Western Union's Josh Craver and his talent management team deliver for a new era.
Back when Western Union offered telegram services, it tested new telegraph machines with the sentence "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog," because it uses all the letters of the Roman alphabet. For more than 100 years, WU was the quick brown fox of the telegram industry.
Today, WU continues to evolve to try to stay ahead of many competitors bearing down on the cash payment and international remittance markets, which some estimate at between $300 billion and $500 billion. Digital-first companies such as PayPal's Xoom and giants like Walmart are pushing into the money transfer space.
WU sent its last telegram in 2006. In 2015 it moved money an average of 31 times per second. Some of its customers are Millennials sending money via their mobile phones. "That means we have to develop our people to understand digital marketing, online customer transactions, and much more," says Josh Craver, vice president of talent management at WU.
"We're also making big moves into digital money transfer and payment technology, one of the fastest-growing parts of our business." WU has tech centers in different parts of the world where software engineers develop customer apps and work to strengthen the company's digital capabilities and compliance technology—software that helps detect fraud and prevent risk to customers and the company.
"Other organizations work with us to be able to use our platforms to move money for customers around the globe," says Craver. "We know that many of our customers are moving money for reasons that are extremely important to them: paying for urgent medical care or education, and providing support following family tragedies or natural disasters. They want to know the money will arrive quickly."
Burgeoning new lines of business plus fierce competition means that WU employees must be agile and open to continual change. "Change is a constant for us. We're building capability around dealing with ambiguity and being agile. We know that transformation is not a one-time thing or a single project. As a company, we will continue to evolve, and employees need to understand this and learn to thrive in a rapidly changing environment," Craver explains.
Some research predicts that by 2020, at least 55 percent of the workforce will be Millennials; WU's workforce already comprises around 65 percent Millennials. The company's 2020 vision and strategy for the business are aligned to the reality of even more Millennial employees by then.
WU uses the promise of abundant L&D when recruiting Millennials. "Our surveys tell us that more than anything, they want development," Craver remarks. "It matters more than money to many of them. So, on career apps like LinkedIn and our careers page, we talk about our best-in-class learning and development and how we invest in our people."
With all the technology advances, WU's learning strategy leverages cutting-edge technology to put learning at employees' fingertips, which Craver believes fits with the preferences of many Millennials and WU's current workforce.
Leadership in action
A key part of WU's evolution has been to change the way performance is managed and measured. Today, company leaders partner with the talent management function to spread culture change.
After discovering that the company was spending millions on a performance management system that most agreed was broken, the talent management team spent 18 months redesigning it in collaboration with a cross-functional team of high-potential employees. As they designed the new system and process, they looked at best practices outside the company and collected data from their own employee surveys and focus groups.
"When we had the new processes ready, we shared the business case with our top 100 leaders and asked them if they would champion the change management initiative," explains Craver. "They understood the need for change, why their roles were critical to our success, and they endorsed the Leadership in Action initiative.
"We've created a culture in which training and learning is facilitated by leaders in the organization, not just by HR or the talent management function. Our CEO, Hikmet Ersek, was one of the first leaders to be a teacher."
To introduce Leadership in Action, each of the top 100 leaders worked with an accountability partner. They created learning circles with six to eight leaders from the next level down in their regions. Once a month, these groups met to discuss people-development topics such as feedback. The leaders and their partners facilitated these conversations. After six months, Leadership in Action had reached the top 500 people in the company, and the new performance management process was launched company-wide in January 2016.
Leadership in Action has been extended to all 2,000 people managers, using the leaders-as-teachers model to train them to be successful using the new performance management system.
"I'm proud of the way we've connected learning to moments that matter during significant organization change," says Craver. "I believe that learning done in the absence of a need to change or perform in a certain way isn't effective. So we use microlearning before a performance conversation, for example, to prepare managers to be effective in these conversations.
"We found that this was also a silo-busting and relationship-building opportunity for people to connect with other leaders across their regions," he says.
We are all customers
As part of its transformation, WU also became more customer-centric. "One of our goals was to change the mindset about customers with the idea that it would lead to behavior change," says Craver.
"We also needed everyone to understand that we, the employees, are all customers of each other. This created a more collaborative and empowering culture. It's a very simple model of seeing an opportunity, owning that you're the one to do something about it, and taking the action to do it."
As with the new performance management system, a leaders-as-teachers model was used to deploy the training, introducing and spreading the model throughout the organization.
Learning about customer-centricity starts during new-hire orientation with a two-hour module followed by one sustainability activity per week for a month. These are 10- to 15-minute reinforcement exercises online. There are four modules, and four months of weekly reinforcement, which adds up to about 120 days of sustained learning.
"In two years, we put 80 percent of our employees through this program. That's about 9,000 people in 59 offices in around the world. Our learning programs are designed with the belief that the application of learning and sustained behavior change takes time," says Craver.
Deep on data
L&D and the performance management function were combined within talent management in 2013, creating a rich collaboration and a pool of talent data for Craver's use.
"We use talent data to understand what new capabilities we need to build to serve our changing market and performance needs. We use it to guide our approach to the roles we need in our digital space. We use it to determine if our top 200 leaders have the agility we need to drive the transformation of our business strategy. And we use it to figure out where there's a need for learning or other development."
Craver likes to go deep into the talent data for a number of reasons. "When you have the data, you can tell great fact-based stories. You can build compelling business cases for investment in your programs. You can use the data to get recognition internally and externally for your talent practices."
He and his team focus on engagement metrics at the team level. "We look at the micro level because that's where stuff happens, and where the valuable employee data is."
Craver's team also uses data to market their programs to employees, managers, and leaders. They are able to use data to show performance improvement and other success by people attending their programs. For example, their data show that people managers who attend the "WU Lead" program have five times higher scores in the engagement of their teams and that people who attend the WU fundamentals program have significantly less attrition in their first year than those who don't attend.
Ersek, the CEO, holds Craver accountable for results just as he would any line of business, according to Craver. "We have quarterly reviews of our plans to compare them to actual achievements and we publish an annual report that shows our business impact. We've become excellent at using data and analytics to tell our stories and to see where to improve. Data definitely drives our decision making."
Craver believes that a major success factor in the company's talent management is the leadership and the buy-in of Ersek, his executive team, and the top 100 leaders. Craver points out that while WU is experiencing major change and a challenging market, employee engagement has gone up for the past three years.
"Over the last three years, we have intentionally created momentum by building on our progress year over year. We continue to focus on customer-centricity, continue to leverage the leader-as-teacher model, continue to make talent data and measurement a priority, and continue to invest in our digital capabilities.
"I attribute our success to having partnered with the business from the beginning and never having stopped being business partners. The business owns and drives the learning culture at WU, and we're enablers."
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