case Study:
VERIZON GLOBAL LEADERSHIP
Making it easier for people leaders to manage the skills they need.
Turning individual contributors into leaders is serious business at Verizon.
Overview
Giving employees the resources, they need to grow is a key component in turning simple managers into people leaders. Verizon recognizes the importance of this, while also understanding the time constraints placed on already overloaded leaders. Global Leadership came to us with a request to ease that burden and help make management training less stressful. We call it "Leadership Academy".
+37%
Completion Compliance
-3 days
Average Completion Time
+2
Optional Courses Completed
4.6 stars
Employee Satisfaction
The Challenge
How does one make managing "extra" work not just easier but maybe even enjoyable? Good question, and one the Global Leadership team asked us to answer. Verizon has a lot of courses available on multiple systems, both internal and vendor hosted. They were seeing a lack of compliance for required courses, and hearing complaints about, not only the extra training involved, but keeping track of where courses lived, and which were required.
The Approach
To complete this task, we needed to know about two things. The learners, and the content. For the first we analyzed several hundred user surveys and interviews to develop three personas to guide us. We also compiled lists of all the content, where it was hosted, what type it was, how long it would take, and if it was required or optional.
Using that data, we developed a system that presented a myriad of information in a clear, concise, and customizable way.
The Solution
To accomplish our goals, we authored two custom APIs into our employee database and our LMS. From those we could discern everything we needed to know about the employee: hire date, promotion date, union status, etc. We created four learner groups in the LMS for the different leadership levels we identified and parsed the course information by multiple metrics. This gave the user control over what data was displayed and how it was presented.
We also created an editorial section with articles, instructional videos and featured topics as well as a progress meter for required training.
The Results
Over its first six months of use, the application outperformed all expectations. Compliance was up over 35%, time to compliance went down by several days and users were actually taking two more courses on average than in previous years.
In follow-up interviews, users were reporting high satisfaction, a better understanding of what was required of them and lower levels of anxiety surrounding the program.
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One piece of information we were surprised to find in our discovery process was, users were interested in seeing the content from the next level above them. Some wanted to get a jump start on building their skills while others just wanted to know what their next promotion would require. This led us to open up the selection of any pathway to all users and creating a fourth "Employee Enrichment" learner group to allow non-managers to build the acumen needed to move up.
Design Iteration
