When off-the-shelf training won’t do
Cardno is a global infrastructure, environmental and social development company that has been making a difference across communities around the globe for 75 years.
Guided by its core values, Cardno is committed to the development of its people and the employee experience it creates through its innovative learning programs. The result is an engaged workforce whose skills and expertise are proven to succeed in its market.
Before engaging with Tribal Habits, Cardno had identified and explored different options for digital learning and training. The motivating factor behind this move was an understanding that while off-the-shelf training materials held great value and had a place within the organisation, there were parts of the business that required bespoke training to be created.
A training narrative had been built around Cardno-specific training. This approach had two high-level objectives:
- Uncovering and sharing the unique skills and approaches that the company has established to serve its market.
- Detailing the way traditional training approaches and business methodologies are rolled out and applied within the Cardno ecosystem.
We knew we had to build our own
The team quickly identified that sharing company-specific knowledge would require the creation of a suite of training modules.
Cardno uses a leading authoring tool that exports to SCORM (Sharable Content Object Reference Model) files as a solution to its training creation challenge. However, there were some challenges with the tool. Creating training required graphic design skills, instructional design skills and specific software knowledge. These were skills that few in the organisation possessed and created a bottleneck in the development of training. The team has also worked with third-party providers with great success, but the investment and timeframes of the arrangement could not deliver the large training load Cardno required.
It quickly became apparent that a simpler, faster and more user-friendly solution was needed to create training. Cardno was searching for a solution that was cost-effective and scalable but could also be updated rapidly. One of the biggest challenges faced when using traditional e-learning authoring tools is that the process of making changes and updates is tedious, requiring system knowledge and involving multiple downloads and uploads of training packages.
“What it boiled down to was we knew we wanted to do things the Cardno way and we knew that traditional e-learning tools were too limited and too slow to get us there in the timeframes we were working to.”
James Hanson – Global Organisational Development Manager – Cardno
After exploring their options, the Cardno team came across Tribal Habits, a platform that allows organisations to create engaging online training modules rapidly. The team was impressed with the ease by which Tribal Habits training could be created and updated. Furthermore, Tribal Habits guided process and simple drag and drop editor meant anyone at Cardno could start creating training without the requisite skills of graphic and instructional design traditional solutions demanded.
After a successful trial, the team quickly found their feet with Tribal Habits and committed to three streams of work within the tool.
1. Project Management ‘The Cardno Way’
As a professional services firm, effective project management is a significant part of what makes Cardno successful. The organisation invests in project management training (PMBOK) to ensure its people are accessing and utilising best practices in the project management space.
While this training is very effective, the team identified a gap which, if filled, could make project management training even more powerful within the organisation. PMBOK training is generic in its nature; it’s built to be applicable across a range of organisations and industries. What Cardno wanted to do was to pair the off-the-shelf training with a suite of highly specialised training modules designed to explain exactly how this methodology would play out in the day-to-day projects managed by its people.
“PMBOKs project management methodology is fantastic, and the theory stands up, but we needed a way to teach and communicate how this methodology would apply to Cardno and to the challenges and nuances we face on a day-to-day basis. Tribal Habits fit the bill perfectly.”
James Hanson – Global Organisational Development Manager – Cardno
The team used Tribal Habits to create this suite of complementary training and rolled it out across the organisation, providing staff with an understanding of how the PMBOK methodology is to be applied through Cardno processes and supporting systems.
2. Capturing and transferring excellence in business development
Cardno identified that the unique nature of its organisation and its clients meant that traditional business development training would provide limited benefit to its people. Cardno is a diverse global organisation and the L&D team knew that there was a lot of company-specific, business development knowledge and wisdom within its workforce.
The challenge for Cardno was to get this information “out of the heads of the few” and “into the hands of the many.”
James Hanson – Global Organisational Development Manager – Cardno
To ensure business development best practices were embedded across the organisation, the team embarked on a knowledge-sharing exercise. 20 subject matter experts were asked to share the business development approaches they had honed over the years; these proven approaches were delivered via webinar and captured via video. Cardno knew if it could codify these approaches and roll them out across the broader team, it would have a highly relevant, proven, business development training package.
Once the videos were recorded, they were “road tested” with some staff members whose feedback was that while the content was very good, watching long videos was not the most engaging delivery method for the content.
Cardno utilised Tribal Habits to bring this training to life. Using the subject matter expert videos as the backbone to the training, a series of fully interactive training modules were rapidly prepared. Developing these modules meant:
- Context and guidance were added to the information provided by the subject matter experts.
- Assessments and quizzes were used to engage staff and ensure the critical messages were being absorbed.
- Reporting on completion rates, assessment results and two-way feedback could be gathered and analysed at the click of a button.
To super-charge the speed at which these modules were created, Cardno elected to engage the Tribal Habits team to support the creation of these modules.
“It would have taken us up to a year to create the topics using a traditional e-learning authoring tool. With Tribal Habits we were delivering amazing training in three months, and we’ve estimated the cost has been about 25% of what it would have been had we gone with a traditional solution.”
James Hanson – Global Organisational Development Manager – Cardno
3. Moving the needle on leadership training
Cardno has delivered facilitator-led leadership training over recent years and has explored opportunities to roll out more scalable solutions to supplement these sessions.
To ensure its leaders were working directly towards the achievement of organisational goals, a decision was made to create a Global Leadership Framework. This framework consisted of four pillars which were supported by eight enablers and a series of desired behaviours.
This framework was highly specific to Cardno, and as such, it was identified that generic leadership training would not suffice. The team got to work with Tribal Habits to create training modules against each of the eight supporting enablers.
These modules spoke directly to the culture, opportunities and challenges present within the Cardno ecosystem and provided Cardno managers with a playbook of how to successfully lead within the organisation.
The interactive elements of Tribal Habits were again used to engage staff and facilitate the flow and absorption of knowledge.
“We’re using surveys to understand any development opportunities in our leadership, and if we identify an area of improvement, we can immediately direct that person to a Tribal Habits training module we’ve created. The module will help improve their understanding and performance in that area.”
James Hanson – Global Organisational Development Manager – Cardno
The results
Cardno’s results on the Tribal Habits platform have been staggering. The team has developed over 40 training topics and has delivered this training to 2310 active users. The project management training alone has had over 15,000 completions.
Cardno sees an average of 96 logins per month indicating that the training content is engaging, highly scalable and evergreen.
By working with Tribal Habits, Cardno can create and deliver vast volumes of training, and the L&D team can amend their training immediately, meaning the team is highly responsive to change.
In terms of meeting objectives, 92% of participants have stated that their training through the systems is ‘going well’ or is ‘great’ and 75% of all assigned training has been completed (which is well above industry benchmarks).
“Tribal Habits has allowed us to develop a solution to rapidly create customised training that is specific to our needs. The solution is vastly cheaper than the alternatives and is faster and more flexible than our previous approaches.”
James Hanson – Global Organisational Development Manager – Cardno
What’s next?
The remarkable results delivered through these initiatives have greatly impressed the Cardno executive team. So much so, that discussions have already begun around localising some of the content created to make it applicable for rollout to each specific region. The team has also committed to creating training through Tribal Habits to optimise parts of Cardno’s induction process and graduate training commitments.