World class customer experience and product innovation are the two biggest objectives that MMT strives to achieve and the firm is a strong believer in the fact that employees will be able to give their best if they are having at work. Hence the philosophies and processes of building strong talent capabilities should imbibe what information do the learners want and how do they want it.

With the increasing speed of businesses and reduced attention spans of learners, gone are the days when learners can be confined into 8-hour long training sessions. In today’s businesses, more important is to adopt learning while employees are doing their jobs and reduce the gap between learning and application. The biggest challenge that any L&D function faces is how to involve the entire organization into the learning process and not really just make it an L&D agenda. To understand the needs of their employees, the L&D function at MMT conducted a survey through which they found out that the three biggest needs of employees are - just-in-time learning, social learning and byte-sized learning. These have now emerged as the pillar of all learning practices at MMT.

To understand the needs of their employees, the L&D function at MMT conducted a survey through which they found out that the three biggest needs of employees are - just-in-time learning, social learning and byte sized learning. 

Let’s take a look at some of the most innovative and effective practices at MMT.

Traits of the Tribe

At MMT, the team created 11 competencies that were linked to one of the tribes across the globe and referred to them as traits of the tribe. The employees were categorized as Soldiers which are managers or below, Team Leads which are senior managers and Clan chiefs which are the senior leaders. The leadership competencies were defined for these three levels and they are now used as anchors to design leadership programs. In general the leadership programs are 3-tiered programs: leading self, leading teams and leading organizations.

CEO’s Leadership Academy

Run by the Deep Kalra Chairman & Group CEO; Rajesh Magow, Co-Founder & CEO – India; Yuvaraj Srivastava Chief Human Resource Officer; other leaders and a few external facilitators, the CEO’s Leadership Academy at MMT is focused on developing HIPOs irrespective of the levels. Hence, it may include employees from complete length and breadth of the organization like Directors with 10-12 years of experience or even Sr. Managers with 6+ years of experience.  The endeavor here is to look at the potential and not the level to groom people who are actually the bright starts of the organization and that too not just for the organization but for the e-commerce industry as a whole.

Trippers Academy

This is a unique mobile application (app) available on both Android and iOS platforms, primarily designed to meet all three needs of the learners as identified in the survey. The majority of learning at MMT happens through this app. It is fascinating to navigate through the app and see all that you would like to see in an easy-to-use learning portal at one place. When one enters the app, the home page presents the entire learning timeline. As on date, the app houses 55 courses (including mandatory ones) categorized into three categories – leadership development, business and culture building courses. Within each course, there are different methodologies through which learning is imparted:

1. Class-room: Learning calendar is available for the course and the employees can enroll themselves through this app
   
   
2. Videos: Top-class videos in the public domain or those that have been bought are pushed to the employees through the app. The duration of these videos is typically 4-5 minutes
   
   
3. Trip-X: on the lines of TEDx videos, the MMT leaders create short videos. This is an extremely powerful methodology as it not only provides absolutely contextually relevant information  but also creates heroes in the system amongst those who share their videos
   
   
4. Article nuggets and case studies: The reading material is sourced from premier institutions and at times abridges versions of some case-studies are created to make them shorter and more user-friendly

This mobile application has been developed in-house with the help of two young professionals who were interested in setting up a start-up. Currently there are 2 full-time employees who manage this app and curate the content that is published. The app faced an initial challenge of adoption which was overcome by hiring trainees who went to each employee to get the app installed on their phones. 

Starting with 40 courses, today, they are adding 3-4 courses per month. In terms of the efficacy, 7 months since the app’s launch in October last year, an average employee has spent atleast 10 minutes on this platform. There also exists analytics on what course material is being watched. The application also includes a point system which is based on the courses completed and the points directly get converted into the learning hours for each employee.

Hackathon

To build in innovation and collaboration in a way that also supports business with new ideas, hackathon at MMT bring together cross-functional teams. Teams take 36 hours to come up with an idea and present it to the leadership team. If the idea gets selected the team gets 30 days to take the idea to production and make it commercially feasible. 

Infeedo

A relatively newer lever in the kitty to promote collaboration, Infeedo is a powerful social platform that is used for town-halls and ideation. This again is developed with the help of enthusiastic professionals who wanted to set a start-up and they piloted with MMT. Using this platform, employees can ask questions and direct them to any leader or team. Other employees may up-vote, down-vote or comment on the questions and the questions then get sorted based on the number of votes received. Once answered, an e-mail goes to the person who asked/voted for the question. An interesting feature of the platform is that the identity of the exact person who asked the question remains anonymous and the moment 6 people up-vote a question, names of everyone who voted and asked the question are displayed.

With 1800 full-time employees across locations, MMT has created an inclusive environment with everyone having access to all these learning technologies. While all these can be accessed individually there also exists a single sign-on through Tripper Villa that houses everything ranging from performance management, leave management, Infeedo, Trippers Academy etc. And as the organization continues to acquire new companies, the plan is to scale these technologies to the new set of employees as well.

(This article is based on the Study Tours conducted by People Matters in association with MakeMyTrip during the L&D League Annual Conference 2016)