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The ATD Case Study Team sources, writes, edits, and publishes proven talent development solutions. They can be contacted at casestudy@td.org

ATD Case Study Team

“Learning initiatives are like smartphones. They can accomplish great things, but they don’t work for long without a charger.” That’s according to Marie Daniels and Emma Weber, who piloted an artificial intelligence–based chatbot to support learning transfer for a sales manager training program at Bayer, one of the world’s largest and most successful pharmaceutical companies.Daniels, the commercial learning lead for Australia/New Zealand at Bayer, supports a busy sales team. In addition to spending time in the field, the team’s managers must also maintain processes and ensure compliance.In her role, Daniels has always recognized that even with exceptional training sessions and workshops, the managers’ different responsibilities make it challenging to sustain the effort of transferring learning into behavior. That’s why Bayer was working with a supplier, ever–Transfer of Learning, to provide phone-based learning transfer coaching in support of leadership programs across Bayer Australia.Daniels had a strong relationship with Lever CEO and founder Emma Weber. So, when Weber shared her prototype for a coaching chatbot with Daniels in 2017, the latter saw it as an opportunity to incorporate a “charger” into Bayer’s sales manager training and development program. It would serve a similar purpose to the phone-based coaches in the leadership program while staying within budget. With the support of an influential senior leader already in hand, she proposed launching a pilot of the chatbot in a matter of weeks.

Bayer: Chatbot Coaching for Learning Transfer

St. Charles Hospital is a 243-bed community hospital and rehabilitation center. Part of the Catholic Health Services of Long Island hospital network, St. Charles has served the community since 1907.The hospital’s healthcare providers use Epic, an electronic health record system (EHR), to communicate patient information such as medical history, diagnoses, and treatment plans. The system contains a specific type of order for nearly every request, from medication to laboratory tests to patient care instructions. For the occasional note or request that does not have an existing order, healthcare providers use a nursing communication order (NCO), which is not routed through the system’s usual channels.In early 2015, NCO was changed to generic procedure order (GPO) in the EHR. It wasn’t long before Andrew Osso, the hospital’s Epic credentialed trainer, and Joan Grothmann, the hospital’s Epic operational lead, noticed that providers were using GPOs more frequently even when an order already existed in the system. This caused delays in patient care because the order, which frequently contained vital patient information, was often invisible to the departments that needed to view it. Osso and Grothmann implemented a performance support initiative to identify and educate providers who used the EHR incorrectly.

St. Charles Hospital: On-the-Job Performance Support to Improve Patient Care

Headquartered in Istanbul, Akbank is one of the largest banks in Turkey. The bank, with more than 800 branches, offers myriad banking services such as corporate and investment banking, private banking, commercial banking, and international banking. The bank’s more than 13,000 employees receive training through Akbank Academy, the organization’s learning and development institute. Due to the highly regulated nature of the banking industry, training is critical for Akbank’s employees to be current in the skills needed to perform their jobs.While the academy already provides employees with in-person and online learning offerings through its course catalog, the academy team sought ways to engage learners and improve learning metrics. In 2017, the team implemented a gamified learning management system (LMS) with features such as badges, points, and coins to encourage course completion, increase mobile app usage, and motivate employee learning.

Akbank: Increasing Learner Engagement Through Gamification

SAP is a global software corporation with more than 90,000 employees worldwide. The organization’s sales staff, dispersed across more than 130 countries, is responsible for securing sales opportunities, facilitating relationships with new and existing customers, and meeting their sales quota. In 2015, SAP’s leadership team set out to increase the already industry-leading quota attainment rates of its salespeople.Surveys of salespeople showed that they did not receive as much sales coaching from their managers as they would like, largely due to time constraints. Sales coaching, defined as the ongoing process of engaging salespeople in coaching with the goal of improving sales performance, is crucial for the development of sales staff. ATD’s research report Sales Coaching: Building a Successful Sales Force found that the top benefit of sales coaching, cited by 73 percent of respondents, is increased sales skills.To give sales staff more opportunities to be coached, SAP’s business operations and sales learning teams developed the Data-Driven Coaching program in 2015. By pairing salespeople with trained coaches outside their line of reporting and using data reports to guide coaching conversations, the teams hoped the program would engage the sales staff and help them increase their quota attainment rate.

SAP: Data-Driven Sales Coaching

P.J. Lhuillier, based in the Philippines, owns and operates a number of financial services companies that specialize in areas such as pawning, domestic and international remittance, microinsurance, and micro loans for businesses. P.J. Lhuillier’s companies include the Philippines’ largest nonbank financial service provider, Cebuana Lhuillier. Because supervisors and officers in P.J. Lhuillier’s organizations hold crucial roles for ensuring branches or departments operate securely and meet performance goals, employees must pass an exam to be promoted to these roles. However, relying on only a written exam meant that some strong candidates for management roles were not promoted to higher critical positions. Less than half of employees who took the exam passed it. With a long waiting period before they can retake the exam, employees who do not pass sometimes feel discouraged or seek employment opportunities elsewhere.In November 2016, P.J. Lhuillier’s talent assessment and acquisitions team set out to change the promotion process. By implementing a holistic approach that includes an interview and a supervisor assessment in addition to an exam, the team hoped to increase the pass rate while also ensuring candidates had all the skills necessary to succeed in their new roles.

P.J. Lhuillier: Developing Assessments for Promotions

Catholic Charities of the Archdiocese of Washington (Catholic Charities D.C.) operates 58 programs in 36 locations throughout Washington, D.C., and Maryland. Through many of these programs, employees provide adult education to community members by teaching courses such as green construction, GED preparation, English as a second language, and employment skills.Catholic Charities D.C.’s adult educators are subject matter experts, many of whom have little formal experience in adult education. While Catholic Charities D.C. has periodically offered employees a training course on adult learning best practices and offers online presentation skills and public speaking training through their learning management system (LMS), the organization wanted to develop additional development opportunities for educators.To create more opportunities to better support workforce training capacity, Catholic Charities D.C. created a mini-conference with adult education workshops and networking opportunities.

Catholic Charities D.C.: Teaching Adult Educators Best Practices in Adult Learning

Founded in 1892, General Electric (GE) has grown to become one of the largest companies in the world. Originally a manufacturer of lighting products, GE now spans many sectors, including aviation, healthcare, and power.GE’s leadership institute, GE Crotonville, develops employees in leadership, strategy, and innovation through numerous in-person instructor-led courses, team-building activities, and one-on-one coaching sessions. But even with locations in 171 countries, Crotonville could not reach all of GE’s more than 300,000 employees. In 2015, to meet this challenge of scale and to bring learning to employees more quickly and on a continual basis, GE’s digital learning team developed the platform BrilliantYOU, with the vision to offer engaging, personal, and socially connected learning to all GE employees worldwide.

GE: Developing an Online Platform to Personalize Learning

N2 Publishing produces custom neighborhood publications that create a sense of community among readers and help local businesses reach sought-after customers through advertisements. The organization’s area directors regularly identify and meet with local business owners to discuss advertising their businesses in N2 Publishing’s products. With more than 900 publications across the nation, N2 Publishing has a large, dispersed sales force of area directors and sales directors working in 47 states throughout the United States.Being remote, area directors receive most of their training and support through phone calls with sales directors and field support representatives, who are available during business hours to answer questions and provide assistance. To provide area directors with a resource they could access at any time, however, N2 Publishing’s talent development team created video-based training courses in January 2016.

N2 Publishing: Training a Remote Sales Force With Video-Based Courses

Founded in 1969 and based in Seattle, SightLife is the only global health organization working relentlessly to eliminate corneal blindness worldwide by 2040. With partners in more than 30 countries, SightLife strives to increase the number of corneal transplants performed each year to transform millions of lives around the globe. To reach this goal, the organization sets monthly targets for corneal donations and corneal transplants.In early 2012, SightLife yielded lower than usual donor and transplant cornea volumes in two separate months. SightLife’s chief operating officer, Bernie Iliakis, was unsure why the numbers had decreased, but he knew he needed to act to improve them.Wary of making major changes without knowing the root cause of the problem, Iliakis worked with SightLife’s operational team leaders to develop and implement a performance improvement initiative called Operation MAX.

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