Chief Learning Officers Link Training and Business Goals

    "We felt we could be better at telling employees, when they start here, how they can grow and develop professionally," says Barbara Reindl, vice president of the St. Paul-based Cardiac Rhythm Management Group, Guidant’s largest division.

    "We get many employees who just got out of college and want to have an idea of what kind of career they can have at Guidant," she says. "We want to be able to say, ‘This is the curriculum if you want to be a manager.’ We’d really love to create a feeling among new hires that they’re joining a learning organization, but it’s not as well marketed here as it is at Motorola and other learning organizations."

    Susan Norton, who became head of employee development in August, has begun talking to divisional vice presidents about their training and development needs and how they should be strategically organized to meet business challenges.

    One of Norton’s discussions resulted in the creation of a three-day workshop where Guidant managers from around the world had an opportunity to hear senior executives address leadership issues, network among themselves, and spend their evenings informally talking with other managers from all levels of the company. Guidant has held the workshops in Brussels, St. Paul, and California, and has received positive comments from managers about the program.

Building a learning environment
    The first goal of Norton and other CLOs is to encourage their employers to investigate what competencies will make them successful and then align development programs with their strategic objectives. The next step is to create an environment in which that learning is readily available to employees and to try to determine what return on investment can be measured after learning occurs.

    CLOs say that they identify needs through interviews with managers and executives, with the underlying premise that matching business objectives with desired competencies among employees will lead to greater productivity. It’s less about having everyone take a PowerPoint class and more about leading employees to the right courseware or college course they can take locally or online.

    Additionally, CLOs say they’re often assigned the task of remaking classroom-oriented training departments--sometimes called "universities"--into blended learning environments in which online courses take a front seat to classroom instruction. Other objectives range from helping management with succession planning and team-building to creating opportunities for conferences where internal business leaders can gain a deeper knowledge of what corporate headquarters has in store for the company.

    Driving the CLO movement is one crucial business goal--saving money. At Xerox Corporation in Stamford, Connecticut, CLO Tim Conlon says that by simply centralizing contracts with various educational vendors, especially in the e-learning market, he managed to save the company millions of dollars. Part of the company's goal was to move away from classroom teaching at its fabled Xerox University and into an e-learning environment. The company saved money by reducing classroom instruction and cutting down the number of contracts it had, often with the same vendors.

    As the speed of business grows ever faster, keeping employees in the learning loop will keep Xerox competitive, Conlon says, an attitude largely shared by other CLOs. "Companies are realizing they’re having to do more with less, and the only way they’re going to do that is by restructuring or retraining, or both," says Tim Sosbe, editorial director of the just-launched Chief Learning Officer magazine. "It’s all about education and workforce development."

Long-term thinking
    A learning environment helps with retention, especially among younger employees accustomed to a lifestyle in which creativity and learning are valued, two traits they would like to see valued by their employers, too. "Employers have begun looking at employees who could have a lifetime career with them and thinking, ‘How do we keep them performing and growing and developing as the years march on?’ " Sosbe says. "Companies are thinking more about having long-term employees because it’s expensive to hire and fire employees."

    Although the head of learning at most companies operates as a part of human resources, the concept of making human capital a "c-level" (CEO, CFO, COO) position certainly has appeal, says Allison Rossett, professor of educational technology at San Diego State University and an e-learning expert.

    Just as the importance of information technology led to the creation of chief information officers, or CIOs, so too would the proponents of learning like "to be at the strategic table," she says. CLOs still work within the HR department, but giving it a special cachet elevates the title.

    Within the corporate structure, CLOs do not always get every piece of the educational pie, says Conlon, who meets twice a year in a forum with other nationally regarded CLOs. Within Xerox, for example, he handles Web-based learning and executive development, but does not oversee the university. Individual departments have funds they can use to obtain specialized training outside the company, if they so choose.

Turning novices into experts
    Most CLOs start their jobs with a large and challenging assignment before moving on to smaller tasks. When George Selix joined the real-estate franchiser Century 21 to serve as senior vice president and CLO more than two and a half years ago, he had the challenge of transforming the training operation by reducing costs and increasing per-agent commissions and retention. The retention part of it was a difficult roadblock to overcome in an industry where more than half of the first-year hires head for the exit after failing to earn much of a living.

    The first order of business was replacing an on-site lecture-based training program with a mix of live e-learning and classroom instruction, often received by agents through a conference feed transmitted on the Web. The training became an intensive six-week course involving 120 hours of instruction, with 24 hours in the live, online classroom, 40 hours of self-directed learning, and 50 hours of income-producing homework. Students learn how to work with buyers and sellers, how to build client databases, which technologies work with different clients, and what real estate knowledge they will need to work as agents.

    After a year under the new system of computer-based training and live instruction, attrition dropped to just 15 percent of new enrollees and commissions closed by new agents jumped 16 percent. Selix continues to refine the franchisee instructional program while also developing a competency-mapping program for Century 21 employees to determine and close enterprise-wide knowledge gaps. By 2004, he’d like to roll out a learning program directed at building specific competencies throughout the supply chain, including consumers, who would have access to online material about the buying and selling process.

    "For a CLO, it all comes down to transferring knowledge and skills to people who don’t have them," he says. "There are experts and novices, and you have to transfer knowledge in such a way that the novices get the knowledge and skills they need to perform like an expert."

Teaching business literacy
    Just a year before Selix joined Century 21, former General Electric executive Bill Kline became Delta’s CLO. Assigned to "develop a vision and strategy around learning" for the company’s six distinct divisions--pilots, reservation representatives, flight attendants, and so forth--Kline first had to learn about the training that already existed.

    First, he created a Global Learning Council, with representatives from each division, and he asked those representatives to identify training needs. Using input from the council, he organized a training program for each division that would enhance employee performance. At the corporate level, he established a "learning services organization" to offer leadership development, succession planning, and talent-management programs.

    As part of Delta’s recovery efforts after 9/11, the Learning Services Organization designed and developed a business literacy initiative. Kline this year unveiled the $2 million program, "Our Airline, Our Business," in which employees role-play and make decisions based on Delta’s financial data. It’s become a huge hit. Since May 1, 1,300 employees a week have gone through the program, which has trained more than 28,000 employees (as of October 27) in the fundamentals of business literacy.

    Now Delta’s managers routinely share the company’s financial reports with employees, ensuring that the knowledge gained will not go unused.

    Unlike some other CLOs, Kline is less concerned about career mapping, since most of the airline's hourly employees stay in the division they joined initially--flight attendants typically do not aspire to marketing positions, and mechanics generally don’t want an eventual career in HR. Rather, he’s ensuring that the company has clear job descriptions and has spelled out training and development requirements for salaried and management positions through competency models.

    Says Kline: "We’re developing a learning system where employees can learn and grow to continually improve individual, team, and operational-unit performance and realize their career aspirations."

A company "willing to invest"
    Figuring out whether training really does pay off is a perpetual struggle for HR departments, even though executives are demanding it. Jim L’Allier, CLO for NETg, a provider of blended e-learning solutions, says it is "a duty of a CLO to establish high-level metrics to determine whether or not a knowledge gap is closed" after putting employees through a training program. Looking at the cost of training and determining the results in monetary terms will help companies see which educational efforts pay off.

    Not every CLO can describe precisely how each training effort paid off. Yet L’Allier has examples of how NETg arrives at ROI through a rigorous formula. Recently, an airline wanted to downsize training for its already reduced information technology workforce, but L’Allier convinced it that a better-trained workforce could increase productivity and reduce costs during a cash-crunch time. He showed how the training on specific IT tools would save employees several hours a week and therefore save the company money.

    The estimated $778,000 in savings against a cost of $321,000 for the training program revealed a 142 percent ROI that could be paid back in 2.6 months, says L’Allier. "It allowed that department head to defend his budget and not cut training because of the loss of people," he says. "When you lose people, you need to do more with less. You need to invest more in training to make up for the loss of individuals you had to sever from the organization."

    Still, ROI is an ongoing process. When Xerox’s Conlon unveiled a Web-based learning system with more than 2,000 courses this year, he wanted to see at least 35 to 40 percent of the company’s employees participate in a course. "That’s a terrible goal because it doesn’t really tell you anything," he concedes. "But three years out, when I see that employees are getting to the tools, then I can begin to put services in place where I can test if the quality of the content is good and if it is getting to the right people."

    Though some CLOs are being chosen now to navigate their companies through a time of cutbacks in employees and training, Guidant’s move comes at a time of great growth for the company and for the medical technology industry, among the few bright lights in the economy. As Norton pushes forward, the company's educational programs build skills and assist employees and managers with understanding corporate goals. Two recent programs help employees learn more about Guidant’s complex products and teach managers the finer points of leadership, communicating with groups, and performance management.

    They’re not about doing more with less. They’re about educating employees to do their jobs better.

    "This is a company that I see is willing to invest in employees, personally and professionally," Norton says. "The last thing you want to see in a company is a status quo mode, where people aren’t developing. Those companies won’t attract talent in the future."

Workforce Online, November 2002 -- Register Now!