When it comes to L&D, everyone’s requirements are different, as are the benefits they seek to gain. For sales, innovative platforms like Fuse may be helping to accelerate sales and bring together an organisation’s extended audience.
For Chief Learning Officers, L&D is a straight-up opportunity to drive enterprise-wide revenue and profitability via metrics like increased customer lifetime value, or even the consolidation of platforms.
For HR Directors, Fuse is presenting unparalleled opportunities in improving employee performance and company culture, while also creating higher retention rates (amongst many other benefits.)
If that seems optimistic amid the ongoing backdrop of the pandemic, it’s time to think again. In LinkedIn Leaning’s 2021 Skill Building in the New World of Work: Workplace Learning Report, two-thirds (66%) of L&D and HR executives globally agreed that they are focused on rebuilding and reshaping their organisations this year. That’s amongst a whopping 5,154 professionals spanning 27 countries, who all rated and revealed their priorities, challenges, and inspirations.
HR is evolving to remain relevant and competitive despite today’s rather uncertain economic landscape, and in this blog, we’re going to give you a few examples of how some of our customers are using Fuse to achieve HR’s top goals.
Performance First: A Million Content Views in 30 Days
There’s no capital like human capital, and the modern HR Director is expected to manage and engage employees across the board in order to boost performance wherever possible. In fact, if you look at HR Technologist’s 10 Ways HR Can Boost Workplace Productivity, ‘encourage workplace training and education’ ranks right up there at the top.
The problem is that many large enterprises rely solely on isolated employee engagement platforms that may focus only on performance management and appraisal, not actively linking to L&D as a way to drive performance. Often, these platforms fail to connect employees in meaningful ways, which has been particularly pronounced during the pandemic.
Fuse customer Avon recognised this as an issue. The multinational had been, for many years, heavily invested in formal learning amongst its 5 million beauty entrepreneurs spanning 53 markets.
When lockdown due to the pandemic occurred globally, many beauty reps didn’t want to embrace virtual selling and to some, it felt it better to put their businesses on hold. Avon recognised the power of connection and social learning: its HR team knew that it had to shift its L&D focus to what people could learn from one another. With Fuse, reps were able to collaborate with one another and with Avon sales leaders, many of whom began producing their own content to help their reps.
Today, Avon has reached its top goal of one million content views by reps within 30 days. It is a tremendous accomplishment and shows the power of a collaborative, socially-driven learning community. Beyond this, the company has seen that an incremental increase in monthly visits to the platform - the difference between low frequency (1 to 2 visits per month) and medium frequency (3 to 4 visits per month) - has shown dramatic uplifts of +320% in aggregate sales over a 6 month period.
Now that’s the kind of performance HR can brag about at the top table.
Improving Company Culture
Regardless of whether we tell our customer stories to demonstrate how Fuse can encourage better engagement, collaboration, or improved profitability, it’s improved company culture that is a common denominator amongst them all.
Fuse customer Joules is a great example of this. Fuse was launched in 2019 at Joules and began with a learner engagement level of 27%, but when Covid hit a few months later and Joules’ entire workforce went remote, engagement shot up to 81% almost instantly.
By bringing in Fuse, Joules was able to facilitate social and collaborative learning. Fuse supported a wider sense of community across the Joules network, connecting colleagues and giving them a safe space to communicate, and share tacit knowledge, ideas and stories.
Employees posted positive and supportive ‘feel-good’ content on Fuse and engaged with one another, helping to support each other and providing advice on physical and mental wellbeing. Fuse became a big part of creating a nurturing environment: it worked as an extension of Joules’ own culture and helped to build and strengthen culture during a time when it was most important.
Hotel chain and Fuse customer Scandic is another great example of using L&D to improve company culture. The company recognised the opportunity to use Fuse to create a culture based around it as a learning organisation. In using Fuse, it modernised its learning approach and promoted internal communication by using the Fuse community functionality.
The housekeeping or food and beverage roles established their own communities within Fuse, and were encouraged to create their own content to support one another.
Continuous learning soon became an active part of daily life, with bartenders and chefs creating content that was consumed by their fellow colleagues, and communication amongst colleagues increasing across the board. Most important, Scandic quickly reached a rate of 75,000 page views a day, showing that it had accomplished its goal of creating a learning-focused company culture.
Creating Higher Retention Rates
Higher retention rates are top of the list for HR Managers. Employee churn and in turn, recruitment, are both expensive and time-consuming, so it’s understandable that HR is always on the lookout for ways to boost its employee retention rates.
L&D is helping this to happen, and Fuse has many examples that demonstrate this. Fuse customer Panasonic boosted its customer service representative retention rates by 26% with Fuse. The company found that when agents were actively engaged with Fuse and could be classified as ‘returning users’ agent retention increased. Watch the video here to learn more.
Recent data pulled from the ‘Avon Connect’ Fuse platform across five markets also shows a 20% retention increase amongst beauty reps who engage with the platform versus those who do not (the same group also produces around 6% more revenue in terms of Average Order Value - win!)
Conclusion
The world of work may have shifted, but whether HR is dealing with a remote, hybrid or somewhere-in-between workforce model, the fact is that knowledge is still at the heart of competitive, successful enterprises. Engaged learners are demonstrating better performance and willingness to actively participate in bettering company culture. Most important, they are sticking around to continue to be part of successful, happy teams.
It’s clear from the examples in this post that HR and other learning leaders have truly elevated the L&D function and proven the value of their programs. If you would like to discuss how you can elevate and get more value out of your L&D programme, get in touch today.
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