Video production: Andrew Kennedy Lewis
Kathy Smith (left), vice president of talent management and development at Nationwide Insurance and Diane August (right), chief learning architect at Nationwide, describe how they develop learning strategies that align with business outcomes from a design, development and delivery perspective.
Read the full transcript of their interview below:
August: When I think about why aligning performance and learning work is important to business results, it’s primarily that we are a partner with them. We want the organization and companies to succeed, so we develop a learning strategy that’s very closely aligned with their outcomes from both the design, development and delivery perspective.
Smith: One example of a learning strategy that is directly related to an enterprise strategy is our future capability learning initiatives. That happened over a two-year timeframe and partnership with our office of strategy. We were all looking to the future at our centennial in 2026. We were looking for what capabilities we have to have as an enterprise and we were locked in that planning and as we identified those and the learning strategies were developed following that. They’re widely sponsored by leadership because they’re so directly intertwined with where we need to be.
August: A second example is our N Suite where N stands for nationwide, which was specifically designed to help our culture come alive, our one nationwide culture. We developed an entire sort of series of N Suite modules on change, on inclusion, leaning in, collaboration, stress, all those kinds of things that would potentially impact associates in their culture. That was very important to our chief executive officer and the executive team because that was an objective that they had established or started anyway and cascaded down. The whole one nationwide approach and philosophy. We are made up of a lot of smaller businesses and so that one nationwide approach is very important to our success in the future that we can efficiently and effectively act like one company.
