Winning Hearts and Minds During a Global Change Project
Project Overview
Reed Elsevier (RE) is the world’s leading science, legal and business publisher. When they connected their own employees and businesses with a single human resources system, they embarked on their biggest global endeavour to date.
RE called on us for our direction and support, both to train their people and to engage them in the story of this ambitious change, making sure new behaviours are here to stay.
We enabled RE to drive change, equipping their people to make the most of the PeopleHUB and pass their learning on. Within six months, we helped Elsevier to win near-perfect uptake of single human resources system across 15 countries, and standardise performance management across the entire business.
Our Solution
We designed and delivered training to help roll out PeopleHUB into Europe and Asia Pacific.
We’re proud of how we met the needs of RE’s diverse cultural groups to make this happen, all on budget.
The solution included:
- A structured learning strategy: Learning styles vary greatly between cultures and roles. We devised training around a range of techniques – including scenario-based training, online videos, coaching, classroom and technical support – which we adjusted for each situation.
- A network of local experts: We accelerated learning by developing PeopleHUB experts in the HR community who can, in turn, provide training on the system to RE managers.
- Face-to-face, where it matters: Sometimes, there’s no replacing in-person training. We flew to various sites in Asia and trained HR professionals on site.
- Passion to make it happen: There were some unexpected decisions which affected tools and timing. Our resilient team made use of what they could – in one instance, creating access to elearning in 24 hours via Survey Monkey to excellent effect.
- A version for every language: We created 11 versions of eLearning to support system variations. The local language versions included Japanese, Dutch and Polish.
The Differences We Made
- 100% of users rated our role-specific learning events as ‘relevant and engaging’.
- 97% of Elsevier’s people used the system to complete their development plans on time.
- The PeopleHUB intranet campaigns achieved the highest readership ever known across the business.
- Employees had instant access to quality eLearning in their own language, tailored to their culture.
- RE reports a demonstrable improvement in PeopleHUB skill and awareness.
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