by Kate Everson
December 8, 2015
Gold
Mind Gym
Media company Thomson Reuters’ leaders already had a nose for news, but they needed a mind for management.
When Thomson Corp. acquired Reuters in 2008, it had to focus on integration and expansion, which took time and effort away from manager development. By 2012, employee engagement was suffering and a strategic capabilities analysis revealed that fundamental managing skills needed to improve at all levels.
Enter the Management at Thomson Reuters’ global initiative. Since 2013, 6,000 managers in 56 countries attended 1,200 skills sessions that equip front-line managers with people management skills so they can drive team performance.
For one of the managerial groups, the company worked with vendor partner Mind Gym to create and deliver the Management at Thomson Reuters’ program. Its target: 7,000 first-line people managers.
Mind Gym researched the company’s regions to understand more about the people who would attend the program. Focus groups, interviews and surveys clued the vendor into the skills these managers already had as well as what would entice them to participate.
The in-house design team created a series of materials — posters, videos, quizzes and emails to explain the reason for the initiative, engage managers so they arrived eager to learn and provide consistent branding for the program.
This pre-program work paid off — literally. Thomson Reuters estimates that for every dollar invested, $1.71 was returned thanks to direct reports’ increased effectiveness and an uplift in engagement across the ranks.
Silver
VisionCor Inc.
Wells Fargo & Co. has been updating and evolving along with the rest of the world for more than 160 years. But recently, it faced challenges attracting new advisers from Generations X and Y.
To meet this need, the company started the Associate Financial Adviser program, an apprenticeship-style experience that includes 15 weeks of fundamental skills and culture training, a year of integration into the adviser role and a year of transitioning from an apprentice adviser to a member of the team.
During the project, vendor VisionCor Inc. embedded itself in the company so it could manage the overall program, support build-out and provide an instructional design team to create more than 200 deliverables and perform quality assurance checks.
Since the program launched, Wells Fargo has increased its retention from 65 percent after the first year of traditional training to 78 percent after a year of the program. Roughly 200 employees have completed it.
Bronze
PulseLearning
CA Technology had to teach 30,000 employees agility, specialization and efficiency via programs released at the same time as products. It turned to PulseLearning for help. The company helped to develop its employees’ level of subject-matter expertise so they could collaborate better with company’s experts and become part of the learning function, rather than an extension.
