Article: Anytime, anywhere learning for the ‘mobile’ employee

Learning & Development

Anytime, anywhere learning for the ‘mobile’ employee

For maintaining consistent performance, Pfizer adopted modern workplace learning practices including mobility, gamification and social learning
Anytime, anywhere learning for the ‘mobile’ employee
 

The adopted mobile learning application provided ‘any-time, any-where and on any-device’ learning

 

Pfizer in India is ranked in the top 10 pharmaceutical players and has showcased an impressive performance. The core focus for the company is therefore to maintain its performance. For this, Pfizer has sought to aggressively improve learning and training for all its employees.

Balancing business priorities with learners’ needs

While Pfizer has put great focus in maintaining business performance, the company has found it challenging to translate commercial strategy into business results by improving sales representatives’ capabilities. Enhancement of coaching skills of the line managers thus became crucial to provide meaningful metrics that link learning and assessment results to business performance. To take learning to its geographically dispersed sales representatives, Pfizer sought to create cost-efficient engagement by leveraging mobile. To embed learning into the daily workflow of sales representatives, the company aimed to convert idle time of sales representatives into learning time during work hours. For this, Pfizer required modern workplace learning practices including the use of video, mobility, gamification and social learning for its large millennial workforce. The core goal was to balance the business priorities with the needs of the learner i.e. relevance, flexibility, recognition and performance support.

In absence of an effective learning model which is embedded in the sales representatives’ daily workflow, sales target were taking a hit, engagement was at a low and attrition was increasing. In this context, Pfizer faced a potential risk of increase in financial cost.

Identifying the right ‘mobile’ strategy

Pfizer at first considered adoption of asynchronous e-learning strategy with deployment on mobile devices since the learner’s familiarity with mobile devices would make the process simpler. Moreover, such a strategy would also make it possible to track completion rates and assessment scores. However, this model lacked flexibility in linking the LMS with local systems and build custom specifications on it. The company therefore adopted a mobile learning application with custom specifications built on the cloud which acts as a mobile first, quiz and assessment-based sales proficiency builder.

Named ROKET (Return on Knowledge Transfer), the adopted mobile learning application provides ‘any-time, any-where and on any-device’ learning and meets the demands of the modern learner. The application also provides the option of using micro-learning content i.e. short videos, infographics, PDFs articles etc. along with game mechanics to make the content and assessment process engaging. ROKET is based on the premise that if sales representatives are engaged in a meaningful, fun, competition-driven and challenging way, they will seek to learn more about the products and improve their selling skills. They will also be encouraged to ‘pull’ the required learning content rather than be ‘pushed’ to taking training. The key business objectives of this project are:

· Create a mechanism for constant improvement of product knowledge of sales representatives through quizzing, coaching and on-the-job assessment

· Create a mechanism for sales managers to provide feedback to their representatives and suggest corrective action

· Create a mechanism through which a monthly proficiency dashboard can be provided that reflects knowledge assessment scores and on-the-job application performance

Escalating ROKET to next phase of product roadmap

Adoption of ROKET has increased user adoption and average sales proficiency scores have improved. Adherence to coaching by managers has also increased. This has created a positive impact to the overall business metrics. Further, Pfizer India has been positioned as a center of excellence for innovation in learning and new technologies.

Taking ROKET to the next phase of the product roadmap, Pfizer aims to link the overall proficiency scores that the company gets from the mobile app to the ‘sales effort data’, which will enable to produce a sales effectiveness index. This effectiveness index will further get linked to the actual sales performance.  

 

(Pfizer won the L&D League award for the “Best in Technology and Learning” category)

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Winner's Response 

The award was a recognition of the impact that our mobile learning solution created on the business. The award also highlighted the growing recognition of mobile learning as a key lever within the enterprise learning space and the need for more use cases to emerge in this domain.

Our approach of delinking mobile from being treated as additional real estate to push e-learning was a differentiator. We leveraged mobile for gamification, on the job performance support and to enhance the effectiveness of managerial coaching. We linked the assessment results with overall employee proficiency. We were able to badge all employees based on their proficiency levels as demonstrated each month. This helped us drive targeted & personalized learning with for every employee segment. The proposition of moving employees from a lower proficiency bucket into a higher one demonstrated a tangible ROI to the business stakeholders.

We plan to lead the way in defining the thinking around mobile learning for the enterprise globally. We are now involved in helping global teams scope out mobile learning requirements across markets. We are also documenting this case study & sharing it with several international journals to encourage other enterprises to realise the real value of mobile learning solutions.

 

 

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Topics: Learning & Development, #RootedinLearning

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