Neal Harris from The Royal and Sun Alliance (RSA) presents their training challenges and shares how Assima's training solution helped them to halve their training design time and decrease their time to competency by 30%
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How RSA halved training design time and decreased time to competence by 30%
1.
2. RSA & Assima Case Study
• A bit about our business
• Our Learning Landscape
• Creating that Culture
• One Particular Challenge
• Taking you through our journey
• Sharing the outcome & results
• The future of eLearning
• Where next?
3. A bit about our business…
• With a 300-year heritage, RSA is one of the world’s leading
multinational insurance groups. Today, we employ around
23,000 people, serving 17 million customers in over 140
countries.
• While our origins lie in London, RSA is a global company with
businesses in both mature and emerging markets.
• We are a leading commercial insurer in the UK, working with
businesses of all shapes and sizes, from Small and Medium
Enterprises (SMEs) to some of the world’s most famous
brands. We are also the fifth largest personal lines insurer in
the UK, selling home, motor and pet insurance via brokers,
affinity partners and direct to consumers under the MORE
TH>N brand.
4. Our Learning Landscape…
“of course we focus
on customer
service....here is the
7 page guide to
answer a phone in
the contact centre”
“Learning
Zone...isn’t that the
place you make me
do that boring
stuff?”
In 2010 98% of our
learning is ‘push’ to
the learner and on
the business terms
and timescales
“hello, is that the
training team....I
have a real customer
service issue in my
team, I’d like you to
design me a 2 day
workshop”
5. Creating that culture…
• Understanding the people within our business
• Understanding the needs of our business
• Talking about Learning, People and the Business, not just the
project
– Yammer
– Delegate stories
– Results
• Making it sustainable
• Winning awards for it!
• We are clear that L&D Supports our position in
the Times 25 Best Big Companies to work for,
and we continue to drive our learning agenda as
a key part of this
6. One particular challenge…
• RSA undertook a complete overhaul of our underwriting systems, and
shifted our main operating system for customer management
• This represented one of the biggest challenges we faced as an L&D
team
• Rolling out to over 750 staff across multiple sites; a major project under
any circumstances.
• Covering a combination of product and system training over a period of
10 days in the classroom, with a substantial portion of this is devoted to
how to use the AIS system itself.
• Keeping on track with the 10 days training schedule is hugely dependant
on the use of an AIS Training Environment in order to allow delegates to
learn, familiarise and practice how to use it.
7. Outlining the issues
“its really hard to learn
from a training system
that doesn’t mirror the
real system, and keeps
crashing in the middle
of practice!”
“10 days – feels
like forever!!! Its
just too long!”
“A faster training system is
needed to be able to offer
a live situation, even a
training system that works
correctly”
8. Laying down the gauntlet…
We needed to completely overhaul our training environment with a brief
to:
• Reduce length of training time by 20% whilst maintaining / improving
knowledge transfer
• Remove dependency on existing training environment/platform
• Be future proof & easily adaptable for other business areas
We scoped out the requirement – what was it we were looking for?
• A solution which could provide us easily with the ability to “clone” our
existing systems into lessons, guided practices and tests.
• Not a one dimensional simulation builder which would take
us a great deal of time to build lessons with
9. The action
With the agenda set, and the challenge laid down, we needed to act fast. We
reviewed the market for different technology solutions to meet our requirements
• Our solution was to harness the unique Assima Training Suite
• This enabled us to create an engaging, interactive training
environment - creating a life-like clone of our systems
• We could build e-learning that looked exactly like our existing systems and
would enable our learners to:
- use lessons on a simulation of the systems
- practice on a system that looked and behaved like the real thing
- then be tested to make sure they were up for the job!
We were now down to just a 4 week window to implement; building, testing,
piloting and testing compatibility with our LMS
10. The results – a summary…
Increased Level 1
evaluation scores
Increased Level 2
evaluation scores
Self service portal
available. Just in
Time learning
Consistent and clear
learning
Consistently training
a minimum of 100
new delegates each
year
Formalised training
A library of 220
lessons and growing
No more PowerPoint
overviews in the
classroom
24 lessons, 4 weeks
1.8 FTE
30% reduction in
Time to Competence
Investment returned
with first 24 lessons
Time to design
slashed by 50%
11. Our Business and our People love it
What business wouldn’t - we’ve seen a £290,000 cost saving in year
one and our people love how useful and easy it was:
“Really helpful to
familiarise with
systems, completed
all of the training for
sales and service
using Learning Zone”
“Assima was
a great help”
“An excellent learning tool”
“The training on
Learning Zone
was fantastic -
best we have
had in years!!! “
12. We’re really proud to be winners in two 2013 Training Journal Award
categories:
- Best Contact Centre Programme – Silver Award
- Best Commercial Programme - Overall Winner
Walk through the contents
Highlight our example as a business and how we have focussed on changing our learning solutions to meet ou
300 years built on our technical expertise - used the grey, bowler hat and umbrella approach deliberately
Classroom and mandatory e
Training not learning
We’re working hard at driving our culture –
Who are our learners Generation XYZ had passed us by untiol we looked at our demographics – no longer bowler hat city gentleman of a certain age – more likely to be a 28 year old female working in Liverpool
What is our the business are trying to achieve (not what training have they asked for like before)
wider culture and communication
thinking about long term and people like it!
Increased our eLearning uptake by 103% in 12 months
A total of 67% of all learning uptake at RSA UK is now On-line Learning
Using Assima for our core skills portfolio we have slashed design times by 50%
Reduced our time to competence by 30%
Driven up satisfaction at Level 1 evaluation by 6%
Driven up learning transfer on average by 4.5%
In 2014 70% of the learning accessed is driven by the individual and focuses on career development
Our Case study -
Our existing training platform simply wasn’t fit for purpose. For example:
The system was unstable and would regularly crash, setting training back for days at a time.
The system was not in real time and therefore outdated and not true representation of what our agents were working with on a daily basis.
Our learners could go through this training, without interacting with any actual system to embed the learning, this meant that their first use of the new system, could’ve been live with a customer!
The business were telling us the training was too long, and people werent coming out ready to hit the ground running with AIS
Our level 1 evaluation data told us we had an issue with “The channel of delivery for this programme was effective” and gave us verbatim feedback like:
The training was very lengthy, and needed to be shorter to drive efficiency
Nothing like a bit of jeopardy like any good story to make it even more exciting!
Solutions like Captivate – but were limited
Significant change to the business – we started with 25 lessons in Personal – went so well. We’re rolling out to 2 other business areas, commercial and business casing for claims. Context sensitive training and link to and next steps
Not only has RSA met training objectives and business objectives, it has also made impressive cost savings with over £290k to be saved in one year.
We’ve seen an increase to 94% in response to “The channel of delivery for this programme was effective” and verbatim comments like:
And beyond – Business love it and involve us in any new initiative to introduce the tool. Some commercial learners
“The structure based on LMS courses and powerpoint was fantastic - very impressed and wished we had this platform years ago. Was very easy to work through and remember. Loved the screenshots and notes, user friendly and very straightforward”
“The training on lms was fantastic - best we have had in years!!! “
NPS score for the 88.89%
Satisfaction score 96.67%
TJ 2013
One example using some great Assima technology where we have made a difference to our business – we’re proud of what we’ve done here and how we are changing the learning culture.
But it doesnt stop there....
Increased our eLearning uptake by 103% in 12 months
A total of 67% of all learning uptake at RSA UK is now On-line Learning
In 2014 70% of the learning accessed is driven by the individual and focuses on career development
Mobile and own device learning accounts for 40% usage on some of our learning products
We’re proud of what we’ve done – but we’re still on the journey!!
Hi, I’m Paul Stevens, MD of Assima UK. I’ve been working in the learning industry for over 20 years, almost all of that time for Assima. For those unfamiliar with Assima, we are a UK learning software and services company, with operations in 10 countries around the world and we focus in particular on helping organisations improve the performance of their people, their processes and their IT systems.
The first phase of the RSA journey moved the organisation firmly out of the traditional classroom training approach into a technology-enabled blend of face to face and self-paced elearning.
RSA successfully implemented a change to an eLearning culture, with the benefits that delivered:
Reduced time in the classroom and away from business
Reduced time to achieve competence
Improved evaluation and reaction from users
Reduced time to develop and maintain training content
Reduced cost
A library of 24/7 accessible reusable content available ongoing
But what is the next step for organisations like RSA? Having got the basics right, how can they continue to improve learning and save even more cost, and how can learning technology support that? Like all good learning functions their first point of reference was to align with the overall business strategy. This, put simply, as with many organisations, is focussed on improving company agility and improving competitive edge – they needed to support this through learning.
Agility. I don’t often like industry buzzwords, but this one is not too bad. Basically it means ensuring the company is able to adapt to change quickly and efficiently – changes in business environment, competitive pressure, new technology and process trends. The key task of Learning Depts is to ensure that users are able to adapt to these changes quickly (quicker than the competition) and adopt new ways of working.
There are two principles we should bear in mind when thinking about the future. The first is how we learn. 70:20:10 simply illustrates that. If RSA wants to improve further, it needs to focus on the 90% of learning that happens outside formal training.
The second is to focus on the new learners coming through and the new learning culture. Toby and Jules. Let’s look at Toby and see what we can learn from him.
Background to bear in mind. Toby has never been formally taught how to play minecraft, but believe me, what he can create and speed at which he manages and controls the game is truly impressive. He learnt by sitting next to his older brother Luke whilst he was playing, watching and asking questions as he went – how did you do that? Why did you do that? How would you do this? He learnt to alt-tab between minecraft and Youtube from me – my claim to fame.
But when Luke’s not there What he’s done is he has created his own fast, in-game support mechanism where he draws on trusted sources to solve his problems as and when they arise. His own immediate in application support mechanism. In fact a kind of EPSS system.
And this is where eLearning is moving, where there is currently lots of excitement within the learning industry, and it is also the next logical area for organisations who have begun to embrace eLearning to explore – as RSA are now doing.
The move to EPSS and EPSS systems also goes hand in hand with a change in learning culture within organisations. As we saw with RSA, their learning culture is empowering the user/employee/individual. Enabling them to take more control over their learning, giving them more opportunities to plan their continuous learning and skills improvement. I’ve called it an EPSS culture. Add to the self direction, collaboration, adapability and a focus on business needs.
You may say that EPSS is nothing new, we’ve had is since the 1990s. Indeed, we have and called it KM, but their were weaknesses. I remember a friend of mine excited about KM – we’ll set up this new system where we’ll store everything that is useful that people need to reference within the business. All they need to do is search through to find what they need when they need it. But in reality, there were several problems:
Slow to deploy
no automated indexation, requires constant adaptation – takes forever to find
Pushing the wrong content
learning vs performance support – you search and then find something that is not suitable, not quick reference, more courseware like
Not providing answers to problems
bad context, bad content, too vague – It is in no way context sensitive
Requires technology experts
to define contexts, to create/publish content – complex to maintain
Not knowing who is logged in, who is accessing what
no user specifics, no social abilities, etc… - relies on you to do all the work to find the right info, not an intelligent system that nows who you are or where you are
The EPSS systems of today need to be very different. They need to be integrated within the systems you are working on, not external. Immediately accessible. They need to understand where you are within systems and provide information that is context sensitive – screen, field, data entry level. They also need to be able to push information to you, not only be a resource on which you pull.
Some key principles of an effective EPSS
Your EPSS must deliver relevant help in 5 seconds, otherwise users it will be confined to the same fate that many KM systems are, it is not used coz users can’t be bothered to wade through – it’s quicker to ask someone or the helpdesk.
Your EPSS should recognise who accesses it and be able to push relevant information by role, as and when the business requires it. Also if you can’t allow easy feedback channels from your users, then your EPSS will never become a Google or Youtube type of resource of choice, nor will it continue to grow and become more effective over time, but become an out of date, un-used, expensive to maintain folly
Your EPSS must be measurable – if you cannot monitor which content is being accessed by whom you can’t improve the system – must have a back end
Immediately access content specific to you in your language
Search for anything – all content automatically indexed
Comment on content and notify author of improvements
Subscribe to content - auto-notification of change
Access the same ePSS from within all applications
Access ePSS from any device – iPads / tablets / mobiles
Access content offline and synchronise when back online
Push information to specific roles, groups or individuals
Push information as a campaign with defined start and end date, to support specific out-of-the-ordinary activities
Collect feedback from end-users to improve the ePSS
Block access to certain system tasks based on criteria
Report on all aspects of ePSS usage