Video: Moving from learning events to a culture of curiosity: Welspun Group’s Story

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Moving from learning events to a culture of curiosity: Welspun Group’s Story

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Speaking to L&D leaders in Perspectives 2020, Bidisha Banerjee shared her insights on aligning learning priorities across Welspun’s diverse business groups and workforce.


One of the key challenges in a global conglomerate is the standardization of culture and employee experience. At Welspun, the company’s business span a wide array of business lines – from home textiles, oil and gas, to infrastructure, across the company’s over 30,000 employees – this is a mix of talent skillsets that spans designers, engineers, finance leads, technology leads.

What brings these diverse groups of businesses and people are the common values that the group shares– customer first, technology and innovation, inclusive growth, collaboration. And to reinforce the culture, there was a need to align competencies across the levels that became a challenge area. 

As the company looked for solutions, it was clear that the intervention will have to be digital. The need for a digital mindset was paramount as the company set to look at its operations into the future. “We had to move from “learning as events” to a culture of curiosity,” Bidisha Banerjee, Group VP – Learning, Culture and Employer Branding – Welspun said. This meant coordination across the groups’ businesses, HR, IT. The company turned to a partner, Skillsoft to begin its journey. 

The company began its journey by getting the leadership buy-in needed to implement the required digital learning infrastructure. “There is the idea that you need to push people into training rooms, but what ultimately convinced the leadership was the various modalities to learn, the variety learning options that employees had and the ease of device-agnostic learning,” Bidisha 

Launching and driving the program

“There was a need for a need for a very strong launch approach, if the company had to move from a “push” based approach to a pull based approach”, Bidisha said. The focus therefore moved to focus on

1) The management sponsorship and getting them to use the tool and showcase it as part of a series of launches

2) Road shows that included theatre, music and so on.

3) Awarding early adopters.

The impact was immediate. The company saw an 80 percent adoption rate in just the first 90 days. During the COVID19 imposed lockdown there was over 300 percent increase in learning activity. 

 

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Topics: Talent Management, #GetSetLearn

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