Gold
Experience Willow
NCR Corp. has struggled to meet its new employees’ onboarding and learning needs. Some 6,000 people across 100 countries are hired each year, and more than 60 percent are millennials.
Head of the New Employee Experience Team, or NEET, Wendy Smith proposed the development of a comprehensive new hire onboarding and blending learning experience. NEET partnered with experiential consulting company Experience Willow to create NCR First Steps.
Using four key strategies to ensure success — consumer-worker first, useful and turnkey, social and collaborative, and sustainable — NEET and Experience Willow worked with NCR’s customer experience and global marketing group to create an exceptional new hire experience. Experience Willow played a critical role in all storytelling and branding efforts, overseeing the creative process alongside global marketing. The company also played a support role in several program aspects, including development of virtual and live learning experiences.
Experience Willow built a framework that identified new hire moments of impact using a proprietary customer experience framework. Then with global marketing, Experience Willow developed a cohesive story to show that “working at NCR is an everyday adventure.” Because the program was geared toward new hires, the name NCR First Steps was chosen. It featured three learning environments: Base Camp, Exploration Plaza and Explorations Plaza Live: The Guideposts.
Because new hire attrition is calculated over the span of a year, NCR has not been able to measure results; the program launched in January. However, early course evaluations show 100 percent of Guideposts participants say they would recommend it to others, and 94 percent would also recommend the virtual two-week orientation.
Silver
INSEAD
To meet its global sales transformation goals, Microsoft Corp.’s readiness team realized its sales training needed to scale faster. Initially partnering with Intrepid Learning Inc., the company decided the best approach was a scalable massive open online course or MOOC. Microsoft selected graduate business school INSEAD to be the content provider and additional design partner.
INSEAD professors aligned the course material with the company’s transformation efforts, emphasizing real-life experiences. Program design had three major highlights: multidimensional interactions to ensure active learning, bite-size content and action learning projects to ensure real-world application.
INSEAD’s swift design and production process allowed Microsoft to expedite design and implementation and roll out the pilot course in five months. The pilot launched with 1,014 students instead of 500 with a pass rate of 85 percent. With high learner satisfaction rates and completion rates above 80 percent in subsequent cohorts, the company plans to use the new approach to train all of its sellers throughout the world.
Bronze
Entelechy Inc.
Customer-facing MasTec Advanced Technologies had high attrition and productivity issues. So it sought help from Entelechy Inc. to create a customized version of Unleash Your Leadership Potential, calling it Coaching and Leadership Essentials, or CLE. Entelechy worked collaboratively with MasTec to create a three-day CLE program, which led to a drop in attrition of more than 15 percent.
