case Study:
Verizon Virtual Onboarding
Creating collaborative learning that brings people together.
Verizon Global Human Resources, responsible for training thousands of new hires a year, was in need of a new approach to the onboarding experience.
Overview
Replacing an extremely popular and effective program, that is based on in-person conversations with a digital one where users can be thousands of miles apart, without losing the intimacy of the group setting, is no easy task. Global Human Resources came to us with a challenge: design an application that was as engaging as the live sessions, while allowing users to access the training from anywhere in the world and do it with the prospect of national lock downs on the horizon.
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No pressure.
1:8 to 1:32
Facilitator : Student Ratio
$0.00
Travel Expenses
+13%
Content "Stickiness"
21,600
Employees Trained
The Challenge
We immediately knew this was going to be a two-pronged approach. One-half voice and one-half code. We could then use the system to support many of the functions of the facilitator. The key would be providing unified content across all screens.
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In lieu of user surveys we relied heavily on facilitators experiences to help recreate the feel of the in-person sessions, holding several strategy meetings to dial it in.
The Approach
We immediately knew this was going to be a two-pronged approach. One-half voice and one-half code. We could then use the system to support many of the functions of the facilitator. The key would be providing unified content across all screens.
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Due to in lieu of user surveys we relied heavily on facilitators experiences to help recreate the feel of the in-person sessions, holding several strategy meetings to dial it in.
The Solution
To handle voice duties, we leveraged the Verizon-owned Bluejeans conferencing application. Many users could connect to a session for greetings and instructions then sent to breakout rooms linking to a custom web application.
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The interaction model was achieved by using cross-browser communications (sockets.io) and server-side scripting (nodeJS) to screen- sync all connected users, much like online video games.
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The controls we kept simple. and timers, prompts and instructions were provided by the system to keep the conversation flowing.
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Facilitators could monitor and jump in and out of rooms to provide encouragement and support, and users could ping their facilitators if they ran into trouble.
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The Results
Over the first 18 months more than 20,000 new hires have been trained using the Learning Map application. Learner follow-up interviews indicated high satisfaction ratings and knowledge retention rates higher than the in-person sessions. The survey data also showed user's perception of Verizon was raised from using the application. It was seen as innovative and forward-thinking by the majority of learners.
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The application was also a hit with facilitators. In postmortem meetings they asserted to love using the app and found they could manage almost 4X the number of learners than in-person classes would allow.
An unintended benefit of implementing this new training method was travel and related costs being cut to zero, saving the Company tens-to-hundreds of thousands of dollars a year.
Design Notes
Due to time constraints and the intent to keep use cases as simple as possible, wireframing was also kept very basic. With only one person responsible for design and coding of the project, a rough outline with notes was all that was deemed necessary.
