Author: Sarah Fister Gale

Name: WellPoint Health Networks Inc. Location: Thousand Oaks, California Business: Health-care company Employees: 17,000

When Chuck Moore was hired several years ago to upgrade WellPoint’s HRmanagement system, administration of even basic employee documents at thecompany was a significant problem. The HR staff received up to 2,000 faxes amonth that required some amount of data entry, but because everyone in thedepartment hated dealing with the paperwork, entering the data was “the lowestpriority, to be done at the end of the day,” Moore says. Consequently,critical documents piled up in HR in-baskets, delaying filing and frustratingemployees, who logged up to 14,000 calls per month to the company’s humanresources call center. “At that time, a six-week turnaround to complete a payincrease was considered good, and errors in all of the data were common,”Moore says.

    The company initially implemented PeopleSoft 7.5 to centralize the HRdatabases, then upgraded to 8.0 in 2001 to take advantage of the new version’sself-service features. PeopleSoft 8.0 allows employees to see benefits options,update personal information, and view their pay history and 401(k) data onlineat any time. Managers can administer employee change information, such as payincreases and title changes, and complete employee reviews without sending hardcopies to the HR department to be entered into the system.

    WellPoint went live with the new version in August, with considerablesuccess. Employees started using it almost immediately with little training orencouragement, Moore says. As of November 2002, the self-service system hadtracked 17,000 separate users for the year, and managers had initiated anaverage of 300 promotions and 40 salary changes per month online.

    “Now when data is entered in the self-service system, it’s done byemployees and the information is updated immediately.” That means, forexample, that a payroll increase shows up on the employee’s next paycheck–notsix weeks later.

    As a result, costs have been reduced dramatically and quality has improvedimmensely, Moore says. Within months of going live, paper flow to the HRdepartment almost disappeared. In 2001 they received 63,000 separate pieces ofpaper; by November 2002 they had received fewer than 1,100 documents for theyear, most of them via e-mail.

    But the most obvious example of the success of the self-service system wasthe ease with which the company completed its open enrollment in 2002. In thepast, WellPoint outsourced open enrollment to a vendor, which required months ofplanning and resulted in many errors and mishaps. Moore’s team used to beginplanning for open enrollment eight months before the event, working with thevendor to design documents and establish the process. “It was a huge task thatcost a lot of money and took an enormous amount of time,” he says.

    However, since the installation of self-service, “open enrollment hasbecome a non-event,” Moore says. In 2002, forms and benefits information wereavailable online, and employees were e-mailed reminders to complete theirenrollment by the end of October. “On the last day of enrollment, more than2,000 people made changes and there were no breakdowns,” he says. And heestimates that the reduction in man-hours, paper costs, and errors saved thecompany $400,000.

    Except for monitoring the number of enrollment submissions and fieldingcalls, the HR team wasn’t involved at all, Moore says. “It trivialized theenrollment process, which means we can apply our resources to other projectssuch as improving recruiting efforts and reducing turnover.”

    It has also changed the makeup of WellPoint’s HR team. “We don’t relyon administrative assistants anymore,” Moore says. “Our focus now is onemployee relationship management.”

Workforce, January 2003, p. 61 — Subscribe Now!

Name: GREAT PLACE TO WORK INSTITUTE Location: SAN FRANCISCO Business: RESEARCH AND MANANGEMENT CONSULTANCY Employees: 11

Employees naturally expect to be treated well by the company that produces theGreat Places to Work lists for 23 countries. So when Amy Lyman, president of theinstitute, wanted to put together a package for the company’s first expatriateassignment, she struggled with how to make it good–but not too good.

    In 2001, the institute already had several affiliates established in foreigncountries, but Lyman needed someone with experience to set up the 100 BestCompanies in Europe list. Fortunately, the employee who had established theoriginal Best Companies structure for the U.S. lists wanted to move abroad, andher partner had dual citizenship in the U.S. and the United Kingdom. “Theyboth saw relocating as an exciting opportunity for them, not as being uprooted.It made tremendous sense for both of them,” Lyman says.

    But Lyman didn’t have the first idea what needed to be done. She admitsthat she was very naive about the complexities of arranging an expatriateassignment. “My biggest problem was creating a compensation package that wouldwork for anyone we moved overseas, not just something special” for therelocating employee.

    Lyman also quickly discovered that the institute’s tax accountant did nothave enough expertise in foreign taxation laws to manage the assignment. “As asmall company doing this for the first time, we needed someone who could explaineverything, from how to compensate for housing and living costs to how to count401(k) contributions and pay medical benefits in the U.K.”

    Finding a service provider that talked to her in plain English about the taximplications was critical to the success of the assignment. “It’s amazinghow complex the tax laws are,” she says. “If we had done this on our own, itwould have been a financial disaster.”

    Lyman used a firm that specializes in expatriate tax law, which helped heravoid some costly mistakes. For example, she initially wanted to go with an “easyfix,” raising the expatriate’s salary to accommodate all of her financialneeds in the U.K., but quickly learned it was not the right approach. “Wefound out that it was better to set the salary at what it would be in the U.S.and add living adjustments.” That way, the compensation expectations for theemployee’s return were managed, and Lyman can justify the package if otheremployees want to know why they aren’t receiving the same amount.

    Because they got the expertise early on, the assignment was a success, somuch so that the expatriate asked to extend her stay an additional two years,Lyman says. “It changes the tax situation, but we trust that our tax personwill make it work.”

Workforce, June 2003, p. 104 — Subscribe Now!

Name: Church & Dwight Co., Inc. Location: Princeton, New Jersey Business: Manufacturer of household, personal-care, and specialty products Employees: 4,1000 worldwide

Church & Dwight is the largest producer of baking soda products in theworld, but to achieve its goal of being a leader in all packaged goods, thecompany had to add major product lines. When Carter-Wallace, a manufacturer ofpersonal-care and pharmaceutical products, came on the market, at first itdidn’t seem to fit their needs, says Steve Cugine, vice president of humanresources. “There was significant synergy between their personal-care productsand ours,” but Church & Dwight had no market for the rest of their lines.

    Eventually, after months of negotiating, Carter-Wallace agreed to split thebusiness, freeing Church & Dwight to buy the entire consumer-productsbusiness, which includes Trojan condoms, Arrid antiperspirants, Nairdepilatories, and First Response pregnancy-test kits, in a partnership with theprivate equity group Kelso & Company, for $739 million. It was a hugepurchase for the company, nearly doubling its staff size, and it immediatelybalanced the size of the company’s personal-care division with that of itshousehold goods division. The additional product lines and manufacturingcapabilities also enabled the firm to ramp up production in many of itsfacilities, get lower prices on shipping, and have greater leverage in themarketplace.

    It was a great strategic move, but culturally the companies were verydifferent, Cugine says. Even though Carter-Wallace was a public company, theoriginal family had a significant presence in the workplace. Their approach tocompensation was also different: Carter-Wallace paid high base and bonuses withfew long-term incentives and had a rich benefits package, whereas Church &Dwight’s compensation packages were average for the industry but above marketfor bonuses and incentives, and its benefits were less attractive.

    The other concern was that, after a year of being on the market,Carter-Wallace employees were frustrated and cynical about the future. “Thedeal had dragged on for so long, they were demoralized,” Cugine says. “Wewalked into a real challenge. It was a massive change for them and us.”

    Some of those changes would be quite painful, especially for theCarter-Wallace plant in Cranbury, New Jersey, which was one town over fromChurch & Dwight’s Princeton headquarters. Because it was so close,executives opted to shut down the plant, leaving most of those hourly workersunemployed. On the bright side, however, those who did keep their jobs didn’thave to relocate, Cugine says, which made the transition easier.

    To minimize resentment and shed light on the process, Cugine, who wasinvolved from the beginning in negotiations for the acquisition, went into theCranbury plant immediately after the deal was complete to manage theintegration. Within days he held group meetings to explain the situation toemployees, lay out the transition strategy, and share details about the newcompensation plans, which they agreed would be implemented over three years toease the impact of the change.

    He and his team also began interviewing employees one-on-one at all of thenewly acquired plants, to determine who would stay and who would go. In a matterof weeks, Cugine’s team hired 300 of the 590 salaried people and 600 of 900hourly people from Carter-Wallace. “As hard as this process was, we had tosettle the issues as soon as possible,” he says. “Not knowing whose job issecure is a real stumbling block to getting people on board.” For those whoweren’t offered jobs, Cugine’s team negotiated severance packages andjob-placement assistance.

    His team also made a point of working with division leaders and employees atthe Cranbury plant to evaluate their processes and procedures to see what theycould incorporate into Church & Dwight’s environment. “We have an intenselyentrepreneurial, hands-on culture,” Cugine says. He worked hard to communicatethose values to the new employees, encouraging them to share their ideas andparticipate in the growth of the company. “We showed them that they were animportant part of this deal and that in the end we were all focused on thesuccess of the company.”

    Cugine calls the merger “an absolute success” and believes the company hasachieved the business goals it set when the deal was made. But there are thingshe would have done differently. He wishes the companies could have had a moreopen dialogue earlier on with employees to assuage their fears.

    “It’s a matter of balance. Carter-Wallace was understandably reluctant togive us access to employees in case the deal fell through, but if I had it to doagain, I would have pushed harder to let them know what was going on.”

Workforce, February 2003, p. 62-63 — Subscribe Now!

Large Company

Name: Unisys Corp. Location: Blue Bell, Pennsylvania Business: Information technology services and solutions company Employees: 37,000

Company culture is founded on an infrastructure of leadership, says RayJackson, associate dean of the leadership school at Unisys University. The firmencourages employees from all ranks to take advantage of the comprehensivetraining program.

“Leaders set the tone of an organization. If you want to influence thebusiness, you have to focus on leadership development,” he says. “Our goalis not to develop 25 key leaders, it’s to develop 2,500 leaders throughout theorganization.”

It’s a radical approach in a world where leadership development is usuallysaved for a few high-performing individuals. “Corporate America beats theleadership skills out of most managers,” Jackson says. “The work routine isso task oriented, they lose sight of the primary strategic goals of the company.”In the three and a half years since the leadership school was launched atUnisys, 2,200 employees have gone through the program, which is open to anyoneinterested in expanding his or her leadership skills.

Unisys CEO Larry Weinbach started the program and opened it up to all levelsof employees to foster a culture in which leadership skills are celebrated andencouraged, Jackson says. Weinbach is the leadership school’s acting dean, afrequent class speaker, and a vocal champion of the program. He believes thatdeveloping leaders across the company will create an environment that can changeand adapt to the economy, making Unisys a better company.

The leadership curriculum at Unisys features six courses within two tracksfocusing on culture and leadership skills. The classroom-based courses are twoto five days long and cover core topics such as developing management and teamleadership skills, understanding culture-change issues, and understanding theimpact that leaders have on performance. “We built a simple curriculum thatdrives consistency and shapes our culture of leadership,” Jackson says.

The skills courses use traditional leadership-training formats, such aspracticing communication skills with peers and working with assessment tools,whereas the culture courses are more informal, employing a conversational tone.In fact, the culture courses are referred to as “conversations,” in whichcourse leaders introduce specific topics, such as how to influence the Unisysculture through leadership or the roles that leaders play as learners andteachers. Participants discuss how those issues relate to their own jobperformance and brainstorm solutions to specific workplace problems.

Even though some courses last five days, the school has no trouble fillingseats. Leadership training is seen as a priority at Unisys, even in lean times,because it’s part of the culture, Jackson says. The entire executive team hasgone through both training tracks, and they regularly return to day sessions,both as speakers and as peers, to share a problem or to monitor the leadershipconcerns of other employees. “That’s a powerful and unique show of executivesupport,” Jackson says.

The programs are not mandatory, nor are they limited to management. Almostanyone can sign up with the support of his or her superiors, and many of thosejunior employees who attend come at the urging of their bosses. At a recentjunior session of the five-day cultural-leadership course, for example, 95percent of attendees had been referred to the course after their managerscompleted it.

Jackson feels that recommendations are a large part of the school’ssuccess. “It’s a real shot in the arm when a manager tells an employee totake the class, and it says a lot about the value of the program.”

And when managers know that subordinates have taken the training, they feelmore compelled to incorporate what they learned into their management style. Forexample, in a recent cultural-leadership course, a participant said that hermanager had taken the training but nothing changed. Then, two weeks later,Jackson received an e-mail from her. She said she was working late one night andher boss stopped in to chat about changing their approach to a project. The mostcompelling part of the e-mail, says Jackson, was the last sentence. She saidthat in the six years she’d worked at Unisys, he’d never stopped by heroffice to chat. “That tells me he was enlightened by the program,” Jacksonsays. And because he knew that others on his team had gone through the training,he realized that it was time to change his behavior and to take action. “Wheneveryone is exposed to an idea, they hold each other accountable.”

To further support and encourage attendees after class and to maximize theimpact of the training, Jackson helps attendees set up ongoing networkingopportunities. It’s not a required part of the course, but people are soexcited about the leadership experience that they want to continue to discussit, he says. The school hosts a moderated online message board and promotesweekly lunch discussion groups in various offices, many of which regularly have30 or more attendees. “The response has been enormous,” Jackson says. Hereceives dozens of e-mails weekly from former students, some of whom took thepilot course in 1999. “The training is so compelling, some people keep comingback,” he says. “It has had a powerful impact on the Unisys culture.”

Workforce, October 2002, p. 84 — Subscribe Now!

Name: MCKESSON CORPORATION Location: SAN FRANCISCO Business: PROVIDER OF HEALTH-CARE SUPPLIES AND SOFTWARE Employees: 22,000

McKesson executives see Six Sigma as a fundamental change in the way they dobusiness. “It’s not an additional step or certification system,” says JeffReinke, McKesson’s vice president of Six Sigma. “It’s how we operate.”

    Before 1999, McKesson Corporation had never thought to implement a qualityinitiative. “Until the late ’90s, quality was an issue for manufacturingcompanies, not transactional ones,” Reinke says. But as health-care costsskyrocketed, McKesson executives realized that the only way they could staycompetitive was to drive costs out of the supply chain.

    At the time, companies using Six Sigma were getting a lot of press abouttheir results, so McKesson’s leadership team met with Six Sigma Academy to seeif the process could transfer to the health-care-supply arena.

    In 1999 they launched Six Sigma, using what Reinke calls “a traditionalapproach.” They identified exceptional employees for a four-week black-belttraining course, pulling them out of the business for two years to work solelyon Six Sigma projects. Beginning with the health-supplies and pharmaceuticaldivision, they trained 15 to 20 black belts and then reassigned them to theiroriginal business units as their teams’ Six Sigma representatives.

    Each wave of training since then has targeted a different business group, andslowly the Six Sigma philosophy has infiltrated McKesson’s business philosophy,Reinke says. The company has since trained more than 120 black belts, 80 of whomare still active.

    When the two-year commitment ends, black belts return to the business athigher positions, helping to spread the approach throughout the organization andensuring that key leaders are committed to the philosophy. “The black-beltassignment is like a succession-planning effort at McKesson,” Reinke says. Thestrongest performers are chosen for the training, and they are promotedaccordingly when it’s over. “Associates know that if they want to grow inthe company, they need to be selected for black-belt training.”

    But Six Sigma training doesn’t end with black belts. In most divisions ofthe company it is mandated that all senior vice presidents go through “basictraining,” which introduces the Six Sigma concept and details how to identifyand scope a Six Sigma project. Across the company every manager and director isexpected to attend basic training and green-belt training, which gives them ahigh-level working knowledge of Six Sigma methodologies and why it’s importantto follow them. “They understand Six Sigma well enough to identify potentialprojects, discuss them using unique Six Sigma vocabulary, and participate on SixSigma projects led by black belts,” Reinke says.

    The mandatory training also raises awareness of the company’s commitment tothe new fact-based approach to business. “In the past, requests were grantedon the basis of seniority or past experience,” Reinke says. “Now,decision-makers know that every project must be supported by hard data before itcan be implemented.”

    Six Sigma training also has no end-date at McKesson. The company now has fourmaster black belts who conduct all of the Six Sigma training in-house, andReinke expects the training to remain an integral part of theemployee-development process. Eventually, all teams will have a dedicated blackbelt, just as they have vice presidents and associates, he says, and everyone inthe company will embrace Six Sigma as a way of conducting business.

    And while the Six Sigma effort showed profits in the first year and eachsubsequent year, Reinke sees it as more than just a cost-cutting initiative. “Ithas helped us get better at our core competencies,” he says. “Six Sigma isour culture now.”

Workforce, May 2003, pp. 67-68 — Subscribe Now!

Medium Company

Name: Fujitsu Transaction Solutions Inc. Location: Dallas, Texas Business: Technology solutions supplier for retailers and financial-services companies Employees: 1,000

The FTS executive team believes that employees in leadership roles are morededicated to making the business successful and will take the extra steps tosupport the needs of customers. The company’s culture and vision statementsare grounded in a commitment to professional development, leadership, andaccountability, says Steve Becker, chief human capital officer. It is thefoundation of the company’s business strategy and the filter through whichevery management decision is made, he says. “Everyone is expected to take aleadership role, whether they are service reps or management. It’s the mostconstructive way to take on new business challenges and shape the company forthe future.”

That doesn’t mean employees are free to take control and run with their ownideas. The goal is to achieve a balance of freedom and responsibility, he says.Employees have the flexibility to pursue their own ideas–as they relate to thebusiness and the corporate culture–but they are also held accountable fortheir actions. “It creates a culture where people are more likely to investtheir blood, sweat, and tears in the job.”

For example, an important part of the FTS culture is community involvement.“It would be easy for the executive staff to choose some charity andcontribute corporate dollars,” Becker says. Instead, a small group ofemployees is responsible for researching charitable foundations and makingrecommendations. Then the entire employee population votes on which ones theywant to support.

From a business perspective, FTS computer salespeople help clients fitindividual products into their existing software instead of tying to sell them abrand new system. “We want them to help customers drive the costs of theiroperations down,” Becker says.

To support the company’s leadership initiative and to hone employees’decision-making abilities, FTS recently launched the Career Resource Center, aWeb-based training and development system from KnowledgePool. The system guidesemployees and managers through the career-planning process. It tracks skillassessments, maps career goals, and offers competency evaluations to helpemployees build individual development programs. Once a career plan has beencreated, employees have access to more than 200 Web-based training courses,ranging from technical to negotiation and communication skills.

The tool also gives management an easy-to-access overview of the talents andaspirations of all employees for more thorough succession planning. In the past,promotions were based largely on management recommendations, Becker says. Nowthe company has a single database cataloging the skills of the entirepopulation, which allows for a more informed, less prejudicial selectionprocess.

The tool is the infrastructure, he says, but employees are expected to takethe initiative to use it. With the career-planning feature, employees can settheir sights on job promotion and actively develop skills to meet therequirements of that role.

Although the Center has been in place only a few months, employees arepleased that the company is actively supporting their desire to pursue careergoals, Becker says. “When employees know that you value them and thecontributions they can make, you create a winning culture in which everyone isexcited about delivering their best.”

Workforce, October 2002, p. 83 — Subscribe Now!

Name: THE VANGUARD GROUP Location: VALLEY FORGE, PENNSYLVANIA Business: INVESTMENT MANAGEMENT COMPANY Employees: 10,000

The Vanguard Group implemented Six Sigma two years ago to add rigor and discipline to its management style. Several years earlier, the company had seen rapid expansion, which resulted in some loss of accountability in the management team, says Rich Luzzi, principal of the Center for Excellence, Vanguard’s internal Six Sigma organization. “There was too much management by the seat of the pants,” he says. “We needed to add metrics and measurement to the process.”

    They decided to implement Six Sigma and created a custom approach, which they named “Vanguard Unmatchable Excellence.” At the heart of VUE are dashboards, computer-based tools that are used to collect and report data about vital customer requirements and business performance. All executives define dashboards for their core strategies and then broadcast them to the workstations of any workers whose performance affects that measurement, Luzzi says. The dashboards are constantly updated to show the results of the teams’ efforts. For example, the people who answer the phones can see the impact that their interactions with customers have on specific business drivers by monitoring their dashboards.

    In the beginning, Vanguard executives used dashboard metrics only at the management level, but by year two, they had disseminated them to the entire employee population in order to accelerate the culture-change process. “When people see the impact they have on the Six Sigma metrics, they know it’s not just management speak,” Luzzi says. “They understand the value of their performance, and that’s where it all comes together.”

    To help people understand the Six Sigma philosophy and how their efforts affect the dashboard measurements, Vanguard offers several levels of training, which is all conducted in-house by VUE masters (also known as master black belts). Employees–who are referred to as “crew members”–receive overview training that introduces them to VUE concepts and terminology. Once they have been chosen to participate on a VUE project, they receive team-member training. Training for VUE specialists (green belts) is given to anyone considered a leader, change agent, or influencer in the company. They learn how to identify and implement projects, build dashboards, and make use of VUE philosophies, Luzzi says. The training also teaches them how to communicate the message to their team members. This is critical to drive the VUE mentality into the leadership organization. Finally, those chosen to be VUE experts (black belts) receive the full four-week training program.

    At most other Six Sigma companies, black belts maintain their role for two or more years. VUE experts stay in the position for only 12 months. During that time they are expected to finish training, complete two projects, pass a certification exam, and then return to a leadership role in the company.

    By putting its brightest people through a rigorous fast track of Six Sigma training and experience, Vanguard is quickly filling its ranks with individuals who use Six Sigma’s measurement-based approach, and they are infusing the culture with the new management philosophy. “Our goal with Six Sigma is to change the way we manage,” Luzzi says. “We are creating better leaders through the use of Six Sigma.”

Workforce, May 2003, pp. 66-67 — Subscribe Now!

Name: American Residential Services Location: Memphis, Tennessee Business: Heating, venting, plumbing, air conditioning, and electricity service company Employees: 7,000

When American Residential Services started its Six Sigma quality-improvement process, one of the first issues it targeted was turnover among the company’s 4,000 service technicians. In 2000 its turnover was 70 to 80 percent—not bad for the industry but unacceptable in the eyes of the ARS executive team, says Robert Beckmann, vice president and Six Sigma Black Belt, whose sole job at ARS is to implement Six Sigma projects. “One of our primary objectives with Six Sigma is to put greater focus on employee development. That begins with hiring,” he says. “We needed to do a better job selecting people.”

    To reduce the number of bad hires and to get a better overall understanding of the quality of applicants, Beckmann implemented a Wonderlic pre-employment assessment test for service technicians. At first, hiring managers were worried that the test would cut off their supply of labor, he says. But when they saw the results of the pilot project, which tracked assessment scores at two service centers, their fears were quelled. Only 10 to 13 percent of applicants scored below 70, which is the test’s “be careful number,” Beckmann says. “It eliminated applicants with the least likelihood to succeed, but it didn’t prevent managers from filling job openings.”

    Beckmann sees that 13 percent elimination as a significant cost-savings for the company. He estimates that each lost technician costs $5,500 to $7,000 and believes that before the test, all of those techs would have been hired on the spot. Except for drug and criminal-background screening, the company didn’t have a detailed interview process. “If they had a license, we got them on a truck,” he says.

    With the success of the pilot program, Beckmann rolled out the tests to the rest of the company’s 70 service centers in January 2002. Now, whenever technicians fill out an application, they also complete the 90-question test, which rates their reliability, customer-service aptitude, and retention likelihood. Managers fax the test to Wonderlic and are e-mailed the results in minutes, allowing them to determine on the spot whether to continue the interview process.

    One year later, the number of those who score poorly on the assessment hovers at 10 to 14 percent for all the centers, he says, and the result of not hiring those people has been dramatic. While the number hasn’t been officially calculated, preliminary data shows that turnover had dropped 20 percent by November of last year. That means they are hiring about 100 fewer service techs per month, which amounts to a savings of about $7 million a year. Beckmann attributes that largely to the test and its impact on the hiring process. “It gives rigor to our entire selection process,” he says. “It makes us take a better look at people and think about the implications of hiring them.”

    And the benefit of the tests touches all of the company’s employees. “Every service team is like a club,” he says. “When there are people in the group who don’t fit, it’s demotivating for the others. Our goal is to have elite teams of technicians who take care of each other and look out for one another.” The test, he says, is the first step in helping them achieve that goal.

Workforce, April 2003, pp. 67-68 — Subscribe Now!

Name: Grant Thornton Location: Chicago Type of organization: Global accounting, tax, and business advisory firm Number of employees: 3,000

When Bob Dean took over as chief learning officer for Grant Thornton two years ago, the company believed in training as a strategic tool for achieving business results. “Daily learning is a key to competitiveness and profit,” Dean says, “and management is focused on building a continuous learning culture.”

The company was already using a learning-management system as a way to handle record-keeping on the Web, but employees needed easier access to training. “We wanted a one-stop shop for learning,” Dean says. So he built Grant Thornton University, a Web-based corporate learning portal. Through GTU, employees can register for any course, whether it’s classroom-based or online, and they now have access to more than 1,000 hours of self-paced training, live Webcasts, and virtual-classroom courses.

But it wasn’t as easy as buying a library of premade courses and throwing them online. Before investing in content, Dean and his team evaluated the needs of end users and built learning paths aimed at every level of the company. His intention was to deliver customized learning solutions to each business unit instead of generalized content for the entire organization. The learning paths are broken down by competencies and skill requirements, and then tied to job performance, he says. So, for example, if an employee receives performance feedback indicating a need for improved teamwork skills, his manager can identify an appropriate team training course for the employee’s position and required competencies, Dean says. “A big part of the learning vision is that managers play an active role in guiding employees toward the right learning opportunities.”

Dean and his team put a lot of thought and effort into choosing not just the right courses but also the right delivery methods for each topic. “We found that the combination of self-paced modules with live virtual-classroom components is critical for learner success,” he says. The self-paced lessons deliver informational content so that the live training can be used for group work, question- and-answer sessions, and case studies. It’s a better use of live training time and enables instructors to cover more content in less time, he says.

The blended model also helped to ease some employees into the new training format. There was a lot of resistance to self-paced training at Grant Thornton, Dean says. It was a foreign way to learn, and employees were skeptical of its value. But the virtual classroom is a more familiar setting, he says. It gives students the opportunity to interact with peers and with course experts who are often high-level executives at the company. “With self-paced training, they can feel all alone,” he says. “But with the combination, they see that the learning model isn’t changing so drastically. It’s comfortable and convenient.”

To introduce GTU to employees and get buy-in from management and staff, Dean uses every opportunity to talk up the project and walk people through the technology. Starting at the top, he invited managers across the firm to participate in virtual kickoff events from their desktops using Centra virtual-classroom technology. “We needed the field managers to be our champions because they are the ones who will get employees to use the learning,” he says.

In the online kickoff sessions he covered the strategic goals of the initiative, showed managers how the technology works, and let them try out sample content. An added benefit of using a virtual classroom to introduce the project was that managers were able to learn about GTU while seeing it in action. “The virtual classroom gets the biggest ‘wow’ factor,” Dean says. “It’s like a talk show delivered to your desktop.”

Workforce, March 2003, p. 60 — Subscribe Now!

Name: NASWA (National Association of State Workforce Agencies) Location: Washington, D.C. Type of organization: Trade association for state workforce agencies Number of employees 10

Several years ago, the Department of Labor began building O*Net, an onlinedatabase of occupational information and labor-market research. The tool can beused by public and private employers, recruiters, and job seekers to define jobskills and competencies, track wages, and research employment data, saysKathleen Cashen, executive director of NASWA, the trade association in charge oftraining for O*Net users. “It helps employers make more educated hiringdecisions and it helps job seekers make better career choices.”

    O*Net was designed to replace the paper-based dictionary of occupationaltitles (DOT), which workforce personnel have used since the 1930s as the primarysource of labor-market information, says Mary Sue Vickers, research director forNASWA. But the Department of Labor struggled to raise awareness and get buy-infor the new tool. “It’s like replacing the dictionary or the Bible,”Vickers says. “Employers used the DOT for 70 years, and old habits die hard.”

    To help people make the switch, the NASWA team was contracted in 2001 tocreate training and build support for O*Net. They began by deliveringface-to-face train the- trainer courses to workforce agency personnel. Over ayear and a half, NASWA trainers traveled to 38 states and trained 732 people oneverything there was to know about O*Net with the hope that they would take thatinformation back to their peers, Cashen says. But it was an expensive andtime-consuming process. Budgets were tight and travel became an issue afterSeptember 11, so NASWA turned to e-learning. In conjunction with Maher andMaher, they built O*Net Academy (www.onetacademy.com), an online community whereanyone anywhere can take free self-paced or live training on the value of anduses for O*Net.

    The first courses focused on the value and benefits of O*Net, to reduceapprehension about switching from the paper-based DOT to an online tool. To makethe training more attractive to skeptical users, NASWA designed several shorterlive courses to meet the specific needs of various groups. “Some people needto know very little about the database to use it, while others need to knoweverything,” says Vickers. “Instead of putting them all through aneight-hour course, we take 45 minutes and give them what they need when theyneed it.”

    The courses are delivered through live scheduled “Webinars” and covereverything from application overviews to HR planning to employee retraining andretention. The Webinar leaders use WebEx software and phone lines to deliverinteractive online presentations and field questions from participants. Forindividuals who can’t attend the live sessions, the Webinars are recorded andstored at the site for reuse, and are supported by self-paced tutorials forthose who need follow-up or performance support training while using thedatabase.

    “People love the sessions particularly because they are convenient andaddress their specific needs in a short amount of time,” Cashen says. The factthat users can complete training over a lunch hour also gives it considerablevalue. It’s a big payoff for a small investment of time, she says.

    NASWA markets the training through e-mail notifications to its members andprevious O*Net users. It also delivers talks at conferences and places links tocourse schedules at the academy and the O*Net Web sites. But the heart of thecampaign strategy is word of mouth. It’s a community that grows as news of thetraining spreads, Vickers says. For example, from August to November of 2002,the number of participants in Webinars increased by 50 percent. Also, there were23,356 user sessions at O*Net sites in the last six months, and 40 percent werereturn users.

    But the best indicator of the academy’s success is the reaction from thegovernment agencies themselves. “The e-learning program for O*Net put NASWA onthe map,” Cashen says. “The other agencies see that they can get informationout so much faster using e-learning and they are coming to us for guidance onhow to do it.”

Workforce, March 2003, p. 62 — Subscribe Now!