the refugee camp.”

But he had help along the way. Nguyen said he can name a half a dozen people from elemen- Nguyen, an educator at heart, enjoys solving problems in unconventional ways. tary school all the way through college who were instrumental in his life. They had no reason to tional learning organization, the other make up a team help him, but they went above and beyond the job that serve an innovation function. The latter is comdescription of teacher. posed of recent college graduates who take on the task Colleen Ruth was simply his high school chemistry of solving a complex problem — likely seeking an anteacher, but later became a mentor when he became swer that will require more time than their program her teaching assistant. She’d go on to help fund part of allows. But that’s part of the point, Nguyen explained. his college degree, and they remain connected. “I never It’s about the challenge. really knew any of my grandparents, but she was probHe likes to solve problems in unconventional ably the closest I had,” Nguyen said. ways, and he encourages his team to embrace this Support like that was part of what drew him to ed- view. To approach a problem from a typical vantage ucation as a profession. It was the idea of not making point is to be an order taker, he said. To do othermoney but making people — “and how do you help wise will produce better, more effective results. them advance their lives not just from a professional “That’s really how innovation happens. It’s thinkstandpoint but a personal standpoint, too?” ing about not how this has always been done but Between his time at Intel and American Express, how it could be done.”

Nguyen spent some time in academia at San Diego Nguyen wouldn’t mind carrying this spirit State University, but it was the right place at the wrong with him into a second life in the Arizona comtime, he said. “I’m actually able to help grow and de- munity where he spent his adolescence. After the velop people more than even when I was a professor at corporate career, he said he may return to teacha university, which is kind of ironic.” ing: “I think it’s important that we give back to Still, even in a corporate setting, Nguyen is the our communities, and there’s no better way to do consummate academic. He is Socratic in his question- it than with education.” CLO ing of assumptions and practices, turning them over to see how they can be improved. He leads a team of Bravetta Hassell is a Chief Learning Officer associate about 120 people — half of whom work in a tradi- editor. To comment, email editor@CLOmedia.com.

30 Chief Learning Officer • March 2017 • www.CLOmedia.com

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Learning in practice Award SPOTLIGHT

MASTERCARD MAKES EMPLOYEES FEEL THE IMPACT OF PHISHING SCAMS Mastercard drew on insights from GP Strategies to transform its annual compliance training from a check-the-box activity into a powerful, engaging e-learning program. In this self-service model, employees experienced the shock of falling prey to phishing scams and learn what they can do to protect themselves, customers and the company.

The Challenge

Phishing scams cost companies billions every year. Teaching employees how to avoid phishing attacks is key to an effective cybersecurity program.

Long gone are the days of poorly written emails from fictional foreign dignitaries asking recipients for personal information.

Today’s phishing scams are much more sophisticated and difficult to recognize, often appearing to come from an employee’s colleagues – and they can happen anywhere at any time with devastating consequences.

In 2015, Ubiquiti Networks, a network technology company, lost $46.7 million to a personalized phishing scam in which the scammer impersonating the company’s finance department convinced employees to transfer money to an account in Hong Kong. In 2016, the Internal Revenue Service issued an alert to its payroll and HR staff warning of a phishing scheme purportedly from executives requesting employees’ personal information.

an unknown sender was a threat, but that knowledge did not curb their behavior.

To combat this disconnect, the Mastercard Global Talent Development L&D team worked with GP Strategies, a global performance improvement provider of sales and technical training, to develop a course employees wouldn’t soon forget.

The Solution

Show employees the impact of clicking on phishing scams, then teach them the right approach.

Mastercard set the aggressive goal of reducing the number of employees who opened phishing emails to 15 percent or less – substantially lower than the industry standard of 24 percent.

To do that, the company developed an enterprise-wide spear phishing exercise to thwart bad behavior, build cyber acumen and teach employees how to be vigilant about identifying and reporting malicious phishing attacks.

If just one person is fooled by these scams it can be financially devastating for a company and destroy customers’ faith in the brand. Yet they have become the most common security challenge and the financial services industry is most targeted by these scams.

To combat this growing threat, companies invest millions in cybersecurity but the risk remains that some new piece of malware will land in an employee’s inbox. That’s why the most effective cybersecurity programs include employee training as a last line of defense.

Mastercard recognized that training is a critical component of its cybersecurity strategy and that the content couldn’t be just a run-of-the-mill course. They needed something compelling that would capture employees’ attention and make them realize the risk these phishing scams represent.

One of the key obstacles in teaching about cybersecurity is employees often don’t take it seriously or fail to understand the impact their actions can have. A 2015 survey conducted by an enterprise security firm showed the majority of employees admit that downloading email attachments from

“We wanted to help employees proactively recognize different types of phishing emails to protect Mastercard as another line of defense against such attacks,” said Poonam Verma, Mastercard vice president, vulnerability management.

To initiate the learning program (Figure 1), employees received authentic-looking emails but instead of getting a general awareness page when clicking on a suspicious link,

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GP Strategies created a program that mimics a hacker removing data from the employee’s computer. “Even though the phishing experience was simulated, to the employee, it appeared to be a real-life event,” said Heidi Milberg, director of learning solutions, GP Strategies.

The program leaders developed two phishing emails that were sent three times over three months to a randomly selected group of employees making up 25 percent of the general workforce. Each email was constructed with progressive intensity to entice learners to click the phishing link.

The emails were tracked and employee responses were ranked as either: • Bad: they opened email and clicked on the link.

• Unaware: completely ignored the email.

• Good: did not open or forward the email and reported it as Junk in Outlook.

Immediately following each simulated phishing attack, employees who responded correctly received a congratulatory email from Mastercard’s chief security officer while others received a notice that they had failed to follow security protocol.

“Getting a personal email from the chief security officer really drove home the seriousness of meeting the learning objectives,” said Jawanda Staber, Mastercard vice president, global talent development.

Employees who failed to follow security protocol received a direct link to an e-learning course with an introduction by the chief security officer. The course covered the impact of phishing to the business, how to recognize and avoid phishing scams,

and the company’s formal reporting and email isolation procedures.

In addition to online content, the course offered a printable quick reference guide on what to do in the event a phishing email is opened or a phishing link is selected.

The results

Mastercard met its target to exceed industry standards and employees report loving the program.

By focusing on qualitative design, implementation and measurable results, GP Strategies helped Mastercard exceed its ambitious goal through a dramatic increase in employee engagement in the training program (Figure 2).

But the numbers alone don’t tell the whole story. Over the last few years, the company’s L&D team has set out to create new and engaging compliance training that employees really respond to. By that measure, the spear phishing program developed with GP Strategies was considered a huge success.

“Feedback from employees showed they found the course to be innovative, provocative, entertaining and informative,” said Maureen Doran-Houlihan, Mastercard vice president, global talent development and learning and development. In fact, one participant commented: “This is how training should be. I almost wanted it to last longer.”

Cybersecurity is vital in today’s world. Ensuring employees are educated about phishing scams and understand the importance of following steps to mitigate their impact is a key risk management strategy that will help keep the company more secure from attack.

Founded in 1966, GP Strategies (NYSE: GPX) is a global performance improvement company serving more than 16 diverse industries. GP Strategies is a leader in sales and technical training, e-learning solutions, management consulting and engineering services. GP Strategies services, solutions and technologies empower companies to perform above their potential.

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BEST PRACTICES IN LEADERSHIP

Becoming Leaders in All Parts of Life

BY WILL BUNCH THE WHARTON SCHOOL OF THE UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA

A Wharton professor’s research opens doors on how human resource leaders can help their employees lead better lives while becoming more productive on the job.

In the late 1980s, Stew Friedman was starting his long career as a professor of management at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School when his first child was born. Suddenly, the young academic could think of only one question: “What was I going to do now to make the world safe for him to grow up in?”

It was not long before Friedman realized that his concerns as a new parent suggested a new way to think about the growth of leadership capacity: “Total Leadership,” an integrated strategy for finding meaning and happiness on the job, at home, in the community, and even for the self. That idea led Friedman to launch Wharton’s Work/Life Integration Project and to start Wharton’s Leadership Program.

that accountants estimated $5.8 million in savings, $700,000 in new revenue, and $500,000 in productivity gains.

The “jazz quartet” of integrating life and career The popular notion of “work/life balance” dates back to the 19th-century drive to shorten the workday, and gained strength as mothers streamed into the labor force in the 1970s and ‘80s. But since the early 1990s, Friedman has stated flatly that “balance is bunk” because it asks workers to make sacrifices in some way. His Total Leadership strategy means finding a common purpose that leads to more seamless fulfillment in the office, at home, and in the community.

“The idea is harmony, like a jazz quartet,” he says, adding that “sometimes you only hear the trumpeter”—meaning occasionally one role, such as career or family, becomes a little louder in the mix.

Blending research on leadership development and work/life from both large-scale surveys and field research, Friedman discovered strategies for what he calls “four-way wins”—in the office, at home, in the community, and for the self— that had major implications for people management in the business world. His research shows that workers who follow Friedman’s Total Leadership approach often shift their attention toward improvement outside of their job and in their office productivity.

Work/life integration is critical to attracting, retaining talent Friedman says that when he started researching work’s relationship to home and community life in the early 1990s, this was largely seen as an issue for the growing number of women in the workplace. Today, women have risen higher in the ranks of management, and aspiring male executives now place much greater emphasis on playing a significant role at home, as Friedman confirmed by surveying Wharton students in 1992 and again 20 years later. Additionally, most human resource executives find that their newer hires from the millennial generation place a greater emphasis on lifestyle and employee satisfaction than the size of their paycheck.

Even more critical is the gain for employers: Friedman’s research with one group of high-potential executives found

The critical role of “clarity of expectations” Friedman’s research shows that workers gain more confidence in seeking their life goals as they develop trust with those around them—especially in the workplace. He advises employees to have candid conversations with the important people in their lives about performance, expectations, and what truly matters to them. “Talk to those people to get a real picture of what they expect of you—which is often different from what people believe is expected of them,” the Wharton professor advises. Indeed, a 2015 Gallup survey of American workers found that clarity of expectations is the most important asset of a good manager and that employees who meet regularly with their boss are three times more likely to be engaged on the job.

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BEST PRACTICES IN LEADERSHIP

Tu r n i n g t h e workplace into a laboratory for life For Friedman, identifying your life goals and core values is the first step toward turning your vision into reality. Some of the common tools for achieving those goals, he notes, are timeshifting, working in different locations to integrate work and home responsibilities, smarter delegation of tasks, and simply finding the courage to tackle a radically different kind of project. This means that a smart human resource executive becomes the lab manager in charge of creating that climate.

How peer support leads to “four-way wins” Friedman emphasizes the importance of peer-to-peer coaching, advising rising executives to “work with a couple of other people who are also experimenting with creative ways to be more productive in various spheres.” He says that developing peer mentors is critical to support the exercises and experiments that will lead to new approaches to work/life integration. One study conducted by Manpower Canada found that while training improved worker performance by 22 percent, training combined with coaching improved it by 88 percent.

5 Ways Your Organization Can Foster Work/ Life Integration

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Understanding work/life integration is critical to business leadership in the 21st century.

Friedman argues that today executives are judged as much, if not more, for the values they bring to the workplace as for their impact on the bottom line. That change requires human resource executives to create new ways of identifying and developing high-potential executives.

2

Increasingly, people management experts are looking less toward “work/life balance” and more toward the intelligent integration of work and the rest of life.

Friedman notes that surging use of smartphones and social media has helped to make personal and business lives more seamless. “The digital revolution,” Friedman says, “has changed everything about how we create boundaries between different parts of our lives and it’s become a much more pressing issue.”

3

Engage in candid conversations with your workers so they better understand what is expected from them—and vice versa.

According to Friedman, your workers probably harbor career expectations that will surprise you—much as they might be surprised by how they are viewed by higher-ups. He helps them define their vision. “It’s 15 years from now—describe a day in your life,” Friedman advises employees. “What’s your legacy? What’s the impact you’re having? Why does it matter?”

4

Create a culture of experimentation that empowers workers to pursue meaningful goals both inside and outside the office.

Studies show that a less rigid, more improvisational work culture—with features like flex time or work-from-home options—makes it easier to attract and retain valued employees. According to a 2011 Families and Work Institute study, 87 percent of workers said flexibility is important in weighing a new job—and an open environment makes them more productive.

5

Establish and nurture peer-to-peer coaching to help workers achieve their goals—and the goals of your organization.

Executives in the people management field can do the critical work to establish and nourish these peer-to-peer coaching networks. Friedman advises expanding these networks to include those with similar aspirations but different life experiences, which “sheds a whole new light on the challenges you are facing.”

COMPANY PROFILE When you partner with Wharton Executive Education, you have the full force of our world-renowned faculty and innovative learning methodologies behind you. It starts with a needs assessment of your objectives and results in customized learning solutions that drive an immediate, measurable impact for your employees-and your organization. And throughout the process, we are committed to helping you meet your goals and achieve success. Visit execed.wharton.upenn.edu/empower or contact Wharton Client Relations at 215898-1776 or execed@wharton.upenn.edu.

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BEST PRACTICES IN HR LEARNING

Retention and Mastery from Short, Repetitive Bursts How high-frequency/low-dose learning instills competency and confidence in the workforce

BY TIM HARNETT Training departments have gone through upheavals in recent years. The incoming generation of workers is disrupting how training has typically been presented. Additionally, declining budgets require L&D teams to do more with less (Staff, 2015).

“Time and resources are at a premium,” notes Greg Poland, Senior Product Manager for Learning and Development at HealthStream. “Being out of the office for even a few days isn’t as feasible as it might once have been. The audience itself is also changing. Today’s learner is much more familiar with finding information on the fly as he or she needs it.”

Poland argues that current conditions are ripe for highfrequency/low-dose learning as an alternative to traditional instructor-led training. “With the proliferation of mobile devices and the influx of millennials, employees are more used to acquiring smaller amounts of information as needed. This is where high-frequency/low-dose learning really blossoms — delivering information on-demand in small bites. Employees get what they need and move on.”

Poland cites two main drivers to employing a high-frequency/ low-dose learning strategy. The first is a focus on competency over completion. “Employees requiring recertification might have to take a course and pass a test every few years,” Poland says. “But putting in the hours doesn’t guarantee competency in the material. By ingesting frequent, short bursts of information, organizations ensure that their employees are competent to the task, confident in their abilities, and retain information longer.”

The second driver is the need to do more with less. “By adapting training to shorter intervals, organizations can deliver the same amount of training in a compressed time frame, spread out over time,” Poland says. “Sometimes it takes even less time to do the initial training. This can end up saving organizations money on travel and coverage costs alone.”

leadership needs to acknowledge the changing nature of the workforce. Companies, products and trainings all evolve. The new working generations are used to finding information for themselves at point of need. They don’t want to wait to learn.

Training should reflect that. Once you get into the evolve mindset, examine your current content and see how it can be adapted for the high-frequency/low-dose learning way. While not all learning is suitable, some can be divided into different modules for easier digestion. The main thing is to identify the key components you want to address with high-frequency/lowdose learning.”

“Take health care, for example. Competency over completion carries magnitudes of importance due to the life-and-death situations employees face in that industry. When receiving CPR, you want someone that’s comfortable, competent and knows exactly what he or she is doing, versus someone who hasn’t had recent training. Someone who’s not in a maintenance of competency program, but instead has biannual certification training that may be coming up soon would likely not be as fresh on the techniques and might not be as competent, which can be potentially life threatening.”

“Many industries, including health care, are facing cutbacks, and saving money without sacrificing quality is crucial. Highfrequency/low-dose learning helps save time and money in your training budget without sacrificing competency.”

How can your organization adapt its learning strategy to incorporate high-frequency/low-dose learning? Poland outlines several steps.

Adapt content (if appropriate): For high-frequency/ low-dose learning to succeed, content should fit the format.

“Content should be suitable enough to be effectively broken down into segments that still provide value,” Poland says. “If there’s an hour-long training that you take every few months, breaking that down into five-minute increments might not provide value. But if it’s something you take for a number of hours or multiple days and you need to keep fresh in your mind, breaking the same training into 15- or 30-minute increments helps employees stay fresh and develops motor memory.”

Acknowledge the need for change: Switching from a focus on completion to competency is essential in today’s workplace, Poland says. “From a high-level perspective,

“Another challenge is time,” Poland adds. “For trainings already in place, it will take time to break that content down into logical digestible segments. This creates an upfront impact as you

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BEST PRACTICES IN HR LEARNING

switch from your current methods to high-frequency/low-dose learning, although this impact dissipates very quickly.”

Be aware of pushback: Challenges will always exist, but Poland believes the benefits present themselves almost immediately. “We’ve found that because there’s an obvious benefit to this kind of training, the pushback quickly dissipates.

Employees may feel like they’ll have more training to do at first, which is not completely the case. When correctly applied, high-frequency/low-dose learning doesn’t add more training; it shifts current training around in a better way. You might get pushback from administration or IT, who might feel like they need to manage more. That might be the case at first, but not long-term.”

“Senior leadership might not initially see the need for new training programs, especially if your organization already has legacy processes in place,” Poland says. “Organizations may feel the way they’ve always done things is fine; why change?

But by demonstrating the benefit and showing how impactful high-frequency/low-dose learning can be in a short amount of time, those barriers quickly fall away and it almost goes full swing in the other direction. Now staff feels like they’re being provided with tools that allow them to excel at their jobs.

Providing this kind of training to your employees also positions your organization as an industry leader, which may help with recruiting and retention.

Assess metrics: Make sure your metrics are appropriate for both the content and your workplace culture. “KPIs are content-dependent,” Poland says. “However, high-frequency/ low-dose learning allows you to focus on competency-based measurements, since you can test more frequently. With the continual feedback and progress tracking that technology provides, you can evaluate where employees are in the moment.

Another strong KPI is confidence — through surveys you 1

can see employees’ confidence about their ability to do their jobs. Employee productivity is another useful KPI to measure the impact of high-frequency/low-dose learning. With more frequent training comes an increase in fluency and more productivity as employees don’t need to spend time getting up to speed or rehashing material they’ve already learned.”

By adapting appropriate content for high-frequency/low-dose delivery, organizations should see a rise in competence and confidence among their workforce. “Training retention isn’t new; the ‘forgetting curve’ was postulated over 100 years ago,” Poland notes. “If you don’t follow up training with additional practice or training exercises, then over time knowledge erodes. But if you sprinkle in spaced-out knowledge boosters or other training sessions, that forgetting curve smooths out. Incremental training gives employees competence in, confidence about and mastery of any subject they need to do their jobs effectively.”

The HealthStream Learning Center (HLC) enables this type of training through our Maintenance of Competency (MoC) curriculum feature. The American Heart Association’s new Resuscitation Quality Improvement (RQI) Program has learners participate in a CPR skills activity each quarter to maintain high-quality CPR skills. This is in contrast to traditional AHA learning methods that require several hours of training on a biannual basis. Organizations have greatly benefited by the ability to provide training and skills assessment to staff on multiple shifts at convenient times. The resulting impact as reported by organizations is an increase in confidence among staff, as well as high levels of staff acceptance due to improved understanding of resuscitation skills and increased practice frequency.

To learn more about how HealthStream can help support your talent management initiatives, visit healthstream.com.

Staff (2015, November/December). 2015 Training Industry Report. Training, 20-21.

COMPANY PROFILE HealthStream is dedicated to improving patient outcomes through the development of healthcare organizations’ greatest asset: their people. Our unified suite of solutions is contracted by, collectively, approximately 4.5 million healthcare employees in the U.S. for workforce development, training & learning management, talent management, credentialing, privileging, provider enrollment, performance assessment, and managing simulation-based education programs. Our research solutions provide valuable insight to healthcare providers to meet HCAHPS requirements, improve the patient experience, engage their workforce, and enhance physician alignment. www.healthstream.com

Why You Should Encourage Leaders to Play Games Some say it’s never a good thing when leaders play games. But when development is the goal, gamification has its perks.

38 Chief Learning Officer • March 2017 • www.CLOmedia.com

BY JOHN GILLIS JR.

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any of us grew up playing Battleship, Monopoly and Clue board games.

Others played “42” in dominoes. All of these games provide bonding as well as learning opportunities, and most adults play those same games today with their kids — in addition to new technology-based games — for the same purpose. We should use them at companies too, including for leadership development.

Many companies are experiencing significant leadership gaps and an insufficient leadership pipeline, primarily due to the increasing pace of change in the global economy. In the October 2016 Harvard Business Review article “The 5 Elements of a Strong Leadership Pipeline,” industry analyst Josh Bersin referenced Deloitte data stating that 89 percent of executives rated “strengthening the leadership pipeline” as an urgent issue; leadership development investments also can improve direct report retention. Because of this, companies increased spending 10 percent last year to $14 billion to prepare “ready now” leaders to step into a new level of responsibility. Similarly, “2016 Best Companies for Leaders,” a December 2015 article in Chief Executive, reported that when doing a 10-year performance comparison, the top 15 percent of the best leadership development companies have a 111 percent market capitalization growth, versus 64 percent for the bottom 15 percent.

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So, why don’t more companies use games for leadership development? According to Development Dimensions International’s Ready-Now Leaders: 25 Findings to Meet Tomorrow’s Business Challenges — Global Leadership Forecast 201415, only 37 percent use a formal program to develop a talent bench for a smooth transition. This is because the money spent on other methods does not have a positive ROI, as only 28 percent of businesses claimed to be highly effective, as stated in the Institute of Corporate Productivity’s June 2014 article, “4 Ways to Take Global Leadership Development to the Next Level.” Considering only a quarter of HR leaders think their company leaders are “excellent” or “very good,” according to a June 2015 American Psychological Association article, “The Corporate Family Model of Leadership Development,” and a healthy percentage of others believe their leadership development programs are ineffective — essentially a waste of money — it’s time to try something new.

Because the shortage of leaders is a critical factor in organizational growth, and current methods are not effective, learning leaders must innovate to build a leadership pipeline. For these innovators, there is an increasing demand to maximize learning technology to create a competitive edge. For organizations that want to see behavior change, to develop good strategists who can build competitive advantage in a complex and dynamic business environment, investing in gamification for leadership development is an answer.

This is not self-paced e-learning; it’s delivering a classroom-based, high-fidelity business game.

start by deciding on a team name, and their decisions amplify from there as they create a multiyear strategy prioritizing a company’s actions. It’s challenging and high pressure, yet engaging.

Instead of a game based on one’s present industry, participants need to step outside of their comfort zone so they can focus on the leadership lessons. Participants don’t get caught in industry specifics, like incorrect product pricing in the game. Instead, incorporating business dynamics like opportunities and threats helps players stay agile and flexible as they determine contingency plans for their company.

Typically, individuals are promoted for self-achievement; yet, they need a holistic company perspective once in a leadership role. With each game participant playing a specific leadership role within the business, the group can see cross-functionally to develop mutual accountability as part of a high performing team.

Participants will ideally play a role on their tablet where they don’t have subject matter expertise, like an HR expert assigned to finance. Sometimes, participants will have an opportunity to play multiple roles within one game, so they can gain a broader perspective. The multiplayer approach is more impactful than a small group crowded around one laptop from a learning design perspective, as the department interdependencies highlight the systemic impacts from decision-making.

Experiential learning incorporating games using realistic work situations for leadership development produces immediate results.

Ramp Up the Technology Children today play games on their smartphone or tablet that look better than many of the antique spreadsheet-based games businesses use today. When it comes to games for leadership development, modern technology demands tablet touch interface, 3D visualization and wireless backups.

To provide a visual classroom description, picture participants sitting at small group tables; they serve as a company’s executive team. The competing teams start with the same financial and human capital, and then collaborate internally while they compete externally to determine where to best allocate their resources. They 40 Chief Learning Officer • March 2017 • www.CLOmedia.com

Provide Support Curriculum and Feedback The game should not be played in isolation. Instead, supporting curriculum should be configured to the organization’s competency model and/or course learning objectives identified during the needs analysis phase of learning design. After configuration, the curriculum should be customized with business-specific examples for the company or industry. This curriculum wraps around the game, so participants can practice what they learned while playing, a learn-by-doing approach in a safe environment.

The curriculum also has to simultaneously address high-priority corporate needs as well as personal development opportunities. Each participant has unique traits — competency, proficiency and job — which require an individual learning approach. Finally, many companies struggle between offering a program that addresses soft skill intangibles and hard skill tangibles — the program should strive to address both.

While the risk-free game environment fosters exploration and innovation, immediate performance feedback can show participants the cause/ effect of their strategy execution and decision-making. For the game’s learning lessons to transfer back to the business, it must be a high-fidelity experience, meaning it simulates day-to-day business decisions accurately. For instance, the immediate financial impacts reinforce key lessons for faster acquisition, better accuracy and higher retention as well as an opportunity to make behavioral adjustments. Just like the real world, each team is trying to increase shareholder value — and their decisions should have buy, sell or hold business implications.

Don’t Forget the Debrief and Assessment Companies skeptical of gaming for leadership development often say previous game experiences were fun, but they did not provide a learning impact. To counter this, a professional facilitator-led debrief helps leaders reflect on their critical thinking, decision-making and mistakes. Game participants benefit from the focus, energy and interactions of a facilitator who catalyzes dynamic,

responsive and respectful dialogue with peers.

They can: engage and reflect on a concrete experience, form abstract concepts, and test the concepts by applying them in new situations.

Self-awareness is foundational for transformational, resilient and authentic leadership. Leadership development games encourage participants to challenge themselves, question assumptions, explore perspectives and build leadership confidence as part of their leadership expedition. Because the facilitator is critical to help participants extract key leadership lessons, that individual must be an experienced professional who understands business and leadership, not just a game administrator. Those years of experience and expertise bring real, practical examples to the leadership lessons.

Assessments are also important. There are many great ones available in the market today, but many of the current program designs make participants feel like an appendage to the curriculum/game.

Thus, in addition to receiving game feedback based on team performance, there also should be GAMES continued on page 60

WE WANT TO HAVE IMPACT LONG AFTER WE LEAVE THE ROOM. This is achieved by how we behave when we are in the room.

For the past 40 years, Designed Learning’s Flawless Consulting® workshops have had a life-long impact on millions of people who want to partner with others to produce results. Through impactful in-person workshops offered globally as well as with extended learning and coaching services offered in-person, online or blended, we create sustainable learnings and make things happen. We can move your team from being a pair-of-hands to being a trusted partner.

IN OUR FLAWLESS CONSULTING WORKSHOPS, YOU WILL LEARN: New ways to deal with resistance • Skills to shift how you are perceived New partnering behaviors • Personally powerful ways to be more authentic Visit designedlearning.com or call (866) 770-2227. We would love to have a conversation about how we can partner with you to achieve the results you desire.

42 Chief Learning Officer • March 2017 • www.CLOmedia.com

VIRTUAL INSTRUCTORS: Almost as Good as the Real Thing Virtual instructor-led training is a cost conscious and effective learning alternative when budget dollars are scarce.

BY JOELYNE MARSHALL

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irtual instructor-led training enables organizations to spend less per learner while delivering more training to more people.

While it’s not the ideal learning format for every situation, it’s easy to understand why virtual instructor-led training has gained popularity in the learning and development world.

It’s a far cry from when virtual instructor-led training first emerged two decades ago as the new, shiny tool on the learning and development playground — used often, but rarely effectively. Delivery was flat, as VILT sessions were essentially online presentations with an

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obligatory Q&A segment added for flavor. Participants sat in a passive experience and were force-fed content, only for it to be forgotten later. This poor use of the tool gave VILT a bad reputation.

VILT has since grown up and made great strides.

With better delivery tools, more experience, and more encouragement from stakeholders to push boundaries, its future potential is vast.

Create Savings and Value Virtual training allows for obvious cost savings.

Travel time and expenses can be dramatically reduced, as learners need not hop on a plane to attend live training sessions. Instead, they can stay at their desk — or in a nearby conference room — to attend training.

In a blended format, as is generally recommended, virtual sessions take less time out of the learner’s workday. Further, VILT sessions coupled with other training elements provide a variety of learning outlets for enhanced engagement. Instead of designing a onetime, full-day classroom instructor-led training session that requires time away from work, learning leaders can design more modular sessions that participants can complete virtually in segments over a few hours, or even minutes.

There also may be significant savings resulting from eliminating hard-copy versions of materials typically used in face-to-face training. Printing participant guides, handouts and other items can really add up. In a virtual session, materials can be provided digitally via company intranet, email or over the virtual platform itself. An outlying benefit here is simpler maintenance; document updates don’t require reprinting or postage.

VILT can deliver organizational benefits that go beyond budgeting, such as an ability to act as a connection point among geographically dispersed colleagues, participants across different departments, or between workers who may not have worked together previously. These connection points are more robust than other, flatter channels, such as email. VILT establishes a protocol for how people connect by adding valuable voice, video and presentation elements. When VILT sessions are effective, workers become more familiar and comfortable, which can help to build frameworks for them to work together virtually in situations outside of training, allowing for its adoption and use in more ways.

VILT has grown up.

With better delivery tools to push boundaries, its future potential is vast.

44 Chief Learning Officer • March 2017 • www.CLOmedia.com

Reader Reaction What Do You Do When Budget Is Tight?

Karishma Mirchandani: 1) Identify individual employee needs and focus on creating groups to satisfy these needs. For example, if a group needs to develop their time management skills versus another group needs to develop their team management skills break down learning by need. 2) Leverage technology. For example, our serious games have been shown to replace the two-day conference and has completion rates of more than 90 percent creating a great ROI. 3) Set goals in advance, short term vs. long term and focus the budget accordingly. 4) Use a provider that does not have too many specific requirements to implement their program. For example, our games only require an internet connection saving costs overall. 5) Try to use what you already have. If your company uses a specific LMS try to find providers that can easily integrate within this LMS.

Brian Zotti: Look inside the organization. See what expertise exists across all employees and find opportunities to leverage that expertise in ways that generate value for the organization’s learning and performance objectives: brown bag sessions, hot topic newsletters, etc.

Vadim Efremov: First off, you don’t need training professionals to teach — SMEs and managers can do it perfectly, sometimes much better than external experts. Second, you have 95 percent of knowledge and best practice within your organization or in your organization’s network — engage SMEs, customers and friends, help them to convert their wisdom into consumable content and orchestrate the process. Third, promote on-the-job training and coaching. Fourth, embrace new technology, but make sure you know what to do with it. Don’t buy complex systems you don’t understand. Fifth, don’t sacrifice business-critical knowledge from outside of your organization which can make you more competitive.

Sharon Gander: Focus on the results that you and the organization absolutely must see ... that everyone in leadership agrees must get done.

Budget for those and only those. Do those well.

Then when another department needs your help — next year after budget is final — they either ante or they negotiate for changes.

What do you think? Join the discussion at tinyurl.com/ hywla6x, follow us on Twitter @CLOmedia or join our Chief Learning Officer LinkedIn group.

Likewise, VILT can expand the organization’s reach into additional audience pockets. Yes, traditional learners are in play for VILT — from front-line workers up to the C-suite — but it also offers a direct opportunity to expand audience reach into the customer base. Consider Austin, Texas-based National Instruments, a global measurement and control solutions company. The organization provides customer training using a virtual platform to build proficiency around its hardware and software. These virtual sessions are offered globally for any customer. National Instruments uses a blended format, with about 90 percent being VILT and the remaining 10 percent as standard e-learning.

“If customers need to keep expenses down, or their schedules don’t allow for eight-hour training days, VILT is a great option for them to gain proficiency,” said James Eifler, senior technical course developer of global customer education, National Instruments. “Otherwise, the customer may not attend any training. Having these various delivery modes allows us to train more customers.”

• Connector points between e-learning modules, providing virtual face-to-face interactions among learners.

• Interactive virtual case study explorations completed in conjunction with asynchronous individual study time.

Using VILT as one ingredient in a fully comprehensive learning program provides a springboard for the level of application and knowledge transfer organizations rely on from effective learners. When done right, blended programs provide learners with a variety of ways to engage, collaborate and connect with learning content.

For example, an onboarding program for new people managers may include a variety of stops for the learner along their role-preparation journey. The first stop may be a video from the CEO, followed up by some engagement with other newbies via the organization’s social network. The learner’s next stop could be a VILT session with their assigned cohort to walk through what they should expect in their first 30, 60 and 90 days in action in their new role. VILT can be a bridge to the next stop, where learners complete a set of microlearning modules covering critical topics on an organization’s history and culture. The journey continues onward.

Try not to mix ILT and VILT in one training event.

Reuse Learning Another benefit of VILT relates to efficiency, resulting from repurposed training resources — documented content in deliverables, video segments from recorded ILT, recorded Q&A sessions in VILT, audio clips from recorded interview sessions and portions of job aids.

Since VILT sessions are often shorter and relatively easier to launch compared to traditional ILT, virtual training can be conducted more frequently. When the content is relevant, smaller learning chunks also can be repurposed or placed into other development programs, embedded into e-learning modules, or even used as standalone microlearning available via mobile device.

VILT easily builds onto an organization’s knowledge repository to create a comprehensive learning journey, and learning leaders should think about VILT sessions with a wider scope. It’s more than a single training event to be conducted and completed; they should consider how VILT can be used again. Individual VILT sessions — and all learning elements — are not unlike puzzle pieces to be matched and connected to other applicable learning elements and programs.

For instance, segments of VILT sessions can be used as a reinforcement or recall device.

This creates blended learning programs that can be used in a variety of ways, including, but not limited to: • Prework for cohorts, allowing participants to get to know each other before intense interaction is expected.

Think Carefully About Design Adding VILT to the learning and development toolbox is not as simple as taking an ILT session and delivering it using a virtual platform. Although ILT elements can be replicated within VILT, instructional designers must design learning with the learner in mind as they leverage virtual capabilities in the right capacities.

Instructional designers who have experience designing VILT understand the value of purposeful activities and continual learner engagement. Something as simple as a Q&A session can have an impact when incorporated effectively into VILT session design.

Q&A segments are a regular element in ILT sessions, but in VILT sessions learners experience engagement that reinforces valuable adult learning principles. For instance, participants like being able to ask questions at any time during a presentation, and they often appreciate tracking features, which allow them to ensure their questions are answered.

A word of caution when designing for VILT: try not to mix ILT and VILT into one training event.

If both delivery methods are used, create separate learning events for the learner’s benefit. “Don’t VILT continued on page 60 Chief Learning Officer • March 2017 • www.CLOmedia.com

45

PROMOTE

Learning Transfer,

ACCELERATE Strategy Execution Technology innovations like learning transfer platforms are changing the game when it comes to boosting engagement, performance and accelerating change.

46 Chief Learning Officer • March 2017 • www.CLOmedia.com

BY ROBERT O. BRINKERHOFF

L

earning and development leaders have been barraged for years with a distressing truth: Most training does not work. “For the most part, learning does not lead to better organizational performance, because people soon revert to their old ways of doing things” according to “Why Leadership Training Fails — and What to Do About It,” an article in the October 2016 issue of Harvard Business Review. Past research on training effectiveness, and dozens of impact evaluation studies over the past 30 years, indicate only about 20 percent of training results in improved job performance for managers and leaders.

But emerging technological innovations called learning transfer platforms, or LTPs, have demonstrated a capability — when designed according to high-impact learning principles – to significantly improve the impact of learning investments.

What is an LTP? An LTP is a cloud-based software platform that wraps custom-designed interactions and learners’ engagements around and into more traditional employee development workshops and seminars. This creates a learning/performance improvement journey for each participant.

The journey process is embedded in the web-supported platform, digitally managed and tracked from start to finish, and accessible from computers or mobile devices. A participant’s first contact with the program is an email or text with a URL link to the platform. Then

Chief Learning Officer • March 2017 • www.CLOmedia.com

47

the platform takes over and drives each individual learner’s engagement, assigning and monitoring tasks and activities over an extended period — from weeks to months to potentially more than a year’s time.

Manager engagement and structured social interaction with other learners support each participant’s learning/performance improvement journey. All task assignments, except scheduled group workshop interventions, can be accomplished on participants’ own schedules at their most convenient and impactful times.

When properly designed, a learning/performance improvement journey will reflect the key best-practice principles of high-impact learning using activities that will create the conditions summarized in Figure 1.

“Bringing together different parts of a blended program into a single platform and bringing in … the learner’s manager are key wins for us in using an LTP,” said Peter Sheppard, global head of learning excellence at Ericsson. “A tool that supports from start to finish in the learning process I’ve always thought essential for realizing the investment in key learning programs.”

LTP supported program, including e-learning and workshop instruction and cohort team projects.

But these extended-time and blended-learning programs have achieved only moderately improved results. While better than their event-only antecedents, few work as well as their organization sponsors need them to. While learning/performance improvement journeys can be designed and managed without an LTP, it is challenging and time-consuming on a small scale, and difficult if not impossible to upscale this approach to large numbers of participants across multiple organizational settings with differing language capabilities. But learning leaders should recognize that LTPs are not meant to replace LMSs. Each platform has differing capabilities and serves different though complementary purposes (see Figure 2).

“For many years, we ... were challenged with driving and measuring greater results from our training,” said Merete Hanssen, head of Volkswagen’s training academy in Sweden. “Our LMS systems were helping us be more efficient and improve our training administration, but did not help us leverage Why LTP Technology Works greater impact from our programs. Now that we It’s tried and true: Learning is a process, not an have an LTP capability, our training participants event. Learning leaders have been practicing time-ex- have and are using more follow-up tools. This is tended leadership development programs for years leading to more on-the-job application of the targetthat include many of the components found in an ed behaviors we were after, and we can measure and demonstrate the difference.”

FIGURE 1: CONDITIONS FOR IMPACTFUL LEARNING LTP approaches succeed for tactical and strategic reasons. These programs can achieve Performance and behavioral change at improved rates — often Focus and direction Learning engagement application for 80 percent and more of participants — Create clear and Create learning activities Manager and trainee matching other types of high-impact learning compelling links between and resources relevant to agree on action plan with initiatives; but they do so more consistently, learning, performance job conditions and application behaviors that with more participants, with greater ease of adand business goals performance goals. drive needed ministration than their labor-intensive, nonestablished. performance LTP counterparts. At the tactical level, they improvement. advance learning practice because: • The software makes high-impact learning Trainee motivated to Learning activities adhere Encourage and support design and execution easier for all. participate in, learn from to best-practice adult trainees’ efforts to apply • LTP programs are often cheaper and and apply the training. learning and performance learning. more cost-effective. They remove knowlimprovement principles. edge foundation building and cohort soManager and trainee There is sufficient Coaching, feedback and cial familiarization from workshop time, confer and agree to engagement in practice additional learning allowing these costly interventions to folearning and performance with feedback. support available. cus entirely on skill practice, role-play and improvement targets. feedback. In many cases, LTP users can Trainees expect to be Trainees have optimal Incentive and reduce workshop time and their concomheld accountable for control over when and performance context itant costs by 1/3 or more. on-the-job learning how they learn. aligns with learning • LTP program participants are more likely application. application goals. to engage in learning and on-the-job application activities. They often find the Provide effective job aids thoughtfully scaffolded learning tasks for practice. easier and more convenient to complete, Source: Robert O. Brinkerhoff, 2017 allowing time for absorption and feed48 Chief Learning Officer • March 2017 • www.CLOmedia.com

back. Secondly, they report feeling more accountability for Learning Learning Transfer learning and applicaManagement Platform (LTP) tion because of transSystem (LMS) parent tracking and Purpose: create, Purpose: administer social network enexecute and manage and manage multiple gagement and feedstructured learning training programs back because with the journeys. and content. platform, there is no Conceptual Conceptual place to hide. foundation: human foundation: • Participants are learning and information more motivated to performance management learn and apply that learning, since they Deliverables: Deliverables: access have a chance to forelearning and and efficiently cast and to believe in a performance organize training journey that is easy to improvement content, schedules start, and has clear outcomes and records. goals that address their Focus: learners Focus: organization social, individual adSource: Robert O. Brinkerhoff, 2017 vancement and job performance expectations.

• Finally, the entire process is infinitely scalable, allowing successful application for a small cohort or thousands of participants spread across the globe.

For instance, an LTP could use the same program translated into 25 or more languages.

FIGURE 2: COMPARING LTP AND LMS

Measurement and Evaluation is Vital Strategically, LTP approaches help address the perennial challenges of driving change and accelerating execution of strategic initiatives. Many of the current management and culture systems learners return to post-training largely overwhelm sustained behavioral change; learning seeds need fertile organizational soil in which to grow.

Learning and systems change efforts can and should be conducted in parallel. For important strategic change, waiting to make the systems changes needed before training can threaten competitive advantage and organization survival. With major strategic change, training is often a necessary catalyst, providing the competencies needed for execution; waiting for the system to be fully changed likely will take longer than the strategy’s shelf life.

LTP technology produces needed competencies faster, for more participants, more easily than without LTPs, and with a greater ROI. Further, LTP evaluation and measurement capabilities enable organizations to till and enrich the systems soil to accelerate change.

How? As the platform guides each individual participant’s journey, it is also aggregating, documenting and analyzing progress data. It provides real-time data on 50 Chief Learning Officer • March 2017 • www.CLOmedia.com

who is trying what behaviors, what is working and what is not, what obstacles are being confronted, and what tactics are being used to circumvent them.

This data can inform ongoing adjustments to the systems, practices and policies that present obstacles, and to frequent feedback loops in tandem with identification of emerging efficacious best practice behaviors the training has produced. Because conditions vary from unit to unit, this data can be sliced and diced in myriad ways to track and report progress in any subgroups one wishes to investigate. Managers can get routine reports on their direct reports’ activities; the managers of these managers can see who is providing coaching and support and who is not; participants get reports to identify and compare their performance against others; program managers can quickly spot early adopters to identify and disseminate best practices to other participant cohorts.

In short, the LTP makes the perennial challenge of evaluating training, especially at pesky Kirkpatrick levels 3 and 4, simpler while augmenting the power and actionability of evaluation findings. This live data and feedback — in frequent and recurring cycles — is precisely what makes accelerated change possible; it enables learning and systems changes to feed one another and proceed hand in hand.

Learning transfer platforms can be of immense help in accelerating learning application and thereby helping to drive strategy execution and organizational change. However, they are not a magic bullet. To harvest their benefits, learning leaders have to design the right tasks and assignments to create effective learning and performance journeys.

“Mindsets need to change; we are not here to provide learning events,” said Steve Mahaley, digital learning strategist, Duke Corporate Education. “We are here to drive successful, behavioral impact in the customer’s business to improve business performance.

This has two critical implications: “First, different sometimes difficult conversations with stakeholders are needed to identify the performance and business outcomes business leader’s need us to address. And second, our designs have to take these answers and build them into a learning journey that will drive results all the way to those needed performance outcomes.”

Finally, these learning-to-performance designs have to be leveraged with concomitant evaluation that will inspire and inform ongoing changes to detoxify the systems that would otherwise extinguish a training program’s emerging performance achievements. CLO Robert O. Brinkerhoff is professor emeritus at Western Michigan University. To comment, email editor@ CLOmedia.com.

CASE STUDY

Taking Leadership in a New Direction at Western Union

BY SARAH FISTER GALE

A

merican money transfer company Western Union has thrived for more than 160 years by constantly looking for ways to reinvent itself. It began as a telegraph service in the 1850s and grew into a financial service company with more than 11,000 employees working in 58 countries, generating $5 billion in annual revenue.

But the firm has occasionally struggled to adapt to an ever-changing marketplace, most recently in adapting to the shifting demands of an increasingly digital consumer base. In 2010 the company brought in Hikmet Ersek as the new CEO; he implemented a 2020 plan to shift the brand from a transactional business to a more customer-centric approach, adding new electronic and mobile channels, and empowering employees to go the extra mile for customers. To support this transformation, the leadership team initiated a companywide culture change to foster a growth mindset and encourage more active talent development between leaders and their teams.

Getting managers to change the way they develop and coach their people wasn’t easy, said Josh Craver, vice president of talent management. “We really struggled to get leaders engaged.”

The Solution The learning organization began by assessing the company’s legacy performance management program, which employed a traditional model of annual reviews and performance rankings — and a whole lot of paperwork, Craver said. The assessment showed the program cost an estimated $14 million per year in time and resources, and it was incredibly unpopular. It had an overall minus 38 percent net promoter score, and a minus 41 NPS among managers, suggesting a majority of employees were dissatisfied with the program. “It was neither meaningful nor effective enough to drive our organization’s 2020 strategy,” Craver said.

The high cost and low satisfaction rates for the existing program made change an easy sell. Craver said the learning team simply showed executives they were spending all of this time and money on a program that 95 percent of our people said was broken, then showed them how to fix it. “They said ‘Great! Go ahead.’ ” 54 Chief Learning Officer • March 2017 • www.CLOmedia.com

SNAPSHOT Western Union’s GPS program helped leaders build mentoring teams to drive a measurably engaged and interactive performance management culture.

The new program, Guide.Performance.Succeed, or GPS, requires leaders to be more hands-on in team development by setting clear expectations, providing regular real-time feedback, and holding their people — and themselves — accountable for meeting talent development goals. Craver’s team estimated the GPS system would require about half the time and resources of the old performance management model, leading to $7 million in projected savings.

It would be particularly effective among millennial employees who generally prefer ongoing feedback and clarity about opportunities for growth and professional development, said Travis Cossitt, senior manager of talent management. “Millennials will constitute 75 percent of our organization by 2020, so this was an important consideration.”

The trick was getting managers to embrace the new way of doing things and change their behavior. To ease them into the new way of managing performance, the learning and development team created Leadership in Action, a training and support program designed to build management capability and encourage GPS adoption across the organization. The program was built around leadership circles, in which diverse sets of leaders come together under a senior leader to learn specific elements of the GPS program, practice new skills and mentor each other.

Leadership in Action was launched in June 2015 for the company’s top 100 leaders. Two senior leaders were made “accountability partners” in charge of one of 10 circles and assigned eight to 10 next-generation leaders from across regions and divisions to work together to man the others. Having executives in charge of the circles was a key component for success, Craver said. “Knowing the CFO or CIO was making time to

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CASE STUDY

meet with them on a monthly basis made people take it more seriously than if it was led by HR.”

How It Works Everyone was asked to commit to one hour per month to participate in group discussions about talent management. Because leaders came from all over the global company, meetings were held via videoconference for convenience. Each meeting focused on a specific GPS topic, like goal-setting, coaching or having difficult conversations.

To minimize the burden on team leaders, the learning group created monthly “meetings in a box” with pre-meeting reading materials or surveys, invitation templates, presentations, practice activities and discus-

appropriate pay for performance for that employee using GPS tools and guidelines, how to be objective, and how to assess behavior and outcomes.

When questions arise that no one can answer, Vega and his partner do the research and get back to the team. “It is important that they know they can rely on us,” he explained.

A Stark Difference in Engagement Along with the monthly meetings, participants can access on-demand e-learning content about GPS and how to adopt the performance management system.

“We’ve had 140,000 visits from 10,000 employees since we launched the program last year,” said Cossitt.

To ensure teams stay engaged, the learning group

“It isn’t just a program being driven by HR. Management has taken ownership of the culture change.”

—Travis Cossitt, senior manager of talent management, Western Union sion guides to facilitate the conversation. “We had to be mindful of how busy these leaders were, and to use their time as efficiently as possible,” Cossitt said.

Having the materials ahead of time and being prepared ensures meetings are engaging and worth people’s time. “GPS is all about ongoing dialogue,” said Libby Chambers, executive vice president and chief strategy and product marketing officer, who is currently leading her own circle. “It creates more opportunities to have these conversations and for managers to get the guidance they need to be successful.”

On her team, her co-leader manages presentations, and she acts as a coach, offering guidance and individual support — inside and outside of meetings. “This isn’t something you have to show up to if you don’t find value in it,” she said. “But they all continue to show up.”

Luis Filipe Rodriguez Vega, head of commercial sales U.S. in Denver, takes a similar approach. Vega was one of the original team leaders in 2015, and led a group in the 2016 program with 1,800 managers from across the company. He and his co-partner prepare for each meeting by reviewing talking points and sharing the prework with the team — though they encourage participants to drive discussions. “In the beginning there was some skepticism, but by the end of the fifth meeting the team was really engaged; we now have a lot of great discussions,” he said.

For example, in one meeting, the prework required participants to select a direct report and describe how they are delivering against their goals for the year.

Then in the meeting they discussed how to assign an 56 Chief Learning Officer • March 2017 • www.CLOmedia.com

added gamification tools, including points for attendance and hosting meetings in the desired time frame, completing e-learning courses, and participating in the Leadership in Action online discussion platform. “Gamification creates incentives for people who like competition,” said Vega — whose team was ranked no. 11 out of 200 at the time of this interview. “People pay more attention when they know they are being measured.”

Early metrics suggest the program is achieving its goals. The 2016 employee engagement survey showed 97 percent of employees have set goals for the year; 96 percent have completed an “empowerment discussion document” in the company’s Workday platform, and the NPS rating for the new performance management system is plus 40 — a roughly 80-point jump in under two years.

“From the beginning we saw stark differences in engagement among employees participating in GPS and those who weren’t,” Cossitt said. “It isn’t just a program being driven by HR. Management has taken ownership of the culture change.”

Going forward, the learning team plans to hang-on to the Leadership Circle model even after all managers have been trained in using GPS, to disseminate new training and culture change messages. “It’s a great plug and play model where managers rely on each other to share new ideas,” Craver explained. “It’s a simple idea, but it can be extremely powerful.” CLO Sarah Fister Gale is a freelance writer based in Chicago.

To comment, email editor@CLOmedia.com.

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BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE

7 Ways to Boost Employee Engagement in the Digital Era

BY JULIE ABEL-HUNT

Technology offers myriad convenient and userfriendly ways to build a learning culture that promotes development, retention and engagement.

igital transformation is an urgent imperative. Today’s talent are either shifting to, or have already become, digital natives. These employees expect a collaborative, flexible, high energy, purposeful and inclusive workplace. Companies that get digital leadership right perform better in the marketplace and have happier, more engaged employees.

But, leadership is complex during a digital boom.

Combined with rising voluntary attrition rates it’s essential that today’s leaders understand how to successfully support talent development to retain and engage the leaders of tomorrow.

In 2016, SAP SuccessFactors and Oxford Economics surveyed 4,100 global executives and employees for a study titled, “Leaders 2020: How Strong Leadership Pays Off in the Digital Economy.” Based on that study, here are seven ways to create tangible business impact in a digital environment.

Build trust. Trust is foundational to become an inspiring and capable leader. High trust levels

1

FIGURE 1: DIVERSITY LEVELS AS A MEASURE OF TRUST

My company has effective diversity programs in place.

34% 39 % Leadership recognizes the importance of diversity and has taken steps to develop it. % 49 55 % ■ Global executives

■ Global employees

confirm and legitimize hard work to establish a strong, functional relationship with team members. These behaviors build trust: 58 Chief Learning Officer • March 2017 • www.CLOmedia.com

• Invigorate: Create a sense of purpose for team members. Help them connect the dots and feel their work is valuable, that the team depends on their contributions.

FIGURE 2: LEADERSHIP TRAINING NEEDED

46

of executives say their organization % devotes resources to training the next generation of leaders.

• Immerse: Promote accountability. Give back to the team and the company by facilitating development activities or offering informal/on-the-job instruction. Contribute by sharing personal points of view to create an environment where everyone is a teacher and a learner. Generosity will help to drive trust and underscore a commitment to building an effective learning culture.

• Include: Welcome participation; seek out others’ opinions and ideas, and spread influence to team members, encouraging their contributions and impact.

The “Leaders 2020” report states that companies that cultivate a diverse workforce and take a broad range of employee perspectives into account are better poised to succeed in a global economy. The study found 56 percent of digital winners — companies defined as high-performers — have more mature strategies and programs to build diversity, compared to just 48 percent of other organizations. However, the study also

Figures’ Source: “Leaders 2020,” SAP SuccessFactors, Oxford Economics

D

found that diversity levels are not where they should be for most companies.

Encourage peer learning and coaching. Besides formal, instructor-led or virtual learning, mentoring and coaching can make a world of difference on performance. But according to Leaders 2020, only 46 percent of executives say their company devotes resources to develop the next generation of leaders — a bad sign for future leadership.

Coaching allows employees to assess their readiness for bigger and broader responsibilities and career plans.

Feedback from a coach will help them to understand their strengths and development areas. Setting goals keeps them focused.

Mentoring is about partnering with a colleague who is a little further along in their career — to enhance knowledge, skills and self-awareness in a certain area. The mentor supports the client via long-term support, guidance and by sharing relevant stories and examples from his or her own experience to build career success.

Bersin by Deloitte reports that mentoring also helps talent and boost employee engagement: it provides an expanded diversity and inclusion/career management effort; and it offers access to numerous networking opportunities such as enterprisewide employee community groups and dedicated mentoring/sponsorship for those with diverse backgrounds.

Communicate clearly. There is a balance between how often and by what means leaders communicate with their teams. While conventional team meetings can’t be avoided for important and time-sensitive topics, they can still be creative and productive: • Share the podium so it’s not a one-way conversation.

• Have the team put away their mobile devices. Mobile technology has a place and a time, but in meetings, it’s generally unnecessary and distracting.

• Assign a different person to run the meeting each week so they are accountable for capturing key points, keeping things on track and ensuring a productive gathering.

• Use social platforms for meetings to: establish communities that are easy to use, design and implement; share team goals, project status, research and upcoming events; and allow for team collaboration and a strong sense of connectedness.

Manage direct reports’ performance. All employees need meaningful feedback to support their growth. Performance, goals, development plans and learning can be connected and managed in one digital framework. Set team goals that include a stretch assignment, shadowing, rotation or a new learning opportunity, and set aside

2

3

4

funding for learning when a free web-based training module doesn’t quite fit the bill.

Develop others. During busy times, it’s easy for employees to deprioritize learning and development to focus on more demanding tasks and deadlines. Don’t. Promoting a culture of self-development — in which everyone takes ownership of their careers and individual development plans — must always be a priority.

Learning leaders must ensure employees focus on their careers, and enable them to perform their best.

Many readily available virtual, on-demand and MOOC offerings do not require a great deal of research time, budget or preparation to participate in.

5

FIGURE 3: JOB SATISFACTION

I am satisfied or very satisfied % % with my job.

87

63

■ Other employees ■ Employees from digital winners

I would be unlikely to leave my job for another.

54%

75 %

These digital experiences help build knowledge and expertise. Also, accessing learning via mobile apps provides just-in-time tools and reinforcement.

The happiest employees are more likely to routinely go above and beyond the minimum requirements for a job, and are less likely to leave their company if given the opportunity, according to Leaders 2020.

The report also states that 75 percent of digital leaders — executives at organizations deemed digital winners — actively encourage all employees to participate in learning and development programs, compared to 51 percent of other executives. Eighty-one percent of digital leaders report that top talent can advance quickly, compared to 61 percent of other executives.

Foster innovation and agility. Technology can’t solve everything. Design thinking is a user-centric approach that addresses business challenges in innovative ways. Ideating is at the core of this process. Anything that needs improving — values, processes, products and standards — should be considered for this methodology.

6

ENGAGEMENT continued on page 61 Chief Learning Officer • March 2017 • www.CLOmedia.com

59

GAMES continued from page 41

VILT continued from page 45

an embedded situational judgment assessment to provide each participant with an individual discovery into their specific inner strengths and development opportunities based on their game decisions.

By leveraging camouflaged real-world case studies, participants immerse themselves in job relevant behavioral situations. These moments matter because they improve the assessment face validity and authenticity, as participants recognize the situation is as realistic as their business environment.

Of course, learning without application is worthless. The key to behavior change is learning retention and application back on the job. In addition to the assessment, programs need time for intentional reflection so participants can document what actions they are going to take when back in their role.

These actions could be developmental or related to specific behavioral change. Creating a leadership action plan can facilitate learning retention and application as well as improve behavior change. Participants need an accountability conversation with their mentor, manager or coach to increase current performance as well as develop capabilities for future roles. Further, there must be follow-up support and reinforcement for successful learning transfer and — this is key — behavioral change that impacts business performance. The plan is where the real individual development value is unlocked and prepped to produce a positive ROI. Albert Einstein said, “Learning is experience.

Everything else is just information.” Experiential learning incorporating games using realistic work situations for leadership development produces immediate results.

The interactive game-learning medium is a scalable method to enable new ideas, while providing “sandboxes” where erroneous behaviors do not have a costly downside. Leaders develop their environment analysis, decision-making skills and consequence reflection over multiple quarters of gameplay where they must collaborate and compete.

Still not convinced on the gamification of leadership development? According to the 2016 ATD and Institute for Corporate Productivity study, “Experiential Learning for Leaders: Action Learning, On-the-Job Learning, Serious Games, and Simulations,” high performing organizations use experiential learning nearly three times more than low performing. So, it can be a good thing when leaders play games. CLO

cross streams,” said Chad Venable, IT training director for AmerisourceBergen. “Don’t get forced into a situation where you simultaneously conduct ILT with people virtually. ... Do not try to have a true hands-on, instructor-led, learning-type session with people both locally and distant in the same event.” This will create a challenging experience for learners who will be distracted by what isn’t happening for them, whether they are virtual or sitting in the live session.

When designing VILT, consider the following key points: • Design content in smaller chunks. »» Create nuggets of content lasting roughly 20 minutes or so. »» Revisit content frequently to aid learning transfer.

• Engage and interact with learners early and often; incorporate an interaction with learners every three to four minutes, essentially almost every slide.

• Create detailed VILT materials. »» Prepare a facilitator guide that identifies key points or suggestions on what to say, what to do, what questions to ask, and what responses to listen for. »» Include detailed producer notes providing parameters for logistical elements such as when to show quizzes/polls, how breakouts will be organized and operated, implementing video and other technology details.

• Test out and master the virtual platform’s functionality. »» Use the features applicable for the training session and its content. »» Train learners how to use features.

• Think beyond traditional execution of virtual training. »» Expand the delivery boundaries beyond the virtual platform. »» Pass control to learners to deepen their commitment and engagement in the session. Allow learners to teach the group.

VILT has made significant strides in the learning and development world. Organizations are using it in creative ways to enhance their learning programs, and taking advantage of layers of related benefits, including cost savings, increased engagement and learning retention. Learning organizations that master and effectively leverage VILT inevitably deliver added business value to the enterprise. CLO

John Gillis Jr. is president of LeadershipX LLC. To comment, email editor@CLOmedia.com.

60 Chief Learning Officer • March 2017 • www.CLOmedia.com

Joelyne Marshall is a learning solutions manager at Caveo Learning. To comment please email editor@ CLOmedia.com.

ENGAGEMENT continued from page 59

7

Partner for success. A digital leader has unlimited options available to support a team, including: • Virtual instruction, gamification and MOOCs. • Social platforms to strengthen community and network connections.

• Apps to use as on-the-job resources.

• Collaboration platforms for meetings and workshops.

Other established performance support choices include: • Peer-to-peer learning, such as coaching, mentoring and shadowing.

• Fostering innovation through design thinking, organizing brainstorm sessions, and promoting diversity of perspectives and backgrounds within groups.

• Bolstering trust by communicating transparently, being reliable and taking

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personal responsibility.

• Teams look to a leader as their most important guide and advocate. They need help understanding company strategy so they can make the right decisions for the business and their development, and they need coaching and mentoring to help them align their strengths to their work, and achieve their desired career goals.

Ultimately, lead and teach an organization’s future leaders. Leverage the digital workplace to help them collaborate, connect and communicate with a focus on the future to position an organization for extraordinary results. CLO

Clifford Capone Vice President, Group Publisher 312-967-3538 ccapone@CLOmedia.com Derek Graham Regional Sales Manager 312-967-3591 dgraham@CLOmedia.com

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Chief Learning Officer • March 2017 • www.CLOmedia.com

61

IN CONCLUSION

To Persuade More Effectively, Pre-suade First There’s more to the persuasion process than just the message alone • BY ROBERT B. CIALDINI

R

Robert B. Cialdini is a behavioral scientist and author of the book “Pre-Suasion: A Revolutionary Way to Influence and Persuade.”

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esearchers like me have long studied how best to persuade. We’ve learned a lot over the years about which elements to build into a message and which psychological strings to strum with that message to elevate its success. But, recently, we’ve begun to realize that by focusing so intently on the message, we’ve missed a crucial component of the process.

Communicators don’t achieve their greatest success by changing a person’s mind with a cleverly crafted appeal but, rather, by changing the person’s state of mind in the moment before the appeal, so the recipient becomes more sympathetic to a cleverly crafted message. They do so through pre-suasion: the practice of arranging for an audience to favor a message before experiencing it.

Let’s explore a few ways CLOs could employ pre-suasion to advance their professional goals. And let’s begin by examining how you could obtain your dream job, one that would put you in the best position to achieve your goals.

would establish your reputation within the organization. You realize that for the idea to succeed, you’ll need the buy-in of a strategically placed colleague, Jim, with whom you’ll need to work closely to ensure learning has a pulse on the business. So, you ask for his feedback on the idea.

It will be crucial to request Jim’s advice concerning your planned project, not his opinion about it. Individuals asked to provide advice, versus opinion, on a plan are put in a cooperative state of mind, which makes them more likely to want the plan to succeed.

There’s an old saying, “When we ask for advice, we are usually looking for an accomplice.” On the basis of scientific evidence, if we get that advice, we usually get that accomplice.

But, there’s one more hurdle to clear: how to get your project approved and funded at the budget level necessary for success. Let’s say you’ve done your homework, examining every element from every angle, and you’ve arrived at a $75,078 figure. Like most of us, you’ll typically round it off to $75,000 before submitting the proposal. That’s a mistake. Specific rather than rounded numbers in your proposal are more likely to be accepted — even if they are for somewhat larger amounts — because that specificity makes it clear they come from precise thinking rather than some pie-in-the-sky estimate. Not only should you use an exact number as your proposal’s budget figure, you should put it at the top of the first page of the proposal, which will establish you, pre-suasively, as a hard thinker and honest communicator about the financial issues involved.

When interviewing for a new job in front of an There’s an additional benefit to knowing about evaluator or team of evaluators, and after saying that pre-suasion: We can use it to influence ourselves in deyou want to answer all questions as fully as possible, sired ways. Suppose you want to think creatively, persay one more thing: “But, before we start, I wonder if haps about a problem that has resisted several tradiyou could answer a question for me. I’m curious, what tional efforts in your now-funded project. There’s a was it about my background that attracted you to my simple pre-suasive step you can take to increase the candidacy?” As a consequence, your evaluators will chance you’ll find a novel solution: Before you begin, hear themselves saying positive things about you and go to a place with high ceilings. Studies show that your qualifications, putting themselves in a state of rooms with high ceilings lend themselves to more cremind favorable to your candidacy before you make ative problem solving. Open, expansive spaces stimuyour case for it. I have an acquaintance who swears he late open, expansive thinking. has gotten three better jobs in a row by employing this Pre-suasion offers an important lesson to anyone pre-suasive technique. wishing to persuade more effectively. For maximum Now that you’ve secured the new position, suppose impact, it’s not only what you do; it’s also what you do you have an idea for an initiative that, if successful, just before you do what you do. CLO

Communicators don’t achieve success by changing a person’s mind with a clever appeal but by changing the person’s state of mind before the appeal.

62 Chief Learning Officer • March 2017 • www.CLOmedia.com