We had our first conference call on Friday, July 7, 07

Introductions – who is on the call? Your company name, # of employees, audience mix, industry (what do you do)

Sandy Michelet The Shaw Group - Construction, maintenance, environmental and infrastructure based in Baton Rouge, LA. Louisiana's only Fortune 500 company. 22,000 employees. We are the company which de-watered New Orleans after Katrina. Engineers, foreman, field employees, project managers.

Jim Anderson with BEBE. Speciality retailer. 280 stores with 35 more store opening this year. 5000 employees - mainly part time field employees, plus three corporate locations (Shared Services, Design Studio, and Distribution Center). Challenged with technology in the field.  PCs are being installed in stores this month. Expanding the intranet connection. Hoping to deliver training webinars in coming year.  Portable DVDs are currently being used to deliver multimedia training.  Use blended learning to deliver compliance training (i.e., harrassment training - CA AB 1825). Dept of 1.

Hugh Lander with Miller Brewing Supports the sales side of the business, not brewery. 1200 people across national accounts division, field sales and speciality divisions. Dept of 12. Blended approach to training - relying on platform training, e-learning and recorded webinars. Focused lately on driving training down to line managers by providing scripted training days.

Jay Naumann with RC Wiley 13 furniture Utah, Vegas, Idaho. Largest furtniutre retalier west of the MS. 3200 employees. 1000 are salespeople. Several 100 people in finance, acct, corpororate. Largest lender in state of Utah. Run an old computer system which is not Windows based. No method for web based training. Dept of 1.

Cathy Perkins, Tenet Healthcare Manages Training for the 3 national division offices (Dallas, St. Louis, Anaheim). Business office type training for about 750 employees, 5 training staff. Call center environment doing billing and collections for AR of ~60 hospitals.

What specific issues are we facing with securing exec buy in?

Jim - The culture is not accustomed to training. Execs want to see ROI - in response, Jim create a training dashboard. All reporting is manual as we do not have an LMS. Execs have seen ROI on sales development program - although they saw an incredible ROI, they preferred to focus on those who didn't attend. Execs want us to develop and police training (however, no authority in position to "police.").  Why do execs focus on the negative? Maybe I've "created a monster" and provided too much reporting without the real tools to do it - high amount of behind the scenes effort.  How do you break the wall down to the executives/organization?

Jay  - the reports must be addressed to front line managers so they are held accountable, not necessarily to the execs.

Jim - Reports are currently provided monthly to the field managers for follow up/compliance.

Hugh - Are there development goals for the company you can latch on to?

Jim - Yes, there are.  This is a business and numbers driven company - trying to get my goals and budget for next year.   Currently, learner completion is at 75%, company wants to see 95%.  Confident I can improve the number if I can get it attached to the goals within the appropriate department/at the right level (i.e., District Managers). 

Cathy - if you have multiple sites to compare, publish a target and encourage friendly competition.

Jim - Established "competition" as a driver to completion percentages in January with mixed results. 

Jay - 75 year old, family run business. All employees know each other - friends for years. Biggest challenge is being an "outsider" in a company who is growing. he company is struggling with letting him manage the process.

 Jim - My suggestion is to forge strong business patnerships with tenured employees and use and leverage the relationship to ultimately get "buy in" throughout the organization.  Work on the small wins and don't expect change overnight.  I struggled for one year before I felt my contribution and I was truly "accepted" at this company - and I'm still working on it with certain more "resistent" departments.

 Why are exec/senior level managers not engaged?

• complacency and habit
• they aren't used to having assistance and don't know what to do with us
• being overwhelmed with consultants
• execs already know everything
• exec EGO gets in the way of success
• time - everything takes too long for the execs
• execs assume that we can change behavior with the flip of a switch

Should we continue doing this?

Absolutely!  The next conference call is Friday, July 20th at 10:00 central time. Our topic will be LMS' and their acquisition.  Cathy will lead and provide conference call info.

Scheduled topics: If you are the speaker, please provide a bridge line. If you do not have one, call Sandy Michelet at 225/932-5857.

The group agreed that we will meet the 1st and 3rd Friday at 10am central.

Cathy July 20th LMS

Marketing (Jay) August 3rd

Getting managers scripted training days - (Hugh). August 17th

Reporting results - L&D scorecard (Jim) Sept 7th

Great meeting!!! See you on the wiki!!

Sandy

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