How SAIL Is Helping Define A Talent Value Proposition For Employees At ACC and Ambuja Cement?
How about working towards creating a learning ecosystem that promotes capability and competency building? Ambuja Cements and ACC seem to have joined hands and have come up with their Super Assisted Intelligent Learning (SAIL) platform which helps them foster a technology-driven learning experience. Basically, its use was accelerated during the pandemic to continually engage with employees, and nurture their growth and this is where the formulation was rooted.
Neeraj Akhoury, CEO India LafargeHolcim, MD & CEO of Ambuja Cements Limited has come on-board with BW journalist, elucidating the need for developing this L&D software for its workforce and that how has it impacted the productivity and working during and after the pandemic.
Technology is impacting every aspect of our lives. Be it watching movies on Netflix, listening to Ted talks or accessing podcasts. The company recognized that Education was not going to be far behind. Therefore we decided to combine technological innovations & new-age learning solutions to deliver to the learners a unique way of learning through a new application called SAIL –Super Assisted Intelligent Learning.
We partnered with Cogknit, a data science company that has developed a product that assists in building talent capability & productivity in a very quick & effective way. Based on the learners’ browsing history, interest areas, personal development goals including leadership goals, the program sources and curates digital content specially curated from across the web, connects them to coaches & experts, to the relevant podcasts & ted talks. More importantly, it connects the learner to coaches from within the organization. It encourages them to take charge of their own personal development aligned to the business goals of the company. So ultimately the learner can check one’s own development plan and plan learning, shape own competencies and fast track one’s career. In a nutshell the digitised learning does three things, it encourages self-learning at one’s own pace, empowers talent & personalizes the experience.
The pandemic was a turning point for the entire learning process in the organization. It catapulted the learner to use digital platforms for learning and it helped us as an organization to leverage the digital platform even more effectively as travel and face-to-face learning was completely halted. As we had invested in new-age learning infrastructure over a year before, we were able to hit the ground running when the lockdown began and leverage its full potential simply because of the base work done earlier. L&D also emerged as a core tool for employee engagement, and therefore became part of business strategy. We digitized our learning programs and partnered with various internal experts and functional heads to deliver these. These sessions utilized the online meeting platform, along with the in-house learning experience platform. We have been running certification programs, role-based programs and expert development initiatives throughout the pandemic & with reasonable success & effectiveness
2. What was the objective behind setting up SAIL and how are you reimagining corporate learning through this platform?
LafargeHolcim India and its operating companies- ACC and Ambuja are large entities with around 30 cement plants and sales units spread out across the length and breadth of the country. We recognized that training needed to be more inclusive, far-reaching and available to employees, literally at their fingertips. We could not always expect the learner to be physically available at a training location or an academy. Moreover, with multi-tasking and with the need to do more with less, it was obvious to us that we had to change the way we disseminated knowledge and encouraged learning. Hence, byte-sized and personalized modules were the need of the hour. There is the Japanese concept of ‘just in time’ in manufacturing – these days’ people are learning ‘just in time’ – when they need to. No longer do people believe in accumulating large bodies of knowledge and skills that they might need at some point in the future – instead they want to quickly navigate, and imbibe specific skills and knowledge areas they require for the immediate future. The AI-first Personalized Learning Assistant is available on both, Web and Mobile, making it convenient for employees to acquire new skills and grasp concepts /learn from anywhere and anytime.
Moreover, we wanted the individual employee or the functional teams to own learning & as an organization move away from the university concept. For learning to be more inclusive, people and teams needed to decide what content was important for them, which way they would like to disseminate it. Through this platform teams can easily create and curate own content too.
To us, the future of corporate learning lies with the individual learner and the key to training success lies in how these individual needs are seamlessly anchored to functional and business needs. We believe in acting more as an enabler to learning, creating opportunities and providing a learning environment. Technology platforms & programs that catalyze and help create such a learning environment will be the future of employee learning for us.
SAIL allowed us to drive learning, build content, store and intelligently disseminate information and also allowed every individual to contribute and engage with organization-wide learning irrespective of who and what you were in the company.
3. What were the key challenges addressed through SAIL?
Scalability & reach was one of our important challenge. The need to reach out to employees & teams dispersed across the country, and to make learning available and handy for all was always a challenge. The learning experience platform took care of this challenge, as today we have 7000 plus of registered users across ACC, Ambuja, LHGH & HSSA all part of LafargeHolcim India workforce.
Moreover another challenge was on how to quickly create and curate content and deliver it to so many employees across various teams. With the LXP we have more than 10,000 units of free content available through the web. Furthermore, we have linked the digital platform to the LH global learning library Percepio where more expert content, books, articles, e-Learning modules, videos etc. are available. In addition SAIL offers a simple way of creating and curating own customized content which can be tailor-made by internal experts who have content creation rights.
Within hours of the lockdown the L&D team realized that they were staring at a huge challenge – how to keep employees connected and engaged and keep the learning going in the organization. SAIL helped address this challenge. We moved with speed and designed digital modules & micro learning content with the use of SAIL.
The e-learning modules extensively covered:
4. How does SAIL assist in the learning and development endeavors of LafargeHolcim India and to what per cent have such initiatives affected the up skilling percentage in your company?
The values of Ambuja Cement and ACC underpin our commitment to be an equal opportunity employer. We are continuously working towards defining our talent value proposition to enrich and fulfil the aspirations of our associates so that they can realize their true potential to ‘make a difference’. SAIL is a catalyst in driving this vision of inclusion. We strive to create an individual-driven learning experience, as we believe in ‘different strokes for different folks’. SAIL has helped us carve this experience by creating an easily accessible, knowledge-driven platform.
There has been 12% percent increase in user engagement year on year since the time of inception. With more initiatives planned, this will only go up in the months to come.
5. What are the different skills that it aims to develop for employee growth and development?
The learning experience platform SAIL integrates learner profile and competencies.
Some of the competencies that modules in SAIL aim at enhancing are
The organization uses SAIL to complement various formats of learning in the following manner;
6. It was launched in 2019, but the program must have taken a new turn during the pandemic. What were the initiatives for a remote learning experience?
Yes indeed it did. During the Pandemic the company’s strategy was hinged on 3 key priorities Health, Cash & Cost. The learning modules were created around these. E.g. as a part of our objective to ensure Health and Safety for all employees we had modules on Covid safety norms, we had topics on wellness, and mental resilience. In fact we complemented this by virtual sessions on these topics organized through various internal and external health professionals. These were also made available through SAIL for a larger audience who could not attend the virtual sessions.
Some other modules that saw a marked increase during the pandemic were on Sustainability as a business strategy, managing Manufacturing Costs, Business Strategy & Managing Sales virtually, working remotely, leadership lessons from pandemic so on and so forth. A lot of cross functional modules were also introduced especially for employees who wanted to make the most of their time to understand other functions of their own company and enhance their business perspectives.
L&D also catered to specific needs of Sales Units/ Plants during this period by organizing short virtual sessions on request.
7. What kind of progress has SAIL made since its inception?
We started SAIL in 2019 for 2000 employees of our Sales Teams. Today we cover 23 functions across ACC, Ambuja, and Lafarge Holcim Global Hub Services & Holcim Services (South Asia) Ltd & have 7342 registered employees in India.
We started with 5200 pieces of content in 2019 but today we have added around 16097 pieces of content by attaching our self to the global state of art business library Percipio. We have 8 curators and 21 internal coaches on the system.
SAIL has been progressing well, and during the year we saw the tremendous engagement of employees on the platform. A total of 10,445 employees logged in on SAIL with a total of 13,669 learning hours.
As mentioned earlier, SAIL is an application that works not only as a repository for programs conducted but also for content creation, curation, and e-learning. Till March 2021, 112 in-house contents were created/ uploaded on this platform, and 09 in-house courses/ e-modules were created at no cost. The high participation of 34,403 employees in webinars and sessions is a reflection of their commitment to grow and learn. The platform saw over 11,000-course completions which were supported by assessments.
To foster an inclusive learning ecosystem, we conduct several other learning services. Our knowledge platforms house 753 sessions conducted through 35 external faculty & 218 internal faculty involved in supporting learning for employees.
Ambuja Cement and ACC’s focus on nurturing talent will always remain a priority. The companies will continue to encourage learning to help teams deliver better, and faster, while accelerating the professional development of our workforce.
8. How do L&D programs help shape the in-house talent in an organisation?
Our human resource strategy empowers our people to set and achieve their own targets. Employees can ask for reviews and discussion on own development plans with their managers as per our Performance management program Thrive.
In addition to support talent development there is a special annual process called People for Tomorrow, aims at identifying good performers in the organization on a continuous basis. It is further complemented by a well laid out potential identification process (The Talent Review & Succession Planning). Leadership development programs in L&D are an outcome of these processes.
The successor development program-a 9 month program was run despite the pandemic and culminated with a cross functional capstone project that each of the candidates implemented and reviewed by the MD & CEO of the organization. It is important to highlight here that all these successor development or leadership programs have been heavily supported by eLearning modules available globally and through SAIL. We have been able to keep our focus on leadership development with help of technology.
This year Emerging Leaders program a virtual leadership program has been also launched by the Global team for promising young talent across Lafargeholcim.
In fact one of the unique selling points of SAIL compared to other learning experience platforms is that it offers an opportunity to map learner profile to leadership & functional competencies .The learners have set of competencies which are automatically mapped to their profiles, however they have the option of seeking and attaching aspirational competencies to their profile too. This itself immediately broadens the search & offers the learner an opportunity to expand capability & shape own talent.
In addition to the above, the leadership of the organization is focused on developing talent through exposure and stretch assignments, internal deputations, projects and international assignments.
9. How do you plan on strategizing its usage in the post-pandemic world where unemployment has risen to a considerable number and hiring have been put to a halt?
We will continue to use SAIL to up-skill our workforce post-pandemic too. The flexibility and reach of this medium also helps us to train large number of people with speed. We have also extended SAIL to cover our business divisions last year & are open to working on how we can cover more associate groups in the future if it can help support capability development for them as well.
_20240830123038_original_image_43.webp)
